Hinnerk Bruhns

Max Weber professeur, Max Weber voyageur

The thousands of letters written by Max Weber between 1895 and 1920, now published in the Max Weber-Gesamtausgabe, throw new light on many sides of his private life and his public activities. One of the less well studied aspects of his life are his numerous long trips to European countries before the outbreak of the First World War. Many of Weber’s letters from Scotland, England, Ireland, France, Spain, Holland, Belgium (but less those from Italy) have as much sociological and anthropological interest as the letters from his trip to America, which have been studied recently by Lawrence A. Scaff. Another aspect of Weber’s personality tackled with in this article are his activities as a teacher and as director of the seminar of economics at the universities of Freiburg im Breisgau and Heidelberg from 1894 to 1903, when he resigns definitively from university after having spent since several years, for medical reasons, more time in Italy and elsewhere than in Heidelberg. Weber’s way back to university at the end of the war, at Vienna in summer 1918 and at Munich in 1919/20, could have opened a new period in the history of German social sciences, but unfortunately he died shortly after having started his lessons on the sociology of the state.

Max Weber: ville et capitalisme moderne

Max Weber’s essay on The City, published after his death, has often been interpreted as a contribution to urban sociology or as a plea for ‘communal liberty’. The present article comes back to the reception of the text, examines it on the background of the research on urban problems at the time of Weber and insists on the strong relation of The City with the detailed analysis of the oriental city in The Economic Ethics of World Religions. Analysing these different contexts and Weber’s argumentation which is focalized on the Stadtwirtschaftspolitik as Verbandshandeln (urban economic policy as activity of a corporate group) enables to clarify the nature and the purpose of Weber’s unfinished essay. It extends the questioning of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, investigating into the rationalization of economic life conducts and institutions in a certain type of medieval towns whose structural conditions had favoured the emergence of the rational capitalism of enterprise and of the modern state.

Werke und Werkgruppen

Max Webers Geschichte der Handelsgesellschaften im Mittelalter ist ein juristisches und rechtsgeschichtliches Werk. Basierend auf seiner Inauguraldissertation und Grundlage fur seine Habilitation, leitet es knapp her, wie die Institutionen der Kommandit-(KG) und der offenen Handelsgesellschaften (OHG) in Abgrenzung sowohl vom romischen als auch vom zeitgenossischen (d. h. grunderzeitlichen) Gesellschaftsrecht aus den Verhaltnissen der italienischen Stadte des Mittelalters hervorgegangen seien (MWG I/1, VII, 5–7).