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Talcott Parsons's Translation Into English of Max Weber's Die Much More than a Mere Translation — Talcott Parsons’s Translation into English of Max Weber’s Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus: An Essay in Intellectual History Uta Gerhardt Abstract: The essay focuses on the young Parsons, discussing his translation of Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (first published in 1930). Parsons’s understanding of Weber in his Dr. phil. dissertation is one backdrop to his translation, whereas another is American sociology in the late 1920s. In my view, Parsons’s comprehension of Weber’s methodology as used in The Protestant Ethic is closer to Weber’s original than that of the recent retranslation published in 2002. As an accomplishment fitting his intellectual biography, Parsons’s work in the 1930s rescued Weber’s thought from certain misconception at the hands of the Nazis. Resumé: Cet essai rend compte de la pensée du jeune Talcott Parsons, de manière d’analyse de sa traduction en l’anglais de Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. En rela- tion de cette traduction par Parsons, il est important de se rappeler que Parsons a préparé son thèse à Heidelberg sur l’idée du capitalisme de Weber, et d’ailleurs qu’on considère par contexte que la sociologie américaine dans les années 1920 était forcement liée au utilitarisme darwiniste de Her- bert Spencer ou suivit la tradition positiviste dans laquelle les travaux de Weber étaient manifeste- ment méconnues. Je vais présenter l’évidence que la compréhension de la méthodologie socio- logique de Weber qu’on peut trouver dans la traduction de Parsons était beaucoup plus satisfaisante que celui des autres traductions qui ont été faites depuis 1930, même celui de 2002. Un effort admirable de Parsons dans les années 1930 était qu’il a sauvé par adaptation en anglais l’œuvre de Weber dont la pensée était menacée d’être détruite ou déformée en Allemagne par les Nazi. The translation of Max Weber’s classic The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism has never been dealt with as an achievement in its own right (Weber 1920, Weber 1930).1 Instead, various reissues of Parsons’s translation have been 1. Henceforth, the Parsons translation of Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capital- ism (originally published 1920), will be cited as The Protestant Ethic, and referenced as “Weber (1930).” Canadian Journal of Sociology/Cahiers canadiens de sociologie 32(1) 2007 41 42 Canadian Journal of Sociology dismissive of his accomplishment (e.g., Giddens 1976). The author of the recent retranslation, Stephen Kalberg, had this to say about his reasons for deeming Parsons’s translation dated: [W]hereas the 1930 translation of PE was oriented mainly to scholars and students steeped in a liberal arts canon, today’s readership is more general and less acquainted with the great works of the past. This new translation is long overdue. (Kalberg 2002: v) Despite such judgement, the question must be raised whether Parsons’s translation not only commands historical value, but also outshines the more recent retranslation. As for the history of sociology, it should be remembered that Parsons’s translation of The Protestant Ethic helped rectify some flagrant misinterpreta- tions of Weber in the late 1920s. The only two accounts aptly appreciating Weber’s work in the English-language world were Frank H. Knight’s translation of General Econonomic History (Weber, 1927) and Richard Tawney’s Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (Tawney, 1926). Parsons, who was familiar with Tawney’s interpretation but was also aware that Tawney had misunderstood Weber’s idea of the “historical individual,” invited Tawney to write the introduction of the 1930 translation. From the standpoint of contemporary sociology, the question arises whether Parsons, as a translator of Weber’s The Protestant Ethic, was better able to understand Weberian methodology than his successor. The Problem: Parsons’s Translation Then and Now My paper raises three issues. One is that Parsons’s translation had a role to play in his understanding of Weber’s theory of capitalism. His Dr. phil. dissertation delivered at Heidelberg University in 1927, an endeavour that dealt with Max Weber and Werner Sombart (another German who analysed the origin of capitalism through economic history), was written in German and in English. The clue is that the Dr. phil. thesis accepted by the Philosophische Fakultät in 19272 and published, according to Heidelberg rules, in The Journal of Political Economy in two parts in 1928 and 1929, differed from the second — indeed earlier — endeavour to write a thesis based on his reading Weber in the original. A copy of the German-language manuscript, preserved in the Harvard University Archives, allows for comparison between the two texts. I propose that when he went back to Weber’s original as he began translating it into English, Parsons discovered errors in the thesis already submitted, correcting 2. The Heidelberg Philosophische Fakultät granted Parsons permission to resubmit his Ph.D. dissertation in English. A faculty meeting was held to lay down these special conditions. The Rigorosum based on the revised — English-language — version took place in June 1927. Much More than a Mere Translation: An Essay in Intellectual History 43 them subsequently when he received permission to rewrite the dissertation in English. My second point is that Parsons was an ardent critic of biologism. In Anglo- Saxon social thought, I argue, biologism had been established through the works of Herbert Spencer, among others, during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Parsons, in his first major opus published in 1937, took as his point of departure Crane Brinton’s indictment of Spencer’s political philosophy as proof that Spencer had long been “dead” scientifically (Parsons 1937:3).3 His main argument — that the Weberian analysis of capitalism, among other theories, had overcome positivism and biologism, culminating in the 1940s in his essay “Max Weber and the Contemporary Political Crisis,”4 where he cited Weber as he endorsed the democratic type of social system, against dictatorial regimes such as National Socialism in Germany — owed much to his understanding of Weber through his translation of 1930. He contradicted contemporary American interpretations of Weber, combating some blatant misunderstandings. Methodology is the third topic addressed in this paper, if only briefly. In Weber’s work, which Parsons emulated, irrespective of the fact that Parsons did not fully endorse Weber’s ideal-type methodology, concept formation played a vital part. To discuss this point with an eye on Parsons’s translation means also looking at the recent retranslation in comparison. Part IV of this paper deals with this issue, if only in a bare sketch of the relevant problem. These three issues are the central themes of this paper. I wish to show that from an intellectual history point of view, and also in regard to the comprehen- sion of Weber, much can be said about the merits of the Parsons translation. Parsons’s Interpretation of Weber’s Dualist Conception of Capitalism in His Two Dissertations and Beyond Prior to translating Weber’s masterpiece, Parsons had written twice on Weber’s distinction between capitalism and the spirit of capitalism. One occasion was the German-language dissertation, which he had completed during his sojourn at Heidelberg University in 1925 –1926, and the other was the publication in two parts in the Journal of Political Economy in 1928 and 1929 of the essay, which was allegedly the English-language version of his Dr. phil. dissertation. The dissertation written in German had the title Der Kapitalismus bei Sombart und Max Weber (Parsons 1926). It had an introductory chapter dealing 3. The quote from Crane Brinton, English Political Thought in the Nineteenth Century, ran thus: “‘Who now reads Spencer? It is difficult to realize how great a stir he made in the world. ... We have evolved beyond Spencer.” See, for comment, Gerhardt (2002): 6–20. 4. The article appeared in 1942 in the Review of Politics and has been reprinted in Gerhardt (ed., 1993): 159 –187. 44 Canadian Journal of Sociology with three contemporary German theories of capitalism.5 The next chapter reconstructed Sombart’s views, which Parsons related partly to those of Karl Marx. Then came the chapter on Weber. It started out with the observation that Weber maintained not one, but two meanings of capitalism, “which bear very little relationship with each other” (1926: 66).6 One was “capitalism as such” (“Kapitalismus ueberhaupt”) and the other modern capitalism. Regarding “capitalism as such,” Parsons understood this to denote an ideal type, which he explained to be a concept based on generalization (“Gattungsbe- griff”). It comprised, he clarified, “a wide range of subsidiary forms such as “founder, colonial, finance, war oriented, political capitalism and some other forms” (1926: 66).7 In contradistinction, he continued, Weber had analysed modern capitalism. The main elements of occidental modern capitalism, as Weber had identified them, were science, the legal system, and the rational organization of labour, which in its pure form amounted to bureaucratization. Furthermore, separation between private households and economic production, as well as rational bookkeeping, had also been important. He then reconstructed Weber’s study of the Protestant ethic, especially as an illustration of Weber’s notion of rationalization as it characterized Weber’s idea of the capitalist spirit. Before he started explicating Weber’s essay, however, he warned that rationality in Weber’s view conveyed relativity. From the standpoint of “value neutrality,” he thought, rationality was in the eye of the beholder, Weber ... strongly and repeatedly stresses the relativity of all rationality. ... At least for ‘value free science,’ there is complete relativity of all rationalisms, the only important thing is the basic perspective from where rationalisation takes place.
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