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TRANSLATING WEBER Keith Tribe1 Max Weber Became A TRANSLATING WEBER Keith Tribe1 It [“Class and Status”] has never been published in English and is not included in part one of W und G, which Parsons of Harvard has translated and is now in English press. The son of a bitch translated it so as to take all the guts, the radical guts, out of it, whereas our translation doesn’t do that!2 After all, one could ‘translate’ W into New Republic style, or even New Yorker style (has not Mr. Lasswell done so?), but we should honour neither Weber nor ourselves by doing it that way. I like it a little clumsy here and there. Maybe W. didn’t etch so much as block out in charcoal; and in any event it looks better in English if one doesn’t use too fine an acid.3 Max Weber became a “founding father of sociology” in the 1940s, with the publication in English of three books: Gerth and Mills’ From Max Weber (1946); Talcott Parsons’ Theory of Social and Economic Organization (1947); and Edward Shils and Henry Finch’s Methodology of the Social Sciences (1949). These writings provided a foundation upon which the post-war social sciences were constructed around the action frame of reference and “value-freedom.” The idea that this canonical reputation is a posthu- mous construct has been broadly accepted since the 1980s; there is how- ever no detailed discussion of the reception process that might turn this proposition into a narrative possessing nuance and depth.4 The origin of this process is nonetheless clear: during the later 1940s American social 1 This essay draws upon, and elaborates, arguments developed elsewhere: “Translator’s Appendix to Wilhelm Hennis, Max Weber’s Science of Man (Newbury: Threshold Press, 2000), 205–16; “Max Weber’s ‘Conceptual Preface’ to General Economic History: Introduc- tion and Translation,” Max Weber Studies Beiheft I (2006): 11–38; and “Talcott Parsons as Translator of Max Weber’s Basic Sociological Categories,” History of European Ideas 33 (2007): 212–33. 2 C. Wright Mills to Dwight Macdonald, 10 October 1943, in C. Wright Mills. Letters and Autobiographical Writings (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 52. 3 C. Wright Mills to Hans Gerth, Greenbelt, Maryland c. October 1944, in C. Wright Mills, 72. 4 Lawrence Scaff has clarified considerably the activity of Frank Knight, Edward Shils and Hans Gerth during the later 1930s in translating sections of Weber’s work. See his “Weber’s Reception in the United States, 1920–1960,” in Das Faszinozum Max Weber. Die Geschichte seiner Geltung, eds. Karl-Ludwig Ay, Knut Borchardt (Konstanz: UVK, 2006), 55–89. Table 2 on p. 89 lists the mimeographed translations made for the use of students in Madison and Chicago. 208 keith tribe scientists, prominent among them Talcott Parsons, turned away from social theory’s classical foundations in politics and economics and sought to rebuild the social sciences around sociology, cultural anthropology and social psychology. These three fields were linked together in Harvard’s Department of Social Relations, implicitly reconfiguring a conception of civil society articulated in terms of markets and power towards a social, non-economic conception of society.5 This new conception of the social sciences was quickly accepted—for example, the Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie was founded in 1948. Six years later it became the Kölner Zeit- schrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie. Max Weber clearly belongs to the classical tradition of politics and eco- nomics; but his deployment by Americans as a modern “social theorist” ensured that he has subsequently been understood as a “founding father of modern sociology”—although so far as his formal university appoint- ments go, he was always an economist, and in any case the German soci- ology of the 1920s and 1930s took little from him.6 The image of Weber as a liberal, value-free social scientist is a resilient one, as Fritz Ringer’s recent account testifies.7 If nothing else, Ringer’s book demonstrates that Weber’s post-war reception in the English language has shaped the understanding even of those who have always been able to read Weber in German. This understanding presumes that Weber was a sociologist, primarily interested in how we might best understand social action and institutions; that in Wilhelmine Germany he was a liberal, and that his early death robbed Germany of a prominent political personality; that his principal work began in recovery from the mental breakdown he suf- fered in the years following 1898; and that the two Protestant Ethic essays from 1904–1905 clearly mark the new departure, opening out themes that, together with the “methodological” essays that closely followed, would develop until his death in 1920. For many years Reinhard Bendix’s Max Weber. An Intellectual Portrait (1959) remained the only accessible 5 See Arthur J. Vidich, “The Department of Social Relations and ‘Systems Theory’ at Har- vard: 1948–50,” International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society 13 (2000): 607–48; and more generally Howard Brick, “Talcott Parsons’s ‘Shift Away from Economics,’ 1937–1946,” Journal of American History 87 (2000): 490–514. 6 I have elaborated both of these points in “A Lost Connection: Max Weber and the Economic Sciences,” in Das Faszinosum Max Weber, 313–29; and the “Translator’s Introduc- tion” to Wilhelm Hennis, Max Weber: Essays in Reconstruction, trans. Keith Tribe (London: Unwin Hyman, 1988), 2–5. 7 Fritz Ringer, Max Weber. An Intellectual Biography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). See my review of Ringer’s text in Journal of Modern History 78 (2006): 697–8..
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