From law to social science and back again - the first step Remarks on the juristic origin of some Weberian concepts Péter Cserne I. Introduction In the last decades, "Weber Studies"1 has grown to a genuine big industry of the academia. The number of books, monographs and dissertations written on or explicitly related to Weber's person and/or work increases by hundreds every year. This applies to almost every discipline in the social sciences and humanities, and characterises not only the German and English speaking world but Spain, Italy and Japan too. The approaches present in these works are diverse as well, ranging from the bio-bibliographical to the reconstructive and the analytic.2 If one is not completely sceptical about the (material) rationality of the work in social sciences, he has to acknowledge that this enduring interest is, at least to a certain extent, due to the inherent values of Weber's work – even if the quality of the interpretations is rather fluctuating.3 In what follows I shall expose the question of the legal origin of certain Weberian categories and ideas, and make some remarks in general on the possible effects of Weber being a jurist on his sociological work. This problematic, yet not fully appreciated in the secondary literature on Weber, can be considered as a small step or episode in the history of ideas (Ideengeschichte). But with two further steps we can arrive to a new perspective on Weber's oeuvre showing, to put it in a metaphor, a "way from law to social science and back again". The second step is to offer a rational choice reading of the Weberian sociological method and the third is to follow this method in the understanding of law, or more modestly, asking for the possibility of a 1 From 2001 on, an excellent journal has been published in England under this title, see http://www.maxweberstudies.org 2 Alan Sica's recently published bibliography: Max Weber A Comprehensive Bibliography (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publ. 2004) lists 4888 items in English. 3 Cf. Dirk Käsler 'Besprechungsessay – Neue Schriften zur Max Weber-Forschung' Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpolitik 55 (2003) 1, 136-147. 1 methodologically sound sociological jurisprudence. I shall endeavour these two steps, both falling in the domain of analytical social theory, elsewhere.4 Whatever the importance and prospects of this larger project might be, the first step, the topic of this paper, should be justified in itself. Now, if it is interesting to investigate the intellectual sources of a scholar – it is neither in order to prove that everything or the most part in what he wrote had originated from somebody else, nor oppositely to show that nothing in his work has traces back in the past, he is a brand original genius. To measure the ratio of copy, plagiarism or common parlance to own creative contribution is a problem of moderate interest in itself. What may make it important to take a closer look on a scholar's intellectual sources is, in general that through the knowledge about the original context, the sources of his key concepts and terminology, we hope to better understand the argument of the (possibly 'classical', and usually timely remote) author. The further use of this knowledge, in turn, can be the subject of another much more complicated discussion about the usefulness or otherwise of the arguments raised in past discussions. Concerning this question, I shall not take side in general. Instead, I reformulate it for our concrete case. Why should it be of any interest that Weber was a lawyer by training? Either to know more about his life or because this fact had left some important but yet highly unappreciated traces throughout his complete oeuvre. Thus, as I see, both historical and rational reconstruction can be appropriate methods to deal with facts about and arguments of past thinkers, at least in Weberology. To go on with this (not genuinely Weberian) methodological pluralism, I even concede that beside these two, there may be other, possibly more complicated ways of reading Weber in social science and philosophy. In the following I shall remain with the historical approach and concentrate on the influence of two eminent jurists, Rudolf Jhering and Georg Jellinek on Weber. There are, of course, several other links from contemporary legal scholarship to Weberian sociology that are not discussed here. Some of them are widely known. Thus 4 For the first attempts in this direction, see my 'The Normativity of Law in Law and Economics' German Working Papers in Law and Economics Volume 2004, Paper 35 (http://www.bepress.com/gwp/default/vol2004/iss1/art35) and it's more jurisprudential Hungarian version (with more but still only cursory references to Weber): A racionális döntések elméletének helye a jogelméletben [How to Use Rational Choice Theory in Legal Theory?] (presentation at the yearly 2 Weber has explicitly borrowed his theory of causal explanation (together with the key terms 'objective possibility' and 'adequate causality') from theories in German criminal and civil law of his age, notably from works of the physiologist von Kries and the legal scholars Merkel, Rümelin, Liepmann and Radbruch.5 His notion of charisma and several further ideas are adapted from Rudolph Sohm's work on Church law.6 Equally well-known is that he criticised intensely and repeatedly the socio-legal work of Rudolf Stammler and got a largely negative inspiration from Stammler's Economy and the Law for his understanding of rule-following and his methodology in general.7 The structure of the paper is the following. First, I shortly overview the role law and legal science have played in Weber's professional and non-academic life (II), then discuss the influence that Rudolf Jhering's socio-legal theory, formulated in his Law as a Means to an End possibly had on Weber (III), and finally give a short comparison of some key features of Georg Jellinek's and Weber's work (IV). Section V concludes. II. Law and legal science in Weber's biography Weber began his carrier as a law student in the summer semester of 1882 at Heidelberg.8 After three semesters, that is, at the end of the academic year 1882-83, he moved to Strassburg, for one year of military service, following which he enrolled in Berlin for two semesters of Roman and German law. During March and April 1885, he returned to Strassburg for his first military exercise. For the winter semester of 1885-86 he prepared for his state examinations, which he passed in May 1886. In the early Hungarian national conference on legal and political theory in Gyõr in September 2004, to be published in 2005). 5 See Max Weber 'Kritische Studien auf dem Gebiet der kulturwissenschaftlichen Logik' (1906), in English: 'The Logic of the Cultural Sciences' in The Methodology of the Social Sciences translated and edited by E. A. Shils and H. A. Finch (New York: Free Press 1949), 164-188. 6 See, e. g. Thomas Kroll 'Max Webers Idealtypus der charismatischen Herrschaft und die zeitgenössische Charisma-Debatte' in Edith Hanke und Wolfgang J. Mommsen (Hrsg.) Max Webers Herrschaftssoziologie (Tübingen: J.C. B: Mohr 2001), 47-72. 7 See Max Weber Critique of Stammler ed. and with an introduction by Guy Oakes (New York: Free Press 1977). 8 H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills 'Introduction. The Man and his Work' in Max Weber Essays in Sociology, translated, edited and with an introduction by H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press 1946), 9. On Weber's student years, early legal publications and his legal views, see e.g. Realino Marra Dalla comunita al diritto moderno La formazione giuridica di Max Weber 1882 - 1889 (Torino: Giappichelli 1992) [MultiVersum 1], Realino Marra La liberta degli ultimi uomini Studi sul pensiero giuridico e politico di Max Weber (Torino: Giappichelli 1995). 3 eighties, Weber was a diligent student of law, in the lecture rooms of the eminent lawyers of the time. Among them, he admired Gneist, whose lectures directed his attention to current political problems. After having concluded his studies, Weber moved back into his parent's home and took up service in the law courts of Berlin as an unpaid court clerk. He worked for about six years as a lawyer but in his letters he often complained about the dullness of mechanical legal work ("öde Juristerei"). At the same time, he nurtured serious ambitions for an academic career and continued his studies at the University of Berlin. He wrote his doctorate (PhD thesis) on the legal history of medieval trading companies (1889). In 1890 he passed his second examination in law. He received his habilitation in Berlin for commercial, German and Roman law for a treatise on the history of Roman agrarian institutions (1891). The modest title actually covers a sociological, economic and cultural analysis of ancient society, a theme to which Weber repeatedly returned. He began to work as an assistant of L. Goldschmidt, later actually replaced his seriously ill professor in giving lectures. Then, his career in legal science suddenly finished. As Max Rheinstein summarises: "Weber, successfully engaged in the teaching of commercial law and legal history at the University of Berlin, made a fateful decision when, in 1894, he accepted the call to a newly created chair of economics at the University of Freiburg. Apparently, the nascent science of economics appeared more challenging to him than legal theory. But the facts that Weber had been trained to be a lawyer and had taught law to regular law students were to leave their mark on all his future work.