Max Weber and the ‘New Economics’

So wrote Ernst Troeltsch to Heinrich Dietzel on 22 October 1917, responding to a request that he assess the relative merits of Max and Alfred Weber regarding appointment to a University of Bonn chair in economics. His offhand remark noting a redirection of Weber s interests some years before serves to underline the fact that well into the new century Max Weber was indeed primarily thought of as an economist. His first permanent university appointment had been at Freiburg, as Professor of Economics and Financial Science;2 he had then succeeded Karl Knies under the same title at Heidelberg in 1897, suffering a breakdown the following year and eventually resigning from the post in 1903.3 When he formally resumed teaching in Vienna in 1918,4 and when in 1919 he succeeded Brentano in Munich, the posts he occupied were also in economics. And as we shall see below, Weber would in fact return to his earlier work on economic theory in the second chapter of Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, a dazzling achievement completed in the months before his death in June 1920.