Some will likely applaud this change because it might make Weber less contagious. Tribe’s new translation is more faithful to the original and also more difficult to read: it is more “didactic” than “narrative,” as Tribe puts it in his introduction. This edition has a rich history: Friedrich Hayek had a hand in shepherding it to publication, but its editor heavily modified Weber’s unfinished manuscript to make it more readable. Readers of this work, never as popular as his Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism but still very influential in America, have until now been forced to rely on an edited version of a 1947 translation. It is about time for a reappraisal, and an excellent opportunity has been provided in the form of Keith Tribe’s new translation of Weber’s masterpiece, Economy and Society(Harvard University Press).
And to the Right, Weber is a carrier of moral wasting disease, the importer-in-chief of cultural relativism to America. To political scientists, he is the architect of “modernization theory”: the notion, now discredited by the rise of China, that the growth of a middle class brings democracy. To the Left, his apologia for Western civilization makes him a worthy artillery target.
