Qu'est ce que les sciences de la culture? ed. by Wolf Feuerhahn, and: Rudolf Stammler et le matérialisme historique by Max Weber (review)

Reviewed by: Qu'est ce que les sciences de la culture? ed. by Wolf Feuerhahn, and: Rudolf Stammler et le matérialisme historique by Max Weber Hans Henrik Bruun Wolf Feuerhahn (ed., trans.), Qu'est ce que les sciences de la culture? ( Paris: CNRS, 2023), 537pp (pbk). ISBN 978-2-271-14532-1. 15 Euro. Max Weber, Rudolf Stammler et le matérialisme historique (ed. Michel Coutu, Dominique Leydet, Guy Rocher, Elke Winter; tr. Michel Coutu, Dominique Leydet) (Quebec/Paris: Presses de l'Université Laval/CERF, 2001), 198 pp. (pbk). ISBN 2-7637-7836-4. It is no accident that Feuerhahn's book is not called 'Roscher and Knies', but has the more general title 'What are the cultural sciences?'. This is not just an ordinary translation-with-an-introduction of Max Weber's first methodological essay, divided into three articles, Roscher and Knies and the logical problems of historical Economics (henceforth R&K). What Feuerhahn wishes to offer us, in addition to the translation, is much more: 'a historical reading of the emergence of the weberian reflections on [the theory of the social sciences] (14)', taking R&K as its point of departure. His very substantial Introduction (it is actually longer than the translation itself) in fact does even more: it ranges widely across the whole field of methodological positions and conflicts within the German social sciences in the latter part of the 19th Century. The translation of R&K that follows—the first one into French (if we except Feuerhahn's own publication of a minor part of the text in 2005), and a major achievement in itself—almost feels like an appendage. For Max Weber, writing R&K was not a labour of love, but an increasingly onerous duty. It was originally meant to be a contribution to a Festschrift on Weber's predecessor Karl Knies; but Weber, who was slowly recovering from his long depression, obviously found it difficult to come to grips with the task. To begin with, he felt it necessary to preface the treatment of Knies with a lengthy discussion of the thought of Knies' colleague Roscher. This is the most systematical, but in my opinion also the least interesting part of R&K. Then, in the second part of the article, Knies makes his appearance, but not for long. One gets the impression that Weber, as he delves more deeply into the complicated methodological issues involved, becomes much more interested in analyzing the views of a number of other, more recent writers (Wundt, Münsterberg, Simmel, Gottl, Lipps and Croce), so that the treatment of Knies—who is after all, together with Roscher, the ostensible subject [End Page 164] of the whole article—is squeezed into a few perfunctory pages at the beginning and the end of the last two articles. There is no real attempt to integrate the various discussions as they follow one another. The final result almost lives up to Weber's own description of an earlier draft as a 'wretched patchwork' (postcard to Marianne Weber of 2 January, 1903, MWG II/4: 31). This may be the reason why Weber did not include the three Roscher und Knies articles in the list of works which, in 1919, he suggests to his editor Paul Siebeck to bring out in a collection of his 'logical-methodological' articles. Feuerhahn notes this (23), but fails to add that Paul Siebeck, responding to Weber's letter, demurred, and proposed also to include R&K (MWG II/10.2: 833 n. 3). Marianne Weber, editing the posthumous Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre, must have agreed with Siebeck, and R&K became the first item in that collection of methodological essays. Should the three articles that make up R&K fact have come first? They were published in 1903, 1905 and 1906, respectively, and we can therefore be sure that the first article, on Roscher, was composed in 1902/1903. Weber's letters to Marianne show that he was also working on the Knies article(s) at that time; but the editors of MWG I/7 (240-41) argue, on the basis of Weber's letters to colleagues in 1905, that the Knies articles were...

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