Max Weber as legal historian

Bibliographic Data

ID20068445
AuthorsHarold J Berman, Charles J Reid
Year2000
Pages221-239
Publication date2000-04-13
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeCHAPTER
VenueThe Cambridge companion to Weber (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherCambridge University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1017/ccol9780521561495.013
OpenAlexW2502603323
ISBN9780521561495
LanguageEN
Citations received2

Max Weber was initially trained in both law and history and he drew extensively on examples from legal history in constructing his later sociological works. Yet he was not, properly speaking, a legal historian. In fact, as we shall show, the superimposition upon legal history of his sociological categories of "ideal types" of legal authority resulted in serious distortions at the same time that it led to some important insights. His sharp separation of "fact" from "value," and his relegation of law to the realm of "fact," led him to overlook entirely the importance of legal values in two of his best known socio-historical studies, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and The City. In the background of his entire sociology of law was an oversimplified historiography in which the history of law in the West was viewed as a progression from a "feudal," "traditional," "personal" type to a "capitalist," "formal-rational," and "bureaucratic" type, with the prospect of an emerging "socialist," "substantively rational" type

Bureaucracy · Capitalism · Feudalism · Historiography · Ideal type · Legal culture · Legal history · Political science · Politics · Protestant work ethic · Protestantism · Realm · Social science · Sociology · Law · Law in Society and Culture · Mathematics · Political Theology and Sovereignty · Weber, Simmel, Sociological Theory

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