The Political Context of Weber’s Sociology

Abstract

It is often said that Weber’s work represents a response to ‘late’ capitalism. Thus expressed, this is a misleading statement. What is specifically important as the political and economic background to Weber’s sociological writings is, in fact, the retardation of German development.²¹ Judged in terms of the British model, the concluding decades of the nineteenth century were indeed a period of ‘mature’ capitalist evolution: by 1900, Britain could be adjudged to have been ‘industrialised’ for more than half a century. Most sociologists in fact, when they speak generically of ‘nineteenth-century capitalism’, have in mind the case of Britain, which is treated as the exemplar of capitalist development. But the point is that the transition to capitalist industrialism took place in Germany only towards the latter part of the nineteenth century; it proceeded without the occurrence of a ‘successful’ bourgeois revolution, and in the framework of a process of political centralisation secured by Prussian military imperialism.