Max Weber's Insights and Errors by Stanislav Andreski

Author:Stanislav Andreski [Andreski, Stanislav]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Reference, General, Social Science, Sociology
ISBN: 9781135657918
Google: uc-doA8aCXMC
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2013-04-15T05:47:06+00:00

4 Systematic comparative sociology

4.1 Law

Weber's sociology of law - which appears as a chapter in the first edition of Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft but constitutes a separate volume in English translation - inspires awe by the breadth of the learning on which it rests. As we saw earlier, he began as a legal historian: he wrote a thesis on the beginning of company law in the Middle Ages (chiefly in Italy) and a book on the impact of the private law on the agrarian history of Rome. By the time he came to write his main treatise he had studied not only the legal history of the chief nations of western Europe but also the codes of Russia (in Russian) and of India and China in translations. The subtitle - The Law and the Economy - indicates his focus; and, as elsewhere, his guiding thread is the search for an explanation of the rise of the modern form of capitalism in the West: here by examining how this process was affected by the pecularities of the legal systems.

Traditionally the study of law was concerned with what Weber calls 'dogmatics' and exegesis - that is, the determination of the meaning of the statutes, drawing subsidiary rules from them and the discussion of the sources of their validity. The idea behind sociology of law is to look at the laws like a botanist at plants: classifying the legal systems, explaining why they are what they are, and examining their interaction with other aspects of social life. The first difficulty is how to draw the line between the entities which are supposed to be interacting: the economy and the law. The concept of 'the economy' includes the property relations, which are more or less identical with the law of property, and therefore it overlaps with the concept of 'the law'. We must be able to separate the variables before we can study their interaction. To make a rigorous sociology of law possible much analysis and clarification is still needed; so we cannot criticise Weber for not having provided a solution of this fundamental question. Intuitively, however, he seems to sense the trap and talks about certain general features of the legal systems - such as regularity versus arbitrariness of the procedures - rather than about provisions of the law which could be regarded as a part of the structure of the economy.

As laws are rules made and applied by people, there is no a priori reason why they should not be adapted instantaneously to the changing circumstances. On the other hand, it has been observed that the laws often persist through a kind of inertia. It is very difficult to judge what weight to attach to this variant of cultural inertia in an explanatory analysis. I suspect that Weber might be over-estimating it when he maintains that the availability of the ready-made Roman law was a crucial factor in the development of capitalism in early modern Europe. We can agree with him that the

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