Introduction

Except during a brief period after their publication, Max Weber's two earliest book- length studies, in 1889 and 1891, have not left much of a mark on social science, and even in Weberian scholarship they have remained largely obscure. When Reinhard Bendix published Max Weber: An Intellectual Portrait to introduce the scholar to an American audience, he began his chapter “Weber's Early Studies and the Definition of His Intellectual Perspective” with a discussion of Weber's agrarian studies for the Verein für Sozialpolitik and his work on the stock exchange. Weber's dissertation and Habilitation were barely mentioned in the biography section (Bendix, 1960: 1– 2). Recently, as part of his overall attempt of meshing Weber's writings with his family and personal history, Joachim Radkau termed Weber's dissertation to be about “tedious material” (öde Materie), an “unlucky start to his career,” claiming that Weber's own youthful experiences with his large extended family provided the “key to [Weber's conceptualization of] economic history,” even his understanding of the beginnings of capitalism itself (2005: 39– 40). The Weber biographer is more generous in his assessment of the academic success of Weber's Habilitation, but in pursuing the elusive goal of characterizing its content, Radkau ultimately considers it an attempt by Weber to root his fledgling sociological understanding of history in a type of naturalism, namely, an interest in the “soil basis of human civilization” (124– 128; the phrase is taken from the English translation: Radkau, 2011: 72).

Such confounding remarks and dubious characterizations have not helped generate more interest in Weber's earliest studies, but the marginal status of these two studies, which have been said “to have met little interest especially in German- speaking areas” (Dilcher, 2008: 167; for the dissertation) and to have garnished so little attention by scholars of Antiquity “as if Weber had not existed at all” (Heuss, 1965: 554; for the Habilitation), might also be explained by the fact that for a long time no English translations were available, which reduced the audience to readers conversant in both German and the arcane technicalities of medieval mercantile law and agrarian structures in Roman antiquity – an uncommon combination. Only now have English translations of the entire studies become available (Weber, 2003; 2010), both of which have the advantage of including translations of numerous passages in Latin and other languages in the original.