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HISTORICKÁ SOCIOLOGIE, Vol 17 No 1 (2025), 25–38
Max Weber as Professor: Freiburg and Heidelberg, 1894–1903
Keith Tribe
DOI: https://doi.org/10.14712/23363525.2025.2
published online: 23. 07. 2025
abstract
Five of the seven volumes in MWG III, devoted to Weber’s academic lecturing, present notes from his teaching on political economy, finance and economic policy in Freiburg and Heidelberg before 1900. Detailed historical understanding of these subjects during this period in Germany is today limited, rendering Weber’s teaching relatively inaccessible for modern readers. All the same, the raw state of this material lends us a window into Weber’s reading and interests in a way mostly denied us in MWG I, which assembles published material for which the drafts, typescripts and proofs are almost all lost. An outline of Weber’s lecturing 1894–1900 is provided, and especial attention given to MWG III/4, devoted to “The Worker Question and the Workers’ Movement”. The editor, Rita Aldenhoff-Hübinger, emphasises that this topic was not uncommon in contemporary university teaching, and that Weber made good use of contemporary sources. Besides reproducing Weber’s own lecture notes, a Freiburg student Nachschrift – a fair copy written up after the lecture from shorthand notes – exists that sheds much light on the way in which Weber presented his material. Similarly, Else von Richthofen’s fair copy of her notes from Weber’s Heidelberg lecture course on agrarian policy (MWG III/5) confirms the lucidity with which Weber talked in the lecture room, based on notes that were at times quite limited.
keywords: Max Weber; political economy; economic policy; agrarian policy; workers’ question
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Max Weber as Professor: Freiburg and Heidelberg, 1894–1903 is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
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ISSN: 1804-0616
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