Economy and Society

Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology is Max Weber's most expansive work, published posthumously in Germany in 1921 by his wife Marianne Weber and not fully translated into English until 1968. Alongside The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, it stands as one of Weber's two most important books, ranging in scope across religion, economics, politics, public administration, and sociology. Weber opens by defining sociology itself as the interpretive understanding of social action aimed at a causal account of that action's course and effects, and he develops his well known method of ideal types by treating rational action as a conceptually pure baseline against which irrational or emotionally driven behavior can be measured as a deviation, illustrated in the book by the example of a stock market panic. In 1998 the International Sociological Association named it the most important sociological book of the twentieth century.