Max Weber: ville et capitalisme moderne

Abstract

Max Weber’s essay on The City, published after his death, has often been interpreted as a contribution to urban sociology or as a plea for ‘communal liberty’. The present article comes back to the reception of the text, examines it on the background of the research on urban problems at the time of Weber and insists on the strong relation of The City with the detailed analysis of the oriental city in The Economic Ethics of World Religions. Analysing these different contexts and Weber’s argumentation which is focalized on the Stadtwirtschaftspolitik as Verbandshandeln (urban economic policy as activity of a corporate group) enables to clarify the nature and the purpose of Weber’s unfinished essay. It extends the questioning of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, investigating into the rationalization of economic life conducts and institutions in a certain type of medieval towns whose structural conditions had favoured the emergence of the rational capitalism of enterprise and of the modern state.