Max Weber Complete Edition

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Book spine and cover from MWG I / 22-1 “Economy and Society. Communities ”with Max Weber's signature stamped on it

The Max Weber Complete Edition (MWG) is the edition of the complete work by Max Weber (1864–1920) based on historical-critical principles.

Weber's work is thematically wide-ranging to the universal historical problems of economy and law, religion and society, state and rule; it is related to the economic, historical and political science disciplines of his epoch and became paradigmatic for the sociology he helped to establish. His writings have received a great deal of attention worldwide due to their strictly conceptual and typifying methodology. His letters, which were completely edited for the first time, show him as a contentious scholar-intellectual and as a rigorously self-determined personality. His lectures, also presented for the first time, convey the image of a demanding academic teacher. The Max Weber Complete Edition is supervised by the Bavarian Academy of Sciences . The edition was completed in June 2020. At the same time, work on the digital MWG started.

Structure of the MWG

The MWG is divided into three departments:

  • Section I: Writings and Speeches
  • Department II: Letters
  • Department III: Lectures and Lecture Notes

The MWG is organized by a group of editors, the Bavarian Academy of Sciences in Munich and the Mohr-Siebeck publishing house in Tübingen. The editors include sociologists, historians and a lawyer: Horst Baier (1933–2017), Gangolf Hübinger , M. Rainer Lepsius (1928–2014), Wolfgang J. Mommsen (1930–2004), Wolfgang Schluchter and Johannes Winckelmann (1900–1985 ). He is responsible for the scientific design, the definition of the editing principles and the choice of the volume editors. The Bavarian Academy of Sciences is the patron of the Commission for Social and Economic History. The MWG editorial team is based here. The Mohr-Siebeck publishing house brings in its existing publishing rights, takes care of the production and international distribution.

In the 1970s and 1980s, an edition based on historical-critical principles was also dedicated to social science authors for the first time. Karl Marx and the " Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe " (MEGA) founded in the 1920s are to be regarded as a politically motivated exception. However, the MWG cannot simply be regarded as a “bourgeois” answer to the MEGA. In terms of the history of science, its emergence is related to the cultural reorientation of the early 1970s. This includes saying goodbye to progressive modernization theories as well as turning away from Marxist world interpretations in western industrial societies. The global problems of this decade increased interest in Max Weber's work, which was available in the form of “Collected Works”, but not in a comprehensive complete edition that corresponded to the scientific needs of the time.

In dealing with relevant edition theories and edition processes, the following principles were defined for the MWG: primacy of a documenting over an interpretive edition; Primacy of the text versions “last hand” over a traditional first version; Primacy of the text over the author. Under these premises, the MWG presents all writings, letters and lecture manuscripts written and co-authored by Max Weber, as well as the speeches, documents and appeals that he has authorized and given for printing. If there are several versions of a text, these are communicated with the help of a text-critical apparatus. Where there is no direct transmission, substitute witnesses are taken into account, such as reports on speeches, reproductions of letters by third parties or lecture transcripts. Excerpts, marginalia, underlinings or editorial interventions by Weber in third party texts are not edited.

The individual volumes of the MWG contain an introduction to the biographical and historical contexts of the work, an editorial report on the origin and transmission of the texts, a text-critical apparatus for documenting text development and text interventions as well as an explanatory apparatus for terminology, scientific, political or personal references that are necessary for understanding the Texts are essential, as well as evidence of literature references and citations. In directories and registers, the MWG contains personal and subject registers, biograms of the persons named by Weber, a list of the literature he cited and, if necessary, a glossary of names and terms from the respective volume-related specialist areas.

The MWG is now complete with a total of 47 volumes. The first volumes appeared in 1984. With the appearance of the volume Practical Economics. Lectures 1895–1899 (Department III, Vol. 2) it was completed in June 2020. The historically and critically processed texts (without text-critical and subject-matter explanatory apparatus) appear in a selection as a Max Weber study edition (MWS). New translations of Max Weber's texts are already based in part on the MWG: the Arabic Max Weber edition started in 2011, the Greek, Italian, French and Korean translations of “Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft” and other writings.

Awards

literature

Complete edition and translations

Secondary literature

  • Max Weber Complete Edition, eighth prospectus , Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 2012, therein: title and table of contents of all volumes published so far.
  • Max Weber Complete Edition, [first] prospectus , Tübingen: JCB Mohr (Paul Siebeck) 1981, therein: Wolfgang Schluchter: Introduction to the Max Weber Complete Edition , pp. 4-15.
  • Edith Hanke, Gangolf Huebinger and Wolfgang Schwentker : The origin of the Max Weber Complete Edition and the contribution by Wolfgang J. Mommsen , in: Christoph Cornelißen (Hrsg.): History in the spirit of democracy. Wolfgang J. Mommsen and his Generation , Berlin 2010, pp. 207–238.
  • Gangolf Hübinger: Max Weber und die Zeitgeschichte, Version: 1.0, in: Docupedia-Zeitgeschichte, December 4, 2019, http://docupedia.de/zg/Huebinger_max_weber_zeitgeschichte_v1_de_2019 , DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14765/ zzf.dok-1712.
  • Gangolf Huebinger: The Max Weber Complete Edition. Potential of a large edition. In: Soziopolis, online
  • Dirk Kaesler : Two thinkers from Germany. A German-German edition story. In: Leviathan. Berliner Zeitschrift für Sozialwissenschaft , issue 4/2008, pp. 590–596.
  • M. Rainer Lepsius : The Max Weber Edition. In: Ders .: Max Weber and his circles. Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 2016, ISBN 978-3-16-154739-3 , pp. 275–287.

Web links

Remarks

  1. ↑ information on the edition can be found on the website of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences mwg.badw.de .
  2. ↑ BAdW press release: "The idea does not replace the work": The Max Weber complete edition is complete. In: badw.de. June 2, 2020, accessed June 15, 2020 .
  3. ^ Editing rules of the MWG .
  4. ↑ Overview of the published volumes of the MWG .