BASTIN the Press in the Light Modern Capitalism

[MWS 13.2 (2013) 151-175]ISSN 1470-8078

© Max Weber Studies 2013, Clifton House, 17 Malvern Road, London, E8 3LP.

The Press in the Light of Modern Capitalism: A planned survey by Max Weber on newspapers and journalism1

Gilles Bastin

AbstractThe first half of the 1910s were a crucial turning period for Max Weber’s thought. Whereas he had initially considered the question of the emergence of modern capi-talism in relation to religious ethics, he started to link the study of contemporary capitalism with that of a variety of other domains—law, music, and the press. With regard to the latter he sought to set up a broad survey in the context of the creation of the German Sociological Society. This paper narrates the story of the formulation of the survey plan and the failure of the project, before setting out to unravel the relation which Weber seems to have wanted to ascertain, between the ‘information economy’ and the economy itself.

Keywords: Weber, journalism, sociology, capitalism, press.

The German sociologist, Max Weber, kept in close contact with jour-nalists and the press throughout his life. From a strictly biographi-cal perspective, Weber worked as an editorialist in several reforming German newspapers, in particular the Frankfurter Zeitung, and he felt drawn to the journalistic profession towards the end of his life, seeing it as preferable to teaching which held so little attraction for him.2 From a more political standpoint, his analysis of the democratic

1. Note of the editors: This article was previously published in Réseaux 109 (2001) and has been translated into English by Tim Pooley for Max Weber Studies. We are grateful to Réseaux for authorizing this publication.

2. I am extremely grateful to Professors R. Kutsch (Leipzig) and R. Lepsius (Heidelberg) for their assistance in helping me to understand Weber’s project. [Note of the editors: Gilles Bastin then provides thanks to people assisting in his translation of Weber’s text into French].

See letter cited by Marianne Weber:

‘“Make money”? Yes, but how? That is the question for me. Instead of playing professor, I would have to go to work for a newspaper or a publisher here, and to this I would have no objection. After all, I can do

152 Max Weber Studies

© Max Weber Studies 2013.

shortcomings of German society led him to see the press as an impor-tant element in the constitution of a strong civil society and to appre-ciate the work of journalists (Hardt 1979: 163). This type of analysis also appears quite clearly in the paragraphs devoted to journalism in Politik als Beruf. Here Weber contributes to the rehabilitation of the profession by stressing the difficulty of the job which requires quick copy on topics demanded by the ‘market’ and assumes often greater responsibility than that of scientists and scholars. He thereby took a stand in a debate triggered by the emergence of sensationalist journalism during World War One. In intellectual circles at the time, journalism, to use one of Weber’s own expressions, was thought of as a ‘pariah’ profession, and devoid of all moral principles.

As one reads this text, probably the best known one dealing with journalism, one becomes aware of a desire for ‘objective’ under-standing of the conditions under which this profession was prac-tised and the scope of which goes far beyond the political issues of the day. Weber discusses at length journalists’ chances of attaining political office. This leads him to analyse in outline the history of press-related professions. He emphasises the increase in size of the companies engaged in the industry and along with it the increasing burden of work placed upon journalists: ‘The need to earn a living by writing articles daily or at least weekly is like a ball-and-chain’ (Weber 1994a: 332).

Although starting from political considerations, Weber eventu-ally finds himself describing the press in strongly economic terms, as he notes all the things that tie the industry to large capitalist con-cerns rather than to a journalistic craft. He uses, for instance, terms such as ‘large capitalist newspaper concerns’ (die groβen kapitalist-ischen Zeitungskonzerne) observing that

the political influence of the working journalist is steadily diminish-ing, while that of capitalist press magnates, like ‘Lord’ Northcliffe, for instance, is growing ever greater (Weber 1994a: 333).

This slippage from political to economic considerations is only sketched out in the 1919 lecture. Weber appears to want to justify himself by referring to a genuine ‘topic in its own right’ of sociol-ogy requiring a more in-depth treatment (‘Even to sketch the soci-ology of modern political journalism would be quite impossible

such administrative work better than this academic gabbing (Kolleg-Schwätzerei), which never gives me spiritual satisfaction’ (quoted in Marianne Weber 1975: 692-93).

Bastin The Press in the Light of Modern Capitalism 153


within the framework of this lecture, for it is in every respect a topic in its own right’ (Weber 1994a: 331).3 How are we to understand this exhortation against excessive ambition when at the same time he is announcing a whole research programme on the subject? In fact Weber’s writings do not contain a formal elaboration of a gen-uine ‘sociology of modern journalism’. That does not mean, how-ever, that in 1919 Weber is anticipating on the future developments of his research, developments which his death a few months later prevented him from bringing to fulfilment. It is much more likely that he is referring to the planned survey, which enabled him to lay the foundations of this branch of sociology ten years earlier.

The Planned Press Survey of 1910: History of Failure

The planned press survey appears most explicitly in October 1910 in the opening address given at the first Conference of the German Sociological Society. It is presented as a project designed to bring together the fledgling scholarly community gathering for the first time under the banner of sociology since the hearers were meant to carry it out: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, the first topic that the society has found to be suitable for purely scientific treatment is a sociology of the press’ (Weber 2007: 82).4 Before considering this project in detail, it is necessary to understand its origin and developments through to its eventual failure a few years later.

The German Sociological Society (DGS) and the setting up of the surveyIn 1909 and 1910, Max Weber was mainly involved in two research projects (judging by the overwhelming place that they take up in his correspondence—see Weber 1994b). One was the setting up of the survey of the press (which Weber called the Preβ-Enquête) and the other was the German Sociological Society (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Soziologie, henceforth DGS). Both projects are, as we shall see, almost inseparable. The DGS was officially founded on 3 January 1909 and Weber quickly became an enthusiastic promoter, urging all schol-ars in Germany who might see themselves as part of this new dis-cipline to join.5 Weber’s level of involvement in this project is such

3. More specifically, Weber refers to a Soziologie der modernen politischen Journalistik.

4. The German term is Soziologie des Zeitungswesens.5. See for instance the letter to Franz Eulenburg dated 12 July 1909 (Weber

1994b: 174).



that it seems likely that he assumed moral leadership of this fledg-ling society.6 It was a novel experience as at the time Weber was still a member of the Verein fűr Sozialpolitik (Association for Social Policy), which had enabled him to carry out his surveys on industrial work-ers and on agricultural labourers to the east of the Elbe.7 His com-mitment to the setting up of the DGS involved two major objectives: firstly, the founding of a purely scholarly forum (whereas the Verein did not separate moral and scholarly concerns [Kaesler 1988: 18]), and secondly, to promote the development of team-based empirical research projects as well as discussion of appropriate methodologies.8 The DGS thus bore Weber’s hopes for the development of sociology as a science and university discipline in Germany. This is very clear from Article 1 of the draft statutes that he drew up for the society:

An association to be known as the German Sociology Society with its headquarters in Berlin has been founded with the aim of promoting knowledge of sociology through the organising of purely scholarly research and by the publication and support of purely scientific work and by the organisation of periodic German sociology conferences. It gives equal support to all trends and approaches within the discipline and refuses to be an advocate for any practical goal (be it ethical, reli-gious, political, aesthetic etc.) (Letter to W.Windelband, 29 May 1910, Weber 1998b: 547).

The Preβ-Enquête project has to be situated in this context. Although it was, to begin with, one of Weber’s personal projects9 (the we used in the presentation of the project at the first DGS conference is largely rhetorical), he was perfectly aware of the difficulty of launch-ing such an undertaking on his own. He had to gain as allies and bring together many colleagues with different areas of expertise in order to tackle such a vast topic. Once founded, the DGS provided the ideal working context to plan the survey. Weber’s efforts to per-suade his university colleagues to join the DGS were thus equally concerned with promoting the project on the press. Thus in a letter to Lujo Brentano dated 13 April 1909, he writes:

6. It was Weber who drafted the statutes of the DGS in May 1910.7. The Verein fűr Sozialpolitik was founded in 1872 by scholars concerned to

promote both the German national economy and the improvement of living condi-tions for workers (Kaesler 1988: 187-88).

8. Among proposals for local committees within the DGS was, for instance, a working group on the use of statistics in sociology.

9. Weber may have started working on the press survey project as early as 1908 (Kutsch 1988).



We wish, for instance, to get going straight away on the sociology of the press. Yes, it needs to be organised. Colleagues with specific exper-tise need to be onside. We must ask ourselves: what can we find out and indeed what can we not find out through a systematic survey? We must gather funds (by getting groups of wealthy people from Berlin, Frankfurt Mannheim etc. to subscribe) and find a publisher who is willing to give some visibility to the undertaking,—and without a ‘Society’, none of that is possible (Weber 1994b: 94).

And in another letter to Franz Eulenburg on the 12 October 1910 he wrote:

There are huge difficulties with the press survey project and you could, of course, prove right in the end and say to me ‘Couldn’t you see? I told you so!’ I know full well that this project must be tackled head-on for it would be an admission of impotence on the part of sociology if it had to explain that ‘such a nebulous domain ridicules my methods’, but this is, in fact, refuted by the existing literature on the press, some of which is excellent. Obviously, I cannot take the thing on alone, and if the people with suitable expertise do not participate, I shall quietly put the project in the out tray (Weber 1994b: 644).

Weber did not plan to head up the project himself, probably because he was aware of the handicap of his recurring health issues, but he took it upon himself to persuade specialists all over Germany to par-ticipate. In total around twenty names appear in the correspondence as future collaborators.10 Among them were Hjalmar Schacht (who had developed a method of statistical analysis of newspapers before embarking on a banking career), Eduard Bernstein who was selected by Weber for his knowledge of the social-democratic press, Robert Michels and Hermann Beck. On the other hand Weber wanted to involve people from the press in the survey. He therefore contacted various members of the Union of German Newspaper Publishers to try to convince them to take part in the research. Several of them responded positively (in particular, Max Jänecke, the president of the Union, Jacobi, the chief editor of the Hannoversichen Kuriers and Curti from the Frankfurter Zeitung). Weber also managed to obtain the co-operation of a recently formed journalists’ professional association (the Reichsverband der deutschen Presse), founded in November 1910 from the merger of two older unions, one representing press editors and the other journalists and writers. It was the editor-in-chief of the Neue Badische Landeszeitung, Alfred Scheel, who defended the idea

10. In June 1910 Hermann Beck cites 56 names of people (in Germany and abroad) who had declared their willingness to collaborate.



of participating in the research project directed by Weber within the association. He even devised a questionnaire for this purpose to be distributed among members of the association (Kutsch 1988).

The issue of funding comes across in his correspondence as one of Weber’s main concerns. In his estimation 25,000 marks were required, at the time a large sum, which could only be raised with strong institutional support.11 Weber was very active in applying for funding and within a few months succeeded in raising four fifths of the target amount, with the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences making a significant contribution. Just how important Weber con-sidered the success of the project may be judged by the offer made to Paul Siebeck, publisher of the Grundriss der Sozialökonomik which was in preparation at the time, to give up payment of royalties for this volume for the benefit of the research project.12 The first few months of Weber’s work on the setting up of the Preβ-Enquête, prom-ised to yield quick results, the first stage being the creation on the 6 March 1911 in Heidelberg of a DGS committee with a brief to carry out the study. At the instigation of its secretary, Hermann Beck, the society had also, from 1910 onwards, planned to set up the ‘German press archives’ to collect press articles in order to facilitate the com-pletion of the project.

The failure: the lawsuits of 1911–1913 and discouragement with the development of the DGSFrom January 1911 until early 1913, Weber found himself involved in three libel cases. Although there was no a priori connection with the research project on the press, the lawsuits turned out to be closely linked to it and significantly affected its development.

The first lawsuit followed a meeting of the feminist circle (Frauenbildung-Frauensstudiums) (in which Marianne Weber was actively involved) about collective kitchens as a means of promot-ing the emancipation of women. A Privatdozent, Arnold Ruge, pub-lished a violently defamatory article about this circle.13 Although

11. At a very rough estimate, given the problematic nature of the exercise, it would be around €103,000 (at the time of writing the original article in 2001) if the calculation is based on the index of food prices in Germany or €289,000 if based on property prices.

12. Letter to P. Siebeck, 11 August 1909 (Weber 1994b: 224).13. In particular he refers to ‘old maids, barren women, widows and Jewesses’ who

allegedly came together in meetings of the circle contrary to the spirit of ‘maternal duties’.



Marianne is not mentioned by name, Weber, wanting to defend his wife’s honour, could not get Ruge to retract his remarks, and pub-licly questioned his involvement in the university sector so that the latter would sue him for libel, a course of action which could only work to Ruge’s disadvantage. After suing Weber in January 1911, Ruge finding himself in a deadlocked situation, retracted his choice of words in late March, an outcome which satisfied Weber.

This lawsuit had weightier consequences from January 1911 onwards. On the 8 January, the Dresdner Neuesten Nachrichten pub-lished an anonymous account of the Weber-Ruge dispute, which hinted that Weber allegedly refused to defend his wife’s honour in a duel, thus failing to honour the ethics of the Officers’ Corps to which he belonged. Weber again wanting to clear himself of the affront, wrote to the editor-in-chief of the newspaper by calling the author a Revolverjournalist, thereby hoping to force him to reveal his identity. There followed a new lawsuit during which Weber, going beyond his own personal interests, raised more political issues con-cerning the press and, in particular, the principle of anonymity and the protection of sources. He was trying to force the journalist who wrote the article to reveal his identity and the source of this libel-lous and erroneous report. The second lawsuit (which Weber lost) provided him with the opportunity to bring to the attention of the public the debate on the issues of freedom of expression and the work of the press. These concerns emerge clearly in an interview given to the Heidelberger Zeitung after the court case. Weber devel-ops the idea that protection of sources, although necessary in sen-sitive domains like politics, cannot be justified when the personal honour of individuals is at stake. Referring to the conference of the Imperial Press Union, he warns:

it is necessary to acknowledge the impossibility for a genuine polit-ical press to exist in political affairs without editorial secrecy. For a newspaper like the ‘Times’ for instance, it would be totally impos-sible to name sources of information, some of which go right to the monarchy itself. This would also apply to information which turns out to be wrong after the event. Things are, however, very different as regards privacy. In cases where news affects or could affect some-one’s personal reputation, the press obviously has the duty—this may be considered professorial discourse; I respect the press but I have also shown that I am not afraid of it—to state in these specific cases: I will only report this information if you [Weber is referring to the source of information] say that you would be willing, if it is disputed or turns out to be false, to be named (Heidelberger Zeitung, 18 October 1912, cited in Weber 1998b: 974-75).



The third lawsuit arose from the previous one. The author of the libellous rumour was in fact an academic from Heidelberg Uni-versity, Adolph Koch, who had been lecturing on journalism there since 1895. Weber, wanting compensation, also forced him to take out a libel action by questioning his ability to carry out this kind of teaching and starting university disciplinary procedures against him. Koch, after deciding to sue and subsequently withdrawing his action, was sanctioned by the university, which stripped him of his teaching qualifications (the Venia Legendi), thereby effectively ending his academic career. In this last case, there was a more direct link with the proposed survey. Max Weber had in fact planned to include Koch in the project but later changed his mind.14 The latter might have felt sufficient resentment to take action for libel (MWG, II/7, 1. Halbband: 8).

The court cases ended around the same time as Weber abandoned the proposed press survey. The vicissitudes of these lawsuits may well have contributed to the failure. Weber may also have felt him-self to be at odds with the press in general, particularly during the second legal action (the editor-in-chief of the Dresdner Neuesten Nach-richten was a committee member of the German Press Union). This seems to be attested by the tone used towards the end of the article in the Heidelberger Zeitung. It would appear that Weber felt cut off from strong funding support as well as having his scholarly legiti-macy undermined, as he could no longer claim to be neutral.15 More-over, the constant attention required by these lawsuits (as evidenced by his correspondence) left Weber neither the time nor the freedom to pursue the Preβ-Enquête project. Furthermore, his concern for his personal research on the economic ethics of the major religions may have also been a decisive reason for his discontinuing the sociology of the press.16

14. In a letter to H. Herkner dated 27 May 1910 Weber, as if he had a premoni-tion, expresses his doubts about Koch: ‘…as far as Koch is concerned, I’d like to find out more about him. He may well be crucial to a press survey, for, given his connec-tions, we might well have a “bad press” if he is not included. But as far as possible we need to tread carefully!’(Weber 1994b: 542).

15. This is Weber’s own interpretation of the failure of the project given in the report that he made to the members of the DGS attending the second Sociology Con-ference in October 1912. The committee of the Reichsverband der deutschen Presse may have discussed the advisability of participating in the project in the light of the court cases (Kutsch 1988).

16. The sociology of the press was to find a second wind in Germany in the 1920s, mainly at the instigation of Max Weber’s brother, Alfred. The lawsuits may be



Yet this explanation is not entirely satisfactory. Weber still main-tained very good relations with far more significant newspapers than the Dresdener Neuesten Zeitung and the lawsuits had clearly demon-strated his good faith. On the other hand, the lack of success of the DGS undoubtedly weighed more heavily. It was apparent from late 1911 that Weber had clearly failed to bring together a large number of researchers around the DGS and the Preβ-Enquête project. The suc-cessive withdrawals of K. Bücher and F. Eulenburg, whom Weber had asked to head up the project seems to have contributed to his discouragement. The sociology conferences of 1910 and 1911 were also marked by difficult debates regarding the necessity of axiolog-ical neutrality advocated by Weber, who was hoping that by being set up as purely scholarly society, the DGS would avoid the debates about value judgements that were going on at the time within the Verein. The Verein had been since 1909 the forum for intense discus-sion on the neutrality and the scientific nature of the social sciences and in particular of the study of political economy. The discussion on the concept of productivity during the 1909 conference of the Verein in Vienna, in which Weber took on the role of a crusader for neutrality, was a key moment in this debate. This led him to estab-lish methodological principles set out in his texts on ‘comprehensive sociology’ (1913) and ‘value freedom’ (1917).17 The DGS could not avoid this debate and Weber met with much criticism on this issue (Kaesler, 1988: 187). These conferences also revealed the difficulty of bringing together for a collaborative project the eminent individuals within the ranks of the DGS (Simmel, Sombart, Tönnies).18 Weber, who had only been prepared to accept the position of treasurer of the association, resigned from this role in 1911, and withdrew com-pletely from the DGS in 1914.19

The Preβ-Enquête did not therefore get beyond the proposal stage. It was never to be tested against empirical results nor the maturation

considered to be the source of the delay in the development of this branch of sociol-ogy in the second decade of the 20th century (Obst, 1986).

17. See M. Pollak (1986b) for a psychological interpretation of this quest for neu-trality (cf. his analysis of the survey of agricultural workers).

18. ‘You must have observed that it was impossible to have one person head up the project. Tönnies would have resigned, as he warned me, and Sombart and Simmel would not have shown up if they had not been on the committee. We just have to work with this’ (Letter to Franz Eulenburg, 12 October 1910, Weber 1994b: 644-45).

19. See Hennis (1996) for further details on the institutional context in which Weber developed his proposed survey.



process of being formulated in terms and using concepts which could substantiate the existence of a Weberian sociology of the press, in the same way as for law, the city and music. The preparatory doc-uments of the project are all that remains, plus a few marginal ref-erences in Weber’s writings which hint at what such a branch of sociology might look like. If it is therefore only possible to confine oneself to careful conjecture, the very nature of this material offers the opportunity to grasp Weber’s arguments at a time when a whole set of abstract issues (and theoretical approaches) was becoming crystallised into a list of concrete questions that could be tested on the ground (a research plan). It is thus worth taking a further look at this particular time.20

The Social Economics of the Press in a Capitalist System

Weber’s starting point for the survey was clearly the idea of a reflec-tion on modern culture. In the first few lines of the Vorbericht Weber seems to imply that the press was of interest as a fruitful detour to seek to comprehend what he calls the ‘major cultural problems of our

20. There are two sources which serve as a basis for an in-depth analysis of the proposed press survey. The more accessible is Weber’s introductory address at the first DGS study days on 19 October 1910. This text (the Geschäftsbericht auf dem ersten deutschen Soziologietage in Frankfurt 1910 henceforth Geschäftsbericht) is readily acces-sible in German paperback editions of Weber’s works. It has been translated into English by Hardt (1998) [and by Dreijmanis (2008), whose translation we use here] and into French (in the journal Réseaux in 1992). The other text, ‘Preliminary report on a proposed sociological survey of the press’ (Vorbericht über eine vorgeschlagene Erhebung über die Soziologie des Zeitungswesens, henceforth Vorbericht) was probably drafted by Weber in early 1910 and distributed to the people to be invited to partici-pate in the project. It is, in fact, a very detailed survey plan full of technical points on the procedure to be followed during fieldwork as well as research hypotheses but rather more allusive in its wording and sometimes lacking clarity. The German text of the Vorbericht was only edited fairly recently by W. Hennis in 1995 and is due to be included of Weber’s complete works still to be published (MWG, I/13). It was recently translated into English by Keith Tribe (see Weber 1998a) and introduced by W. Hennis (Hennis 1998) for History of the Human Sciences.

Both texts are incomplete but the Vorbericht contains more than the Geschäftsberi-cht whose ‘essayist’ character Weber himself stressed. The Vorbericht gives a wonder-ful insight into the laboratory where interpretations can be devised and at the same time strategies for research and the accumulation of supporting evidence are devel-oped. We therefore base most of our analysis on the latter text.

A third document entitled Disposition für die Bearbeitung einer soziologischen Unter-suchung des Zeitungswesens appears to confirm that Weber had been considering this research project since 1908.



time’, i.e. the emergence of a modern culture and a new type of per-sonality or modern ‘man’.

A survey of the press should in the final analysis tackle the major prob-lems of our time: I. How the means of psychological suggestion by which modern society has the continuous tendency to integrate and acculturate the individual: the press as one of the means of forming the subjective individuality of modern humanity. II. The conditions created by public opinion principally through the press. The emergence, main-tenance, concealment and reorganisation of artistic, scientific, ethical, religious, political, social and economic elements of culture: the press as a component of the objective individuality of modern culture (1998a: 111).

In the 1910 address, this problem is formulated as a question:

I would merely ask you to consider what modern life would be like if there were no press, and none of the kind of public awareness [Publiz-ität] that the press creates (2008: 83).

‘The newspaper business’ and ‘spirit’ of newspapersIn the next part of the survey plan, Weber does not limit himself to the examination of the cultural role of the press in modern times. The theme appears from the opening lines as a horizon for the research rather than as its concrete objective: ‘The ultimate aims of the investi-gation cannot therefore form its immediate objective’ (Weber 1998a: 111). The perspective chosen to tackle the topic is, in fact, highly materi-alist: Weber sets as a principle of the survey to consider first of all the economic structures of press concerns and the economics of the press in general. He may, for instance, deliberately refuse to con-sider production by press concerns (referred to as Stoff, or material) as any different from other economic products:

We have instead to begin from the fact that all cultural activity on the part of the press today is bound up with the conditions governing the existence of private enterprises, and must so remain; I believe that it is the newspaper business which has to be at the centre of investigation, its necessarily given conditions of existence and their consequences for the formation and commercial prospects of the entire range of modern newspapers, whose competitive activity can be observed on a daily basis (1998a: 111-12).21

21. The argument reappears in a similar form in the Geschäftsbericht: ‘If we examine the press sociologically, we find that what is fundamental for all our inves-tigations is the fact that the press today is necessarily a capitalist, private business enterprise’ (2008: 84).



The primacy accorded by Weber to a materialist standpoint on the press may also be clearly observed in the structure of the survey as set out in the Vorbericht. The text is organised around two major sections: the first devoted to the ‘newspaper business’ (Das Zeitungsgeschäft) and the second to its ‘outlook’ or ‘spirit’ (die Zeitungsgesinnung).22 The two levels of analysis that this choice seems to set against one another are given separate treatment by Weber in the perspective of the survey. One part of the investiga-tions that he anticipates, consists, in fact, of business analyses of the management of commercial press concerns (he planned to look at the accounts and at their entries in commercial directories), the structure of the newspaper market (competition between newspa-pers and the setting up of press trusts, distribution methods such as subscription or sale by individual issue) and the news markets more generally (‘The cost of domestic news services in comparison with those abroad’; or the influence of press agencies on ‘the gath-ering of material’:

Reuters and Associated Press would be especially important, the latter the sole agency still owned by existing (American) newspapers, which therefore is a powerful instrument of monopoly on the part of these newspapers. It would be necessary to investigate the commercial prin-ciples according to which newspapers subscribe to these agencies, or the (approximate) conditions governing the subscriptions, the news classifications used for this purpose (e.g. as ‘important’ or ‘sensa-tional’), and the changes in these categories (Weber 1998a: 113).

In this first part, Weber also lays great emphasis on the problems of work organisation within the newspaper industry, the distribution of workloads and of power between staff members—what he calls ‘the distribution of material’, career paths and the organisation of journalism as a profession:

22. The translation of these two terms is somewhat problematic. Zeitungsgeschäft is a very general term which refers to a newspaper or the press as a commercial com-pany or business. Depending on the context, it could be rendered as ‘press (com-mercial) concern’ or ‘newspaper business’. [Note of the editors [I.D. and C.F.]: Keith Tribe’s translation has ‘newspaper business’ throughout.] For Zeitungsgesinnung we have opted for ‘spirit of the newspaper’ [Note of the editors: Keith Tribe translated it as the ‘character’ or ‘general character’ of a newspaper]. Weber also uses at the end of the first part of the Vorbericht the term Geist der Zeitung. In any case, it is interesting to compare the translation of Gesinnung proposed by J.-P. Grossein in the context of the sociology of religion. There the term refers not so much to the individuals’ ‘outlook’ (representation of the world), as to their disposition or attitude of mind, their moral-ity in daily action.



Social background, previous education, means of recruitment, condi-tions of appointment and payment, the ’career’ of journalists (if pos-sible by questionnaire) (Weber 1998a: 116).

In the part dealing with ‘the spirit of the newspaper’ [see n. 22] (Weber 1998a: 117), Weber planned to deal with firstly, the development of the collective identity of the newspaper (what he calls ‘newspa-per anonymity’), secondly, with the influence exerted on content by ‘tradition’ and political allegiance. Finally, in a section entitled ‘The production of public opinion by the press’, he planned to study the effects of newspaper reading on language, life styles, scholarly debates and ‘public morality’ [Note of the editors—the inverted commas are Weber’s]:

What kind of reading matter does the press encourage, and what changes in forms of thought and expression does it promote? (Clas-sical example to start with: analysis of American ‘magazines’.) Extent and nature of linkage between newspaper reading and that of other printed material.

What are the other media forms that the Press displaces? (Classical example: Russia before and after the decree granting relative press freedom, displacement of periodicals, transformation of the entire nature and tendency of reading material.) Urbanization of the coun-tryside and small towns through the influence of the press (Weber 1998a: 118).

The organisation of the planned survey seems to point to a marked economic determinism which appears clearly in some of Weber’s comments, for instance when he asks how a newspaper’s capital may influence its content or how pressure groups manage their news-papers. The Vorbericht is, however, a more complex text than this determinist outline would lead one to believe. In any event, it cannot be reduced to a series of abstract and descriptive categories which could be set out in a descriptive text book on the press, which could be used anywhere and in any period (1. Economic structures: own-ership, organisation of labour…, 2. Cultural and ideological content of newspapers…). To interpret the planned press survey in this way would mean that insufficient account is taken of its manifestly clear orientation towards a specific socio-economic context, of Weber’s repeatedly declared intention to seek to understand the develop-ment rather than the state of the press and finally of the highly prob-lematised character (behind the very descriptive appearance of the outline and its abundance of detail) of the research paths suggested. The questions raised are, in fact, mostly oriented by and towards



some central issues: the problematic nature of rationalizing, within a modern capitalist context, organization and behaviours. This ques-tioning implied in numerous formulations emerges as the third part which seeks to resolve the problematic opposition between eco-nomic structures and their ideological consequences.

Capitalism and the press: a mutual relationshipMost of the questions raised in the ‘economic’ part of the project are oriented towards the idea that the production of information does not depend (or no longer depends) on a craft activity putting the journalist at its core but rather on an industrial-scale activity involv-ing large companies and forms of sub-contracting (press agencies, suppliers of classified advertisements and supplementary mate-rial…) within highly structured markets (for instance, that of offi-cial press statements and communiqués issued by administrations) which have a strong organisational and institutional dimension. This underlying question clearly comes out in the section of the survey plan dealing with ‘americanism’):

‘Americanism’ in the press, in respect of layout, arrangement, the rela-tive importance of individual sections and the organization of head-lines. Influence on the character of the newspaper and the way in which the newspaper is read. Exact analysis of the commercial char-acteristics of American newspapers by contrast with that of ours, pen-etration of these characteristics here, reason for this (or why not)? (Weber 1998a: 114).23

As far as journalists are concerned directly, Weber is interested in their ‘career paths’ and ‘life chances’ within the profession and seems to want to question the image of the profession (and also how the ‘profession’ is organised in the sense of the usual attributes men-tioned in the paragraph on the survey plan: trade unions, tribunals for the regulation of professional conduct…). He also examines the permeability of the profession with regard to other activities (thus specifying his investigation of ‘career paths’ and giving it a compar-ative dimension), as well as the influence of the individual journalist within an organization such as a newspaper:

Specific character and development of the socio-economic position of journalists, changes from and to other kinds of occupation, the nature

23. It was a commonplace to decry the americanisation of the press in the early years of the 20th century. Delporte (1999) has been able to show that in France this constituted a form of romantic resistance to the industrialization of the press.



of the journalist’s life chances (that prevailing today compared with earlier, domestically compared with that abroad) both within and out-side his occupation.

Newspapers and journalism The qualitative demands made upon modern journalists, adaptation and selection through the conditions and practices of the newspaper business (Weber 1998a: 116).

From both these perspectives, the model of journalism as a craft or profession is implicitly opposed to one which sees journalists as sal-aried employees subject to economic constraints within the news-paper industry.24 On all these points, it may be said that Weber is seeking to test against the facts the idea that the modern press is assimilated into a form of rationalized capitalist economy.

In the second part of the survey plan, the questions and sugges-tions formulated by Weber cannot be reduced to what has since become the classic problematization of the formation of public opin-ion and the role of the press. Weber is not so much interested in how the press affects the ideas of individuals but more their every-day life through the rationalization and universalization of the tools through which individual life worlds are interpreted. These issues emerge clearly in the section on ‘public opinion’, in which Weber discusses more concrete cultural elements than the usual contem-porary meaning of the term appears to suggest, when it is manipu-lated, for instance, for the production of opinion polls. He examines the influence exerted by the press on vernacular language, on modes of life, particularly rural ones, on ‘public morality’ and scientific debates. The press thus helps to define stable and unified frame-works of thought and action.25 As Weber himself observes at the end

24. This emerges in the section on ‘newspapers and journalism’ which we have already quoted and which goes on to say: ‘Conflict and balance of interests between the press concern and journalists. Corporatist organization of journalists from the standpoint of its organizational development as well as in the type and developments of its work (professional placement, benevolent funds, the tribunal for awarding honours and conducting arbitration of the “German Editors’ Union”). Degree of influence of individual journalists on the “spirit” of the newspaper and its development.’

25. For Weber this is by no means unconnected to the structure of the news-paper market: ‘Competition between types of newspaper and the consequences. To what extent is this governed by purely commercial concerns and to what extent by political or other factors? Which types emerge as winners? Endogenous tenden-cies to regional monopolies of political news by major newspapers. To what extent do big-city newspapers and particularly those from national capitals dominate the countryside?’ (point A.VI)



of the Vorbericht, the press exerts a ‘globalizing’, ‘uniformizing’ and ‘reifying’26 influence on modern culture and ‘the sensibilities’ of our contemporaries:

Such questions can be easily multiplied and only in relation to these and similar questions would the actual major cultural questions concerning the significance of the press—with its ubiquitous, stan-dardizing, matter-of-fact and at the same time constantly emotionally-coloured influence on the state of feelings and accustomed ways of thinking of modern man, on political, literary and artistic activity, on the constitution and displacement of mass judgements and mass beliefs—be open to debate (Weber 1998a: 119).

When one reads the Vorbericht, one realises that Weber’s reasoning consists not in opposing or ranking the two separate levels of anal-ysis through the outline for the proposed survey, but in the use of specific examples, to compare ‘economic’ and ‘cultural’ logic. There are many such examples in the press survey proposal, and they emerge as the pivotal points of the analysis. One may cite, in par-ticular, because Weber refers to it in the all the texts in which he deals with the issue of the press, the question of anonymity since in his day many press articles were published anonymously. From the perspective of the Geschäft as well as from that of the Gesinnung, ano-nymity is linked to the western process of rationalization (since, on the one hand, the newspaper as a business concern was becoming further removed from the journalistic craft which justified signing an article and, on the other, the production of articles which bear no indicators of individuality forms part of the process of ‘uniformiza-tion’ of judgement, a question of great interest to Weber).27

The question of the ‘language’ of the press could be cited as another of those pivotal points. In fact, it comes up both in the first part when Weber refers to the ‘usual classification of information’ linked to the provision of news items through press agencies and in the second where he discusses ‘the stylisation of how the press is read through the page layout’, referring to the ‘formal changes in the way things are expressed and thought about and how the press edu-cated its readership in that regard’. As a letter dated 11-14 December

26. Note of the editors: ‘ubiquisierender, uniformierender, versachlichender’—Keith Tribe’s translation below in text differs from the rendition in English of Gilles Bastin’s own translation (Keith Tribe has ‘ubiquitous, standardizing, matter-of-fact’).

27. Clearly the treatment given to the issue of anonymity in the survey is very different from that accorded to it at the time of the lawsuits. Here, it is not about political stakes but a symptom of economic change.



1910 and addressed to Karl Vossler confirms, Weber was actively seeking for this survey a person able to conduct research on

the (whether direct or indirect) influence of the development of the press on language but emphatically not ‘newspaper German’ or any-thing of the kind, but the continual effect of emotional stylisation and telegraphic style etc. (Weber 1994b: 730).

Weber concludes: ‘We might need this!’This type of reasoning is most effective when the examples stud-

ied are drawn directly from the business world and concern that par-ticular exemplar of ‘the modern human being’ in Weber’s view, the entrepreneur. It is in the case of entrepreneurs that the comparison of Geschäft and Gesinnung appears in the most direct manner and that ‘the enrichment and schematisation of thought’ (Weber 1998a: 119) that newspaper reading leads to may be transposed most effectively into a Lebensführung or life conduct, which has economic effects. In his economic history lectures in 1919, Weber clearly stresses the role played by the development of the press in the expansion of com-merce. In it Weber describes the emergence in the 18th century of ‘an organization of information’ in a world where economic behav-iours had so far only been based on information garnered from ‘the exchange of letters’:

For the development of a wholesale trade carried out in such fashion, and specifically for speculative trade, the indispensable prerequisite was the presence of an adequate news service and an adequate com-mercial organization. A public news service, such as forms the basis of exchange dealings today, developed quite late. In the 18th century, not only did the English Parliament keep its proceedings secret, but the exchanges, which regarded themselves as merchants' clubs, followed the same policy in regard to their news information. They feared that the publication of general prices would lead to ill feeling and would destroy their business. The newspaper as an institution came into the service of commerce at an astonishingly late date. The newspaper, as an institution, is not a product of capitalism. It brought together in the first place political news and then mainly all sorts of curiosities from the world at large. The advertisement, however, made its way into the newspaper very late. It was never entirely absent but originally it related to family announcements, while the advertisement as a notice by the merchant, directed toward finding a market, first becomes an established phenomenon at the end of the 18th century—in the jour-nal which for a century was the first in the world, The Times. Official price bulletins did not become general until the 19th century; origi-nally all the exchanges were closed clubs, as they have remained in America virtually down to the present. Hence in the 18th century,



business depended on the organised exchange of letters. Rational trad-ing between regions was impossible without secure transmission of letters (Weber 1927: 220).

A similar logic underpins the issue of commercial advertising in the Vorbericht (one of the longest sections of the survey plan). Advertise-ments justify analysing the press as a means of regulating economic behaviours and now constitute an economic sector in their own right (through specialised sub-contractors and the way in which they are financed…). Weber is interested both in the development of newspa-per advertising as an economic sector (specialised newspapers and firms and advertising ‘marts’) and in the power struggle between newspapers and advertisers:

The importance of the material dependence of newspapers upon advertising revenue in the determination of newspaper prices and their general character. (Alleged and genuine risk for the integrity of the newspaper on the one hand; and on the other: facilitation of better-quality news services and other substantive aspects of the newspaper.) The relation of advertisement and the actual text of the paper (paid text, covert advertising, forms of the same). Attempts on the part of advertisers (major advertisers or, occasionally, commercial associa-tions) to influence the editorial part of the newspaper, to gain influence over artistic or other forms of criticism, or to exclude the advertise-ments of competitors (Weber 1998a: 115).

Weber also suggests that studies of the effectiveness of this kind of advertising should be carried out:

Psychological limits to the effect of small advertisements and other forms of promotion on the one hand, of commercial advertising on the other, in the latter case according to variety of purposes (Weber 1998a: 115).

We know how significant this type of questioning proved to be and how important advertising is to the media.

The ‘Survey’: Interpreting the Facts in Fine Detail

Weber’s proposed press survey reflects in interesting ways the methodological principles that he applied in his empirical research. It is striking how many times he repeats his call both in the Vor-bericht and the Geschäftsbericht for an absolutely neutral and scien-tific treatment of the subject, free from any value judgement on what journalists write or how they work. Just as we could see in the DGS an instrument for the setting up of such a survey, these two texts,



as well as those written for the DGS (letters and statutes) take on value as models and manifestos of what sociological research should look like.28 A. Oberschall (1965) (and Lazarsfeld and Oberschall 1965) in his work on the history of empirical research in the field of social science in Germany, stresses this point and describes the pro-posed press survey as the first ever attempt in that country to jus-tify a large-scale project using an empirical approach. Moreover, he emphasises the modernity of the project’s conception and the prox-imity of its approaches (collective research, projects designed with student training in mind …) to those found in the United States after the second world war. Although questionnaire-based studies were widely used in Germany in the late 19th century, Weber’s approach broke with the reforming aims that had been up to that time typical of this type of research (in particular projects sponsored by the Verein). He also integrated in a very innovative fashion, considerations as to how the research could best be organised to give the project the greatest chance of success.29 The Weber that may be assumed to be at work in the preparation of this planned survey is a subtle field methodologist, who builds on his initial experience with the Verein and affirms the specific character of an approach to the social world that is both productive and scientific. Here there is no question, as was the case with his first survey on agricultural workers conducted for the Verein, of asking only the employers to find out about the workers’ jobs.30 Weber planned to use questionnaires with journal-ists and explored multiple methodological paths: content analysis,31

28. Hinnerk Bruhns (1996) heads one of his articles with a quotation from Weber which illustrates the absence of a systematic methodology and epistemology which could be dissociated from the ongoing research project: ‘Only by laying bare and solving substantive problems can sciences be established and their methods devel-oped. On the other hand, purely epistemological and methodological reflections have never played the crucial role in such developments’ (Weber 1949: 116).

29. In part because the subject of the research is an open field which cannot be captured simply through the kind of moral categories which served to steer ques-tioning in the surveys conducted by and for the Verein: ‘For it is plainly visible that the difficulty of clearly formulating the phenomenon under investigation shows the need for collective brainwork: different ways of formulating the problem may be discussed, whereas as far as the questionnaire is concerned, only the technical possi-bilities raise issues. The nature of the questioning is clear but not its scope’ (letter to Franz Eulenburg, 12 October 1910, Weber 1994b: 644).

30. Weber had already carried out such methodological reflection at the time of that first survey. As a result, he had set up an additional survey using pastors as informants in order to neutralize any possible bias.

31. Here it may be noted that although Weber intended to read the newspapers



participant observation in American newspapers, consulting news-paper archives, balance sheets and accounts.32 He also defines the conditions which would make the survey not only acceptable to its ‘target audience’, but thus also able to produce data. One such con-dition was going to be the active participation of all actors of the newspaper business, from the earliest stages of the research.33

This project is marked by a considerable concern on Weber’s part to get away from any kind of essayism or abstract dissertation (referred to in the text as ‘writ[ing] an entertaining Feuilleton’—Weber 1998a: 119), as the very form of the plan clearly indicates. Weber’s intention was to gather facts or rather intuitions on the relevant facts to under-pin the problematique and argument being elaborated.34

These anchor points of the field study (that we have described as the key nodes of the argument: anonymity, language and how adver-tising is organized) appear to take on a far greater heuristic value for Weber than mere illustrations of an idea. It is these nodes which give rise to an idea and then support it. A good example is to be found in a passage of the Geschäftsbericht in which Weber describes the use of opaque glass windows in American stock exchanges to pre-vent information being communicated to people not involved in the

with ‘a pair of scissors in his hand’, his aim was not so much to carry out a tradi-tional content analysis (picking out themes and ideological content) as to evaluate the space given to various headings within the overall economy of the newspaper or to comprehend the ‘style’ of the world description of each newspaper and the manner in which it typifies and categorises news.

32. Weber’s methodological opportunism and his positions in the Verein sur-veys are well described by Kaesler. Weber, who had put a classified advertisement in a newspaper as early as 1892 offering to carry out ‘private surveys’, was heavily involved in developing the methodology for the 1907 survey of industrial workers.

33. It proved, however, to be a difficult task. A. Kutsch quotes certain elements of discussion which shook professional associations of newspaper publishers and showed how certain misunderstandings persisted regarding the point of empiri-cal surveys of the press. For Kutsch (1998), the Preβ-Enquête was greatly hampered by the publishers’ reluctance to collaborate. The support gained by Weber from the Reichsverband der deutschen Presse was, for instance, solely due to the interest shown by Alfred Scheel in this type of research. Scheel, after numerous debates within the association, succeeded in launching his own questionnaire-based survey (the themes of which were set out by Weber in the paragraph headed ‘Newspapers and jour-nalism’ in the Vorbericht). The questionnaires were sent out in March 1914 to 1,800 reporter-editors (Redakteure), but the outbreak of war a few months later prevented him from making use of the data. [note of the editors: for the translation of Redakteur as ‘reporter-editor’, see Dickinson in this issue].

34. This may explain the rather off-putting catalogue-like aspect of the Vorbericht.



market proper (Weber 2008: 83). It is not merely a matter of adding an anecdote to the general idea already expressed in abstract terms—the differences between Britain and the United States with regard to the relative power of the press and institutions such as Parliament or the markets—but to contribute a weightier element of proof to a theoretical argument that would lack any historical value if it were to be simply stated. It is these ‘local differences’, as Weber himself says, which make the argument more convincing than mere grand ideas, and the Vorbericht may be construed as an instrument for pro-ducing such differences. In the case of the influence of the press on language, Weber summarizes as follows: ‘it has no value if not illus-trated by numerous concrete examples’ (Vorbericht, B.III.4). It is this kind of obsession with proof (or rather with clues) that explains how far it was from Weber’s intention to set up formal experiments to test hypotheses that were fully developed a priori and how he put for-ward multiple research paths and suggestions for data that needed to be gathered to underpin his arguments.35

Thus it may be seen that the term ‘rigour’ takes on a rather par-ticular meaning in the planned survey. It implies both eschew-ing abstraction because knowledge derives from facts and at the same time selecting data to which meaning can only be attributed from the perspective of the problematique chosen. Weber is not deterred by the imprecise nature of some of the factual data. His aim is not to achieve a precise static description or an exact tab-ulation but to make comparisons, for instance, with other coun-tries or other periods. Rather than monitoring the data itself, the requirement for rigour, which Weber takes as a starting point, applies to the monitoring of the relevance of the data in relation to his overall problematique, which requires comparative analy-sis. This conception of rigour may, for example, be illustrated in the Vorbericht, in relation to the differences in production costs for various newspapers:

35. ‘Indeed, Weber’s writings reveal increasing use of all possible syntactic intri-cacies and elaborate turns of phrase permitted by the German language. He con-stantly appears to want to stretch these possibilities to the limit, and even beyond as if he were intent on not losing anything which could bring additional proof or a crumb of indirect evidence, whenever a digression, an example or counter-example seem to bolster an assumption, deepen significance or improve the overall workings of his historic argumentation’ (Passeron 1996: 46-47). The passage of the survey plan on commercial advertising could be cited as an example of this type of reasoning, shown here in its initial stages.



Here in any case it is not the accuracy of individual numbers that mat-ters, but rather the comparison of the relative significance of the indi-vidual items today with respect to earlier prevailing magnitudes, at home and abroad, between the differing types of newspaper: the most important thing is to place the greatest emphasis upon the changes that occur, the developmental tendencies (Weber 1998a: 113).

Conclusion

Weber’s press project appears in many ways to be an opportunity missed. As regards both knowledge of the newspaper industry and the development of innovative and empirical approaches to research, it can only be a matter of regret that the project was never complet-ed.36 A detailed examination of this project enables us, however, to show the link, which seems to us to exist between this survey and Weber’s other work on the historical sociology of capitalism. The date of the Preβ-Enquête (1910) corresponds to that chosen by sev-eral commentators as the tipping point from a sociology of religions (of Protestantism specifically) to a sociology of the development of western civilisation in which religious ethics becomes just one ele-ment of the emergence of modern rationalism. For Marianne Weber, who places this ‘change of perspective’ between 1909 and 1913:

Weber regarded this recognition of the special character of western rationalism and the role it was given to play for Western civilization as one of his most important discoveries. As a result, his original inquiry into the relationship between religion and economics expanded into an even more comprehensive inquiry into the special character of all Western civilization (Marianne Weber 1975: 333).37

Again according to Marianne Weber, Weber’s studies on western music and its rationalization (written in 1912–13) were one of the catalysts for this change. In our view, the proposed press survey also forms part of the broadening of his problematique. Weber con-sidered the press to be both one of the loci and one of the means of the development of capitalist rationalism (through the effects on the life conduct of individuals38). To him, the press may thus have

36. Many research paths set out by Weber have only been explored recently by the sociology of media and communication. Notable examples include the develop-ment of the sociology of influence built around notions of ‘agenda setting’, framing or ‘priming’.

37. Note of the editors: the English translation of Marianne Weber’s biography of her husband has ‘Eastern rationalism’ here, which is a mistake.

38. During his earlier surveys of agricultural and industrial workers, Weber had



been one of the historical phenomena on which he could base his demonstration.

The failure of the Preβ-Enquête reveals to a certain degree how far Max Weber was out of kilter with (it is tempting to say ahead of) the rest of early 20th century German sociology. His inability to get the representatives of this emerging discipline to accept the constraints of a large-scale collective project as well as those of a demanding and rigorous epistemology may be read in the despair which he expressed in a letter, quoted by his wife, and written after the DGS conference of 1911. In it he deplores the futility of his quest for a sci-entific approach comparing himself to a Don Quixote of value free-dom.39 The lawsuits of 1911–1913 were probably, in this perspective, merely sideshows.

Even when Weber’s empirical surveys were successfully com-pleted, as in the case of the major studies for the Verein, they were not widely commented on, which is striking given the amount of theoretical and epistemological output on this author. It is outside the scope of this present study to explain the reasons for this silence, but one can only think that there would be still much to be gained even today by taking inspiration from the research paths put for-ward by Weber for analysing the press and its relationships with the society in which it develops. Through this project Weber shows us in fact a pathway which makes it possible to remove the analysis of the press and more widely ‘news organization’ from the arena of public opinion to which it is often confined, to bring it within the purview of the social economy of modern capitalism. This is no doubt the cost required if one day answers are to be found to the questions raised by the proposed press survey.

ReferencesBruhns, H. 1996. ‘Max Weber, l’économie et l’histoire’. Annales HSS 3:

November-December.

Delporte, C. 1999. Les journalistes en France 1880–1950. Naissance et construction d’une profession. Paris: Seuil.

insisted on including questions about reading and particularly the reading of the press (Hardt 1979; Kutsch 1988).

39. ‘Frankly, I took such an active part in the founding of this organization only because I hoped to find there a place for value-neutral scholarly work and dis-cussion… I am sick and tired of appearing time and again as a Don Quixote of an allegedly unfeasible principle and provoking embarrassing “scenes”’ (quoted by Marianne Weber, pages 424-25).



Eberhard, F. 1963. ‘Franz Adam Löffler und Max Weber—Zwei Pioniere der Pub-lizistikwissenschaft’. Publizistik 8:5.

Hardt, H. 1979. Social theories of the press: Early German and American perspective. Bev-erley Hills-London: Sage.

Hennis, W. 1995. ‘Die Zeitung als Kulturproblem. Zu Max Webers Vorschlag für eine Erhebung über das Zeitungswesens’. In Ansgar Fürst zum Ausscheiden aus der Redaktion der Badischen Zeitung, 59-68. Freiburg: Badischer Verlag. (This arti-cle is a short presentation of the Vorbericht, published for the first time in this volume.)

—1996. ‘Max Webers Vorbericht für eine Erhebung zur Soziologie des Zeitungswesens. Einführung und Text’. Jahrbuch Politisches Denken 1995/96. Stuttgart: Metzler.

—1998. ‘The media as a cultural problem: Max Weber’s sociology of the press’. His-tory of the Human Sciences 11.2: 107-10.

Kasler, D. 1988. Max Weber: An introduction to his life and work. Chicago, IL: Univer-sity of Chicago.

Kutsch, A. 1988. ‘Max Webers Anregung zur empirischen Journalismusforschung. Die Zeitungs-Enquête und eine Redakteurs-Umfrage’. Publizistik 33.1: 5-31.

Lazarsfeld, P.F., and A.R. Oberschall. 1965. ‘Max Weber and empirical social re-search’. American Sociological Review 30.2: 185-99.

Oberschall, A.R. 1965. Empirical social research in Germany, 1848–1914. (New York: Basic Books).

Obst, B. 1986. ‘Das Ende der Presse-Enquete Max Webers. Der Heidelberger Professorsprozeβ von 1912 und seine Auswirkungen auf die deutsche Zeitung-swissenschaft’. In Von der Zeitungskunde zur Publizistik Biographisch-institutionelle Stationen der deutschen Zeitungswissenschaft in der ersten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. R. vom Bruch and O.B. Roegele, 45-62. Frankfurt am Main: Haag und Her-chen Verlag.

Passeron, J.-C. 1996. Introduction à Max Weber, sociologie des religions. Paris: Gallimard.

Pollak, M. 1986a. ‘Max Weber en France. L’itinéraire d’une œuvre’. Cahiers de l’IHTP 3: 1-70.

—1986b. ‘Un texte dans son contexte, l’enquête de Max Weber sur les ouvriers agri-coles’. Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 65: 69-75.

Weber, Marianne 1975. Max Weber: A Biography. New York: Wiley.

Weber, Max 1924. ‘Geschäftsbericht und Diskussionsreden auf den deutschen sozi-ologischen Tagungen (1910, 1912)’. In Gesammelte Aufsätzen zur Soziologie und Sozialpolitik, ed. Marianne Weber, 431-91. Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck).

—1927. General Economic History, trans. Frank H. Knight. London: George Allen & Unwin.

—1949. The Methodology of the Social Sciences, trans. and ed. Edward A. Shils and Henry A. Finch. New York: Free Press.

—1988. Politik als Beruf. Stuttgart: Reclam.



—1994a. Political Writings, ed. Peter Lassman and Ronald Speirs. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press.

—1994b. Briefe 1909–1910, Max Weber-Gesamtausgabe II/6, ed. M. Rainer Lepsius and Wolfgang J. Mommsen. Tübingen: JCB Mohr (Paul Siebeck).

—1998a. ‘Preliminary report on a proposed survey for a sociology of the press’. History of the Human Sciences 11.2: 111-20.

—1998b. Briefe 1911–1912, Max Weber Gesamtausgabe II/7, ed. M. Rainer Lepsius and Wolfgang J. Mommsen in collaboration with Birgit Rudhard and Manfred Schön. Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck).

—2008. ‘Transactions of the First German Conference of Sociologists’. In Max Weber’s complete writings on academic and political vocations, ed. J. Dreijmanis, 80-97. New York: Algora Pub.

Copyright of Max Weber Studies is the property of Max Weber Studies and its content maynot be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder'sexpress written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles forindividual use.

BASTIN the Press in the Light Modern Capitalism

Documents

Transcript of BASTIN the Press in the Light Modern Capitalism