The History of Commercial Partnerships in the Middle Ages is of crucial importance today.
The Chronicle of Higher Education
Social scientists in all fields and historians of modern business culture, as well as social theorists and Weber scholars, will finally be able to put Weber's more famous writings on modern economies and societies in historical perspective. This book ... Read moreshows for the first time that the roots of the modern business firm are even deeper in history than the story told in Weber's best-selling work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. For years to come, readers of all kinds will thank Kaelber for making Weber's ideas more accessible.
Charles Lemert, Andrus Professor of Sociology, Wesleyan University Lutz Kaelber has performed a service by translating and annotating this important product of Weber's scholarly apprenticeship. Written in the peculiar staccato of historical legal writing of the time—a period in which legal history was at its peak—the text deals with a crucial problem in the rise of western capitalism: the step-by-step creation of a legal structure (a form of liability for debt suitable for capitalist enterprise) out of a legal tradition oriented to the economic unit of the productive household.
Stephen Turner, University of South Florida Affords specialists access to an underappreciated aspect of Weber's analysis of early capitalism.
Contemporary Sociology
Weber's extraordinary dissertation, defended when he was 25, is a minor masterpiece, which surely makes this book the most important translation event for Weberians in the last quarter century. Kaelber's lengthy introduction is indispensable, and corrects a number of longstanding errors in the literature. Everyone who cherishes the Weberian legacy is in his debt. Historical economists, social theorists, intellectual historians, and historians of higher education will want to own this volume.
Alan Sica, The Pennsylvania State University Show Less