Includes bibliographical references and index.

Max Weber was the foremost social theorist of the twentieth century; Economy and Society is Weber's most famous work after The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. It consists of diverse essays that Weber was working on at the time of his death in 1920, ranging over subjects in economics, politics, religion, public administration, and sociology. The book was first published in German in two parts in the early 1920s, then in a more authoritative edition in the late 1950s. Economy and Society is a classic work of social theory, and is considered the founding text for modern social debates about action, rationality, bureaucracy and charisma, formal and material justice, religious beliefs, and economic conduct. In this new translation of Part I, Keith Tribe, one of the English-speaking world's leading experts on Weber, aims to present the clearest and most faithful translation yet. Tribe's translation is accompanied by commentary and notes that reflect the decades of scholarship that have passed since Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich published their English translation in 1968.