Abstracts

Max Weber Studies Vol. 2 No. 2 (May 2002): 139-162

Max Weber’s Writings on the Bourse: Puzzling Out a Forgotten Corpus

Knut Borchardt

This article raises three main questions: 1. Why has the complex body of work on the bourse, and Weber’s role as a leading expert on it, been overlooked in the Weber literature? 2. What do we know about the reasons and origins of his writings on the bourse? 3. Is there any connection between this explosion of writing activity and his sudden silence after 1897? Despite the intensive researches for Börsenwesen as part of the Gesamtausgabe, there are still significant gaps in our knowledge of the Freiburg years. Weber’s involvement in studying the bourse in 1894 comes out of his involvement as a jurist in the school of Levin Goldschmidt. Whether the Freiburg years turned Weber into a national economist, as recently emphasized, has to be critically considered in the light of his writings on the bourse. Against this background, it is not implausible to link Weber’s psychic collapse with the completion of his work on the complexities of the bourse.

Keywords: Max Weber, Marianne Weber, Levin Goldschmidt, stock and commodity exchanges, commercial law, Nationalökonomie, economics, futures trading.