The historical-critical edition of Max Weber's writings on sociology of
law (MWG I/22-3) revealed deep layers of Max Weber's legal texts that
thus became readable for the first time. Weber breaks out from the legal
centrism of the normative world and designs an Interpretation that
follows the "world history of law" in a cultural-comparative sense,
thereby making him appear particularly topical for today's debates on
the relationship between globalization and legal analysis. With his text
"Die Wirtschaft und die Ordnungen" ("Economics and the Orders"), Weber
anticipated the idea of "legal pluralism" that emphasizes the diversity
ofnormative orders. Further, the departure from the occidental
development path of law towards the "developmental conditions of law"
opens up the cognitive horizon for insights into other legal cultures,
their interferences and hybridizations for which we still seem to lack
the categories today. It is, then, all the more remarkable how Weber
designed a great, all-encompassing meta-narrative on legal rationalism
in the Occident based on a multitude of highly branched out legal
histories - a narrative that can only be told through the perspective of
universal history and with the world cultures of law in mind. This
interpretation also captures the birth of sociology from the spirit of
jurisprudence - so impressively detailed in Weber's work - that accords
particular importance to law in the analysis of modernities.
