韦伯1891年的教授资格论文（只有德国才有的东东，下文出版社介绍的第一句话说是博士论文，疑误）。

Prof. Richard I. Frank has translated into English Max Weber’s 1891 doctoral dissertation dealing with Roman agriculture. Weber was born in 1864, the son of a wealthy family with connections in the upper levels of German business, political, and academic circles. Like his father, Weber studied law and wrote his doctoral dissertation on medieval trading companies (1889) under a family friend, Professor Levin Goldschmidt. That gave him the title Dr. phil. and qualified him in German law. He then decided to qualify in Roman law as well, a most unusual course, and embarked on a study under another family friend, Theodor Mommsen, Europe’s leading Romanist. The result was the present work (1891), which was his Habilitationsschrift and as such entitled him to teach in any German university.

The first thing to be noted is the work’s scope. It begins with a three-fold classification of surveying procedures from an obscure handbook, goes on to describe the triumph of capitalism and cities, then their replacement by manors, and closes with an allusion to mankind’s dream of world unity. This is not a narrow monograph! He focused on particular institutions and times and sought “to understand” each as a result of the interplay of various political, economic, and ideological forces. In this he followed the philosophy of Wilhelm Dilthey: “We explain nature, but we understand (verstehen) mental life.”

If Weber drew any lesson from the history he traced it was the dynamic, decisive role of capital. It determined the various legal categories of land, it used slaves to develop plantations, and when the supply of slaves declined it replaced them with tenants, and later it changed tenants into serfs and plantations into manors. Indeed it has been argued that through all Weber’s works on antiquity “the key, unifying theme in them is the issue of the existence and nature of ancient capitalism.

An excellent reading choice for both academic and legal scholars.

Features: Bibliographical data, tables, graphs, and maps.