‘The Digression Is the Story’ (or How to Read Economics and Weber). An Interview with Keith Tribe

Keith Tribe’s academic work combines an original mix. Tribe is a recognized scholar in history of economics who has played a very important role in the dissemination and translation of the work of Wilhelm Hennis and Reinhart Koselleck in English speaking academic circles, and he is currently working on a new translation of Max Weber’s Economy and Society for Harvard University Press.
This interview was recorded in the context of his visit to Copenhagen Business School in 2016 (one of Tribe’s talk on that visit was recently published in this special section in Sociologica). In our conversation, Tribe kindly answered questions about his different academic interests. In the first two answers, he expands on the original method of analysis of economic ideas unfolded in his book The Economy of the Word: Language, History, and Economics (2015, Oxford University Press). The answers to questions 3, 4 and 5 are about Weber, particularly the strange role Hayek played in making the first English translation of Economy and Society, the contemporary relevance of Hennis’s interpretation, and a clarification about the long lasting confusion with the term “iron cage”.