The social and economic preconditions for the modern form of bureaucratic administration are as follows.

(1) There must have developed a money economy to provide for the payment of officials, which nowadays is universally made in money. This is of great importance for the general mode of life of the bureaucracy, although it is not, on the other hand, in any way the decisive factor for its existence. In quantitative terms, the largest historical examples of a bureaucratic system which has achieved some obvious degree of development are: (a) Egypt in the time of the New Kingdom (though there were also marked patrimonial elements present in this case); (b) the later Roman Empire, but especially the Diocletianic monarchy and the Byzantine state which developed from it (though here again there were marked feudal and patrimonial elements present too); (c) the Roman Catholic Church, increasingly from the end of the thirteenth century onwards; (d) China, from the time of Shi Huang Ti to the present day, but with marked patrimonial and prebendal elements; (e) in an increasingly pure form, the modern European state and more and more public corporations, since the evolution of princely absolutism; (f) the modern large capitalist enterprise, which is more bureaucratic the larger and more complex it is.

In the period of the Warring States, the politically determined capitalism which is common in patrimonial states, based on money-lending and contracting for the princes, seems to have been of considerable significance and to have functioned at high rates of profit, as always under such conditions. Mines and trade are also cited as sources of capital accumulation. Under the Han dynasty, there are reputed to have been multi-millionaires, reckoned in terms of copper. But China's political unification into a world-empire, like the unification of the known world by Imperial Rome, had the obvious consequence that this form of capitalism, which was essentially rooted in the state and its competition with other states, went into decline. The development of a purely market capitalism, directed towards free exchange, on the other hand, remained at an embryonic stage. In all sections of industry, of course, even in the cooperative undertakings to be discussed presently, the merchant, here as elsewhere, was conspicuously superior to the technician. This clearly showed itself even in the usual proportions in which profits were distributed within associations. The interlocal industries also, it is plain, often brought in considerable speculative profits. The ancient classical disposition to set a high value on agriculture, as the truly hallowed calling, hence did not prevent a higher valuation being placed, even as early as the first century B.C., on the opportunities for profit from industry than on those from agriculture (just as in the Talmud), nor did it prevent the highest valuation of all being placed on those from trade.

Max Weber has been described as not merely the greatest of sociologists but ‘the sociologist’. Yet for most of his career he would not have described himself as a sociologist at all. His own training was in history, economics and law; he was opposed to the creation of professorships of sociology; and in a letter written at the very end of his life he said that his only reason for being a sociologist was to rid the subject of the influence of the collective – or, as it would now be put, ‘holistic’ – concepts by which it continued to be haunted. It was not until after 1910 that he began to compose the treatise which we now have, still uncompleted, as Economy and Society. It is a work of a markedly different kind from his early writings, whether his historical studies of medieval trading companies and Roman agrarian law or his contemporary investigations of the stock exchange and the condition of agricultural labour in the Junker estates to the East of the Elbe. Yet it would be a mistake to read too much discontinuity into the sequence of his writings. His ideas changed over the course of thirty years, as they were bound to do. But his overriding preoccupations did not.

Weber wrote extensively about politics not only from an academic standpoint but also as a committed participant in the controversies of his own country and period. This is, at first sight, out of keeping with his strictures against those ‘favourably disposed towards the admission of value-judgments into teaching’. But in his own terms, his commitment to nationalist values and his advocacy of the policies which he believed would best serve the interests of Germany as a major power are perfectly consistent with his rigorous separation of academic from political values. He did not claim scientific objectivity for his personal values, and he acknowledged the entitlement of others to support different values provided only that they were consistently held. It is true to say that his insistence on the duty of the scholar to accept the findings of science whether they accord with his preferences or not has an obvious connexion with his insistence on ‘realism’ and ‘facing facts’ in the views which he puts forward about practical politics. His open contempt for those who cherish illusions about peace and progress and his determination to expose hypocrisy and rhetoric among the advocates of Conservatism and Social Democracy alike are both expressions of an underlying commitment to what one of his commentators has called ‘the familiar bourgeois values writ large’.

For all their intrinsic importance, the individual results of the work so far done in experimental psychology on the course of the processes of fatigue and training are not perhaps of much direct assistance to the compilers of this survey for their special purposes for the reasons already mentioned. Nevertheless, it might possibly be of some use to them to acquaint themselves with some of the simpler concepts commonly employed in the more recent studies in this field, even though, unfortunately, the precise meaning of many of them is at present a matter of dispute. However, some of these concepts are sufficiently clear in meaning, represent measurable quantities, are of proven usefulness and can provide the compilers with a convenient summary of certain simple elements in personal qualifications for work, together, if necessary, with a handy terminology: for instance, such concepts as that of ‘fatiguability’ (measured in terms of the rate and degree of onset of fatigue); ‘recuperability’ (measured in terms of the rate of recovery of efficiency after fatigue); ‘capacity for training’ (in terms of the rate of improvement in performance in the course of the work); ‘durability of training’ (in terms of the extent of the residue of training left after breaks and interruptions in the work); ‘stimulability’ (in terms of the extent to which the ‘psychomotor’ influence of working itself improves performance); ‘powers of concentration’ and ‘distractability’ (in terms of the reduction or lack of it in performance caused by an unaccustomed environment or extraneous disturbances, and, in the case of a reduction, in terms of its extent); and, finally, ‘habituation’ (to an unaccustomed environment, extraneous disturbances, and – most important of all in principle – to the combination of different activities).