AGRARIAN SOCIOLOGY OF ANCIENT CIVILIZATIONS

The Agrarian Sociology of Ancient Civilizations—Weber’s neglected masterpiece which first appeared in German in 1987 and was reissued in 1909—represents a fascinating and rigorous exercise to bring the newly-forged concepts of sociology to bear on civilizations as diverse as Mesopotamia and Egypt, Hebrew society in Israel, the city-states of classical Greece, the Hellenistic empire and, finally, republican and imperial Rome. Blending, throughout the work, description of socio-economic structures with investigation into the mechanisms and causes of the rise and decline of social systems, the volume ends with a magisterial explanatory essay on the underlying reasons for the ultimate fall of the Roman Empire and, with it, the close of Antiquity itself.