"Communal relationships" and "associative relationships". A reconstructionof Max Weber's terminology

Max Weber wrote two different fragmentary versions of his contribution to t he famous Outline of Social Economics, both of which have been published to gether under the title Economy and Society. There are also two different ve rsions of his basic sociological terms, both of which draw on Ferdinand Ton nies' central work Community and Society. Starting with Tonnies' descriptio n of the dichotomy between "community" and "society", first Weber's use of the notions of "communal relationships" and "associative relationships" in his essay On some Categories of Interpretive Sociology (1913) and in the ol der parts of Economy and Society is analyzed. In a second step Weber's modi fications of these categories in his Basic Sociological Terms (1920) are re constructed. The main thesis is that only with this definitive version of h is sociological categories was Weber able to describe the marker economy an d those associations based on a formal order, voluntary or imposed, within a coherent theoretical framework.