Reading Max Weber: The Limits of Sociology

Abstract

Max Weber is often cited as an enigmatic figure because of the tension between scholarship and politics which his entire adult life allegedly manifested. Others prefer a psychoanalytic reduction, concerned as they are with discrediting his pessimistic version of the future of western civilization. But few have been interested in bringing to light the clear tension in his scholarly work between sociological theory and social theorizing. In what follows, I offer an interpretation of Weber's work based on just such a distinction. That Weber refused to `leave his post' and speak to the first principles which the western project presumes, when these principles were not his own, had serious consequences for him. In effect, one of Weber's greatest accomplishments is precisely the way he speaks to the limits of sociology while staying true to those limits.