Max Weber Revisited

Abstract

Ralph Schroeder (ed.), Max Weber, Democracy and Modernization. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998, £16.99 paperback, xii+206 pp. (ISBN 0-333-71254-4)

Richard Swedberg, Max Weber and the Idea of Economic Sociology. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998, £19.95, x+315 pp. (ISBN 0-691-02949-0)

Sam Whimster (ed.) Max Weber and the Culture of Anarchy. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999, £17.50 paperback, xii+235 pp. (ISBN 0-333-68227-6)

There has been a resurgence of interest in the work of Max Weber over the past twenty years. This may be traced back to the publication of Wolfgang Schluchter's Rise of Western Rationalism (1981) in 1979, and Jürgen Habermas's Theory of Communicative Action (1984) in 1981. These landmark publications opened Weber's work to a wide academic audience because they characterised Weber not simply as an historical sociologist, a methodologist or legal theorist, but as a theorist and critic of modernity. Weber's account of the rise, nature and trajectory of modernity has since been addressed in important works by Sam Whimster and Scott Lash (1987), Wilhelm Hennis (1988), Lawrence Scaff (1991), Charles Turner (1992), Bryan Turner (1992), and David Owen (1994), and still constitutes the main point of interest in his work today. There are a number of important reasons for this. First, Weber's account of the modern world offers an alternative to that forwarded by Marxist theory; an alternative which has become increasingly viable since the collapse of state socialism in the late 1980s. Secondly, his work emphasises the importance of ideas, beliefs or ‘ideal interests’ alongside material interests for understanding historical change, and fits neatly within the recent cultural turn in sociological theory. Thirdly, his theory of the progressive rationalisation and disenchantment of the modern world informs some of the main lines of contemporary social and cultural critique, including Frankfurt School critical theory and certain strands of postmodern theory. For these reasons, amongst others, Weber remains a key figure within the realm of sociological theory, a fact that is confirmed by the rapidly expanding secondary literature on his life and work.