Max Weber (PDF)

Max Weber (1864-1920) is recognized throughout the world as the
most important classic thinker in the social sciences - there
is simply no one in the history of the social sciences who has been
more influential. The affinity between capitalism and
protestantism, the religious origins of the Western world, the
force of charisma in religion as well as in politics, the
all-embracing process of rationalization and the bureaucratic price
of progress, the role of legitimacy and of violence as offsprings
of leadership, the 'disenchantment' of the modern world
together with the never-ending power of religion, the antagonistic
relation between intellectualism and eroticism: all these are key
concepts which attest to the enduring fascination of Weber's
thinking.

The tremendous influence exerted by Max Weber was due not only to
the power of his ideas but also to the fact that behind his
theories one perceived a man with a marked character and a tragic
destiny. However, for nearly 80 years, our understanding of the
life of Max Weber was dominated by the biography published in 1926
by his widow, Marianne Weber. The lack of a great Weber biography
was one of the strangest and most glaring gaps in the literature of
the social sciences. For various reasons the task was difficult;
time and again, attempts to write a new biography of Max Weber
ended in failure.

When Joachim Radkau's biography appeared in Germany in 2005
it caused a sensation. Based on an abundance of previously unknown
sources and richly embedded in the German history of the time, this
is the first fully comprehensive biography of Max Weber ever to
appear. Radkau brings out, in a way that no one has ever done
before, the intimate interrelations between Weber's thought
and his life experience. He presents detailed revelations about the
great enigmas of Weber's life: his suffering and erotic
experiences, his fears and his desires, his creative power and his
methods of work as well as his religious experience and his
relation to nature and to death. By understanding the great drama
of his life, we discover a new Max Weber, until now unknown in many
respects, and, at the same time, we gain a new appreciation of his
work.

Joachim Radkau, born in 1943, is Professor of Modern History at
the Bielefeld University, Germany. His interest in Max Weber dates
back nearly forty years when he worked together with the
German-American historian George W. F. Hallgarten (Washington), a
refugee who left Germany in 1933 and who, as a student, listened to
Weber's last lecture in summer 1920. Radkau's main
works include Die deutsche Emigration in den USA (1971); Deutsche
Industrie und Politik (together with G. W. F. Hallgarten, 1974),
Aufstieg und Krise der deutschen Atomwirtschaft (1983), Technik in
Deutschland (1989), Das Zeitalter der Nervosität (1998), Natur
und Macht: Eine Weltgeschichte der Umwelt (2000).