Max Weber's Science of Man

In this work, the author continues his argument against received wisdom in the understanding of Max Weber. He seeks to rescue the work of this important thinker from sociologists and systems-theorists, demonstrating an essential continuity throughout Weber's work in his concern with the pervasive force of economic calculation and material rationality in the shaping of "man". Ranging widely over the work of Weber's contemporaries, and making use of Weber's unpublished papers and correspondence, the author provides an elegant account of the motive of Weber's scholarship. He demonstrates how a better understanding of Weber in his own context can present us with a figure who can still teach us, as he sought to teach his own contemporaries.

Table of Contents:
Part One Max Weber's Science of Man I Max Weber's Science of Man 1 Is there a Weberian Anthropology? 2 Weber and the Contemporary Sciences of Man 3 Weber's Epistemological Objective: The Empirical Registration of Human 'Dispositions' 4 The Spiritualist Foundation of Max Weber's 'Interpretative Sociology'. Ernst Troeltsch, Max Weber and William James' Varieties of Religious Experience 5 The Sociology of Educational Means and Ends 6 Charisma and 'Inner' Transformation Part Two The Value Relation and the Power of Judgement II Max Weber as Teacher 1 The Educational Intention 2 The Systematic Perspective of the Work 3 The Disciplinary Context 4 The Meaning of 'Value Freedom' for the Communication of Practical Insights 5 Max Weber's Failure III The Pitiless 'Sobriety of Judgement': Max Weber between Carl Menger and Gustav von Schmoller. The Academic Politics of Value Freedom 1 Between History and 'Theory' - Also a Generational Conflict 2 The Pedagogic Background to the 'Postulate' 3 On Stage at the Conferences of Higher Education Teachers 4 Academic Scholars or 'Business Professors' IV The Meaning of Value Freedom - Impulse and Motive for Max Weber's 'Postulate' 1 The Origin of the Debate 2 Weber's Motives Part Three The 'Cultural Problems of Capitalism' V Outlines for an 'Intellectual Biography' of Max Weber 1 Talent, Diligence and Curiosity 2 The Formation of Sensibility 3 Early Reading 4 Friedrich Albert Lange 5 The Machinery of Modern Capitalism 6 A New Beginning and the Fixing of Central Interests 7 The 'Cultural Problems of Capitalism' and the 'Major Projects' Translator's Appendix

About the Author :
Born in 1923, Wilhelm Hennis served in the German navy during the war, after which he studied law at Gottingen. During 1951 and 1952 he was parliamentary assistant to Adolf Arndt, legal adviser to the SPD, and research assistant to Carlo Schmid at Frankfurt University from 1953 to 1960. From 1967 to until his retirement in 1988 he was Professor of Political Science at the University of Freiburg. He still lives in Freiburg, and he remains an acerbic commentator upon modern politics. The Translator Born in 1949, Keith Tribe studied social sciences and economic history at the Universities of Essex and Cambridge, and was appointed to Keele University in 1976, where he is now Reader in Economics. From 1979 to 1984 he was a visiting research fellow at the University of Heidelberg and the Max Planck Institut fur Geschichte, Gottingen.

Review :
"Hennis wanders the far-flung shores of Weber's oeuvre and brings back nuggets of textual gold with which to dazzle the reader. His method, he says, is not a reconstruction rather it's a true appreciation of the full range of the work and a matter of judgement, of correctly divining the centre of gravity of Weber's work. Hennis expresses a real fear that Weber along with the western canon will slowly slip away beyond the horizon of contemporary understanding. Weber the prophet, ignored politically in his own day, now stands unregarded by social science. Whatever one thinks of this threnody, Hennis should take some comfort that the memory of the authentic Weber has been given a further lease through these essays. Sam Whimster, reviewing the original German edition"