ABSTRACT
This is worth noting, if only because the Weberians of the late twentieth century are in one respect very different from, say, the Hegelians of the mid-nineteenth century. The Hegelians, while more or less grudgingly admitting their debt to the great master, felt oppressed by his shadow, unable to step out into the light of new thought, and were thus mere epigones and, worse, the last epigones of philosophy because they believed that, after Hegel, there was little if anything to say. Not so our modern Weberians, who seem, on the contrary, to be happy epigones, eager to acknowledge their debt to the master, unworried by his shadow. In many ways, Weber is not seen as a source of shadows at all, but as a pervasive light that inspires social science.
