ABSTRACT
In 1971, Guenther Roth and the author published a collection of their essays on Max Weber under the title Scholarship and Partisanship. The book was divided into three sections: Ideological Conflict and Scholarly Commitment, Comparative Studies of Authority and Legitimation, and Predecessors and Peers. Under the third heading there were essays on Max Weber and Marxism, the genesis of his typological approach, a comparison between Weber and Jacob Burckhardt and a survey of the writers who had commented on the relation between Protestantism and Capitalism before Weber. Weber and Emile Durkheim were at opposite poles as social theorists and their divergence is still characteristic of the field. At one point in his discussion Durkheim seemed to conceive his task in the same terms as Weber. He wanted his sociology to occupy a middle ground between the nominalism of the historians and the realism of the philosophers.
