ABSTRACT

Max Weber famously declared that the vocation of sociology requires that sociologists should suspend certain values in the pursuit of the ideal of ‘valuefreedom’. This imperative, together with all the arguments and issues surrounding the relevance, ethics and politics of sociology that it prompted, have been rehearsed and discussed since Weber almost to the point of exhaustion. In the 1960s and 1970s the issue of ‘value-freedom’ shaded over into the Marx-Weber confrontation that, once Parsons had fallen out of favour, shaped a great deal of theoretical sociology in the anglophone world in that period (see Kilminster 1998: ch. 8). This confrontation was partly a theoretical one about alienation versus rationalization (Löwith 1982) and historical necessity versus cycles of charisma (Mommsen 1970, 1974). It was also a political and moral confl ict about the relevance and proper task of sociology (see Kilminster 1979: 32-7). The orthodox interpretation of Weber had seen him essentially as a ‘value-free’ sociologist of modernization (Parsons 1937; Bendix 1966) and this was challenged in the 1960s and 1970s in the name of the revolutionary Marx (Zeitlin 1968). This polarization gave way in the late 1980s and 1990s, following the events leading up to and the fi nal collapse of the Russian communist empire, to a wave of further interpretations of Weber (e.g. Hennis 1988; Scaff 1989). These drew out of Weber his ideas about the importance of a robust civic-political culture and the need for politicians of strength and integrity as a counterweight to modern individualism and subjectivism.