ABSTRACT
What kind of understanding are we after when we relate a writer to his or her contemporaries? There are clearly different kinds. The most basic is interpretive: a writer's work can only be made intelligible, not by treating it as an isolated enterprise, but by situating it in the context of the intellectual tendencies and debates which help define its meaning and elucidate its purpose. A second form of understanding is causal: we seek to identify the influences to which a writer is subject, and their contribution both to the creation of specific works and to the process of his or her development as a whole. A third understanding is evaluative: it is only by comparison with others that it is possible to define the distinctive character of a writer's work, and assess the quality of its 'achievement'. These interconnected forms of understanding, easy to specify in principle, are of course more difficult to attain in practice, and are the subject of considerable methodological dispute. The characterization of 'Weber and his contemporaries' as a study of the relationships between particular individuals, for example, is itself only one, by no means uncontroversial, way of defining such a project.
