ABSTRACT

In recent years there has been a considerable resurgence of interest in the work of Max Weber among scholars all over the world. More than ever before he is recognized as one of the great European thinkers of the turn of the century. After some delay, he has been granted a prominent place in European intellectual history, in company with Emile Durkheim and Vilfredo Pareto, as one of the founders of sociology as a scholarly discipline. Max Weber's unique contribution was to conduct his empirical sociological research from a universal-historical vantage point. He was a historian before he became a social scientist and, eventually, in the narrow sense, a sociologist. As a social scientist, he continued to be particularly interested in historiography. And although the ideal-typical theorems in which Weber tried to encapsulate the culturally significant problems of his time as precisely as possible were expressed in ever more abstract terms he intended thereby to create important conceptual tools for historiography as well as for sociology. In his late work, Economy and Society, Weber tried to grasp social reality in systems of 'pure types', all of which were constructed only with regard to systematic factors, allowing the contingencies of historical time to retreat into the background. None the less, Weber's conceptualization incorporated all that was known of the history of the Western world at his time. Also, in his classic studies on the sociology of world religion, a historical dimension is always evident. One reason for the present worldwide interest in Max Weber's work is that he succeeded in posing socioiogical questions against a historical horizon of unusual breadth, whose relevance for our present situation is obvious.