ABSTRACT
What Max Weber was referring to in this quotation was the problem of the relationship between social science and politics, but his claim that the matter was not susceptible to a philosophical solution was a conclusion that a wide range of thinkers could not accept. The extent to which Weber became an object of criticism for many political theorists has often been noted, but there has been little close scrutiny of these critiques. Although much of the discussion of Weber’s work revolved around his plea for scientific objectivity and a separation of facts and values, the underlying issues were far more complex. I have elsewhere discussed the place of Weber’s work in the ‘Weimar conversation,’ and especially the essays on the vocations of science and politics, as well as the projection of that conversation, by émigré scholars, into the American context,1 but it is worth examining in more textual detail some paradigmatic examples of that projection and the confrontation with Weber. The complex exchanges of teaching and learning between émigré scholars and their American hosts were complicated by contests among the émigrés about their own legacy, and Americans were left to make what they could out of these contests.
