ABSTRACT
When Max Weber died, the obituaries described him sometimes as a pioneering thinker, other times as a political force. Some persons, however also remember him as an unbalanced, self-contradictory, charming figure, or at least refer to the abundance of interests, without apparent interconnection, that he harbored. And indeed, for the person who did not know him in depth, it must have been tempting to judge him in this way. Nothing of what Max Weber has done, said, and written has been discussed, commented on, misunderstood, and ridiculed as much as his theory of value neutrality in the social sciences. The theory finally turned up in parliamentary discussions, party meetings, and in the Berlin commission charged with investigating war guilt. Troeltsch called Max Weber a politician; people have seen that he was something more. In fact, he was a pragmatic politician, but this was based upon asceticism.
