ABSTRACT
M a x W e b e r , the man and his achievement, continues to fascinate and perplex. Interest in Weber as a person, which revived after the war with Mommsen’s biography and erupted so notably at the Heidelberg Congress of 1964 (1 ), has easily survived the absorption of his scholarly work into the various disciplines to which he contributed. Indeed, it has almost become a specialised discipline in itself. Throughout the decade since Heidelberg, the international output of translations (2), anthologies (3), theoretical monographs (4 ), general interpretations (5) and historical or biographical studies (6) has proceeded without stint. A review article of this nature, faced with so much rich material, cannot possibly do justice to the range of topics it contains; even to attempt a comprehensive survey would result only in a superficial resume of what reviewers have already said elsewhere. I shall therefore select a large slice of subject-matter which cuts across much of the field-namely, Weber’s methodology-and examine some of the results under this heading that seem to emerge from recent literature. But I shall not feel myself disqualified from following up the problems which emerge as well, or from presenting conclusions of my own.
