ABSTRACT
All of a sudden, Max Weber died on June 14, 1920. The academic world was shocked and began to mourn a great personality German academe had lost. The “myth of Heidelberg” was dead. Numerous obituaries followed celebrating the great German the country had lost. Almost nobody mentioned a big oeuvre, Weber should have had written. Sure, he was famous for the “Protestant Ethic” and the fierce discussion about this seemingly idealistic undertaking. His obsessive fights for “value freedom” were remembered. Protestant Ethic and value freedom were rather curiosities of this great man that cornerstones of his oeuvre. But that was almost all there was. In the beginning, the personality beat the oeuvre, obviously non-existing. This began to change as Marianne Weber went out to publish Weber’s manuscripts. But even in the Weimar Republic Weber remained a name without oeuvre. When the young Talcott Parsons came to Heidelberg he confessed that Weber’s name had never been mentioned at the London School of Economics where he studied before coming to Heidelberg. This state of affairs is almost unbelievable given the fame of Weber as the world’s leading sociologist today. He has long gone “global”. This paper traces the road to success of Max Weber, the improbable classic.
