ABSTRACT
If there is one figure in the sociological firmament who needs no special Festschrift one hundred years after his birth, it is Max Weber. Weber has become the Benedict Spinoza of sociology. The irony of the situation is that the "Midwest tradition" in sociology, that tendency sometimes covered by the rubric "Chicago school" and points west, should be celebrating Weber's centennial. For if there is one tendency in contemporary American sociology that owes relatively little to Weber and, indeed, offers slender obeisance to him, it is the Midwestern style of work–the style identified with Mead, Dewey, Veblen, Cooley, and Park, among others. Erving Goffman's pioneering work in social psychology and his similarly unusual work on behavior in bureaucratic institutions are also without noticeable indebtedness to Weber's sociology. To be a Parsonian became for a long time the only way a person in American sociology could tolerably deal with big issues without being condemned as a Marxist.
