Just as in the case of Marx, there has been a great deal of discussion for many years concerning how to interpret the thought of Max Weber.1 Weber has been seen as an idealist,2 as a voluntaristic antisystems theorist,3 as a bourgeois apologist,4 as a synthesizer of the materialist and idealist traditions,5 as offering a developmental theory of history based on the concept of rationalization,6 as a bourgeois Marxist7 or some other type of Marxist,8 and as a type of conflict theorist.9 Jeffrey Alexander sees Weber as a theorist of the multidimensionality of social life but argues that throughout his career Weber moved progressively away from a normative (idealist) perspective and increasingly toward an instrumentalist (materialist) one. Collins also sees Weber as multidimensional, but he chooses to emphasize the conflict dimension.10