ABSTRACT
After his precarious recovery in 1902 from the emotional breakdown that had struck him a few years earlier, Weber began a series of "methodological" investigations that laid the groundwork of the sociology for which he would later become celebrated. Sandwiched between these dates is Max Weber's role in the founding of the German Sociological Society in January 1909, and his withdrawal from the Society four years later when it failed to adopt doctrinal positions compatible with his own. Weber was always keen to insist that "scientific" work, of which his sociology was part, was distinctive from political engagement in a number of ways. The difference between the political and the scientific or scholarly writings is constantly being confounded in reality is nowhere more evident than in the work of Weber himself. Weber's work, it is true, has been challenged from the beginning, though how successfully is a matter of opinion.
