Introduction

Abstract

The past decade has witnessed a remarkable revival of scholarly interest in the writings of Max Weber. To paraphrase Erich Fromm’s comment upon developments in Marxist scholarship, one might say that Weber has become transformed from a ‘dead saint’ into a ‘living thinker’.¹ Today, opinions polarise about the contributions of Weber almost as completely as they do about those of Marx. The sharpest controversy over Weber’s thought in the recent literature has concerned the relationship between his political and sociological writings.² In 1953, Georg Lukács published Die Zerstörung der Vernunft (‘The Destruction of Reason’), a work which attempts to trace the development of irrationalism in German social thought from Schelling to Hitler. The book includes a section on Weber, in which Weber is treated as a prominent spokesman for the bourgeois imperialism of Wilhelmine Germany. Lukács’s book, however, gives far more space to Nietzsche than it does to Weber, and the analysis of the writings of the latter is somewhat cursory. Although the work set something of the framework for the controversy which followed, the most important stimulus to debate was provided by Wolfgang Mommsen, in his Max Weber and die deutsche Politik (‘Max Weber and German Politics’), published in 1959.