Max Weber in America

Lawrence A. Scaff’s account of Max Weber’s sojourn in the United States is a singular scholarly achievement. Scaff has made an important contribution not only to the scholarship on Weber, to which he had already added a great deal, but also to the history of social science and American intellectual history. The work is sensitive to the contexts of American and European thought, and in such a short space it is difficult to convey the depth and breadth of detail in Scaff’s reconstruction of the travels of Max and Marianne Weber from the point of their arrival in New York on August 29, 1904, to their departure for Germany on November 19 of the same year. There are two basic dimensions to the book. The first, to which ten of the thirteen chapters are devoted, consists of a meticulous descriptive narrative of each component of Weber’s extensive travels; the second presents an incisive overview of the later reception of Weber’s work in the American academy. Although the story of the trip had been part of Marianne’s biography of her husband, Scaff not only expanded and corrected the account, stressing the significance of the visit for an understanding of Weber’s work, but also approached it as a way of opening a window on American culture, intellectual life, economics, and politics during the early years of the twentieth century. The trip took place at a crucial juncture in Weber’s life. He had just begun to recover from a severe psychological breakdown and had completed a draft of part 1 of his opus The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (eventually published in 1905) as well as the publication of his famous essay “The ‘Objectivity’ of Knowledge in Social Science and Social Policy

Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Biography · Literature · Narrative · Period (music · Political science · Politics · Scholarship · Sociology · History · Law · Political Theology and Sovereignty · Weber, Simmel, Sociological Theory