Max Weber in Politics and Social Thought
From Charisma to Canonization

A comprehensive account of the wide-ranging impact of Max Weber's ideas on German and American intellectuals in the twentieth century.

Joshua Derman (Author)

9781107025882, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 18 October 2012

298 pages
23.1 x 15.5 x 2.3 cm, 0.57 kg

'… Derman has made a fine contribution to Weber studies when it comes to understanding the reason for Weber's long life after life. For this book helps us recognize, once again, that Weber's charisma survived routinization precisely because it could not be reified despite canonization.' Sung Ho Kim, Review of Politics

Max Weber is widely regarded as one of the foundational thinkers of the twentieth century. But how did this reclusive German scholar manage to leave such an indelible mark on modern political and social thought? Max Weber in Politics and Social Thought is the first comprehensive account of Weber's wide-ranging impact on both German and American intellectuals. Drawing on a wide range of sources, Joshua Derman illuminates what Weber meant to contemporaries in the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany and analyzes why they reached for his concepts to articulate such widely divergent understandings of modern life. The book also accounts for the transformations that Weber's concepts underwent at the hands of émigré and American scholars, and in doing so, elucidates one of the major intellectual movements of the mid-twentieth century: the transatlantic migration of German thought.

Introduction
1. Max Weber and his circles
2. Value freedom and polytheism
3. The meaning of modern capitalism
4. Skepticism and faith
5. Max Weber's sociologies
6. Charismatic rulership
Conclusion.

Subject Areas: Political science & theory [JPA], Social theory [JHBA], History of ideas [JFCX]