This book is the first account of the way in which Weber appropriated and modified sources in the legal tradition, in which he was trained, to construct his sociology. It leads directly to a new understanding of Weber's intent and his relations to the tradition of social and political theory. the book takes the reader into the heart of Weber's conceptualizations of action and social science, without ever giving the impression that these are rarefied and marginal issues. This is an important book for understanding the significance of one of the key sociologist's of the twentieth century.
If you have stumbled on to this page, you are probably wondering what all these books are doing together, and how anyone would have an "also bought" list that runs, depending on the day, from Kant to Elster and Daston to Ritzer. They all do belong here. The connecting thread is this: I have always been drawn to basic questions about what sort of knowledge of the social world and history is possible, and by the implications of these questions.
I started out asking philosophical and methodological questions about social science and social and political theory. Now I mostly ask social theory questions about philosophy. Most of this is informed by the history of these subjects. Knowing something about the history of these questions is a good thing, but it is also a curse. It is difficult to read the latest word on, for example, philosophical problems with causal modeling, without the grim recognition that the author has unknowingly recycled solutions that were available a century ago.
These basic methodological topics may seem to be a bit of a bore. Weber, on which I have spent much of my ink, may seem like a distant and dusty figure. But the topics, and Weber's writing in particular, open onto a vast variety of subjects and literatures, and provide a special, privileged access to them. And despite the forbidding titles, the books (and my other writings) are full of the human presence of great and not so great thinkers.
