Stephen Kalberg. 2012. Max Weber’s comparative historical sociology today. Major themes, modes of causal analysis, and applications Farnham, UK and Burlington, VT: Ashgate. 330 Seiten, $ 28.45 Stephen Kalberg. 2014. Searching for the spirit of American democracy. Max Weber’s analysis of a unique political culture, past, present, and future Boulder, CO and London: Paradigm Publishers. 142 Seiten, € 19,50

Excerpt

Sociology has systematically ignored the dictum of the philosopher and mathematician Alfred North Whitehead, who, in 1916, famously wrote: ‘A science which hesitates to forget its founders is lost.’ This is the case even for those strands of sociology that model themselves most closely on the natural sciences. Thus, network analysis continues to draw inspiration from Simmel’s formal sociology; while so-called analytical sociology appeals to the authority of Robert K. Merton, and cannot resist raiding the classics (notably Tocqueville) for examples of universal social mechanisms. But how to treat ‘the classics’? Ideal-typically, there are two approaches: one which takes the value of the classics to be self-evident and concerns itself with exposition and contextualization; and one which uses the classics as a toolkit and seeks to integrate earlier insights and concepts into empirical research and/or theory building. The first approach risks slipping into scholasticism, or even sect-like adulation; the latter can lead to oversimplification or even vulgarization. These two recent works by Stephen Kalberg—a leading US Weberian scholar and translator of The Protestant Ethic—lie somewhere between these two poles. Kalberg’s profound understanding of Weber prevents any danger of vulgarization; while his insistence on the continued relevance of Weber’s analysis for understanding contemporary issues is a bold attempt to make Weber continue to work his passage. At best, the reader gains a better understanding of both Weber and the world in which they live. …