Runciman's attempt to correct Weber's mistakes is a valuable contribution to the philosophy of social science.

Elizabeth A. Kaye specializes in communications as part of her coaching and consulting practice. She has edited Requirements for Certification since the 2000-01 edition.

Can politics be studied scientifically, and if so, how? Assuming it is impossible to justify values by human reason alone, social science has come to consider an unreflective relativism the only viable basis, not only for its own operations, but for liberal societies more generally. Although the experience of the sixties has made social scientists more sensitive to the importance of values, it has not led to a fundamental reexamination of value relativism, which remains the basis of contemporary social science. Almost three decades after Leo Strauss's death, Nasser Behnegar offers the first sustained exposition of what Strauss was best known for: his radical critique of contemporary social science, and particularly of political science. Behnegar's impressive book argues that Strauss was not against the scientific study of politics, but he did reject the idea that it could be built upon political science's unexamined assumption of the distinction between facts and values. Max Weber was, for Strauss, the most profound exponent of values relativism in social science, and Behnegar's explication artfully illuminates Strauss's critique of Weber's belief in the ultimate insolubility of all value conflicts. Strauss's polemic against contemporary political science was meant to make clear the contradiction between its claim of value-free premises and its commitment to democratic principles. As Behnegar ultimately shows, values—the ethical component lacking in a contemporary social science—are essential to Strauss's project of constructing a genuinely scientific study of politics.

Max Weber's writings in The Sociology of Religion are today acknowledged as a classic of the social sciences in the twentieth century. They are key texts for understanding Weber’s central sociological concepts concerning Western and Eastern ‘civilisations’. This book argues that the concept and problematic of personality plays a pivotal role within these works. Providing a detailed reconstruction of this concept within Weber’s systematic studies of world religions as well as throughout his methodological and political writings, this book shows its complex development within three strictly related problematics associated with Weber’s influential comparative historical sociology and theory of social action – individuation, politics and orientalism. Together they shape and constitute what is distinctive in Max Weber’s theory of personality.

Max Weber is widely regarded as the most important and influential figure in the history of the social sciences. Among other things, he wrote extensively on the methodology of the social sciences, but his writings on methodology are complex and are the subject of many conflicting interpretations. In this authoritative new book, Sven Eliaeson provides a comprehensive introduction to Weber's methodology and to the various ways it has been interpreted by subsequent scholars in Europe and the United States. Eliaeson shows how the vested interests of scholars have resulted in biased interpretations of Weber's work. Weber was preoccupied with the intellectual problems of his time and not with our current disciplinary crises. By placing Weber's thought and methodology in its historical context, Eliaeson is able to provide a masterly reconstruction of his central concerns while at the same time exploring the enduring relevance of Weber's work for sociology today. This book will be recognized as a definitive work on Weber's methodology and will be an indispensable text for students and scholars in sociology and the social sciences.

This book is a critical study of the work in the area of law of three classical social theorists: Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, and Karl Marx.

Basing his research on Gramsci’s theory of hegemony, Rehmann provides a comprehensive socio-analysis of Max Weber’s political and intellectual position in the ideological network of his time. Max Weber: Modernisation as Passive Revolution shows that, even though Weber presents his science as ‘value-free’, he is best understood as an organic intellectual of the bourgeoisie, who has the mission of providing his class with an intense ethico-political education. Viewed as a whole, his writings present a new model for bourgeois hegemony in the transition to ‘Fordism’. Weber is both a sharp critic of a ‘passive revolution’ in Germany tying the bourgeois class to the interests of the agrarian class, and a proponent of a more modern version of passive revolution, which would foreclose a socialist revolution by the construction of an industrial bloc consisting of the bourgeoisie and labour aristocracy. © 1998 Argument Verlag GmbH, Hamburg. Translated from German “Max Weber: Modernisierung als passive Revolution. Kontextstudien zu Politik Philosophie und Religion im Übergang zum Fordismus”.

Giddens's analysis of the writings of Marx, Durkheim and Weber has become the classic text for any student seeking to understand the three thinkers who established the basic framework of contemporary sociology. The first three sections of the book, based on close textual examination of the original sources, contain separate treatments of each writer. The author demonstrates the internal coherence of their respective contributions to social theory. The concluding section discusses the principal ways in which Marx can be compared with the other two authors, and discusses misconceptions of some conventional views on the subject.

This book examines the Werturteilsstreit ("value-judgment dispute"), from its initial stages in the debates between the eminent German social historian Max Weber and his contemporaries, to more recent contributions from scholars such as Karl Popper, Talcott Parsons, and Jurgen Habermas.