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Title: Max Weber: An Intellectual Portrait by Reinhard Bendix ISBN: 0-520-03194-6 Publisher: University of California Press Pub. Date: 01 July, 1977 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 5 (1 review)
Rating: 5
Summary: Brilliant, A Classic: A Must Read for Weber Fans
Comment: I want to give a shout out to Henri Edward Dongieux who authored the Amazon.com guide to "get to know Weber and Habermas". I want to give my stand disclaimer: I am not a sociologist or a student of sociology, just a general reader with an interest in the history of ideas.
Funny story about this book: I bought Weber's theory of social and economic organization (with the foreword by Talcott Parsons). I don't know what I was thinking there. I read about thirty pages of Parsons introduction to Theory and was like, "forget this."
So then the next day I'm surfing around Amazon trying to figure out how I'm going to figure out Weber and I see the above mentioned list. Well, Henri was right: this book is THE place to start if you're looking to access the ideas of Weber.
One further digression before I actually review the book itself: Weber is hard to access for a couple of reasons: First, all his stuff has been translated from the German. This is compounded by the fact that Weber, despite his highly rigorous thought, was kind of making up terminology as he went and also by the fact that German has tons of words that don't translate well into English.
Second, Weber kind of died before he finished pulling together the various strands of his grand theory together, leaving his work uncomplete.
So, preliminary matters aside, I will move on to a description of the book. Since this is the first review of this work on Amazon (and how can that be?). I will provide a non-judgmental description of content and then a few observations.
The book is divided into three Parts. Part One is called "German Society and The Protestant Ethic". Part Two is "Society, Religion, and Secular Ethic: A Comparitive Study of Civilisations" and Part Three is "Domination, Organization, and Legitimacy: Max Weber's Political Sociology". Before Part One, Bendix includes an introduction and a chapter on Weber's "Career and Personal Orientation". That first chapter is most illuminating and serves to ground Weber in place and time.
The first part of the book is divided into two chapters. The first chapter talks about his very interesting early studies of eastern german agarian society and the various german stock exchanges. Bendix refers to these two early studies over and over through out the book. The second chapter of the first part of the book discusses Weber's most popular and well known ideas about the protestant work ethic and the spirit of capitalism. Having laid out the touchstones of Weber's work, Bendix moves into part two, which concern Weber's studies of world religion.
Part two deals exclusively with Weber's interest in world religion. Bendix devotes a chapter each to his studies of China, India and Palestine. Bendix notes that it is obvious that Weber's main interest was in the roots of the west that he found in Palestine and so the chapters on China and India are of limited use (except as a guide to what Weber THOUGHT about China and Indian religion. Bendix concludes part two with a chapter summarizing Weber's "sociology of religion".
Part three has a similar structure to part two. Bendix runs off a couple of chapters on charsmatic domination and traditional domination as a means to explicate Weber's theories of "Legal Domination" which represent, perhaps, Weber's main achievment. Again, Bendix points out that Weber's interest in chasmatic domination and traditional domination are really only "foils" for his overriding interest in "legal domination", in the same way that his studies of India and China are foils for his interest in the society of ancient Palestine.
In part three, Bendix also includes a couple of chapters that tie the book together and link the three parts, as well as a further attempt to ground Weber in the thought of his day.
OK, so that is the descriptive part. Now, some observations:
First off, as someone who really didn't know anything about Weber's thought (outside of a cursory understanding of his thesis in the "Spirit of Capitalism"), I found this book to be immensely compelling.
One can dismiss all of Weber's substantive conclusions about the nature of society and government and still be Wowed by the tremendous influence he has had on all social thinkers in the past century. I now see Weber's influence everywhere I look!
I also feel like any further attempts to read Weber will be made about a thousand times easier becaue I have read this book.
Although I read all but about twenty pages of this five hundred page book, I believe one could derive the same meaning from reading chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, 8, 9, 12,13, and 15, while skipping the rest.
This book also has a handy index!
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Title: Emile Durkheim: His Life and Work, a Historical and Critical Study by Steven Lukes ISBN: 0804712832 Publisher: Stanford University Press Pub. Date: 01 October, 1985 List Price(USD): $35.95 |
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Title: From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology by Max Weber ISBN: 0195004620 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: 01 December, 1958 List Price(USD): $29.95 |
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Title: The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Routledge Classics) by Max Weber, Talcott Parsons, Anthony Giddens ISBN: 041525406X Publisher: Routledge Pub. Date: 23 May, 2001 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
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Title: The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge by Peter L. Berger, Thomas Luckmann ISBN: 0385058985 Publisher: Anchor Books/Doubleday Pub. Date: 01 June, 1966 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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Title: The Theory of Communicative Action: Reason and the Rationalization of Society by Jürgen Habermas ISBN: 0807015075 Publisher: Beacon Press Pub. Date: 01 April, 1985 List Price(USD): $29.00 |
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