Max Weber in America

by Lawrence A. Scaff

Max Weber, widely considered a founder of sociology and the modern social sciences, visited the United States in 1904 with his wife Marianne. The trip was a turning point in Weber's life and it played a pivotal role in shaping his ideas, yet until now virtually our only source of information about the trip was Marianne Weber's faithful but not always reliable 1926 biography of her husband.Max Weber in America carefully reconstructs this important episode in Weber's career, and shows how the subsequent critical reception of Weber's work was as American a story as the trip itself.

Lawrence Scaff provides new details about Weber's visit to the United States—what he did, what he saw, whom he met and why, and how these experiences profoundly influenced Weber's thought on immigration, capitalism, science and culture, Romanticism, race, diversity, Protestantism, and modernity. Scaff traces Weber's impact on the development of the social sciences in the United States following his death in 1920, examining how Weber's ideas were interpreted, translated, and disseminated by American scholars such as Talcott Parsons and Frank Knight, and how the Weberian canon, codified in America, was reintroduced into Europe after World War II.

A landmark work by a leading Weber scholar, Max Weber in America will fundamentally transform our understanding of this influential thinker and his place in the history of sociology and the social sciences.

328 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2011

Reviews

[Nils · Rating 5 out of 5]

A first rate piece of narrowly focused intellectual history. Scaff proceeds along two lines: first, Max and his wife Marianne’s trip across America in 1904, and how this shaped his thinking about modernity, rationalization, religion, and many other topics; second, Weber’s intellectual reception in the United States, especially in its initial phase in the 1930s. The former aspect affords a kind of picaresque journey through Progressive era America, as seen through the eyes of one of the great theorists of all time.

The second entails a close reading how Weber was “Parsonsified” — though Scaff makes clear that the reason why Parsons’s notorious translation of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit If Capitalism is so ‘flattening’ is partly attributable to the influence of RH Tawney as editor and British publishers’ disdain for Germanic orthographic practices. Scaff beautifully recreates the (often viciously competitive) networks of Weberians at the University of Chicago, Harvard University, the University of Wisconsin, Columbia University, and the New School for Social Research. The way in which Weber’s texts were incrementally translated was central to his reception as a counter-Marxist prophet of modernization, as opposed to a dour teutonic diagnostician of the politics of rectitude, of the “steel case of modernity,” and of the “polar night of icy darkness and hardness that lies ahead of us.”

Scaff also moves quickly over some points where he might have gone deeper, especially on the reception history. First, Weber was crucially deployed as a tool for fighting various internal political battles for educational or disciplinary reorganization’s at at least two of these places (Harvard and Chicago), something Scaff only touches on in passing. Second, he also mentions only in passing the way that the Americanized Weber (that is, as the prophet of modernization) was re-imported back into Germany in the 1960s, again as a vehicle to fight various local intellectual battles, against both conservatives and Marxists.

[Kent · Rating 5 out of 5]

In which the great sage palavers with WEB Du Bois, Booker T Washington, Knoxville TN pols, and Wm James, attends sundry Quaker and African American services and the Harvard-Penn gridiron showdown ( Penn wins), and prowls the Chicago stockyards and St Louis worlds fair. Some of its more unexpected juxtapositions, eg a visit to land-rush Muskogee, has a delicious if wholly unexpected Ruggles of Red Gap vibe.
History of W’s reception in America, especially translations (looking at you, young Talcott Parsons) a stretch for non-Weberians, but author keeps his prose clear and straightforward. A mind-expanding stretch, I should say.

[Titus Hjelm · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant book! Covers 'Max Weber in America' both literally, through a narrative of the Webers' 1904 trip and genealogically, through discussing Weber's influence on later American sociology and how Europe rediscovered Weber through American sociology. The book is beautifully written, combining travel narrative with ministudies of the effect of the American trip on Weber's theorizing. The main focus is--not surprisingly--on the development of the Protestant Ethic thesis, but Scaff covers episodes that inspired Weber's thinking about race, social status, even music, for example. Weber's meetings with DuBois and James are described and analysed masterfully. Although there is less about the man himself, I think Scaff succeeds in providing a link with the personal life and the work of one of the most celebrated social scientists ever. He also does it without reverting to tedious (and contentious) psychoanalysing, such as found in the otherwise brilliant biography by Joachim Radkau. Highly recommended!

[m · Rating 4 out of 5]

Real good book, almost a guilty pleasure to read.

A blogger wrote an informed, enthusiastic post about this book.

And Alan Wolfe wrote a good-enough review.

[Mert · Rating 2 out of 5]

2/5 Stars (%44/100)

It was okay in general but there were lots of unnecessary details in my opinion, especially Marianne Weber's loooongg descriptions of everything. Other than that, it was nice to learn more about Max Weber's visit to the US because it really affected his way of thinking. I was more or less familiar with Weber's ideas but the book provided me with more information about the visit (that's the purpose because Marianne Weber already published a book about Max's life). To sum up, it is a nice book to learn more details about the 1904 visit but I found most of the parts boring and irrelevant. I would not read it again.

[The Book : An Online Review at The New Republic]

MAX WEBER IN AMERICA? The idea seems almost preposterous. We often think of Weber as the quintessential European thinker: abstract, worldly, brooding, and difficult. The America of his period of greatest productivity, the first two decades of the twentieth century, comes down to us as isolationist, anti-intellectual, bombastic, and about to embark on flapperdom.Read more...

[Ruth · Rating 4 out of 5]

Martin Luther meets Mulberry Street.