Max Weber in der Welt: Rezeption und Wirkung (review)

Abstract

278 Max Weber Studies© Max Weber Studies 2016. Terry Horgan and Matjaž Potrč’s argument that there is only one world, which is blob- or jello-like with enough internal variability to allow for statements that are true in the sense that they are assertable under ‘contextually operative semantic standards’,20 but have no real parts to which the semantic distinctions correspond, is more austere and physicalist than Gabriel’s, but ends up with the same implication: there is no world to which we can match our categories. There are two lessons from this. The first is that Gabriel does not escape the problem that his is only one ungrounded and ungroundable choice of a fundamental ontology among others. The idea that we are fated to live in an unlimited plurality of fields of sense is a variation of the neo-Kantian philosophy that preceded Weber. The second is that Weber’s assertion that the world is a meaningless chaos, which is also ungroundable, doesn’t sound too bad as an explication of the ontology relevant to the human epistemic condition . Indeed, a meaningless chaos is not an inclusive whole of the sort Gabriel wants to reject, precisely because it does not allow us to match our categories to it. Stephen Turner University of South Florida Michael Kaiser and Harald Rosenbach, eds., Max Weber in der Welt: Rezeption und Wirkung (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2014), xii + 243pp. (hbk). ISBN 978-3-16-152469-1. €39.00. This collection of thirteen essays is the product of a conference organized in 2012 by the Stiftung Deutsche Geisteswissenschaftliche Institute im Ausland—an umbrella organization that includes, among others, the international German Historical Institutes and Orient Institutes—to celebrate its tenth anniversary and official renaming as the Max Weber Stiftung. The foundation now joins the ranks of at least two other major institutions, both founded within the last twenty years, that have chosen the polymathic German scholar for their aegis.21 This trend signifies what is arguably the Michel Serres, Genesis, trans. Genevieve James and James Nielson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995 [1982]). 20. Terry Horgan and Matjaž Potrč, ‘Blobjectivism and Indirect Correspondence ’, Facta Philosophica 2 (2002): 253. 21. The Max-Weber-Kolleg at the University of Erfurt and the Max Weber Postdoctoral Program at the European University Institute. Book Reviews 279© Max Weber Studies 2016. ultimate stage in canonization, when an intellectual’s name can serve to brand the widest domain of publicly funded academic inquiry. There cannot be many intellectuals, besides Weber, who enjoy such status today: acknowledged as a founding father by a range of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences; read, translated, and debated the world over; and, though certainly not uncontroversial, still sufficiently associated with the values of individual freedom and intellectual integrity to serve as the figurehead of an international institution . It is a fate that the irascible, idiosyncratic Weber could have hardly imagined for himself.22 The aim of this volume, in keeping with the global mission of the Max Weber Stiftung, is to explore Weber’s relationship to ‘the world’. The contributors have chosen to engage this evocative theme in several different ways; a selection will be discussed to exemplify the variety of perspectives.23 One approach is to investigate the significance of ‘the world’, understood as a conceptual counterpoint to Europe or the Occident, as the object of Weber’s empirical or theoretical reasoning. For example, Marta Bucholc illuminates the central role that the ‘Polish question’ (Polenfrage) played in Weber’s understanding of Occidental modernity, persuasively showing how Polish Catholics functioned as the foil against which he constructed his ideal type of ascetic and ‘demagified’ Protestantism. Another approach is to consider what it meant for Weber to be a scholar in the world, guided in his inquiries by ‘value-relations’ (Wertbeziehungen) to topics with distinct cultural resonances. Sam Whimster’s chapter examines the formative impact of Weber’s childhood experiences on his political world-view and methodological self-understanding. Through a close reading of Weber’s early letters and essays, Whimster reveals a precocious mind that was attuned to the strange pageantry of the Kaiserreich’s public commemorations, with their blend of...