Max Weber's Empirical Sociology in Germany and the United States: Tensions between Partisanship and Scholarship

Abstract

More than any other man of his generation Max Weber remains today influential as well as controversial. Neither intellectually nor politically are scholars done with the man and his work. However, his impact has not been steady over the five decades since his death. At various times Emile Durkheim, Georg Simmel, Ferdinand Tönnies, Robert Michels, Vilfredo Pareto, and Sigmund Freud have attarcted more attention and approbation. Among these members of the “generation of 1890”—as H. S. Hughes has called them—Durkheim emerges, in the long run, as Weber's closest rival in sociology. In one respect his reception has outstripped Weber's: he was incorporated with less strain into stuctural functionalism, the only contemporary “school” in American sociology that may deserve the lable. It is indicative of this difference that the Parsonian or Durkheimian approach is often contrasted with the Weberian, usually as a juxtaposition of an integration versus a conflict model of society. However, the Weberian approach has not given rise to a comparable school, perhaps because its practitioners are concerned less than functionalists with a general systems theory.