Max Weber's Work and Our Times

Abstract

Max Weber was an observer-participant in the Methodenstreit that reshaped the intellectual landscape of the ivory towers in early 20th-century Germany and the Conference of Versailles that reshaped the political landscape of Europe (and beyond) at the end of the Great War. Uncompromising commitment to the spirit of classical Enlightenment ideals informed Weber’s praxis in both forums. At the beginning of the 21st century, when these ideals are facing unprecedented challenges from a peculiar constellation of modernist and post-modernist cultural developments, Weber’s work still speaks to us. Weber’s reflections on the methodology of the social and cultural sciences help us to see that modernist quantification-rationalization and post-modernist relativism-perspectivism are two sides of the same coin. His reflections on the sociology of culture help us to see that both the modernist “iron cage” and post-modern fragmentation are the results of the disenchantment of the world. I will argue that Weber’s methodological insights become sociologically significant at this point in history because they contain valuable resources for imagining and offering an alternative to this “fate of our times.”