The paradoxical relation of knowledge and values: On schluchter's analysis of the value theme in the work of Max Weber

Abstract

Max Weber's legacy remains a legacy of fragments. It is as if certain fissures ran through his life and work. There is, for example, the question of the stages of his intellectual development and disciplinary orientations: having begun in the study of law, he shifted early to political economy, but eventually moved toward sociology. His scholarly production in these fields was deliberately separated into wide-ranging substantive studies and meth odological writings, themselves fragmentary, never resulting in a compre hensive "methodology." Add to this that his entire scholarship was divided, as a matter of principle, from his politics. In spite of many valiant and partially successful attempts to find "thematic unity" (Tenbruck 1980; Kalberg 1979), the "master clue" (Nelson 1974) to the wholeness of We ber's oeuvre has remained elusive.1 Weber is not entirely responsible for the impression of fragmentation. For one thing, at the time of his death in 1920, he was engaged in major projects, including the comparative studies of "world" religions, and the "handbook" known as Economy and Society. One can at least speculate that had his lifespan not been foreshortened by pneumonia at the age of 56, he would have been able not only to complete those two projects, but also to provide a greater sense of coherence, if not systematic unity, to his lifework and ideas. Both fragmentation and unity are to some extent, of course, in the eyes of the beholder, and at the same time subject to the vagaries of the publication-, translation-, and reception-histories. English-language editions of Weber's works, issued by several different publishing houses, have ap peared sporadically over many decades. The translations have been uneven