Weber,Max

Abstract

AbstractAlthough many textbooks name Max Weber as one of the field's canonical authors, what contemporary urban and regional studies actually owe him remains vague and contested. In contrast to other branches of social science, neither Weber's sociohistorical writing nor his sociotheoretical attempts launched an explicit or enduring Weberian tradition in research on cities, space, and society. Nevertheless, through his writings on the Western European medieval city or through his concept of class and social stratification, Weber has been influential. A “neo‐Weberian” strand in British urban studies, which flourished in the 1970s and 1980s, and, more recently, the discourse on the “European city” demonstrate that, despite the lack of a clearly formulated Weber paradigm in urban and regional studies, Max Weber's themes and concepts can be a point of departure for theoretical approaches to the city and for empirical methods of understanding urban social reality.