[MWS 13.1 (2013) 109-110] ISSN 1470-8078 Vesa Oittinen disputes the review of Max Weber and Russia Vesa Oittinen In the last issue of Max Weber Studies (12.2:273-74) Professor Dittmar Dahlmann reviewed Max Weber and Russia, edited by myself. The review does not seem to have engaged entirely with the contents of the book. Max Weber and Russia consists of materials of a symposium held at the Aleksanteri Institute of the University of Helsinki in 2007. The institute is at the moment the biggest research unit in Europe focusing on the society and culture of Russia. The main focus of the symposium was to discuss the ways in which the concepts of West ern sociology, and especially Weberian ideas, might be employed in the research of Russian realities. We were not pursuing 'Weberol ogy' sensu stricto, rather the symposium publication continued the investigation already started in the 'Heidelberg Weber Lectures' of Yuri Davydov and Piama Gaidenko in 1992.1 To the problems we are discussing belong, among others, the question of idiosyncratic traits of rationality in Russian culture, the reception of Weber's ideas in Russia, and applicability of categories of Weberian sociology to the modernization processes in Russia. Professor Dahlmann has nothing to say about this, the main content of the book. Instead, he has hastily browsed the footnotes and found that some of the contributors did not use or refer to Max Weber-Gesa mtausgabe. Because Professor Dahlmann himself has been the editor of this publication, this seems to be in his eyes enough to dismiss our Weber book altogether. True, in one sentence he admits that we mostly cite from the English edition 'which to be sure is based on the Gesamtausgabe', but already in another sentence he claims that work ing with such texts 'would distress any philologist'. Saying so, Pro fessor Dahlmann himself admits that he has taken the viewpoint of 1. The lectures aie available in German: Jurij N. Dawydow and Piama P. Gaid enko, Russland und der Westen. Heidelberger Max Weber-Vorlesungen 1992 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1995).© Max Weber Studies 2013, Clifton House, 17 Malvern Road, London, E8 3LP. 110 Max Weber Studies a Weber philologist when approaching our book, and perhaps cares less about what we are actually trying to say. He does not, however, specify in his review any cases where citations from other editions than the Gesamtausgabe would have distorted the discussions in our book. He claims, further, that we do not discuss Weber's connections to such Russian thinkers as Sergei Bulgakov, or Fjodor Kistjakovskij while just the contrary is the case: these thinkers are discussed in several contributions. The final contribution, which I wrote as editor of the volume, is not primarily concerned with Slavophilism or Ivan Kireevskij, as Profes sor Dahlmann alleges. Instead, it focuses on Chaadaev and the prob lematics of how Western forms of rationality, analyzed by Weber, undergo certain idiosyncratic mutations when transplanted in the social realities of Russian life. Contrary to the claims of Professor Dahlmann, I do not discuss at all the Hegelianism of the Slavophiles and the Zapadniki, just for the simple reason that 'an engagement with a double Hegel à la russe' would not help us very much to understand what is going on in Russia. Be this as it may, I do not share the arrogant view of Professor Dahlmann that the Slavophiles vs. Zapadniki discussion is not at all worthy of analysis. Russia was one of the first periphery countries to encounter the impact of Western modernity, and the 19th century Russian intellectuals were the first ones who tried to conceptualize this. In this sense, the Slavophile vs. Zapadniki discussion as well as Chaadayev's essays foreshadowed the experience of other colonial non-European peoples and cultures, and it deserves, to my mind, to be studied with the conceptual tools of Weberian sociology.© Max Weber Studies 2013. ...