Book Cover
Book
Author Radkau, Joachim, 1943-

Title Max Weber : a biography / Joachim Radkau ; translated by Patrick Camiller
Published Cambridge : Polity, [2009]
©2009

Copies

Location Call no. Vol. Availability
 MELB  301.092 Weber Rad/Mwa  AVAILABLE
Description xix, 683 pages : illustrations, portraits ; 24 cm
Contents At the Den of the Sick Lion -- Pt. I. The Violation of Nature -- 1. Great Mother and Harsh Nature: A Precocious Youth on the Margins of Berlin -- 2. Max and Minimax: Blood Brothers and Drinking Companions - Surly Fraternity as a Primary Social Experience -- 3. From Father's Boy to Mother's Boy: A Comradely Marriage and the Day of Judgement for the Father -- 4. Antaeus, Antiquity and Agrarians: the Unshackling of Creativity through the Earthing of Culture -- 5. Eruptions from the Ice: Creativity as Natural Catastrophe -- 6. A 'Gospel of Struggle' and Old German Corpulence: From Lifestyle Crisis through Creativity Crisis to Existential Crisis -- Pt. II. Nature's Revenge -- 7. The Demons: The Wildness of Nature and the Riddle of Sexuality -- 8. 'A Sort of Spiritualistic Construction of the Modern Economy': The Protestant Ethic and the Vain Quest for Redemption through the Spirit -- 9. South - North - West - East: Changing Attempts at Spiritual Conquest of the World -- 10. From the 'Essay of Sighs' to 'Psychophysics': the Seven-Year Argument with Naturalism against Naturalism -- 11. From the Eranos Circle to the 'Erotic Movement': New Roots and New Milieux -- 12. Max Weber's Love-Hate for the Germans -- Pt. III. Salvation and Illumination -- 13. Value-Free Science, Love and Music -- 14. Charisma -- 15. The Naturalness of Community - The Disguised Naturalism in Economy and Society -- 16. From Deborah's Song of Triumph to the 'Titans of the Holy Curse': Pacifist Herdsmen, Prophets and Pariahs - the Israelites -- 17. World War and Flight from the World -- 18. Great speeches, the Great Love and Death -- 19. Epilogue: Powerplay and the Wrangling over Max Weber's Spirit -- A Chronology of Max Weber's Life
Summary "Max Weber (1864-1920) is recognized throughout the world as the most important classic thinker in the social sciences - there is simply no one in the history of the social sciences who has been more influential. The affinity between capitalism and protestantism, the religious origins of the Western world, the force of charisma in religion as well as in politics, the all-embracing process of rationalization and the bureaucratic price of progress, the role of legitimacy and of violence as offsprings of leadership, the 'disenchantment' of the modern world together with the never-ending power of religion, the antagonistic relation between intellectualism and eroticism: all these are key concepts which attest to the enduring fascination of Weber's thinking." "The tremendous influence exerted by Max Weber was due not only to the power of his ideas but also to the fact that behind his theories one perceived a man with a marked character and a tragic destiny. However, for nearly 80 years, our understanding of the life of Max Weber was dominated by the biography published in 1926 by his widow, Marianne Weber. The lack of a great Weber biography was one of the strangest and most glaring gaps in the literature of the social sciences. For various reasons the task was difficult; time and again, attempts to write a new biography of Max Weber ended in failure."--BOOK JACKET
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index
Notes Translated from the German
Subject Weber, Max, 1864-1920.
Sociologists -- Germany -- Biography.
Genre/Form Biographies.
ISBN 9780745641478 hardback
0745641474 hardback