This wide-ranging and assured book, written by one of the leading Weber scholars in the English speaking world, shows us the many sides of Max Weber. The book provides an authoritative guide to the current burning issues in social theory, religion, rationalization, the body, modernization, postmodernism and capitalism. It will be essential reading for anyone interested in Weber's claim that the aim of sociology must be to explain what is distinctive about the times in which we live.

This wide-ranging and assured book, written by one of the leading Weber scholars in the English-speaking world, shows us the many sides of Max Weber. The book provides an authoritative guide to the current burning issues in social theory, religion, rationalization, the body, modernization and capitalism. It will be essential reading for anyone interested in Weber's claim that the aim of sociology must be to explain what is distinctive about the times in which we live.

This book brings together leading figures in history, sociology, political science, feminism and critical theory to interpret, evaluate, criticize and update Weber's legacy. In a collection of specially commissioned pieces and translated articles the Weberian scholarship recognizes Max Weber as the figure central to contemporary debates on the need for societal rationality, the limits of reason and the place of culture and conduct in the supposedly post-religious age. In Part 1, Wolfgang Mommsen, Wilhelm Hennis, Guenther Roth and Wolfgang Schluchter provide a full and varied account of the theme of rationalization in the world civilizations. In Part 2 Pierre Bourdieu and Barry Hindess critically examine Weber's social action model, and Johannes Weiss and Martin Albrow address the putative 'crisis' of Western rationality. In Part 3 Jeffrey Alexander, Ralph Schroeder, Bryan Turner, Roslyn Bologh and Sam Whimster scrutinize Weber's understanding of modernity with its characteristic plurality of 'gods and demons'; they focus on its implications for individuality and personality, the body and sexuality, feminism and aesthetic modernism. Part 4 turns to politics, law and the state in the contemporary world: Colin Gordon on liberalism, Luciano Cavalli on charismatic politics, Stephen Turner and Regis Factor on decisionism and power and Scott Lash on modernism, substantice rationality and law. This book was first published in 1987.

This book explores the uses and limits of Max Weber's work for thinking sociologically about capitalism today. The books argues that through Weber, a network of concepts can be developed that can frame a sociological analysis of the present.

An authoritative and comprehensive survey of the major themes, thinkers, and movements in modern European intellectual history.

This book is an in-depth interpretation of Max Weber as a political theorist of civil society. On the one hand, it reads Weber's ideas from the perspective of modern political thought, rather than the modern social sciences; on the other, it offers a liberal assessment of this complex political thinker without attempting to apologize for his shortcomings. Through an alternative reading of Weber's religious, epistemological and political writings, the book shows Weber's concern with public citizenship in a modern mass democracy and civil society as its cultivating ground. Kim argues Weber's political thought, thus recast, was deeply informed by Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche and other German political thinkers and also reveals an affinity to the liberal-republican tradition best represented by Mill and Tocqueville. Kim has effectively resuscitated Weber as a political thinker for our time in which civic virtues and civil society have once again become one of the dominant issues.

This is a case study of one pietist religious group, the Bruderhof. A Christian brotherhood founded on Anabaptist and evangelical pietist doctrine, they practice community of goods, seeking to emulate the vision of the Apostolic church and fulfill the ethic of brotherhood taught in the Sermon on the Mount. Rubin offers compelling accounts of the lives of Bruderhof apostates who foundered over issues of faith, and relates these crises to the central tenets of Bruderhof theology, their spirituality, and community life.

Bringing together the author's major scholarly work on Weber over the last thirty years, offering a rich examination of the major themes in his sociology, alongside a reconstruction of his mode of analysis and application of his approach, this book will appeal to scholars around the world with interests in social theory, German and American societies, cultural sociology, political sociology, the sociology of knowledge, comparative-historical sociology, and the sociology of civilizations.

These essays bring Weber's sociology to bear on the current transformation of the political landscape. After the collapse of communism, many states are faced with the challenges of democratization: they need to establish their legitimacy in an uncertain economic climate and within a new geopolitical order. The essays in this volume develop Weberian concepts and apply his comparative-historical method to deepen our understanding of these problems. They cover a wide range of examples, from the United States to Western and Eastern Europe, and from Russia and Japan to the Islamic states.

This rich and assured book is a major contribution to the growing Weber industry. It reveals Weber's theory of modernity in a new and unexpected light.