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Book Review
Methods/Theory
Fritz Ringer.
Max Weber's Methodology: The Unification of the Cultural and Social
Sciences. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1997. Pp. viii, 188.
$35.00.
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At a time when the sheer quantity of Weber scholarship threatens to overwhelm all but the core specialists and cognoscenti, Fritz Ringer has written a work that fully deserves to stand out from the crowd. Ringer's most striking achievement is to do two things well that are often successfully done separately, but rarely together. He offers both a rich account of the intellectual and institutional context in which Weber's methodology was developed and a critical analytical discussion of the philosophical implications of its central principles. One would expect a skilled history of ideas from the author of The Decline of the German Mandarins (1969), but the analytical discussion is no less impressive and informative. Given Ringer's view that Weber was both the product of the context in which he worked and transcended that context through the imaginative and innovative synthesis of its intellectual components, he was honor bound to offer both the historical and analytical parts of the story. |
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