Wolfgang Mommsen is the author of numerous works including Max Weber and German Politics: The Age of Bureaucracy and Max Weber and his Contemporaries. He is also editor of the Max Weber Gesamtausgabe.

'This lively, well-written volume is a valuable addition to the literature on Max Weber.' Choice 'As an interpreter of Weber, ... Mommsen is of the first rank and this book makes clear the historical dimensions of Weber's thought, the value commitments which underlay it and Weber's pre-eminent position as a theorist of modernity.' ANZJS

• Preface. Acknowledgements.Part I: Politics and Social Theory.1. Politics and Scholarship: The Two Icons in Max Webers Life.2. The Antinomical Structure of Max Weber's Political Thought.3. Max Weber's Theory of Legitimacy Today.Part II: Max Weber on Socialism and Political Radicalism.4. Capitalism and Socialism: Weber's Dialogue with Marx.5. Joining the Underdogs? Weber's Critique of the Social Democrats in Wilhelmine Germany.6. Roberto Michels and Max Weber: Moral Conviction Versus the Politics of Responsibility.Part III: The Development of Max Weber's Theoretical Ideas.7. Max Weber on Bureaucracy and Bureaucratization: Threat to Liberty and Instrument of Creative Action.8. Ideal Type and Pure Type: Two Variants of Max Weber's Ideal-typical Method.9. Rationalization and Myth in Weber's Thought.10. The Two Dimensions of Social Change in Max Weber's Sociological Theory.Part IV: The Rediscovery of Max Weber.11. Max Weber in Modern Social Thought.Notes.Index.