Joshua Derman – författare

The year 2020 marked the centennial of the death of Max Weber, the German sociologist, scholar of world religions, economic historian, social philosopher, and theoretician of modern political life. This volume presents a collection of essays on the legacy and relevance of his thought. The authors, an international array of distinguished scholars, are drawn from various disciplines--philosophy, political science, intellectual history, and sociology. They comprise both experts who have contributed to the ongoing study of Weber's work and theorists who discern his enduring bond with key problems in the humanities and social sciences. Max Weber at 100 seeks to understand the ways that Weber's legacy may take shape in the century to come. It contends that Weber's sustained relevance will derive not only--and perhaps not even predominantly--from his empirical claims, such as the "Weber thesis" about the origins of capitalism. Two key dimensions of his thought will play an increasingly important role in determining his significance: his inchoate but equally evocative theories about ecology, global capitalism, imperialism, democracy, and gender; and his broader, non-empirical or even philosophical observations concerning questions of human nature, value freedom, objectivity, secularization, rationalization, and disenchantment. The contributors cast a critical eye over Weber's oeuvre to ask what can still be learned from his work, and how his legacy might be contested or transformed.

Max Weber is widely regarded as one of the foundational thinkers of the twentieth century. But how did this reclusive German scholar manage to leave such an indelible mark on modern political and social thought? Max Weber in Politics and Social Thought is the first comprehensive account of Weber's wide-ranging impact on both German and American intellectuals. Drawing on a wide range of sources, Joshua Derman illuminates what Weber meant to contemporaries in the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany and analyzes why they reached for his concepts to articulate such widely divergent understandings of modern life. The book also accounts for the transformations that Weber's concepts underwent at the hands of émigré and American scholars, and in doing so, elucidates one of the major intellectual movements of the mid-twentieth century: the transatlantic migration of German thought.