Did Max Weber's Agony and Ecstasy Influence His Scholarship?

Abstract

When exploring the intellectual history of a discipline, one cannot help but wonder about the “real” person behind the scholarship. To what extent do personal life experiences influence a scholar's theories, conceptualizations, and expectations? Max Weber, the German scholar whose intellectual curiosity was, at least partially, inspired by strong personal anxieties, became one of the most influential social scientists of the twentieth century. His own intellectual and personal obsessions, along with the efforts of his wife and colleagues to present his work to a larger audience, had much to do with who he was, as well as the body of scholarship that he created.

Beyond Bureaucracy—Public Administration as Political Integrator and Non‐Weberian Thought in Germany

“…Students of public administration outside Germany, by contrast, tend to identify formal legality and hierarchical governance as well as the application of standard operating procedures by unemotional bureaucrats with Weber’s concept of a nonpolitical sphere of public administration and with Hegel’s notion of the state as the expression of ultimate reason for the sake of the collective good (cf. Lee and Raadschelders 2008, 420–21 [on Hegel and Weber]; Raadschelders 2010; Rutgers 2001; Sager and Rosser 2009), while feeling the necessity to characterize elements of administrative autonomy and flexibility as surprisingly non‐German (e.g., Wilson 1989, 14–18).…”