Max Weber: A BiographyISBN: 978-0-7456-4147-8
Hardcover
700 pages
March 2009, Polity
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The tremendous influence exerted by Max Weber was due not only to
the power of his ideas but also to the fact that behind his
theories one perceived a man with a marked character and a tragic
destiny. However, for nearly 80 years, our understanding of the
life of Max Weber was dominated by the biography published in 1926
by his widow, Marianne Weber. The lack of a great Weber biography
was one of the strangest and most glaring gaps in the literature of
the social sciences. For various reasons the task was difficult;
time and again, attempts to write a new biography of Max Weber
ended in failure.
When Joachim Radkau’s biography appeared in Germany in 2005
it caused a sensation. Based on an abundance of previously unknown
sources and richly embedded in the German history of the time, this
is the first fully comprehensive biography of Max Weber ever to
appear. Radkau brings out, in a way that no one has ever done
before, the intimate interrelations between Weber’s thought
and his life experience. He presents detailed revelations about the
great enigmas of Weber’s life: his suffering and erotic
experiences, his fears and his desires, his creative power and his
methods of work as well as his religious experience and his
relation to nature and to death. By understanding the great drama
of his life, we discover a new Max Weber, until now unknown in many
respects, and, at the same time, we gain a new appreciation of his
work.
Joachim Radkau, born in 1943, is Professor of Modern History at the Bielefeld University, Germany. His interest in Max Weber dates back nearly forty years when he worked together with the German-American historian George W. F. Hallgarten (Washington), a refugee who left Germany in 1933 and who, as a student, listened to Weber’s last lecture in summer 1920. Radkau’s main works include Die deutsche Emigration in den USA (1971); Deutsche Industrie und Politik (together with G. W. F. Hallgarten, 1974), Aufstieg und Krise der deutschen Atomwirtschaft (1983), Technik in Deutschland (1989), Das Zeitalter der Nervosität (1998), Natur und Macht: Eine Weltgeschichte der Umwelt (2000).