INTRODUCTION: Max Weber Today

Max Weber can be considered a “Victorian polymath” due to the extraordinary breadth and depth of his scholarship, quite at odds with today’s hyper-specialization. His conceptual innovations in social science, and his characteristically comparative views of economics, ancient and modern history, sociology, and cultural analyses, have left lasting impressions on thousands of researchers who followed his lead. He was inspired to work in this fashion by Goethe, Theodor Mommsen, and a raft of leading historians who taught him, but he outdid all of them in terms of advancing sociology’s scholarly scope. The authors in this Handbook are among the most well-recognized Weberians on the current global scene, each of whom well qualified to examine Weber’s contribution to a given area of work that he did or that has been directly inspired by his example. These topics include rationalization processes, comparative methods, academic freedom, the Protestant Ethic, the sociology of law, socio-economics of China, India, Ancient Judaism, and Russia, economy and society, political sociology, charismatic authority, and many others, each described concisely in this chapter.