Exactly 20 years ago Donald N. Levine published Visions of the Sociological Tradition and by doing so set theoretical and methodological standards for any future historiography of sociology.^{Footnote 1} In the first part of the book Levine distinguished between different forms and types of writing the history of the discipline. He thus asked whether previous histories of sociology were predominantly conceptualized as stories of linear progress and the accumulation of valid insights or rather as tales of an unavoidable plurality of paradigms which neither converge nor build upon each other, whether the history of sociology was told with a bold synthetic intent (something which Parsons famously did in his The Structure of Social Action) or merely with the aim of contextualizing and historicizing the emergence of sociologically relevant topics and ways of thinking etc. In the second part of the book Levine took up the task to spell out the different traditions of sociology thereby characterizing not only national discourses of sociology (German, Italian, British, American and French ones) but also some which can be traced back to Ancient Greece or—like the Marxist debate—which are notoriously difficult to contextualize within a narrow national framework. In a third and last part Levine dared to ask which sociological debates of his own time, in 1995, were most important or at least en vogue and whether sociology, as a discipline, was doing well or, on the contrary, might have entered a state of crisis due to the fact that the traditions pointed to by Levine were now in a process of dissolution that might lead to a fragmentation of the discipline––something which was paradoxically prevented in the past due to the persistence of these very traditions.

Lawrence Scaff’s new book Weber and the Weberians has indeed not much to do with Levine’s earlier attempt although both authors have undoubtedly contributed to the field of a historiography of sociology. But Scaff does not have the all-encompassing systematic ambitions of Levine and so it would not be wise to compare the two works. It might be helpful, nevertheless, to keep in mind Levine’s arguments and methodological approach in order to characterize the strengths and weaknesses of Scaff’s book and to analyze the costs of any attempt to analyze the legacy of a particular sociological classic (not a national tradition)––something that was done by Jeffrey C. Alexander, for example, with respect to the Durkheimians^{Footnote 2} and that is now done by Scaff with respect to the Weberians.

Scaff begins the first chapter of the book with a sketch of Weber’s legacy arguing that, in the meantime, a kind of “tentative agreement” [3] concerning the central features of Weberian ideas in the human sciences has emerged. At least six such features [4ff.] should be stressed. (1) Authors in the tradition of Weber—so Scaff argues—are engaged in configurational analysis which means that they are focusing on the interactions of actors, organizations and institutions in their attempt to explain social phenomena and processes. (2) Weberians also try to understand social action with respect to institutional chances and constraints. (3) They assume that phenomena are brought into existence by a variety of different causes. (4) Followers of Weber assume that actions are embedded in wider social and cultural contexts. (5) They are usually well-versed in historical and comparative work since this type of analysis is crucial for understanding the (contemporary) social world. (6) Weberians attempt to carve out analytical categories from the empirical material above all ideal-types. Scaff’s sketch is a convincing one although one material, should at least mention that it is not really surprising and new insofar as similar features of a Weberian strategy of sociological analysis were already pointed out by, for example, Stephen Kalberg in the mid-1990s.^{Footnote 3}

What is different from Kalberg’s earlier attempt, however, is Scaff’s much greater interest in the question of how the Weber tradition came to be established in the United States. In the densely written pages of the rest of the first chapter, Scaff convincingly points to a number of talented students and interpreters that Max Weber had in the period between the two World Wars. He highlights the effects of the (often rather idiosyncratic) Weber translations by Frank Knight, Talcott Parsons, Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills and others in the US context. He nicely tells the story how the Weber texts became required reading in sociology courses at the University of Chicago and how highly gifted students such as Reinhard Bendix, David Riesman, Daniel Bell, Morris Janowitz or Milton Singer became socialized within this intellectual milieu and began the careers that ultimately made them major figures of the discipline. Readers will also appreciate that Scaff does not shy away from rather speculative reasoning when he answers the question why German immigrants who saved their lives by fleeing to the United States were so attracted to Weber’s mode of thinking that they were not only able, but willing to further the Weberian cause within US-American universities. Scaff—in reference to German leftists and particularly those related to the so-called Frankfurt School—put it this way: “Weber as the self-described ‘outsider’ took on the function of providing orientation to the experience and displacement and the condition Adorno labelled the ‘damaged life.’ The rationale for such an appropriation was to be found in the work itself, since Weber could be read to have confronted the spectre of capitalist modernity, writ large in the United States, with an acceptable cosmopolitan and critical sensibility familiar to a European. But the result of this émigré perspective was then a different kind of Weber, more attuned to the critical problematics of modern life, the unsettled position of the scholar and teacher, and the demanding existence of the ‘intellectual desperado’ (Siegfried Kracauer’s pointed characterization of Weber) confronting a world of turmoil” [16]. Scaff’s sketch with respect to Weber’s legacy during the interwar period is probably the most stimulating of the whole book. After 1945 Weber’s influence becomes more diffuse depending on the enormous growth of sociology, particularly in the US, and the ensuing differentiation into highly compartmentalized sub-disciplines. That makes it difficult for Scaff—and for any other author! —to clearly identify Weber’s legacy in the same, often biographical manner as was possible with respect to the period between the two World Wars. If one wants to criticize Scaff’s story nevertheless, one should probably point to the somewhat US-American perspective in his overall endeavor. This is surprising insofar as Scaff, a great Weber-scholar who is familiar with the international and particularly German literature on Weber, certainly could have taken a broader view. There is not much in Scaff’s first chapter on Weber’s influence in countries such as Great Britain or in other national contexts. As Scaff himself knows quite well: not all students of Weber migrated to the US, and Weber’s worldwide influence especially after 1945 has been enormously pushed by the aura of the University of Heidelberg and its department of sociology. This was the place where Wolfgang Schluchter, in particular, educated many students from Japan, India, Brazil and many other countries throughout the world who afterwards went back to their home countries in order to spread Weberian modes of analysis there. Especially when one recalls Levine’s emphasis of the importance of national traditions, the question arises why Scaff predominantly focused on the US-American reception of Weber’s thought and why he did not make a greater effort to understand why in countries such as France, for example, despite the huge impact of Raymond Aron, Max Weber’s influence remained rather weak. To be fair and to give more credit to Scaff’s historiographical sketch: Scaff certainly does discuss Aron in the later chapters of his book, and he is certainly not silent with respect to Karl Mannheim’s and Norbert Elias’s influence on parts of British sociology. However, these later discussions of the aforementioned authors do not have a primary focus on identifying different national paths in the reception of Weber’s oeuvre as was the case in the first chapter when Scaff tried to characterize the fate of Weber’s writings in the US context. Thus a kind of US-bias can be detected. However, admirers of Scaff’s work––and this reviewer belongs to that group––are certainly willing to explain this bias by referring to the constraints of writing a book of not more than 200 pages.

In the second and following chapters, Scaff tries to identify a variety of themes and topics of Weber’s work which were interesting and promising enough to allow Weberians to build upon, from “Historical and Cultural Analysis” to a “Theory of Social Action,” from “Orders, Structures, Institutions” to “Paths to the Modern World”. One could certainly argue whether the topics just mentioned were really the ones that have dominated both Weber’s own oeuvre and the works of his followers. But, in my opinion, this would be a rather vain and fruitless critique: it is always possible to find additional topics since the phenomena Weber dealt with are basically endless. Be that as it may, Scaff’s choice of topics and themes is a plausible and reasonable one, leading to the conclusion that it would be more fruitful to ask whether this thematic focus really allows one to obtain—as promised by the title of the book—a concise overview and a clear portrait of those to be called “Weberians.”

Scaff’s thematic focus is convincing as long as he deals with “Historical and Cultural Analysis”—and if it is only for the simple reason that authors who, in a comparative-historical perspective, have dealt with the importance of religion for processes of social change almost necessarily had to link their analyses to categories used by Weber as well. Sociologists such as Reinhard Bendix, Robert N. Bellah or Shmuel N. Eisenstadt have either published great works on Weber and/or became prominent by writing texts very much in the line of Max Weber’s original interests. It therefore does not require much effort to convince readers that there is a Weber tradition in the field under investigation. It should, however, be noted that Scaff’s arguments, even in the chapter on “Historical and Cultural Analysis”, tend to challenge the good-will of at least some of his readers, especially when he emphasizes Weber’s alleged methodological and theoretical proximity to so-called “critical realism” [49] or when he claims compatibility between Rational-Choice-Theory on the one side and Weber’s approach on the other as—according to Scaff—can be seen in so-called “analytical Weberianism” [62]. Those readers would probably ask whether Scaff is in danger of doing too much for the Weberian cause, given that, ultimately, there is not much sociology left outside the Weberian cosmos.

These doubts seem to increase when readers reach chapter 3 where Scaff discusses Weber and the Weberians in the context of a “Theory of Social Action”, with quite a few pages on Talcott Parsons and on Jürgen Habermas. Now, it should be immediately emphasized that Parsons has probably done more than anyone else in order to make American sociology familiar with Weber’s work; and one should also stress that Habermas, especially in Theory of Communicative Action, extensively used Weberian terms and insights in various parts of his opus magnum. But is that sufficient to describe these great sociologists as Weberians? Edward A. Tiryakian, for example, a student and admirer of Parsons, once argued convincingly that Parsons’s real “hero” was not Weber but Durkheim.^{Footnote 4} And with respect to Habermas one might doubt whether his strong focus on the problem of integration of modern societies and his wide-ranging discussions of juridical-philosophical topics is more an indicator of his interest in Durkheimian questions than in those predominantly discussed in Weber’s oeuvre. To reiterate: Weber’s influence on Parsons and Habermas has been and––in the case of Habermas––still is enormous. But Weber has undoubtedly influenced almost all sociologists, at least in parts of their works. However, that does not mean that all sociologists automatically have to be characterized as Weberians. Where are the fine-grained analyses of actor-constellations in Parsons’s and Habermas’s works, where one can find the systematic comparisons that Scaff considers as central to a Weberian research program? And how is Parsons’s and Habermas’s proximity to theories of modernization and socio-cultural evolution compatible with Weber’s theoretical and methodological principles as Scaff himself notes in later chapters [153ff.]? To be sure, Scaff never claims that Parsons and Habermas have to be regarded as Weberians! But it is also clear that it becomes increasingly difficult for readers to understand who should be called a true Weberian and who does not deserve such an honorable label.

These and similar difficulties do not disappear in the following chapters because Scaff simply seems to discuss too many authors who have reworked or modified Weber’s topics and theories. Despite all these problems, however, one has to admit that readers will benefit even from these chapters since Scaff always succeeds in providing highly instructive insights to Weber’s original arguments and concepts. And yet, the clarity of Scaff’s style and his tremendous mastery of the vast literature written by so-called “Weberians” cannot conceal the odd fact that certain topics are completely missing, topics that “true” Weberians—at least in my opinion—should deal with today. So it is certainly surprising that the debate on the rise of the West triggered by historian Kenneth Pomeranz in 2000^{Footnote 5} and shaped by sociologists such as Jack Goldstone is not mentioned at all, or that the challenge of “global history” for traditional narratives of sociology and especially the narratives of its so-called founding fathers is not really dealt with. Why is it that this debate in which Weber’s historical-comparative approach should particularly have taken center stage seems not to be important for Weberians? Is that indeed the case? If not, where are the Weberians in sociology who (with the exception of Goldstone and a few others) are prepared to shoulder the task of the great and truly Weberian problems placed on the agenda by Pomeranz?

This is a pressing question—particularly one with respect to Scaff’s own book and its last chapter entitled “Weberian Social Theory and the Future.” Scaff himself—to reiterate––does not discuss challenges facing Weberians from the research area of global history. He has different topics in mind when he reflects on the future of Weberianism. He has hope that at least some national traditions of sociology might be open to Weberian ideas, and that attempts toward a diagnosis of our time might give Weberianism a new push: “Weber’s ideas could be used to show unattached and homeless intellectuals where they had come from, where they had landed, and where they were most likely headed in our rationalized and disenchanted world” [174]. Here, again, some readers might doubt whether Weberian sociology should be used predominantly by public intellectuals with a particular interest in a diagnosis of our time and whether it is above all terms such as “disenchantment” or “rationalization” that are most helpful for a sociology in search of its (new) identity: the enormous diffuseness of Weber’s concept of “rationalization” is well known^{Footnote 6} and the critique of overgeneralized processual terms within sociology is certainly increasing.^{Footnote 7} If this is so, then Weberianism might still have a bright future, but probably not in the fields suggested by Scaff. That should not, however, prevent sociologists from reading this stimulating book.