Culture

Max Weber in America by Lawrence A. Scaff

Max Weber in America BY Lawrence A. Scaff. Princeton University Press. Hardcover, 326 pages. $35.
The cover of Max Weber in America

Max Weber in America? The idea seems almost preposterous. We often think of Weber as the quintessential European thinker: abstract, worldly, brooding, and difficult. The America of his period of greatest productivity, the first two decades of the twentieth century, comes down to us as isolationist, anti-intellectual, bombastic, and about to embark on flapperdom. How could one have any influence on the other?