References to the United States appear throughout Max Weber's work, and in a number of places are of pivotal theoretical importance—among them, the reference in Politics as a Vocation (1919) to the rise of the political machine and the party boss who brings in the votes as the model for all modern political parties; his discussion in Science as a Vocation (1919) of the American university whose business and division of labor is geared toward the production of research as the model for the future of the academic profession; his exploration of the Protestant sects in the United States that function to produce a disciplined associational life as an alternative to the solitary Calvinist and Puritan who seek justification through calling; and, of course, the figure of Benjamin Franklin, who becomes the pivotal example of a secular ethos of accumulation whose origin The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905) seeks to explain.

In Max Weber in America, Lawrence Scaff shows that these examples are part of a wider context rooted in Weber's 1904 journey to the United State to attend the Arts and Sciences Congress as part of the St. Louis World's Fair. In his earlier book Fleeing the Iron Cage (1989), Scaff sought to provide a historical reconstruction of Weber's encounter with and conception of modernity in the fin-de-siècle period. His current book is continuous with this project, but instead focuses on Weber's encounter with fin-de-siècle United States, a country that was in a state of dynamic development on all fronts—including the increasing power of large corporations, the progressive movement seeking to tame this power, the struggle to form labor unions and the incessant labor conflict that accompanied this process, the urban concentration of immigrants side by side with patrician elites, the official declaration of the closing of the Western frontier to settlement only 14 years before, and of particular significance for Weber, the reshaping of the agrarian economy as continuous with capitalist industry. In a prodigious piece of historical and biographical research, Scaff reconstructs Weber's itinerary in the United States, an itinerary that included an address on the exceptional development of American capitalism, as well as meetings with such notable figures as W. E. B. DuBois, William James, and Samuel Gompers.

Weber, as is well known, was a thinker whose work centered on analytic typologies and developmental histories. However, the Weber who emerges out of Scaff's narrative is an acute observer of particulars who was simultaneously attentive to the distinctive contradictions of American culture as well as to the broad sweep of economic and political trends shaping the developmental history of the United States. Some of Weber's letters give a vivid account of his astonishment at the extreme contrasts he encountered. For example, he is impressed both by the horrifically unsanitary working conditions of the slaughterhouses in Chicago and by their mechanized efficiency. Likewise, he notes the city's neglect of public services—including a dysfunctional streetcar and public sewage system—existing side by side with brilliantly innovative architecture and a cultured civic appearance. Moreover, on his journey to Oklahoma, Weber notes that he finds greater civilization among the Native Americans than he found in Chicago; and yet, as Scaff demonstrates, Weber was already aware of the process by which the raw land and virgin forests were being transformed via new frame houses, railroads, and oil rigs into the features of urban capitalist civilization.

Scaff often fills in the sociological and historical backdrop of Weber's observations so that the narrative is at times as much about the United States that Weber is visiting and its meaning for his later sociological work as it is about his own encounters. It is nevertheless striking how many of Weber's specific observations did not make it into his broader sociology, a good deal of which was written after his visit. And this seems to be the case even though Scaff takes great pains to reference the many points at which the specific problems Weber observed can be understood as part of his general interest in the transformation of all agrarian life to the imperatives of capitalist culture.

Of these broader sociological observations that were never, or at best partially, incorporated into his subsequent work, two in particular are worthy of attention. The first is the thesis of Weber's address to the the Congress of Arts and Sciences in St. Louis. In this address, whose implications Scaff draws out especially acutely, Weber gives his own account of the exceptional nature of American economic development, focusing on the fact that there was no traditional rural economy in the United States as there was in Europe. Instead, according to Weber, the farmer was already playing the role of the individual capitalist, and so unlike the economic development of Europe, there was no class of rural peasants or rural elites to resist industrial capitalism and, thus, no protracted struggle between those whose roles were defined by the culture of the rural economy and those defined by the new culture of capitalism. This sounds a bit like a combination of the Turner thesis and Louis Hartz's unconscious Lockeanism avant la lettre, but Weber gives this American exceptionalism thesis a twist—as Scaff insightfully points out—by viewing Europe as the exception. This version of American, or more accurately European, exceptionalism is not to be found in his subsequent work on the origins of capitalism, though it would certainly have modified it profoundly.

A second element whose influence seems to have traveled across the Atlantic only in part was Weber's meetings with the major philosopher of American pragmatism, William James. On the one hand, according to one of the more fascinating discussions of the book, Weber engaged mightily with James's Varieties of Religious Experience (1902). Here, Scaff shows rather convincingly that in The Protestant Ethic, Weber embraces James in finding a psychological motivation for ascetic denial, while playing James against himself in insisting on the practical force of religious ideas. On the other hand, as Scaff points out, Weber's criticisms of the unity of the sciences, as well as his claim that analytical concepts in the social sciences must be justified by their usefulness in illuminating questions driven by our constantly changing value interests, coincide largely with the positions of James and John Dewey. Yet their arguments are not directly referenced in Weber's later works on methodology.

These omissions are all the more striking when read against the second part of Scaff's book, in which he presents one of the most comprehensive accounts available of the American appropriation of Weber as a founder of empirical sociology—an appropriation that ironically was fed back to Germany itself. Here, Scaff demonstrates that despite an intense struggle by Talcott Parsons, Edward Shils, Hans Gerth, and C. Wright Mills to define Weber's legacy, he was in the end reshaped into both a functionalist and an empirical sociologist. Space limitations do not allow me to do justice to this discussion, except to note that the interpretation of Weber's work has traveled a mighty distance from the experiences of discovery that motivated it in the first place, often not to its advantage.

Reading Scaff's narrative of the American journey through his account of Weber's “routinization” in American sociology, we are left with both a puzzle and an irony that still needs interpretation. As for the puzzle, unlike Weber's contemporary Werner Sombart, who used his trip to the United States as a stimulus to write his famous 1906 essay, Why There Is No Socialism in the United States, Weber never forged a similar account that was incorporated into his own theories of the development of the modern state and capitalism out of traditional forms of authority—though as Scaff demonstrates in the greatest of detail, Weber was constantly noting the ways the United States differed from the culture of Europe. On the contrary, despite Weber's account of the development of the US party system in his comparative political sociology in Politics as a Vocation, American examples typically appear on the edges of his work. This leaves us with the irony that the American reception of Weber as the model social scientist of both functionalism and empirical sociology filled this vacuum. Both this puzzle and this irony still await explication, though it is a credit to Scaff that he leaves the reader wondering how such an explication should be provided.