I begin with a short quiz. Max Weber was a) the author of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism; b) one of the three great founders of modern sociology and social theory; c) the preeminent theorist of rationalization and bureaucratization in the twentieth century; or d) a grim prophet of the disenchantment of the world, one whose intellectual honesty led him to undermine the very possibility of objective or universal “facts of value,” thereby paving the way for the decisionism and irrationalism characteristic of Weimar politics?

Of course it is possible to answer this question with the slippery “all of the above,” but most will be prone to plumb for one (or at most two) of the characterizations listed. Depending on accidents of educational background, generation, and political slant, Weber can appear as the great and necessary forerunner of contemporary social theory (despite the creakiness of some of his ideas), the great alternative to a Marxian understanding of modern capitalism, or as a kind of devil figure who presages the end of political philosophy (insofar as he denies that modern scholarship—and a fragmented reason—have anything to tell us about how we should live our lives). The first avatar might be called the Harvard Social Studies Weber; the second, the Weber of much of the sociological discipline itself (both German and American); and the third, the Weber whose notion of Wertfreiheit has given conniptions to scholars on both the left and right of the political spectrum. Weber may not exactly be all things to all people (as seems to be the case with Nietzsche), but the conflicting images we have of him tend to reveal more about ourselves than they do of this troubled genius.

Joshua Derman’s wonderful new study masterfully deconstructs the polarity of the monumental, stolid Weber versus the disabusing Weber whose “soul craved a universe in which failure . . . was to be the mark of human nobility” (to use Leo Strauss’s memorable phrase). As an intellectual historian, Derman attempts something that (to my knowledge, at least) has not been attempted before. His book not only provides an overview of Weber’s thought, concerns, and historical context but also tells the complicated story of how his fragmentary writings were posthumously turned into the “collected works.” These were appropriated over time by an eclectic (transatlantic) cast of characters in the 1930s and 1940s, disciples and opponents who ultimately enabled Weber to take his place in the canon of social and political theory. Derman provides an exceedingly interesting account of how young Weber enthusiasts in America—for example, Edward Shils, Talcott Parsons, and C. Wright Mills—teamed up with emigré German scholars to produce the first Weber texts in English, and also presents a well-deserved tribute to Marianne Weber, whose selfless dedication to her husband’s work and life produced the first “complete” German edition of his work in 1924—the fount from which Shils and Parsons drew, enabling the “Americanization” of Max Weber.

Some of this story, especially the bits on the Heidelberg years and the Weber salon, will be familiar to readers. But while many are acquainted with the key figures in that circle—Georg Lukács, Karl Jaspers, Friedrich Gundolf, et al.—it is good to know more about the nature and extent of their relationships to Weber. And it is also good to see Weber’s consistently contrarian behavior during World War I documented. His unshakable nationalism notwithstanding, Weber managed to alienate doctrinaire students on the Left and the Right repeatedly, telling each side what they did not want to hear. Thus, after attending Weber’s lectures on socialism at the University of Munich, a young Max Horkheimer left feeling that “Max Weber must be an ultraconservative” (p. 60). Yet at the same time, many saw his value pluralism (the famous “polytheism” of values, the “warring gods” of the Vocation lectures) as the sine qua non of a democratic (postwar) Germany.

The intellectual and political context in place, Derman offers, in his next five chapters, studies of key Weberian themes—value freedom and polytheism; the meaning of modern capitalism; skepticism and faith; the warring components of Weber’s approach to the study of society; and charismatic rulership. Each of the five chapters offers excellent (and exceptionally clear) explications of just what Weber meant by such metaphors as “the warring gods” and his description of the modern state as a kind of Betrieb. Again, these discussions offer much that will be familiar to readers of Weber. But where Derman really shines is in tracing the reception of elements of Weber’s oeuvre, not just by American sociologists-to-be but also by various sectors of the German university world in the years following his death.

It is here that Derman’s account of Weber’s Rezeptiongeschichte comes into its own and offers new, and often startling, information. Weber may not have been all things to all people, but there is a parade of surprises concerning his appropriation in his native land in the late 1920s and throughout the 1930s. Soon-to-be Nazis like Otto Koellreutter bristled at Weber’s description of the state as a mere Betrieb, while more famous figures like Carl Schmitt deployed Weber in his own war against statutory positivism, even as he argued that the notion of the state as Betrieb precisely captured the depoliticalization of liberal-capitalist-technological society (pp. 106–9). While for the most part the Nazis had little use for Weber (whose political activities after the war aligned him securely with the struggle for parliamentary democracy), the occasional sympathetic Nazi reader—like Karl Wilhelm Rath at the University of Göttingen—could praise Weber’s clearing away of the old illusions—the “death of God”—as the prelude not to a world of subjective, existential decision making (which god should I follow?) but to the birth of a new order of “concrete” duties and community, one in which all talk of competing values and “warring gods” would look positively quaint and oh-so-nineteenth century (pp. 71–74).

Derman is also exceedingly good at disentangling the various strands of Weber’s anti-utopianism, and the reasons why each of them has had a significant afterlife. First, there is the stoic, disillusioned Weber—the heroic individualist who so impressed Siegfried Kracauer, Ernst Troelsch, and Karl Mannheim. Second, there is the “temperate anti-utopianism” of the thinker who famously insisted (in “Science as a Vocation”) on the need for passion, a sense of proportion, and personal responsibility for consequences. This Weber was attractive to both Karl Löwith and Eric Voegelin, and seemed to provide a path forward in a world where the stage for meaningful individual political action had become extremely constricted. Finally, there is the “hot anti-utopianism” of Weber the proto-existentialist, the Weber who railed against intellectual and political opponents, and whose ultimate values were deeply personal ones, in extreme tension with all supposed “universal” values. This Weber, in Derman’s account, was most evident to those who knew him well—such as the philosopher Karl Jaspers, whose entire conception of Existenzphilosophie borrowed heavily from the model of personal authenticity provided by Weber.

Derman concludes his study with the unlikely career of the notion of “charisma” (literally, “gift of grace”), a Greek term that Weber lifted from the New Testament in order to characterize rulers whose personal qualities inspire virtually unquestioning devotion in their followers. In his later writings, he offered charismatic leadership as an alternative to the suffocating “rule of officialdom” that he (increasingly) saw as the fate of the modern, administered world. But as Derman points out, the term did not immediately catch on in a German academic context still ruled by more “holistic” conceptions of state and society. It was only with the rise of fascism in Italy, and the contributions of people like Roberto Michels, that charisma made its way into political sociology for good, winding up, postwar, as part of the American political vernacular. The strange story of the sea change undergone by “charisma” is alone worth the price of admission to Derman’s study. Like the rest of the book, it leaves one with an enhanced understanding of the contingencies, misunderstandings, and institutional vagaries that Weber encountered on his posthumous road to canonization.