As one of the celebrated founding fathers of sociology, Max Weber (1864–1920) should interest historians of science for a number of reasons. On the one hand, his life and work provide key insights into not only the origins of sociology's methods and identity but also the broader scientific debates from which sociology emerged during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. On the other hand, one could cite a long list of examples, such as Robert Merton's work on the origins of the Scientific Revolution through to late twentieth-century scholarship on professionalization, to illustrate the extent to which Weber's ideas have been an important source of inspiration for history-of-science scholarship. However, for reasons that are far from clear, Weber has never been fully established as a subject for serious and sustained historical enquiry. Indeed, while Weber does not feature in the New Dictionary of Scientific Biography (Detroit, 2008), there was up until now only one full-length biography of Weber, which was written by his wife, Marianne, in 1926. It is in this context that two new and very different biographies of Weber are to be welcomed as important contributions to our historical understanding of Weber, sociology and, by extension, the history of history of science.

First published in German in 2005 and featuring seven hundred densely filled pages (trimmed down from over a thousand for this translation), Joachim Radkau's Max Weber: A Biography physically embodies the size of the gap in the literature that it aims to fill. Utilizing extensive archival and primary source material, Radkau has attempted to chart both Weber's life – from his childhood in Erfurt and Berlin through to his death after a lung infection at the age of fifty-six – and his intellectual trajectory – from his postdoctoral surveys of agrarian life through his famous studies in what we now describe as the sociology of religion, law and large corporations. In so doing, Radkau aims to capture the ‘whole’ of Weber by guiding us through the key episodes in his life, including the illness and depression that led to a near twenty-year absence from university teaching during the first two decades of the twentieth century, and showing how they can help us understand more about the writings, including The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and the posthumous Economy and Society, for which he is still renowned. By weaving together Weber's professional and personal lives in this way, Radkau endeavours to enrich our perspective on Weber by portraying him as someone who straddled a range of disciplinary boundaries and participated in numerous political debates, such as those about the Treaty of Versailles and Germany's Weimar constitution, at a time when sociology was only just being fully established as an intellectual and university subject.

The results of Radkau's ambitious efforts are mixed. On the one hand, he frequently makes connections and evokes intriguing contexts for thinking about Weber and his work. For example, Radkau positions The Protestant Ethic in the context of Weber's bouts of illness, which led him to spend significant periods of time in Rome. As Radkau notes, the possible connections between a work emphasizing the importance of Protestant identity and Weber's time at the heart of Catholic power are intriguing. Furthermore, Radkau frequently makes good use of Weber's letters to throw light on his attitudes towards important intellectual questions, including historical materialism, which has provided a crucial point of reference for Weber's reception among different groups of sociologists throughout the world. Notwithstanding these positives, though, Radkau's efforts frequently lose their way. In part, this is because he attempts to cover far too much material – an unintended but somewhat foreseeable consequence of writing the first scholarly biography of an intellectual giant. Thus, while the connections Radkau suggests between Weber's travels and The Protestant Ethic are quickly sidelined in favour of a reinterpretation of the text, each chapter is divided into sections of only around a page and a half in length, which frequently interrupts their momentum.

Most of these problems are not to be found in Fritz Ringer's much shorter and more narrowly focused Max Weber: An Intellectual Biography. Framed as an ‘advanced introduction’ (p. 3) to Weber's work, Ringer's book concentrates on the task of putting the best-known of Weber's work and the trajectory of his intellectual development back into their late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century contexts. Consequently, the overall structure of Ringer's book will meet with the expectations of anyone familiar with Weber's major writings on religion, capitalism and bureaucracy. Nevertheless, Ringer's effort to locate Weber in the intellectual and institutional contexts of his time does mean that his take on these subjects is often different to what one finds in the conventional sociology literature. For example, by considering how Weber's interaction with his critics helped create what is usually seen as the definitive 1920 edition of The Protestant Ethic, we get a much stronger sense of Weber as a historical figure existing in a particular place and time. However, while pursuing this aim, Ringer's writing does also exhibit – as he happily admits – the preoccupations of someone who identifies and sympathizes with the subject of his study. For Ringer, Weber is a thinker whom we should view as a political liberal who is not just historically interesting but also, as Ringer outlines in the concluding chapter, still intellectually relevant and stimulating. While this sympathy explains Ringer's obvious enthusiasm for his subject matter, it also provides a context for his responses to numerous important questions. For instance, Ringer devotes a great deal of time and energy to acquitting Weber of the charge of unwitting Nazi apologetics – an accusation that is occasionally levelled at Weber with respect to his writings about charismatic leaders who can dominate societies.

Together, then, Radkau's and Ringer's books represent welcome and important contributions to the effort to develop better understanding of Weber as a historical figure. While drawing attention to important aspects in Weber's life and development and illustrating the broad range of work that he produced, both books also demonstrate how much work is still to be done not just on Weber but on developing a more historically sophisticated history of sociology. For instance, one issue that neither Ringer nor Radkau address in any great detail is how and why Weber came to be associated with sociology at all. As Robert Proctor has shown in Value-Free Science: Purity and Power in Modern Science (Cambridge, MA, 1991), Weber actively avoided sociology until sometime after he had established his methodology and published his most famous works. In this respect, while Ringer and Radkau restore Weber to more appropriate historical contexts than has often been achieved in the past, there are still a number of assumptions about Weber and sociology in their work that are rooted in the ways that sociologists, rather than historians, have viewed the history of their discipline. Given the importance of Weber to both sociology and history of science, such issues are ones that historians of science themselves might look to address in future.