Joshua Derman's study of the intellectual afterlives of Max Weber has ambitious goals: to portray Weber's academic and intellectual reception in Germany from 1920-45 and in the United States from the 1920s to the late 1960s. Derman builds on two recent areas of Weber scholarship—one that has revised the conventional interpretation that Weber's influence in Germany was very limited in comparison to that of the U.S., and the other, on the intellectual impact of the early English translations of Weber by Parsons, Shils, Gerth, and Mills in the 1940s. Derman maps new terrain in both the German and American contexts; he refocuses the American story on the period of the 1920s to the 1940s before the translations were made, to explain the interest in Weber in the first place. The result is an erudite intellectual history of Weber's reception—based on a remarkably comprehensive mastery of all of Weber's major texts and the voluminous German and American secondary literatures. Derman's comparative framework allows his own interpretation of Weber's texts to emerge clearly in the course of his rendering earlier generations of scholars' intepretations. He concludes that Weber's early German interpreters “best understood what [Weber] meant by his concepts”—not least because they did not ascribe to him a coherent program for the discipline of sociology (p. 223). Unlike some other reception histories that treat the question of authorial intention as irrelevant, Derman aims directly at the reconstruction of Weber's intended meaning and then uses that as a benchmark with which to compare later appropriations and reformulations, an approach that proves fruitful and undogmatic.

The study also does not shy away from the most important and complicated themes in Weber's oeuvre: value-free social science, skepticism about revolutionary politics, the Protestant ethic, modern capitalism, and bureaucracy; the task of sociology and its method; and political charisma. Each chapter is organized around one of these themes and is deeply researched in German dissertations, academic journals, dissertations, personal papers, and correspondence. One weakness of the book as a whole, however, is that each chapter begins with a fairly lengthy paraphrase of the central arguments in key Weber texts. Too much space is taken up by these summaries (pp. 50–58, 82–91, 141–145, 179–185), and some of chapter one (pp. 14–33) rehearses biographical context of Max Weber's life that will already be familiar to most German historians.

One of the greatest strengths of the book is its treatment of Talcott Parsons's intellectual biography, which is rendered with great precision based on Parsons's papers, from his student days in the mid-1920s Heidelberg of Marianne and Alfred Weber, Karl Mannheim, and Karl Jaspers to his career at Harvard after 1936. Chapter one traces the trajectories of Parsons, Edward Shils, and Alvin Johnson, each of whom contributed to the “institutionalization” of Weber in American academia. Derman is interested throughout his study in what he calls “intellectual entrepeneurship” (p. 224), and his account of the “race” between two competing academic teams to translate Weber into English (Gerth and Mills “win” with their 1946 From Max Weber), is told with dramatic flair.

Chapter two contrasts the “individualistic” conclusions Gustav Radbruch and Karl Jaspers drew from Weber's “Vocation” lectures with Nazi academicians who believed that Weber's notion of value-freedom cleared the ground for a new “concrete order” based on racial homogeneity. While the fact that Nazi intellectuals appropriated Weber for purposes quite foreign to his own is interesting, it does not sustain Derman's conclusion that Weber's “intellectual ethos bore stronger affinities to the world of Weimar and Nazi-era radicalism than we might otherwise think” (p. 79).

Chapter three examines the institutions and mentalities Weber believed distinctive of modern capitalism. In the first half of the chapter, Derman traces the history of the reception of The Protestant Ethic by German academics and intellectuals in the 1920s and 1930s, showing, for example, how Lutheran and Catholic readers sought to exploit Weber's conjoining of Calvinism and capitalism. The second half of the chapter examines how different thinkers (Schmitt, Lukacs, Parsons) exploited the analogy between the modern state and capitalist enterprise (Betrieb) in different ways (pp. 103-116) and follows Parsons's role in canonizing Weber's writings on bureaucracy. Derman concludes somewhat vaguely that “Weber's analysis of capitalism resonated with contemporaries not merely on account of its scholarly thesis, but largely because it engaged their political hopes and fears” (p. 116).

Karl Jaspers once said of Weber, “He could appear as the consummate relativist—and yet he was the man with the strongest faith of our time.” Derman's chapter four presents three different interpretations of Weber's anti-utopianism—“hot,” “temperate,” and “cold”—and argues that the “hot” interpretation of Weber (which emphasized his faith above his skepticism) took its cue from Weber's intense personality itself and has subsided as those who knew him firsthand have passed from the scene.

Chapter five, “Max Weber's Sociologies,” is a tour de force. Derman explains that Weber oscillated between more historical and more abstract-formal analyses, and that “it required work to make a sociologist out of Weber in a way that would be acceptable to his contemporaries. One aspect of his work would have to be rejected in favor of another,” or the antinomy transcended (p. 167). Ultimately, it was Parsons who “constructed a Weberian ‘sociology’ out of writings that contained no consistent vision for the discipline” (p. 11) by transcending the formal-historical dichotomy common to interwar German sociology. As Derman describes the composition, revisions, and posthumous publication of Economy and Society, he attains insights into Weber's thought process that are exhilarating (pp. 145–57).

Chapter six contrasts the career of the concept of charisma in Germany and the U.S. While interwar German intellectuals found the concept of political charisma unattractive for various reasons, German émigré scholars made it into the canonical social scientific concept it is today, first by using it to analyze fascism and Nazism, and second by examining the generation of Asian and African political leaders who challenged colonial rule in the 1950s and 1960s through its lens.

Derman's history refreshes our view of Weber's entire oeuvre, highlighting the differences national, generational, ideological, and disciplinary boundaries made to Weber interpretation.