Max Weber

Max Weber: The Lawyer as Social Thinker aims to relate the categories of Weber's social thinking to the intellectual context of legal thinking and theory in which he was educated. It aims to show how knowledge of these relations illuminates our understanding of Weber's own intentions. The authors submit that Weber radically undermines teleological social theory by providing a thoroughly anti-teleological sociology. The book identifies some of the key sources of Weber's thought within the legal tradition, notably the jurisprudential theorist Rudolph von Ihering, a typical teleological thinker influenced by Bentham as well as neo-Kantianism. Some of Weber's most famous ideas, for example his claim that explanations of action should be adequate on the level of meaning and the level of cause, the concept of ideal interests, and his stress on "vocations", are shown to be variants of Ihering's concepts. The differences are systematic and profoundly revealing. Max Weber: The Lawyer as Social Thinker is the only account of the sources of Weber's sociology in the legal tradition, as distinct from an account of Weber's sociology of law. The book leads to a new interpretation of Weber. It should be of interest to scholars in social theory, jurisprudence and the history of ideas.