Hearing of Weber’s death in 1920, many in the German academic community might have thought the news referred to Alfred Weber, Professor of Economics at the University of Heidelberg. While his elder brother Max had recently made a forceful return to public affairs, he was still known principally as the fin de siècle advocate of a muscular national imperialism and the author of some significant, albeit occasional, articles in specialist journals. Although he had tentatively resumed teaching and a more overt political role—having resigned his own post at Heidelberg in 1903, due to a deep depressive illness—Max Weber’s scholarly reputation remained limited at the time of his death to a relatively narrow intellectual circle in Mitteleuropa.

Thereafter, the elder brother reclaimed his birthright; only a few years later, Alfred could complain that his own students were more interested in ‘Marx and Max’ than in himself. In the first instance, this was largely due to the efforts of wife Marianne, who not only tirelessly promoted Weber’s work, but also in a very real sense ‘authored’ the Max Weber we know today. At the time of his death, Weber’s only book publications were the two texts necessary for an academic career, while the main body of his work—the vast mass of Economy and Society; The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism—either languished in manuscript or had appeared in specialist journals. It was Marianne who assembled these studies into posthumous collections and edited the unpublished texts, thus ensuring a growing but still limited reputation in the Weimar Republic. International sacralization came with Talcott Parsons’s rendition of The Protestant Ethic into English in 1930 and highly selective use of Weber for the construction of his own structural functionalism. It was this edulcorated transatlantic version that was re-imported into the fledgling Federal Republic as a ‘good’ German, tainted neither by Nazi collaboration nor Marxist sympathies.

In 1959 this image was decisively challenged by Wolfgang Mommsen’s Max Weber and German Politics. Mommsen’s meticulous reconstruction of Weber’s ‘unsentimental politics of power’ created a furore in Adenauer’s Germany. The counter-attack—and, to some extent, successful recapture—was led by Parsons himself at the Heidelberg Soziologentag in 1964. Weber’s influence as a far-sighted liberal advocate of the ‘ethics of responsibility’, theorist of modernity and a founder of the distinctively modernist enterprise of sociology continued to grow, both in Germany and internationally. Less a distinct tendency or school than an ether in which the social sciences are bathed, his generic concepts—‘the Protestant ethic’, ‘charismatic leadership’, ‘rationalization’, ‘disenchantment’ and ‘ideal types’—have entered the lexicon of modern intellectual life, if all too often stripped of the originary contexts of their formulation. Weber’s standing remains such that Lawrence Scaff could argue that whoever is ‘able to have his own Weber interpretation accepted could determine the further progress of the social sciences’: ‘Weber is power’.

Up till now, this whitewashing of the political dimension of Weber’s thought has been accompanied by a comparable silence about his sexual and psychological history. Interest in Weber’s legacy has produced relatively few attempts at an overall picture of the man. Despite several ‘intellectual’ biographies and numerous specialist studies, the sole ‘Life’ has been Marianne Weber’s 1926 Lebensbild. Along with a survey of his family history, intellectual life and political engagements, this offered some judiciously chosen insights into the thinker’s personal suffering during his seven-year breakdown. Unsurprisingly, the devoted widow’s portrait tends towards the heroic. Marianne’s considerable literary talents conspire to present a tragic titan of world-historic stature; the closing lines of this part-biography, part-eulogy rise to a scarcely credible pathetic fallacy: ‘As he lay dying, there was a thunderstorm and lightning flashed over his paling head . . . The earth had changed.’ The image contributed not a little to the formation of a quasi-cult around the ‘myth of Heidelberg’. Belatedly translated into English as Max Weber: A Biography in 1974, the work has remained, despite its obvious limitations, the standard reference for those seeking a fuller picture of the thinker’s life and work. A new biography has long been needed, both to encompass recent advances in Weber scholarship and to benefit from greater distance, both temporal and affective, from the man.

At over a thousand pages, including an extensive scholarly apparatus, Joachim Radkau’s Max Weber: die Leidenschaft des Denkens aims to fill this void. Radkau has assembled a vast amount of data from varied sources: the ongoing work of the Munich-based Gesamtausgabe, prior biographical studies and, most significantly, the closely guarded family archive material, usually inaccessible to researchers. In particular, unpublished correspondence between Weber and the women he was closest to—wife, mother, mistresses—together with their exchanges on him, provides a much fuller picture of his emotional life. (A short note at the end of the text indicates that Radkau gained access to this correspondence via copies of transcripts originally prepared for the Max-Weber-Forschungsstelle in Heidelberg, one of the participating institutions of the Gesamtausgabe, though the details of this minor social-scientific scoop remain unclear.)

By any standards, then, this is an important work. It is also somewhat eccentric. Radkau’s organizing thesis is that ‘nature’ provides ‘the often vainly sought missing link between Weber’s life and work’. As he explains in his Introduction:

I want to portray Weber’s life in three acts, with Nature as the generator of dramatic suspense. A sketch in the manner of a myth, certainly, or even better: an ideal type. For why not apply Weber’s method to himself? One learns from him that we indeed need ideal types in order to grasp reality.