Irony as vocation

the fate of a social scientist in the writings of Max Weber and Norbert Elias

Marta Bucholc

pp. 143-160

in: François Dépelteau, Tatiana Savoia Landini (eds), Norbert Elias and social theory, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013

Abstract

Max Weber died in 1920, and his death was commonly considered to be premature. It would be a fascinating exercise in alternative history of social science to imagine the development of sociology with Weber living on to be seventy or even eighty, witnessing the rise and fall of the Third Reich, or even the dawn of the Bonn Republic, yet another prosthetic German state in his lifetime. How would the experience of totalitarianism, the horror of Holocaust, and the menace of the atomic bomb have impressed the author of Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft? Would he have a presentiment of our late modernity as Moses had had a foretaste of the Promised Land?

Cited authors

Weber Max

Elias Norbert