FRANCO FERRAROTTI
353
same time he was a far cry from the arrogant pan-Germanism of a col–
league such as Heinrich von Treitschke. Currently four major German
social scientists-Horst Baier, M . Rainer Lepsius, Wolfgang Mommsen,
and Wolfgang Schluchter-are working on a critical edition of the
"Collected Works" of Max Weber. The
Gesamtausgabe
will take several
years, but the first volumes are already available. They include the person–
al correspondence of Weber, including the rich exchanges with his wife,
Marianne Weber. Lepsius is in charge of this section of the Weberian
opera
omnia
and we learn from him that far from being the stoic hero we have
been remembering since his death in 1920, Weber actually was a man filled
with existential and intellectual contradictions who, for many years, suf–
fered from mental exhaustion. Especially
in
the United States, thanks to
the effort of Talcott Parsons and Edward Shils, Weber was interpreted as an
impassionate analyst, whereas we now know that his attitude as a sociolo–
gist was not at all "neutral" or cold-blooded. When he wrote about
Werifreiheit,
this Tonio Kroger of the social sciences simply meant that
nobody was entitled to teach from the chair and speak to the students
about his personal principles of preference as
if
these were scientific propo–
sitions, binding for everybody.
This "new image" of Max Weber seems to point the way for some sort
of alliance between the south and the north of Europe. A certain amount
of participation is essential to the understanding of human problems and
does not exclude,
per se,
the critical distance which is required by a fairly
objective evaluation.
ALFRED KAZIN
AN
EARLY CONTRIBUTOR
1915 - 1998
