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“... early music came about – in short, of how works were collected into a canon – is addressed by William Weber in The Rise of Musical Classics in 18th-century England. Strictly, the classics did not rise: the notion was invented, as Weber notes. Public music in England (tabors, crumhorns and shawms apart) began with ...”

“... an assumption that, without Haydn, no similar seedling would have taken root in soil so fertile. William Weber in his Music and the Middle Class (1975) quotes two pertinent comments by different writers about Austrian society in the 1820s and 1830s:   To play is their pride, and in that consists chiefly the education of the middle class.   A ...”

“... relentless observation and quantification of British academics.Nihilistic Times: Thinking with Max Weber is a revised and expanded version of the Tanner Lectures on Human Values that Wendy Brown gave at Yale in 2019. As she acknowledges, Weber is, on the face of it, a surprising choice of ally for a radical political thinker ...”

“... beyond policy or ideology; they reach into more basic questions of human psychology and what Max Weber called the ‘vocation’ of politics. Corbyn, of course, never wanted to lead anything, let alone the country. It wasn’t until the age of 66, when it was ‘his turn’ to stand as the left-wing candidate in a Labour leadership election, that he was ...”

“... More than most, Max Weber’s reputation reflects the aspirations of others. His wife, Marianne, did much to establish it in Germany, rapidly turning his articles and drafts into books and writing a biography. Liberal émigrés were what one of his American editors, Günther Roth, describes as its shock troops in the English-speaking world ...”

“... nation to have vindicated the higher principles of humanity.’ The Leader of the Opposition, William Gladstone, seconding Disraeli’s vote of thanks to the troops who had pulled off this masterly campaign, could only acquiesce. Unfortunately, however, Disraeli meant by the purity of his purpose precisely the opposite of the course the Guardian was ...”

“... the late 1860s and his death in 1883, while the other two giants of the sociological canon, Max Weber and Émile Durkheim, wrote their most important works between 1890 and 1920. As Bhambra and Holmwood show, this canon wasn’t established until after 1945, and then only thanks to the American sociologist Talcott Parsons, who led the effort to establish ...”

“... that Mann succeeds in carrying a perceptible way forward the same intellectual enterprise to which Weber’s posthumous treatise is addressed. Although Mann’s treatment suffers from a number of serious and even crippling defects, they are not fatal: 541 pages on, despite some alarming bumps and lurches, the show is still on the road. The first serious defect ...”

“... in social research that governments, and corporations, would be wise to keep track of. Steven Weber’s The Success of Open Source explores the economy that has produced the ‘open source’ and ‘free software’ movements. Eric von Hippel’s Democratising Innovation looks at an economy involving a much wider range of user-supplied innovation. Both ...”

“... It is over seventy years since Max Weber put forward the thesis that the Protestant ethic was closely linked to the ethos of capitalism, a thesis which has inspired a long-standing debate among historians. In the cases held to support the theory, Weber included Scotland. Economic historians have at various times commented on the paradox of the Scottish case, contrasting the backward economy of the country in the 17th century with its monolithic adherence to an extreme form of Calvinism, but nobody has, till now, taken the trouble to make a thorough study of whether the evidence from Scotland confirms or contradicts Weber’s theory ...”

“... It may seem perverse to begin an essay on India by invoking a historian of France: Eugen Weber, who died this year, a colleague of mine and a formidable presence at UCLA. He wrote a book in 1976 on how France became a proper nation by transforming ‘peasants into Frenchmen’. But the Weber I knew, and bantered with during the last years of his life, also had an Indian past of which he felt periodically obliged to speak, though he spoke of it to me with discomfort ...”

“... student to find out what her invitation referred to, and accepted it only when she learned that William James had been there before her, with his Varieties of Religious Experience). The lectures were subsequently put together, after her death in 1975, by Mary McCarthy, as The Life of the Mind. The question that crops up, unstated, throughout Elizabeth Young ...”

“... maturity, as well as to many of the most important works of 20th-century social theory, from Max Weber to Hannah Arendt to Michel Foucault: guilt and innocence are rarely as easily distinguishable as we might like them to be. This is what it means for a problem to be systemic. Bad things don’t happen simply because bad people intend them; and good people ...”

“... Christopher Hill, C.H. Wilson, C.B. Macpherson (and long-dead greats such as Tocqueville, Marx, Weber, Durkheim and Tonnies) is his answer to the question of why fully-fledged industrial capitalism first took off in England. This has usually been thought to be the same question as ‘how did England escape its peasant origins and turn into a ...”

“... with almost every sentence in it. The problem is perhaps epitomised by Watt’s dependence on Max Weber, who, I increasingly think, had quite a genius for getting things wrong. Watt, speaking of Crusoe’s methodical book-keeping, quotes Weber on ‘profit-and-loss book-keeping’ being ‘the distinctive technical feature ...”