Anti-Magician
Geoffrey Hawthorn
- BuyMax Weber: A Biography by Joachim Radkau, translated by Patrick Camiller
Polity, 683 pp, £25.00, January 2009, ISBN 978 0 7456 4147 8
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. Marianne’s biography appeared in German in 1926, in English in 1975, and has been regarded as the most authoritative. Joachim Radkau’s was first published in German in 2005, at much greater length than in the new English edition. ‘There is no longer any reason for silence,’ he writes: all those who knew Weber are dead. ‘The truth . . . has a certain quality of release’; but it does nothing, he believes, to destroy ‘the magic of the great anti-magician.’
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Vol. 31 No. 16 · 27 August 2009 » Geoffrey Hawthorn » Anti-Magician
pages 31-32 | 3175 words