“... 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 ...”

“... it was looking as if both of these sources would soon be exhausted. In 1898, the English chemist William Crookes sounded a Malthusian alarm: the world’s population, he said, would very soon outstrip its food supply. This was a global crisis in the making, but, Crookes warned, it was especially acute for white people: ‘The fixation of nitrogen,’ he ...”

“... to distance ‘politics’ from ‘economics’, no longer seem to work. The economist Isabella Weber was met with scorn from many in the profession when she argued in the Guardian in December 2021 that strategic price controls would be a better response to the current situation than monetary tightening (‘truly stupid’, Paul Krugman called her position ...”

“... nurtured the same spirit of ressentiment.In his lecture of 1919, ‘Politics as a Vocation’, Max Weber sought to identify the traits that make for a good politician. The trouble, as he perceived it, was that a leader must show emotion and demonstrate purpose to their followers, but without losing sight of objective facts. ‘The problem is simply how can ...”

“... 171-2, 184, 201-2 it is implied that in 1935 Fortune and Bateson were in competition for a ‘William Wyse Studentship, a Cambridge University research grant’, which was awarded to Bateson. Also at page 172 we learn that ‘in 1947 Fortune returned to Cambridge University as a lecturer at Wolfson College.’ Comment. The original of the photograph is in ...”

“... history. Their mordant view of the Old Gang built on the insights of earlier critics like Max Weber, and of historians who had been marginalised in the Twenties and exiled under Hitler. Like many Anglo-Saxon writers of the period – Barrington Moore is a prime example – these scholars concluded that Nazism was the ultimate price paid for a stubborn ...”

“... demystifying the landscape they are usually thought to have taken a decisive step towards what Max Weber called ‘the disenchantment of the world’. Generations of historians have accordingly seen the Reformation as a milestone on the route to the Enlightenment and modern secularism. Protestantism, they claim, was a newly hatched rationalism running around ...”

“... commitment to strictly descriptive neutrality. Shapin authorises this commitment by invoking Max Weber’s counsel to scholars not to moralise. But Weber was addressing scholars principally in their role as teachers talking to captive audiences of students. That is not Shapin’s role here. As an author and cultural ...”

“... as more significant ‘utopians’ than has been recognised. Dr Davis is also interesting on William Sprigge’s A Modest Plea for an Equal Commonwealth of 1659, the anonymous Chaos (1659) and The Free State of Noland (1696), which he classifies as ‘Harringtonian’. He has even found a couple of Royalist utopias, which he discusses in Chapter ...”

“... two incommensurable audiences, the one political, the other financial. Should they employ what Max Weber called ‘charismatic authority’ and cloak monetary policy in the aura of political sovereignty, or speak to the markets in their own technical language? Bernanke opted for the second: he provided information and issued warnings with maximal precision (a ...”

“... combining the vitality of Fuseli’s libidinous acrobats with the pearly translucence and sheen of William Etty’s bottom-heavy models. Mid-19th-century paintings of fairies are also distinguished by a disregard for orthodox spatial organisation and by a compositional intricacy which is often deliberately bewildering. The eye-aching effects of The Fairy ...”

“... BlackRock raining missiles down on Britain.Investment requires an ethos of patient optimism. Max Weber saw the mentality of the investor, who forgoes pleasures now for some predictable benefit tomorrow, as the crucial ingredient of capitalism. Without investment, capitalism ceases to function as capitalism, turning instead into legalised extortion and ...”

“... Early issues of Plebs included a series of articles on Greek and Roman economic development by William Craik, a railway worker from South Wales who had enrolled at Ruskin.Mansbridge, Craik, De Leon, the Plebs League, the WEA and Ruskin College find no place in Stray’s account. Their absence demonstrates the need for Hall and Stead’s book, which takes ...”

“... them is remarkably uniform. It is perhaps best illustrated by the circumstances behind Eugen Weber’s book. Invited by the University of Toronto to deliver a special lecture about fins de siècle, he soon discovered that there was not much to say. Centuries were an early modern invention, and it was only the end of the 19th that had attracted any ...”

“... and every other late-developing nation was forced to confront – the ‘social question’. Max Weber put it bluntly: how to ‘unite socially a nation split apart by modern economic development, for the hard struggles of the future’? Weber was among the conservative German nationalists who saw the social question as a ...”