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“... sophisticated work it is. Watt cites Lukács in German and Durkheim in French, alongside works by Weber, Troeltsch, Mannheim, Merton, Parsons, Radcliffe-Brown and more. In his preface he thanks Adorno, Henry Nash Smith, I.A. Richards, Talcott Parsons and Peter Laslett, among others. The standard caricature of the Cambridge-influenced criticism of the postwar ...”

“... Here are the earthbound details that illuminate one aspect of the life of a soaring spirit. William Schaberg is a bibliophile who in 1984 was able to buy an 1889 copy of Götzendämmerung (Twilight of the Idols), the purchase of which set him on a collector’s hunt for other early copies of Nietzsche’s works and on a study of their history. There was ...”

“... or dialects in preference to standard French) into a nation. In the famous phrase of Eugen Weber, only after 1871 did the Third Republic, and economic modernisation, turn ‘peasants into Frenchmen’. From this point of view, one would expect the Second Empire’s celebrations of the Saint-Napoléon holiday to have been sad affairs: dreary propaganda ...”

“... tirade. With Revolutionary Road, many of his contemporaries – including Kurt Vonnegut and William Styron – felt that he did something comparable for an entire generation; that he saw the cracks in the 1950s. In 1956, William H. Whyte Jr, a Fortune magazine journalist and Max ...”

“... but their successors went a lot further. In a famous essay published nearly ninety years ago, Max Weber suggested that politics was becoming the territory of the professional: politics was the politician’s whole life, his ‘vocation’, and the modern political party was his home. Others, like the Italian sociologist Robert Michels, argued further that for ...”

“... to hear. For example, although most of the evidence suggests that Mozart’s marriage to Constanze Weber was ‘modern’ in its level of what we might anachronistically call emotional equality, Mozart, when describing his future bride to Leopold, painted a distinctly old-fashioned picture, quite possibly intended as a soothing re-creation of his mother’s ...”

“... as Mariani shows, he could inspire extreme affection in people. But too soon they would feel, as William Carlos Williams wrote, ‘uncomfortable’ with his ‘roaring boy, predatory reputation’. It seemed that nothing could contain him, except his poetry. So when the poetry stopped, in a very real sense he had nowhere to go. Like the visionary company ...”

“... threats to human autonomy in capitalist rationalisation and bureaucratisation. ‘Each man,’ Weber warned, ‘becomes a little cog in the machine,’ pathetically obsessed with becoming ‘a bigger cog’. Karel Čapek invented the word ‘robot’, deriving it from the Czech word for forced labour, to evoke the growing superfluity of man in the regime ...”

“... A.J.P. Taylor, Maurice Cowling, Lawrence Stone and the Cerberus of Scottish historiography, William Ferguson. But if the softer, gentler Trevor-Roper outlived many – though by no means all – of his foremost adversaries, their pupils and heirs had not forgotten the scars borne by the previous generation. In his battle with Trevor-Roper over matters ...”

“... that all others are aberrations. It also stems directly or indirectly from our commitment to Max Weber and his belief in the inevitable disenchantment of the world as a result of capitalist modernisation. Over the past generation, formerly conservative countries such as Ireland, Spain, Portugal and Greece have all been profoundly transformed, and in all of ...”

“... of the human herd.’ If you cite this sort of passage from Nietzsche (or similar ones in William James or John Dewey) in order to argue that what we call ‘the search for objective truth’ is not a matter of getting your beliefs to correspond better and better to the way things really are, but of attaining intersubjective agreement, or of ...”

“... a pre-modern, pre-capitalistic, magical cosmology, into a modern, capitalistic, scientific one. Weber’s ‘Disenchantment of the World’ had occurred. We are seeing in attitudes to nature an extension of the themes so brilliantly worked out in Thomas’s earlier work on Religion and the Decline of Magic. In 1500 we are in the anthropocentric world of the ...”

“... the missionary Journeys; the Miracles; the Revelations; the Agony’. Reviewing a biography of Sir William Stephenson, a figure in British wartime intelligence, he declined even to list its inaccuracies: ‘To make such a charge against this biographer would be unfair. It would be like urging a jellyfish to grit its teeth and dig in its heels.’ In his 1951 ...”

“... a distinction between the ‘mythic and moral symbolism’ of blood, on the one hand, and what Max Weber might have called ‘disenchanted blood’, on the other. Some of the time Starr seems to think that the more disenchanted blood is, the more it is purged of its cultural baggage, the better. To take one example, ‘mythic and moral symbolism’ clouded ...”

“... tactile authority, few rivals outside the work of DeLillo, Pynchon and (more to his own taste) William Gibson. And, as in their novels, local observation in Jameson was complemented by an implacable awareness of what he called the ‘unrepresentable exterior’ enclosing all the slick and streaming phenomena in view. In the novelists, however, allusion to ...”