The young Max Weber and German social democracy : the "labour question" and the genesis of social theory in imperial Germany (1884-1899)

"The Young Max Weber and German Social Democracy examines the formative years of a classic social thinker once called the 'bourgeois Marx' from the standpoint of his relationship to the foremost working-class organization of his time. It argues that Weber's early engagement with the standpoint of the rural worker - not his later study of the ethics of ascetic Protestant entrepreneurs - first convinced him of the central role of culture in human agency. The crisis of liberalism in a rapidly modernising, conflict-ridden Imperial Germany embarking on colonial expansion emerges in the work as the decisive setting for the genesis of Weberian social thought"--