On Jan Rehmann's Max Weber

This exciting Gramscian reading of Weber has several advantages over the standard accounts (whose positions are here thoroughly summarized). First, it places Weber's America trip dramatically at the center of his understanding of modernization, and thereby at the heart of his accounts of politics, agrarian economics, and religion and culture. Meanwhile, it offers a rich survey of the philosophical and historical context into which his own thought sought to intervene. Finally, its Gramscian perspective allows a far more productive grasp of Weber's project than stereotypical ideology critiques. Indeed, it emphasizes the way in which his extraordinary range of interests and analyses constitute a properly German political project, designed to overcome the dilemmas of a transition from the Junker state to a modern one thereby unifying several classes. The book thus gives a stimulating vision of the unity of this work and its affinities as well as its differences with a Marxism conceived far more broadly than the usual 2nd and 3rd international stereotypes. Fredric Jameson