During 1909 and 1910, Max Weber planned a major study of the con temporary newspaper business. Although the project eventually col lapsed, he did draft an outline proposal which is here translated into English for the first time.

Weber’s improvised reply to Werner Sombart’s lecture on ‘Technology and Culture’, presented at the first meeting of the German Sociological Society in 1910, opens and closes with an appeal to uphold the principle of ‘value-freedom’ in academic discussions. Referring to the capitalist development of antiquity as an illustration, Weber argues for a factually precise conception of technology and against a Marxist definition in terms of economic causality or property relations. Turning to the influence of technology in the development of formal (...) aesthetic values, his primary emphasis is on how the modern metropolis gives rise to new forms of literature, painting, architecture and especially orchestral music. The editorial notes to this translation place Weber’s remarks in the context of his critical relationship to predecessors and contemporaries (including many of those present at the conference) and within the thematic development of his career-long studies on the rise of occidental rationalism. (shrink)

Sociology, like poetry, explores/discovers/creates hidden or heretofore non-existing human potentialities; both rebel against closing, identifying the-already-achieved reality with the limit of that potential. Sociology is destined to sustain the autonomy of, simultaneously, human society and human individuals, and autonomy means the awareness of the human origins of social reality and of the possibility of making it different from what it is. In the age of rapid and radical individualization, the task of sociology is to service self-interpretation with the view of (...) widening the sphere of human autonomy through disclosure of multiple social connection which contribute to its present form and future changes. (shrink)