Why another book about Max Weber? He is recognizably among the most important sociologists of all time and, except for Karl Marx, probably the most commented upon as well. Yet Weber's sociology is one of the least well understood. I say this even though everyone has heard of the Protestant ethic, charisma, and the iron cage of bureaucratization, and current Marxists write of legitimation crisis and make most of their revisions in a Weberian direction.

Very simply: because some of the most important parts of Weber's advanced work have been overlooked, underused, or drastically misunderstood. An instance is Weber's theory of capitalism. His early paper “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism” (1904) has been the subject of an enormous literature. For many, it remains the “Weber thesis,” despite the fact that others have pointed to his mid-period series on comparative world religions, which moves considerably beyond his early position (1916/1951, 1916–17/1958, 1917–19/1952; see Parsons, 1967). And, indeed, Weber's comparative analyses remained half finished, with pictures still to be drawn of ancient Mediterranean societies, Islam, and medieval Christendom; and Weber's last treatment of the subject, just after the end of World War I and in the aftermath of the German revolution, deals with Marxism much more extensively and moves his sociology of economics much farther from his early idealist interests.