SOURCE: "Weber's Moral Vision," in The Limits of Rationality: An Essay on the Social and Moral Thought of Max Weber, George Allen & Unwin, 1984, pp. 91-112.

In the following essay, Brubaker examines the underlying philosophy of ethics in Weber's works.

Weber presents himself as an empirical scientist, not as a moral philosopher. It is true that he has no moral philosophy in the traditional sense. He elaborates no rules of individual conduct, harbors no vision of an ideal society. And the standard terms of moral argument—good, right, ought, should—are conspicuously absent from his vocabulary. Yet the whole of his scientific work is informed by a fundamentally moral impulse—by a passionate concern with the 'fate of man' in contemporary capitalist civilization (Löwith). This concern is embodied in Weber's empirical interpretation of modernity in terms of its 'specific and peculiar rationalism' and in his moral response to...