Max Weber in America is a masterpiece. Scaff is recognized as a leading Weber scholar and social theorist, and here he demonstrates the intellectual significance of Weber's visit to the United States both for Weber's work and for its subsequent American reception. There is no comparable book. -- Guenther Roth, professor emeritus, Columbia University This is an outstanding and pioneering work. Scaff offers a vivid picture of Weber's American experience as it has never been written before, and his book is full of fresh insights. He possesses a deep and detailed knowledge of both the American scene and of Weber's German contexts and background--few Weberians combine both qualifications as excellently as Scaff does. Reading this book was pure pleasure. -- Joachim Radkau, Bielefeld University, Germany

Max Weber, widely considered a founder of sociology and the modern social sciences, visited the United States in 1904 with his wife Marianne. The trip was a turning point in Weber's life and it played a pivotal role in shaping his ideas, yet until now virtually our only source of information about the trip was Marianne Weber's faithful but not always reliable 1926 biography of her husband.Max Weber in America carefully reconstructs this important episode in Weber's career, and shows how the subsequent critical reception of Weber's work was as American a story as the trip itself. Lawrence Scaff provides new details about Weber's visit to the United States--what he did, what he saw, whom he met and why, and how these experiences profoundly influenced Weber's thought on immigration, capitalism, science and culture, Romanticism, race, diversity, Protestantism, and modernity. Scaff traces Weber's impact on the development of the social sciences in the United States following his death in 1920, examining how Weber's ideas were interpreted, translated, and disseminated by American scholars such as Talcott Parsons and Frank Knight, and how the Weberian canon, codified in America, was reintroduced into Europe after World War II. A landmark work by a leading Weber scholar, Max Weber in America will fundamentally transform our understanding of this influential thinker and his place in the history of sociology and the social sciences.