| Abstract: | Starting from the recently translated biography of Max Weber by Joachim Radkau, this essay re‐evaluates Weber's “science of reality” in relation to his personality, the cultural context of the early twentieth century, and the position of Weber's thought in the sociological canon. The argument progresses through sequentially enlarged analyses, which propose that Weber's general style of thinking is a type of dissonant composition that places emphasis on the many relationships between cultural reality and the concepts derived from it, and not as much on its content. The logic of such a compositional approach to reality is based on similar principles found in sound and music, which Weber in fact uses in a more latent as well as more active form, to pursue his aim of a style of thinking as “aesthetics of dissonance”. The latter is a sort of “methodological wedge” that pries open the many layers of reality. As such, Weber's “science of reality” is an early “classical” example of a recent and much needed call for a social science as the “art of listening”. |
