Sunday, December 27, 2015

Weber and the switchmen

The title of this post could be the name of a rock band, but it's not.  Earlier today I was looking briefly at an almost decade-old review (by Peter Thomas in New Left Review, Sept/Oct 2006) of Joachim Radkau's 1000-page biography Max Weber: die Leidenschaft des Denkens [the passion of Thought] (and don't get the idea that I have any German because, regrettably, I really don't).  And just now, in writing a comment at another blog, I was prompted, perhaps (though who knows) because of having looked at the Thomas review this morning, to mention the passage in "The Social Psychology of the World Religions" in which Weber compares ideas to "switchmen."

Since this post doesn't have much of a point, you can file it under 'inconsequential stuff that your blogger thought he might as well throw onto the interwebs before 2015 shudders to a close'.

5 comments:

L.D. Burnett said...

Thanks for your comment, LFC. :)

LFC said...

Most welcome.

L.D. Burnett said...

And I see you have left another dauntingly smart comment on one of my colleague's posts! It is an under-acknowledged privilege to have such readers.

LFC said...

L.D.,
You are too kind. My comments are riffs on the main posts, so the latter should get a lot of the credit. I'm sort of under the weather and not in the best mood at the moment, to be honest, but I guess I do like writing blog comments -- talk about an underwhelming (for lack of a better word) niche/metier/whatever! ;)

LFC said...

p.s. Just left a comment on your blog, which I hadn't visited in a while. I see you've gone to a moderation system, apparently, which is prob. not a bad idea.