Max Weber and his wife visited the United States in 1904 after sending the first part of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism to press. The trip was a turning point in Weber’s life and it played a pivotal role in shaping his ideas. Max Weber in America by Lawrence Scaff carefully reconstructs this important episode and shows how the subsequent critical reception of his work was as American a story as the trip itself. The book provides details about the visit: what Weber did (for example, he participated in the famous Congress of Arts and Science in St. Louis), what he saw roaming the streets of New York and Chicago, whom he met ( W.E.B. Du Bois and William James) and why, and how these experiences profoundly influenced Weber’s thought on capitalism, immigration, science and culture, Romanticism, race, diversity, Protestantism, and modernity.

Scaff, Lawrence A. 2012.  Max Weber in America. Princeton University Press.

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