Kant and Max Weber

Yet another installment in the record of scholarly blindness:

"Weber's place in the German idealist tradition is a neglected area in Weber scholarship. It was not until the past decade that, for example, the all too apparent influence Nietzsche exerted on Weber received systematic attention ... Equally apparent, yet even less investigated, is the Kantian link. Except for the interest in the neo-Kantian epistemology of Weber's time (via such figures as Rickert and Windleband), Kant has been all but completely left out in contextualizing Weber's thought ... For a brief yet strong argument for the Kantian nature of Weber's examination of modernity, see Ernest Gellner, who claims, 'Thus the preoccupations of Kant and of Weber are really the same. One was a philosopher and the other a sociologist, but there, one might say, the difference ends. It is of course a very significant distinction. They saw the same problem, but Kant saw it as a universal one, which concerned man as such; Weber saw it as a differential problem--concerning why some men, but some men only, saw the world in a certain way and acted in a certain manner.' See his Legitimation of Belief (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974) 184-95" Sung Ho Kim, Max Weber's Politics of Civil Society, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2004), fn. 80, p. 53.