Sam Whimster on Max Weber and the Culture of Anarchy, 25 years later
Max Weber and the Culture of Anarchy is a book that came out of the circumstances of the 1990s. Under Gorbachev, Russia pursued glasnost and released Eastern bloc countries from Soviet hegemony. In 1990 the German Democratic Republic and the Federal German Republic were re-united (Wiedervereinigung). A call went out to academics internationally to come and teach in the universities, East of the Elbe. Over the summer of 1992, I gave a course on modern and postmodern social theory in the Institute of Marxism-Leninism at Leipzig University, my underlying idea being to convey to students the weirdness of the culture of western capitalism.