It’s worth remembering, though, that his own career included both scholarship and political work. He just didn’t think you could do both at once, because politics skew scholarship. Nowadays a lot of people would agree on the grounds that there are always politics, so scholarship is always skewed. Philosophically this is a more wittgensteiny position. I think Weber’s response would be something like, of course that’s the case, which is why scholars need a rigorous ethic and robust peer networks. There are no guarantees, but there’s also in principle no reason we can’t do ‘better’ with that rather than ‘worse’.

Dave, I read Weber as the kind of modern who fed directly into the postmodern. For him the failure of coherence was something of an existential crisis rather than the occasion for irony and play it later became. On the one hand he was deeply steeped and emotionally invested in the old metanarratives of reason, virtue and nation; on the other hand he saw clearly how local, contingent and arbitrary those constructs are. What I like about Weber and his generation is that they stare full into that abyss and still think it’s worth trying to pull some stuff together, trying to reconstruct a sense of the good from scratch. That’s where the communication comes back in, as we pragmatically negotiate our categories and boundaries to find ways of living together that we can value. In fact, as it turns out this is what we’ve been doing all along, as John’s references show.

without background categories it seems hard to identify particulars in the foreground

That said, isn’t the thrust of, for example, Charles Taylor’s Sources of the Self or Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things a warning that those background categories are subject to change?

What “we” need to do, perhaps, is acknowledge that we must use boundaries/categories/words to communicate at all, while at least occasionally questioning the categories and what we (think we) know about them.