John Patrick Diggins, a provocative academic who writes primarily on American politics, has the happy faculty of raising your interest without entirely satisfying it. His latest book seems at first glance a departure from his previous work, but it isn’t at all. For in Max Weber: Politics and the Spirit of Tragedy, Diggins offers an intellectual biography of a seminal figure of our century — and tries to make the case that Weber’s ideas offer an alternative to an “American political culture almost innocent of irony and tragedy” that suffuses the country as the century comes to a close. Diggins first raises our interest with the biographical aspects of his book: Its portrait of Weber the man gives dignity and stature to Weber the intellectual. But the case he makes for Weber’s relevance ultimately doesn’t satisfy For while Max Weber was unquestionably a great social scientist, perhaps the greatest we have seen, he had a profoundly flawed understanding of how America came to be, the ills that beset her, and where we can go to find a cure for those ills.

Weber died in Germany in 1920 at the age of 56. His work, translated and championed by the leading American sociologist Talcott Parsons, has had an enormous influence in American universities, an influence that extends beyond the books professors read to the classes they teach As a result, most people know something about his ideas — charisma, the Protestant ethic — even if they do not know his name.