Max Weber: A Man Under Stress.

In his study of history, Weber availed himself naturally of the typological concepts of the social sciences and humanities. Possibly he deferred too much to the nco-Kantian philosophy of Rickert when he described historiography and sociology as disciplines distinguished by their primary intellectual concern, respectively, with the singular and individual and with the regularly recurrent. One need but read Jacob Burckhardt or Arnold Toynbee's Study of History to see that Rickert's dichotomy reflects a limited phase of historiography in Germany. It was the time of Meinecke, the dean of modern German historiography. Like Dilthey, whose life-long concern was Schleiermacher, Meinecke placed the eminent individual into the center of Iris social and intellectual world: out of the rich matrix of a thousand and one influences emerged the central figure. A peculiar congruence between the individual and his world was maintained through the tact with which the writer could keep the proper balance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]