Wilhelm Hennis has written a book that is first and foremost a caveat as impassioned as it is well-documented and logical. The former characteristic may seem to contradict the latter. However, it is one of the author's considerable merits that he contrives to make them co-exist. From his foreword on, Hennis warns the reader against an intellectually improper strategy which he argues is being mounted quite openly the massive takeover of Max Weber, which is as swift and greedy as it is irresponsibly careless of the author's deepest original intention. It should not thus surprise us that the book brings to mind the warning call of a conscientious inspector of the ministry of Fine Arts, roused by the unscrupulous tomb-robbers smashing and looting Etruscan necropolises by night. The comparison is not too far-fetched. Anyone with even the slightest familiarity with current sociological 'production' will quickly see that the immense and apparently unsystematic output of Max Weber is cheerfully appropriated and decanted, as it were, by means of lifting it out of context. Whole propositions, concepts and standpoints are purloined for current studies in sociology, not unlike the way the first Christians behaved in constructing their basilicas with the aid of the pagan temples of classical antiquity. Hennis especially deplored the fact that this use of Weber is at once now universally practised and wholly unmindful, indeed, alien, to the author's basic intention. In the early 1960's, when I was writing Max Weber e il destino della ragione (Laterza, Bari 1964 English ed., Sharpe, N.Y. 1980), I discovered the Erfurt sociologist had been more or less crudely 'embalmed'. Wilhelm Hennis fiercely supports this same point of view in the present work. However, whereas I confined myself to attributing this sterilizing and embalming to a more or less conscious plan, under the 'systematic' attentions of Talcott Parsons and other North American sociologists