Guenther Roth was born and brought up in Darmstadt, crossed the Atlantic in 1953 and remained in the United States. He was Professor of Sociology at the University of California at Davis, the State University of New York at Stony Brook, the University of Washington in Seattle and he followed his wife, the renowned medievalist and religious studies scholar Caroline Bynum, to the University of Columbia in New York. In his works on Max Weber and the history of the Weber family and its extensive cosmopolitan network Roth stayed in close touch with the Germanophone world and its culture. He held guest professorships in Mannheim, Berlin and Heidelberg and visited Germany just about every year. He published in German and English and occupied a central place in Weber research on both sides of the Atlantic.

From 1962 to 1968 Roth together with his friend Claus Wittich worked on the first complete edition in English of Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Learning from the German text and considering how best to create the most appropriate translation gave Roth a profound knowledge of the work of Max Weber. He became an acknowledged expert on Max Weber in the United States, and by writing numerous essays and book reviews he supported a systematic and text-related reception of Weber. In the light of the not always reliable translations Roth performed an important role that is insufficiently appreciated in Germany.

Roth was interested in the distinction between Weber's theoretically constructed models (typologies) and the analysis of historical-developmental constellations, and he had a particular interest in applying these models in the complex situations of recent history. His most important book was Politische Herrschaft und persönliche Freiheit where he analysed the conjunction of patrimonialism and charisma in the power structures of the Soviet Union and China, the decay of political parties in the United States, and the charismatic elements of the counter-culture in the 1960s and 70s.

A second stream of research concerned the embeddedness of Weber's thought within the context of academic knowledge and the history of the Weber family. He brought an inexhaustible knowledge to both of these subjects. He investigated the ever-widening circles of the Weber family history, taking Max Weber's father out of the shadows and putting him in his rightful place, depicting the religious and social networks between Max Weber's mother and her sisters, and recovering the history of the businesses of the generation of the grandfathers and great-grandfathers. Using the rich correspondence and business records of the families of Souchay, Schunck, Benecke, Bunge, Lucius and Mylius, he was able to chart in great (personal) detail the formation of a German-English cosmopolitan bourgeoisie for the decades 1800 to 1900. Roth tracked the German-American business and family connections to a romantic episode in a Cuban sugar plantation. Roth's book is a rich fund of socio-historical knowledge that has yet to be utilised.

Max Weber knew this family history and visited many of its protagonists, yet it cosmopolitan character was already in decline during his lifetime. In Roth's view Weber was a 'would-be Englishman'. Certainly he was an anglophile, he understood international politics primarily as a bid for world markets, and he saw in English parliamentarism a basis for the selection of strong statesmen. But England was for him an instructive comparison between societies and not an alternative for his national identification. The 'political' members of the family - the ministers in Prussia and Baden-take a backseat to the businessmen. Roth articulates the balance as 'Max Weber between cosmopolitanism and nationalism'. His researches have uncovered previously unknown Anglo-American family connections and for the first time enlarged and developed Marianne Weber's Lebensbild. He has also written important and critical essays on Marianne Weber herself.

Guenther Roth acquired his intellectual and thematic formation from Reinhard Bendix, who in 1955 hired him as a research assistant at the Institute for Industrial Relations in Berkeley. Bendix was looking for a German speaker to work on his comparative studies on the history of industrialization, which resulted in the publication of Work and Authority in 1956. Roth investigated the labour movement in imperial Germany, resulting in his dissertation, The Social Democrats in Imperial Germany. The book was published in 1963 in America and, regrettably, was not translated into German. It would have enlivened the then very conventional treatment of the subject in Germany. In the book Roth developed his thesis of 'negative integration' of the labour movement in German politics and society. The labour movement was embedded in a dispersed system of labour associations that kept it out of the political decision-making process. His analysis touched upon a central factor in the delayed democratisation of German society. At the same time Reinhard Bendix was working on his influential Max Weber. An Intellectual Portrait, which was published in 1960. This revealed to an American audience just how far-ranging and multi-sided Weber's substantive studies were. Until that point Weber's writings had been restricted to the selection by Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills and the translation of the Protestant Ethic. This led Guenther Roth to seek a wider academic understanding of Weber's work. Roth, in the tradition of Reinhard Bendix, represents an historically oriented macro-sociology that acknowledges the moral postulates of a humanistic self-enlightenment. The title of a book he edited with Reinhard Bendix captures his academic and scientific viewpoint - Scholarship and Partisanship (Berkeley, 1971).

Another German emigrant, like Roth a Darmstädter, Kurt H. Wolf, who was forced to leave Germany in 1933 and from Italy in 1939 found shelter in America, had an impact on Roth at the start of his career. It was from Wolff that Roth learned about the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt. Roth attended his seminars after the war. Wolff offered him joint work at Ohio State University in a study of de-nazification. Roth left Germany in September 1953 on board a converted American troopship which had a touch of the old emigration ships - 'no Italian luxury steamer for Fulbright students' as Roth recalled (see his autobiographical sketch in his Politische Herrschaft und persönliche Freiheit). The experience of emigration distanced him from the post-war reconstructing Germany and its National-Socialist past and distinguished him as a German-American sociologist.

Guenther Roth studied at the New School for Social Research in New York in 1954-55 and it was there he got to know Alfred Schütz, Albert Salomon, Otto Kirchheimer and other German emigrants. He now lives in New York again, on Riverside Drive in the district between Morningside Heights and the Hudson - a district favoured in the 1930s and 40s by German intellectual refugees. A walk through the area with Guenther Roth brings it back to life, and in his person and through his work he stands as their last representative.

* This article was first published in Köelner Zeitschrift für Sociologie und Sozialpsychologie. Max Weber Studies gratefully acknowledges permission to carry the translation.

© Max Weber Studies 2006, Department of Applied Social Sciences, London Metropolitan University, Old Castle Street, London E1 7NT, UK.