The 125 th anniversary celebrations of the Université de Montréal coincide with the hundredth anniversary of the publication of Max Weber’s seminal essay on “The ‘Objectivity’ of Knowledge in Social Science and Policy.”  Embedded in the context of the Methodenstreit that preoccupied German intellectuals at the turn from the 19th to 20th century, Weber’s essay proposed a method for the historical and social sciences—the ideal-typical reconstruction of motives for social action—and defined the role of subjective values in relation to scientific enquiry.  Although this essay and, more broadly, Weber’s elaboration of a new science of verstehende Soziologie responded to intellectual and social challenges of the Wilhelmine Reich, they also helped lay the foundations of modern social science outside of Germany.  Translated—literally and figuratively—to other cultural and social contexts, however, Weber’s thought took on other meanings and engendered diverging scientific practices within different national and disciplinary contexts.  Retracing and understanding this process of cultural and intellectual transfer from Weber’s Germany to today’s international social scientific community has become one of the projects of the Max Weber Research Group working at the Centre canadien d’études allemandes et européennes.

In this international, interdisciplinary conference, eighteen prominent scholars from four continents will reflect not only on how Weber has informed their own work but on how Weber has shaped and been integrated into their scientific disciplines in general.  By exploring and seeking to explain from an explicitly Weberian perspective contemporary understandings of Weber in different cultural and institutional contexts, this conference more broadly seeks to reestablish interdisciplinary dialog, the premise being that although Weber’s methodology and subsequent legacy contributed greatly to the extreme division of scientific labor, the responses that Weber offered to the Methodenstreit of Wilhelmine Germany potentially transcend disciplinary and cultural specificities and re-open the possibility of broad scientific dialog .