what you say here is a criticism, and no one denied that weber wasn't guilty of a eurocentrism that stems from the occident/orient distinctions he makes. what was challenged was whether it was based on an idealism that could also be found in the rest of his work (no) or that it was even important to worry terribly much about someone who did much the same as marx did in various places. it's really not much of a criticism at all, given the era.
(not to mention that you, yourself, have done much the same since you once advanced the sapir whorf eskimo language hoax on this very list, demonstrating that you, too, are capable of exoticizing the author based on urban legends that prey on such tendencies)
the analogy with socrates being labeled gay today is telling. today, people call socrates gay because the idea you're advancing is not especially widely understood. ditto weber and his use of occident and orient. the quesiton is, does that one lone criticism, the only one that you have some grounds for, demolish all of his work as you and carrol want to suggest? one can hardly dash weber's work off as useless based on this criticism, simply because you've found that the rest of your criticisms have been revealed to be based on poor readings of secondary accounts/interpretations or a focus on TPE, which is like reducing marx to one of his early texts.
silly.
kelley
>I'm afraid that you & Kelley don't know what I'm talking about when I say
>Said commits the same intellectual error as Weber's, much less managing to
>disagree with me.
>
>It's the same type of error as saying that Socrates was "gay."
>Anachronism, in a word.
>
>Yoshie