The editor, John Dreijmanis, is a political scientist with extensive teaching, research and administrative experience at a number of Canadian, American, British, South African, Polish, German and Chinese universities. He currently teaches political science at Universität Bremen.

Dreijmanis has many publications on the socio-economic and political transformations in Central and Eastern Europe and South Africa and on higher education policy and the labor market for educated people, including academics. His books include The Role of the South African Government in Tertiary Education (Johannesburg: South African Institute of Race Relations, 1988) and Government Coalitions in Western Democracies (co-ed. and co-author) (New York and London: Longman, 1982). He has also published in Parliamentary Affairs, Government and Opposition, Il Politico, Higher Education Review and in other journals.

Max Weber made many significant interpretations of both academic and political vocations in his two lectures on “Science as a Vocation” (Wissenschaft als Beruf, 1917) and “Politics as a Vocation”...

Max Weber made many significant interpretations of both academic and political vocations in his two lectures on “Science as a Vocation” (Wissenschaft als Beruf, 1917) and “Politics as a Vocation” (Politik als Beruf, 1919), as well as in a series of newspaper articles written between 1908 and 1920. Since these writings are of more than historical interest, there was a need to bring them all together in a single volume. Newly translated and annotated, this collection comprises both lectures plus 32 articles which Weber wrote on academia. Most of these have not been translated before.

In the introduction, Prof. Dreijmanis relates the academic and political vocations to each other conceptually, showing that there is considerable overlap and some convergence: the need for passion, an “inward calling,” as well as career insecurity in both vocations.

Dreijmanis then examines the person of Weber and provides a new view of him, in part through the lens of Carl C. Jung’s theory of psychological types as further developed by the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). As an extravert with a powerful thinking function and intellect, he was driven to take an interest in events outside himself and to speak his mind. The introduction does not retrace Weber’s intellectual development but addresses a psychological factor which has remained unmentioned and which provides an explanation for why Weber reacted quickly to significant academic and political developments and became involved in some of them.

The new translations, by Gordon C. Wells, are faithful to Weber’s style of expression, and correct an accumulation of errors in the oft-translated essays on “Politics” and “Science.”

The book includes a Glossary, Bibliography, Names Index and Subject Index.

This new translation will be a boon to scholars, given the "importance now given to translation and exegesis in Weber studies...." noted by David Chalcraft in his preface to Hans H. Bruun's Science, Values and Politics in Max Weber's Methodology, new expanded edition (Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2007), p. xiv.