Weber and the Environment: Classical Foundations for

In the last two decades classical sociology, notably Marx, has been mined for environmental insights in the attempt to surmount the “human exemptionalism ” of post–Second World War sociology. We-ber, however, has remained an enigma in this respect. This article addresses Weber’s approach to the environment, including its sig-nificance for his interpretive-causal framework and his understand-ing of capitalism. For Weber, sociological meanings were often an-chored in biophysical realities, including climate change, resource consumption, and energy scarcity, while environmental influences were refracted in complex ways within cultural reproduction. His work thus constitutes a crucial key to constructing a meaningful postexemptionalist sociology. ENVIRONMENTAL SOCIOLOGY AND THE ENIGMA OF WEBER Environmental sociologists have long seen ecological issues as consigned to the wilderness within sociological thought. In the first two decades following its organization as a field in the late 1970s, environmental so-ciology was largely defined by a persistent critique of sociology as a whole for its “aversion to the natural environment ” (Buttel et al. 2002, p. 5). In 1 The authors would like to thank Joseph Fracchia for his assistance. We also want to express our appreciation to the AJS reviewers for their extraordinarily helpfu