The article proposes the survey of the attempts to reconstruct the theoretical core in Weber’s sociological work notorious for its ambiguity in this respect. The work on reconstruction of this core reflects as in the mirror the major shifts in the agenda of contemporary sociology. The confrontation of the system functionalism and conflict sociology during the first post-war decades Jed to “translation wars” in the USA and gave rise to two competing images of Weber – a theorist of social order painted by T. Parsons and as “bourgeois Marx” defended by H. Gerth, C. W. Mills, R. Collins. The renascence of sociological evolutionism in the 1960’s made central the question about the status of Weber’s work on Western rationalism and rationalisation...