page 9 (without footnotes)

Religious ‘virtuosity’ is ‘for the unresponsive’ just as hard to understand as the fanatical advocacy of causes (human rights) for those who radically reject them.17

The more we are prey to emotional reactions such as anxiety, anger, ambition, envy, jealousy, love, enthusiasm, pride, vengefulness, piety, dedication, desires of every sort, and their (from the standpoint of purposively rational action) irrational consequences, the greater the degree to which we emotionally understand them; and even when they far exceed our own capacities in intensity we are nonetheless able to empathise with them, and take account intellectually of the orientation and chosen means of action motivated by them.18

We are confronted here in the very first pages of Economy and Society with the oldest questions in the interpretation of human action: the person quite obviously has a ‘dual being’ – spirit, soul, material. Might it not be that Weber’s ‘basic concepts’ lead us not into his sociology, but rather into his anthropology?