I started out asking philosophical and methodological questions about social science and social and political theory. Now I mostly ask social theory questions about philosophy. Much of my writing is concerned with the vestiges of neo-Kantianism that haunt and distort present day philosophy and the "human sciences." Most of this writing is informed by the history of these subjects. Knowing something about the history of these questions is a good thing, but it is also a curse. It is difficult to read the latest word on, for example, philosophical problems with causal modeling, without the grim recognition that the author has unknowingly recycled solutions that were available a century ago. Max Weber, on whom I have spent much of my ink, may seem like a distant and dusty figure. But the topics, and Weber's writing in particular, open onto a vast variety of subjects and literatures, and provide a special, privileged access to them. And despite the forbidding titles, the books (and my other writings) are full of the human presence of great and not so great thinkers. I dislike and avoid philosophical jargon, so even the most dense of these texts is accessible to non-specialists.