Review of Turner, Stephen P. (2022) Mad Hazard: A Life in Social Theory, (Current Perspectives in Social Theory, Vol. 38) Bingley, UK: Emerald Publishing

There is a disparity between how a scholar’s professional life looks from outside and from within. ‘Mad hazard’ is perhaps the last expression coming to mind, when one looks at Max Weber’s riverside house in the south-German university paradise of Heidelberg. Nevertheless, that is how the patriarch of sociology characterized his career and how Stephen Turner entitled his autobiographical book. This seems to be a lucky choice, as the title provides a hermeneutic key to the text: it is hard to resist the temptation to interpret the book as an empirical unpacking of Weber’s canonical 1918 Munich speech ‘Science as a Vocation’. While in the speech Weber lays out the perils, limitations and values of the academic profession, in the book Stephen Turner shows them as a live tissue as he dissects his own vita in front of the reader.