Book excerpt: In Romance and Reason Andrew Koch notes that in the annals of social research the jury is still out on Max Weber. It is for no other reason than Weber's enormous body of foundational work in sociology that he is continually undergoing several simultaneous versions of integration into contemporary social research. Whether Weber is a central, secondary, or tertiary consideration in social research it behooves any social scientist to take a position on the work of Max Weber. In this erudite new intellectual biography Koch argues that Weber's understanding of the Enlightenment, in all its epistemological and ontological structures, conveys the Enlightenment itself as an alienating worldview. As a result, Koch contends, the full depth of Weber's body of work has yet to be excavated and studied. Romance and Reason is an analysis of the genesis of the concept of alienation and, in an imaginative and necessary turn, Koch works to recreate the context in which Weber understood alienation in both the intellectual and lived sense. This book is a fundamental explication on the contemporary Weber and is a salient addition to sociology, cultural studies, cultural anthropology, and any field that is invested in understanding contemporary culture and society.