Embattled Reason constitutes an intellectual profile of one of America's preeminent sociologists. This collection of essays, published over the course of thirty years, embodies a series of intellectual choices in response to current concerns and to debates of the past, affording a coherent and unified view of Bendix's work as a whole.

Part I: Biographical, Introduction 1. A Memoir of My Father 2. How I Became an American Sociologist 3. Emigration, Generations, and Ideas Part II: Intellectual Dialogues: Past and Present Introduction 4. Encounters with Marx 5. A Reading of Tocqueville’s Letters 6. Values and Concepts in Max Weber’s Comparative Studies 7. Inequality and Social Structure: A Comparison of Marx and Weber 8. Two Sociological Traditions: Durkheim and Weber 9. Max Weber and Jacob Burckhardt Part III: Ideas and Institutions: Ancient and Modern, Introduction 10. Transformations of Personal Charisma in Early Christianity 11. Sociological Reflections on the Early Christian Claim to Absolute Truth 12. The Advocacy of Science: Galileo 13. Advocates of Science and their Perplexities: From Bacon to Turgo 14. Comparative Industrialization: Japan and the Protestant Ethic 15. Comparative Industrialization: Culture and Politics in Western and Eastern Europe 16. The Position of the Social Sciences 17. A Personal Testimony on Twentieth-Century Social Change