 Seen this way, we find a remarkable consistency in Weber’s thought. Weber’s main problematic turned on the question of individual autonomy and freedom in an increasingly rationalized society. His dystopian and pessimistic assessment of rationalization drove him to search for solutions through politics and science, which broadly converge on a certain practice of the self. What he called the “person of vocation,” first outlined famously in The Protestant Ethic, provided a bedrock for his various efforts to resuscitate a character who can willfully combine unflinching conviction and methodical rationality even in a society besieged by bureaucratic petrification and value fragmentation. It is also in this entrenched preoccupation with an ethical characterology under modern circumstances that we find the source of his enduring influences on twentieth-century political and social thought.