Among historians of ideas, any number of "elective affinities' have been sought between Weber and his predecessors or contemporaries. Here I suggest another: between Weber's formulations of the relationships between church, sect and democracy and certain themes in Dostoyevsky's writing. Dostoyevsky was not a central influence on Weber, but we do know that he had read and discussed The Brothers Karamazov, making explicit reference to it on more than one occasion.³ We know from Honigsheim that scarcely a week passed without Dostoyevsky's name being heard at the Webers' Sunday gatherings.⁴ What Weber "took" from Dostoyevsky is perhaps no more than what he tried to take from any great novelist: an awareness of the tragic irreconcilability of opposed value positions and a corresponding ability to do equal justice to rival world-views. As one who was religiously "unmusical", nowhere would his admiration have been greater than in Dostoyevsky's treatment of lives lived according to, or in defiance of, religious precepts.⁵