Abstract: Professor Su Guoxun has studied Max Weber for nearly forty years. He payed special attention to Weber's category of formal rationality and substantive rationality, and his understanding of it has gone through three stages: the first stage is to reconstruct the category, and analyze how Weber compared civilizations and shaped his judgments about different civilizations based on it. The second stage is the reflexive stage, which is to reflect on the process of Weber's use of the category and the conclusions drawn, and to expose Weber's dilemma; the third stage is the transcendental stage, which is to create the concept of "Moderate rationality" according to the spirits of Primitive Confucianism and Neo-Confucianism, and reshape the relationships between formal rationality and substantive rationality, then gain insight into the trends of human civilization and the transformation of Chinese society in the context of globalization according to "Moderate Rationality". Professor Su Guoxun's substantive interpretation of the formal category of formal rationality and substantive rationality, as well as the practice of drawing resources from Chinese civilization to change Weber's dualism, give us some inspiration in reversing the formalization trend of Chinese sociology.