Weber, Max (1864–1920)

Max Weber was one of the founding fathers of sociology. Educated as a law historian and a political economist, he has been recognized as possibly the major architect of modern social science along with [Page 1523]Karl Marx and Émile Durkheim. Weber's profound influence on the sociological discipline stems from his quest for objectivity, his historical-comparative methodology, and his claim that social science implies an effort in understanding human meanings and motivation for action. Weber is best known for his much debated thesis, “Protestantism and the Spirit of Capitalism”—which claims that the seeds of capitalism as an economic attitude, or ethos, were in the sixteenth century Protestant work ethic—and for his sophisticated conceptual analysis of power legitimation, bureaucratic organization, and status stratification. As a methodological tool for sociology, Weber developed the ideal type—a classificatory device intended to assist the scholar in the historical and comparative analysis that constitutes the bulk of social research. An ideal type—say, of bureaucracy, of capitalism, of class, of economic action, and so on—is a conceptual category that the scholar builds from the radicalization and combination of various aspects of the diversified and complex historical reality: it is ideal in the sense of being an analytic abstraction, not a political or moral aspiration. His elaborated typologies of power, administration, economic system, social structures, and so on, have had a decisive impact on the development of subsequent, more specialized sociological inquiries and are still essential references for current social researchers.

Besides sophisticated conceptual analysis, Weber devoted his creative mind and scholarship to the comparative analysis of the Western world, conceived of as an extraordinarily exceptional, peculiar cultural experience. Capitalism, the modern state, an abstract organization of the arts, and a rational legal system are just a few of the central features that characterize the West as unique according to Weber. To make sense of this historical exception, Weber envisioned rationalism as a central force shaping all Western institutions. Extending from religion to law, economics, politics, music, architecture, and even sexuality, rationalization means a historical drive toward a disenchanted (i.e., secularized) world in which “one can, in principle, master all things by calculation” (Weber 1919/1946, 139). What makes modern capitalism a rational mode of economic life is that it depends on a calculable system of production made possible by such institutional innovations as monetary accounting (including double-entry bookkeeping), centralization of control, separation of workers from the means of production, discipline on the factory floor, and so forth. The calculability of production is enforced also by the spread of rationalism in noneconomic spheres such as law and politics with the development of bureaucratic administration, the introduction of formal equality in citizenship, the birth of an autonomous judiciary, a depoliticized professional bureaucracy, and so on.

Institutional rationalization was, for Weber, predicated on the rise of a peculiarly modern, rational type of personality, identifiable as a “vocational person” (Berufsmensch). This complex interplay of ideas, motives, innovations, and interests produced modern rational Western civilization with its enormous material and cultural capacity for world mastery, encapsulated in a disenchanted, secularized approach to life and nature. Rationalization was indeed for Weber the fate of human history, which he captured with the metaphor of the “iron cage.” However, the bureaucratic “petrifaction” was also just one face of the modern world that rationalization has brought about, the other being a “polytheism” of value fragmentation and values contest: disenchantment was the other side of a new spiritual enchantment.

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