Weber, Max

Max Weber (1864–1920) was born in Prussia in 1864. His father started his career as a journalist, became a local city official in Erfurt, and then moved to Berlin on his election to the parliament as a National Liberal—the political party that supported the chancellorship of Bismarck and hence the unification of Germany under Prussian rule. His mother was descended from a rich family of international merchants based in Frankfurt. She was brought up somewhat severely in a beautiful villa overlooking the River Neckar and the old town of Heidelberg. She was devoutly religious but in an ethical rather than a superstitious way. In Berlin, she supported the social-evangelical movement whose aim was to improve the welfare of the poor through the work of the church and through reform politics. She was not a Calvinist, as is often (mistakenly) stated.

Weber studied history and law at the universities of Heidelberg, Göttingen, and Berlin. His doctoral dissertation investigated how legal forms of partnership were developed to spread the risk on medieval trading ventures. His habilitation thesis, required for teaching in a German university, [Page 878]examined the changing forms of property ownership in ancient Rome. Both studies required an intensive involvementin primary materials (and so foreign languages and handwritten documents). Weber, in this and also his other intellectual interests, was a beneficiary of the research seminar, which had placed the German universities in the forefront of research in the study of cultures, history, theology, languages, and archaeology. One of Weber's greatest achievements was the comparative study of the economic ethics of the world religions, an achievement made possible in large part by German scholarship and the techniques of interpreting documents.

He rose to national academic prominence with the publication in 1892 of an empirical survey of large landowners in the eastern provinces of Germany. The study was started when he was still completing his research on ancient Rome, and he was only 29 when he presented the findings in Berlin in 1893 to Germany's premier social policy association. The survey investigated the reasons behind the crisis in agricultural profits, the move of farm-labourers off the land, and the use of migrant labourers from Poland and the Ukraine. Prussia's rise to hegemony over all other German states had been based for over two centuries on its welldisciplined armies conscripted from peasants in the eastern provinces. During the decade of the 1890s, Weber pursued the controversial political question of how Prussia's ruling class (the Junkers) were using protectionist measures to support their own, uneconomic, farms while at the same time using cheap immigrant wage labourers and so displacingthe settled German farmworkers.

Weber is pivotal to the “conversation” of social theory, and it needs to be made clear how his social theory relates to social science and how social science relates to politics and social policy. The farm study is beyond doubt firmly rooted in empirical social science methods. But what Weber brought to the survey was a demand to include the psychological or subjective factors of why farmworkers were leaving their traditional villages. What part did the desire for freedom and independence (from their Junker landlords) play in their decisions to move to the cities? This was a question additional to and separate from the Marxist thesis of immiserization that regarded the flight from the land solely in material terms. The “psychological magic of freedom” had to be placed alongside “bread and butter questions” as Weber expressed it. In addition, Weber considered what political conclusions should be drawn and debated from the fact that politicians were benefiting directly from state economic policies at the cost of national defence (of the eastern border against Russia).

...