Weber, Max (1864–1920)

MAX WEBER WAS A German political economist who is considered the founder of modern sociology. His most popular work is the essay “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism” (1904), which found the roots of capitalism in the Protestant work ethic. Weber's interests were not limited to the sphere of the sociology of religion, but encompassed such diverse fields as public administration, political science, and economics. His research on the Protestant work ethic shed light on the way poverty came to be associated with vice and sin.

The son of Max Weber, Sr., a prominent politician, Weber was born in Erfurt, Germany, and grew up in an atmosphere pervaded with politics and leading intellectuals. He was a quick and precocious student and he had acquired a firm cultural background even before starting university. In 1882, he enrolled as a law student at Heidelberg, although he also attended lectures on history, economics, and theology. After two years, he decided to continue his studies at the University of Berlin, where he remained for the following eight years, apart for a brief period spent at Göttingen.

Weber continued to study history even after graduating and passing the examination for the bar. He earned his doctorate in legal history in 1889. Weber was also increasingly active in political economy, advocating economic reforms that could solve the wide social problems of his country at the turn of the 20th century. In the 1890s, Weber became professor of economics first at Freiburg Univeristy (1894) and then at Heidelberg (1897). The same year of his appointment at Heidelberg, however, his father died only two months after Weber had had a serious quarrel with him. The impossibility of resolving the conflict finally provoked a nervous breakdown, which rendered him unable to lecture or to produce any type of research.

In 1903, he resigned his professorship at Heidelberg, but became associate editor of the Archives for Social Science and Social Welfare. He soon started to publish his most important papers in the journal, including “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.” His attempts to bring together social democrats and liberals in a new political entity collapsed because of liberal fears over the possible revolutionary hopes of social democrats.

During World War I, Weber served as director of the army hospitals in Heidelberg and was later a advisor to the German Armistice Commission at the Treaty of Versailles and to the commission responsible for drafting the Weimar Constitution. In 1919, Weber resumed teaching at the University of Munich, just a year before his sudden death of pneumonia. In the midst of right-wing riots of 1919 and 1920, he was challenged by his students for his left-wing opinions. Only “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism” was published in book form during his lifetime; all his other works were collected and published posthumously.

Weber found that the main feature of his society was an increasing rationalization and bureaucratization. This process was brought about by the Protestant work ethic, which Weber faults for depriving people of any sense of spontaneous enjoyment of life and driving them to consider the accumulation of wealth an end in itself. In Economy and Society (1922), Weber details the shift from a value-oriented society, based upon traditional and charismatic authority, to a goal-oriented organization, based on legal authority. This made Weber focus on the concept of domination.

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