Max Weber 1864 – 1920

Max Weber was a German sociologist, jurist, and political economist, one of the founders of modern social science. His Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism argued for an elective affinity between Calvinist asceticism and the rationalizing logic of modern capitalism, while Economy and Society laid out a vast comparative analysis of forms of authority, rationality, and law. He developed the methodology of ideal types and the sociology of domination, and his late lectures Politics as a Vocation and Science as a Vocation remain touchstones of reflection on the modern condition.

Max Weber was born in 1864 in Erfurt into a wealthy and politically active bourgeois family; his father was a National Liberal deputy, his mother a serious Calvinist. He studied law, history, and economics at Heidelberg, Berlin, and Gottingen, took his doctorate and habilitation in commercial law in the early 1890s, and was appointed to chairs in political economy at Freiburg in 1894 and Heidelberg in 1896.

A severe nervous breakdown in 1897-1903 forced him to give up lecturing for years, but the period launched the great essays of his middle career: The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904-1905), the methodological essays of 1903-1917 collected as the Logos volume, the comparative studies of the religions of China, India, and ancient Judaism, and the two great lectures 'Science as a Vocation' (1917) and 'Politics as a Vocation' (1919). The unfinished Economy and Society was published posthumously by his widow Marianne Weber in 1922.

Weber's analyses — of the disenchantment of the world, the iron cage of modern rationalization, the three pure types of legitimate authority (charismatic, traditional, legal-rational), and the methodology of ideal types and verstehen — laid the foundations of comparative-historical sociology and shaped twentieth-century social theory across political colors. He died of pneumonia at Munich in June 1920.