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Max Weber Biography

Economist, Political
Scientist, Educator, Philosopher, Scholar, Sociologist,Anti-War
Activist, Literary Critic, Journalist (18641920)
QUOTES
The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above
all, by the disenchantment of the world.
Max Weber

Synopsis
Born in Germany in 1864, Max Weber was a precocious child. He went to university and became
a professor, but suffered a mental breakdown in 1897 that left him unable to work for five years.
In 1905 he published his most famous work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.
He returned to teaching in 1918 and died in 1920. He is considered the father of modern
sociology.

Early Life and Education


Max Weber was born on April 21, 1864. His father, Max Weber Sr., was a politically active
lawyer with a penchant for earthly pleasures, while his mother, Helene Fallenstein Weber,
preferred a more ascetic lifestyle. The conflicts this created in their marriage acutely influenced
Max. Still, their house was full of prominent intellectuals and lively discourse, an environment in
which Weber thrived. Growing up, he was bored with school and disdained his teachers, but
devoured classic literature on his own.
After graduating from high school, Weber studied law, history, philosophy and economics for
three semesters at Heidelberg University before spending a year in the military. When he
resumed his studies in 1884, he went to the University of Berlin and spent one semester at
Gttingen. He passed the bar exam in 1886 and earned his Ph.D. in 1889, ultimately completing
his habitation thesis, which allowed him to obtain a position in academia.

Early Career
Weber married a distant cousin, Marianne Schnitger, in 1893. He got a job teaching economics at
Freiburg University the following year, before returning to Heidelberg in 1896 as a professor. In
1897, Max had a falling out with his father, which went unresolved. After his father died in
1897, Weber suffered a mental breakdown. He was plagued by depression, anxiety and
insomnia, which made it impossible for him to teach. He spent the next five years in and out of
sanatoriums.

When Weber was finally able to resume working in 1903, he became an editor at a prominent
social science journal. In 1904, he was invited to deliver a lecture at the Congress of Arts and
Sciences in St. Louis, Missouri and later became widely known for his famed essays, The
Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. These essays, published in 1904 and 1905,
discussed his idea that the rise of modern capitalism was attributable to Protestantism,
particularly Calvinism.

Later Work
After a stint volunteering in the medical service during World War I, Weber published three
more books on religion in a sociological context. These works, The Religion of
China (1916), The Religion of India (1916) and Ancient Judaism (1917-1918), contrasted their
respective religions and cultures with that of the Western world by weighing the importance of
economic and religious factors, among others, on historical outcomes. Weber resumed teaching
in 1918. He intended to publish additional volumes on Christianity and Islam, but he contracted
the Spanish flu and died in Munich on June 14, 1920. His manuscript of Economy and
Society was left unfinished; it was edited by his wife and published in 1922.

Legacy
Weber's writing helped form the basis of modern sociology. His influence runs throughout the
realms of sociology, politics, religion and economics.

Weber, Max
(b. April 21, 1864, Erfurt, Prussia [Germany] d. June 14, 1920, Munich, Ger.),
German sociologist and political economist best known for his thesis of the
"Protestant Ethic," relating Protestantism to capitalism, and for his ideas on
bureaucracy. Through his insistence on the need for objectivity in scholarship and his
analysis of human action in terms of motivation, Weber profoundly influenced
sociological theory.

Early life and family relationships.


Weber was born in Erfurt, the eldest son of an aspiring liberal politician whose family
had become wealthy in the German linen industry. The father soon joined the more
compliant, pro-Bismarckian "National-Liberals" and moved to Berlin, where he
became a member of the Prussian House of Deputies (1868-97) and the Reichstag
(1872-84). As such he became part of the Berlin social milieu and entertained in his
house men prominent in scholarship and politics.

Helene Weber, the sociologist's mother, was raised in Calvinist orthodoxy. Though
she gradually accepted a more tolerant theology, the Puritan morality of her mother
remained intact within her. As a result of the social activities of her husband she came
to feel increasingly estranged from him, and, after the deaths of two of her children
and the serious illness of young Max, she was aghast at his inability to share her
prolonged grief. He, in turn, tended to adopt a traditionally authoritarian manner at
home and to demand absolute obedience from wife and children.
Weber left home to enroll at the University of Heidelberg in 1882, interrupting his
studies after two years to fulfill his year of military service at Strassburg (Strasbourg).
During this time he became very close to the family of his mother's sister, Ida
Baumgarten, and her husband, the historian Hermann Baumgarten, whose influence
on Weber's intellectual development was profound.
After his release from the military, Weber was asked by his father to finish his studies
at the University of Berlin, where he could live at home. This was perhaps because his
father considered the influence of the Baumgartens subversive of his son's character.
From 1884 until his marriage in 1893, Weber left his father's house only for a
semester of study at Gttingen in 1885, and for some brief periods of military
manoeuvres with his reserve unit.

Early career.
During most of his formative years as a scholar in legal and economic history, Weber
was thus continually subject to his parents' conflicting and unanswerable claims on his
loyalty. Since he spent his mid- and late-20s working simultaneously in two totally
unremunerative apprenticeships--as a lawyer's assistant and as a university assistant-he was financially unable to leave home until the autumn of 1893. At that time he
received a temporary position in jurisprudence at the University of Berlin and married
Marianne Schnitger, a second cousin.
After his marriage, Weber paid unwitting homage to his Calvinist forebears by
continuing a compulsive work regimen that he had begun after his return to Berlin in
1884. Only through such bondage to his labour, believed Weber, could he stave off a
natural tendency to self-indulgence and laziness, which, if tolerated, would lead to an
emotional and spiritual crisis.
Weber's great capacity for disciplined intellectual effort, together with his
unquestionable brilliance, brought the reward of meteoric professional advance. Only
a year after his appointment at Berlin, he became a full professor in political economy
at Freiburg, and then, in the following year (1896), at Heidelberg. Following his

doctoral and postdoctoral theses on the agrarian history of ancient Rome and the
evolution of medieval trading societies, Weber wrote a comprehensive analysis of the
agrarian problems of the German east for one of Germany's most important academic
societies, the Union for Social Policy (1890), and important essays on the German
stock exchange and the social basis of the decline of Latin antiquity. He was also
politically active in these years, working with the left-liberal Protestant Social Union
(Evangelisch-Soziale Verein).

The Freiburg address.


The high point of his early scholarly career was his inaugural address at Freiburg in
1895, in which he pulled together some five years of study on the agrarian problems
of Germany east of the Elbe into a devastating indictment of the ruling Junker
aristocracy as historically obsolete. In Weber's view, the existing liberal parties were
in no position to challenge and replace the Junkers. Nor was the working class ready
to accept the responsibilities of power. Only the nation as a whole, educated to
political maturity by a conscious policy of overseas imperial expansion, could bring
Germany to the level of political maturity attained by the French in the revolutionary
and Napoleonic eras and by the English in the course of their imperial expansion in
the 19th century. Weber's Freiburg address thus advanced an ideology of "liberal
imperialism," attracting to its support such important liberal publicists as Friedrich
Naumann and Hans Delbrck.
In the months following his father's death in August 1897, an increasing nervousness
plagued the young scholar. His return to teaching in the autumn brought a brief
respite, which ended in the first months of 1898 with the first signs of the nervous
collapse that was to prostrate him between mid-1898 and 1903. For five years he was
intermittently institutionalized, suffering sudden relapses after slow recoveries and
vain efforts to break such cycles by travelling.

Later works.
In 1903 Weber was able to resume scholarly work, though he did not teach again until
after World War I. Although he had resigned his professorship at Heidelberg at the
height of his illness, he came into an inheritance in 1907 that made him financially
independent. The nature of his most important work after his partial recovery suggests
that his prolonged agony had led him to develop brilliant insights into the relationship
of Calvinist morality and compulsive labour, into the relationship between various
religious ethics and social and economic processes, and into many other questions of

lasting importance. Indeed, all of Weber's most important work appeared in the 17
years between the worst part of his illness and his death.
A brief glance at The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Weber's best
known and most controversial work, illustrates the general trend of his thinking.
Weber noted the statistical correlation in Germany between interest and success in
capitalist ventures on the one hand, and Protestant background on the other. He then
went on to attribute the relationship to certain accidental psychological consequences
of the notions of predestination and the calling in Puritan theology, notions that were
deduced with the greatest logical severity by Calvin and his followers.
In Calvin's formulation, the doctrine of predestination invested God with such
omnipotence and omniscience that sinful humanity could know neither why nor to
whom God had extended the grace of salvation. The psychological insecurity that this
doctrine imposed on Calvin's followers, stern believers in hellfire, was too great, and
they began to look for loopholes that would indicate the direction of divine will. The
consequence was an ethic of unceasing commitment to one's worldly calling (any
lapse would indicate that one's state of grace was in doubt) and ascetic abstinence
from any enjoyment of the profit reaped from such labours. The practical result of
such beliefs and practices was, in Weber's estimation, the most rapid possible
accumulation of capital.
Weber never denied the claim of his critics that highly developed capitalist enterprises
existed centuries before Calvin, and he was well aware that there were other
preconditions, material and psychological, for the development of capitalism. In
response to these criticisms Weber argued that, before Calvinism, capitalist enterprise
was always fettered by the passive or active hostility of the prevalent religious order.
If some capitalists were, by virtue of their skepticism, able to escape the guilt feelings
that conventional morality dictated, it was nevertheless a fact that never before had
religious convictions enabled people to conceive of their success in the accumulation
of capital as a sign of God's everlasting grace. The Puritans, Weber argued, had
accepted the cloak of worldly asceticism voluntarily, as a means of alleviating
otherwise unbearable spiritual burdens. In so doing, however, they helped to create
the enormous structure of modern economic life, which came irresistibly to determine
the life and values of everyone born into it. Thus "fate decreed that the cloak should
become an iron cage."
Weber published Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus (190405; The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 1930) in the journal he had just
begun to edit, Archiv fr Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik. In 1905-10, he
published a number of exchanges in his Archiv between himself and critics of his
thesis. During these years, however, which he spent in Heidelberg when he was not on

one of his numerous journeys through Europe, the middle-class German culture in
which he had been nurtured experienced its first spasms of disintegration. The
Protestant morality that he had come to accept as inescapable destiny came under
attack from the youth movement, from avant-garde literary circles such as the one
centred on the poet Stefan George, from Neoromantics influenced by Nietzsche and
Freud, and from Slavic cultural ideals, exemplified in Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky.
Weber's political sociology is concerned with the distinction between charismatic,
traditional, and legal forms of authority. Charisma refers to the gift of spiritual
inspiration underlying the power of religious prophecy and political leadership. In
many of these later concerns, Weber touched, sometimes explicitly, on themes that
had first been broached by Nietzsche.
His acute interest in social phenomena such as mysticism, which are antithetical to the
modern world and its underlying process of rationalization, paralleled a late
awakening of Weber's aesthetic and erotic faculties. In 1910, amid the crumbling
social order of European middle-class society, Weber began a series of important
discussions with Stefan George and his close disciple, the poet Friedrich Gundolf. At
roughly the same time, he embarked on an extramarital affair, probably his first
experience of sexual intimacy; one of his most brilliant later essays contains a
penetrating analysis of the conflicting relationships between eroticism, ascetic and
mystical modes of religiosity, and the general process of rationalization ("Theorie der
Stufen und Richtungen religioser Weltablehnung," 1916; "Religious Rejections of the
World and Their Directions").
During this same period Weber was engaged in efforts to gain respect for sociology as
a discipline by defining a value-free methodology for it, and in his analysis of the
religious cultures of India and China for purposes of comparison with the Western
religious tradition. Also of critical importance in his last decade was his stoical
examination of the conditions and consequences of the rationalization of political and
economic life in Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (1922; Economy and Society, 1968) and
journal articles.
Indeed, Weber's most powerful impact on his contemporaries came in the last years of
his life, when, from 1916 to 1918, he argued powerfully against Germany's
annexationist war goals and in favour of a strengthened parliament. He stood bravely
for sobriety in politics and scholarship against the apocalyptic mood of right-wing
students in the months following Germany's defeat. After assisting in the drafting of
the new constitution and in the founding of the German Democratic Party, Weber died
of a lung infection in June 1920.

Assessment.
Weber's significance during his lifetime was considerable among German social
scientists, many of whom were his personal friends in Heidelberg or Berlin; but
because of the fact that little of his work was published in book form during his
lifetime and because most of the journals in which he published had restricted
audiences of scholarly specialists, his major impact was felt after his death. The only
exceptions were his formulation of "liberal imperialism" in 1895, his widely discussed
thesis on Protestantism and capitalism, and his extensive attack on German foreign
and domestic policies during World War I in the pages of theFrankfurter
Zeitung, which stimulated liberal sentiment against the government's war aims and led
Gen. Erich Ludendorff to view him as a traitor.
In general, it may be said that Weber's greatest merit as a thinker was that he brought
the social sciences in Germany, hitherto preoccupied largely with national problems,
into direct critical confrontation with the international giants of 19th-century
European thought Marx and Nietzsche and that through this confrontation he
helped create a methodology and a body of literature dealing with the sociology of
religion, the sociology of political parties, small group behaviour, and the philosophy
of history. His work continues to stimulate scholarship.
Adapted from Britannica Online.

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