A profile of German sociologist, historian, author and philosopher Max Weber, one of the founders of modern sociology.
German sociologist, historian and philosopher, Max Weber, is one of the greatest sociologists of the twentieth century, a founding "father" of modern sociology. He approached sociology as a scientific, objective study of social action.
Karl Emil Maximilian Weber (Max Weber) was born in Erfurt, Germany on April 21, 1864.
Weber was appointed professor of political economy at Freiburg in 1894 and at Heidelberg in 1897. He suffered a nervous breakdown and did not teach again until after World War I. An inheritance left to him in 1907 enabled him to continue his work as a private scholar.
Max Weber's Sociological Ideology
His political sociology focuses on the persistent role of domination in social life. Three themes run through Webers work:
- The nature of domination (Herrschaft)
- The character of rationality
- The intertwined relation of religious ideas to economic activities.
Weber also distinguished between three types of authority as follows:
- Traditional, which is the way of the past in which the elders hold the rein
- Charismatic, which is the personal voice of the individual
- Legal-rational, where norms and laws are based of rule
In Germany at that time, Weber noticed that there were statistical correlations between the emergence of capitalism and the prevalence of Protestantism, Calvinism in particular. His interest in religion came from two sources: first relates to why capitalism developed in the West, rather than other cultures such as Asia, for example; second, was the question of status in terms of positions of different social classes.
He proposed the 'Protestant ethic' as a relevant answer to both by arguing that, unlike Catholicism, Protestantism regarded all work as a justified 'calling' and, by treating everyone in an individualistic and impersonal way, opens up for rational modes allowing capitalist enterprises to thrive.
Weber's Influence
Weber had wide influence over a selection of German intellectual life at Heidelberg. He warned his students not to confuse science with politics and he stressed this in his lectures and essays. His discussions of the 'ethics of conscience' and 'ethics of responsibility' are most compelling.
Weber insists that social explanation is about ideas and meanings, as well as economics and social structure. That in order to understand a person's actions, it is necessary to understand the ideology that drives him or her.
He died on June 14, 1920, in Munich Bavaria.
Major Works
His major work, unfinished at his death, was Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, edited by J. Winckelmann, 2 volumes in 1956, (Econony and Society, three volumes, in 1968). It contains Weber's major discussions on types of economic activities and his sociology of religion. His most accessible work is Wirtschaftsgeschichte, 1923-24, (General Economic History, 1961), which was reconstructed by students from Weber's set of lecture.
Sources:
Biographical Dictionary, edited by Una Mcgovern, Chambers (2002)
Dictionary of Modern Thinkers, edited by A. Bullock & R.B. Woodings, Fontana (1983)
Max Weber: an Intellectual Portrait by R. Bendix. London (1960)
