Maximilian Carl Emil Weber, commonly referred to as “Max Weber”, was born in Erfurt, Germany, on April 21, 1864. The eldest son of seven of a wealthy merchant family, Weber’s family life consisted of a dichotomy of politics and religiousness. This dichotomy would significantly influence his personal beliefs, teachings and writings.
Weber’s father, Max Senior, was an aspiring liberal politician who possessed an authoritarian view of the world and his status as patriarch of the family. At home, this viewpoint meant that Max Senior required absolute dedication from his wife and children. In public, Max Senior was involved with German high society, particularly those with significant political influence. Because of this, the Weber household often hosted scholars and political figure. Through his father, Weber was introduced to the world of scholarship.
Weber’s mother, Helene, was a devout Calvinist. She advocated and instilled in her son a strong work ethic that necessitated sacrifice. Helene was descendent from the Huegenot line, best known for producing public servants. From his mother, Weber was introduced to the world of statesmanship.
In 1882, Weber enrolled as a law student at the University of Heidelberg. He briefly left his studies this same year to complete the two-years of military service required of every 18-year old male. He returned to his studies in 1884, and upon completion of his studies he passed the examination that permitted him to practice law, but did not immediately do so. Instead, he continued his study of history, for which he would eventually earn a doctorate. When studying, he lived mainly with his parents.
Weber mainly studied legal and economic history. Weber’s graduate studies focused on ancient Roman agrarian history and the evolution of trade in these societies. In addition to these works he authored a treatise on the problems with German agriculture, particularly in the eastern portion of the country.
In 1893, Weber married his distant cousin, Marianne Schnitger, an author and feminist. Although most of Weber’s political writings have not been translated from their original German, Schnitger was responsible for ensuring that Weber’s works were published after his death. In the same year he married, the University of Berlin employed Weber as a temporary professor. Only one year later, he was promoted to a full professor at Freiburg, teaching political economy.
Max Senior died in 1897, and after that, Weber began to demonstrate a nervous instability. In 1898 he suffered the beginnings of a nervous breakdown, a breakdown which would climax at the end of the year. For five years, until 1903, Weber was periodically institutionalized for his mental disorders. Most scholars identify his mental disorders as providing him with insight into morality and work ethic, the subject of many of this later works.
In 1903, Weber resumed teaching, and in 1907, he inherited funds making him independently wealthy. In World War I, Weber worked as a director of the military hospitals in Heidelberg. Subsequent to the war, he worked to reestablish Germany as a supreme European power, consulting on documents such as the German Armistice Commission and the Treaty of Versailles, at which the Weimer Constitution was drafted. During the Constitution’s drafting, Weber fought for Article 48, the Article that Adolph Hitler would later use to assume absolute power in the country. This fact has made Weber’s political involvement controversial
In 1919, Weber accepted a teaching position at the University of Munich. At the University of Munich, he was the department chair of the first ever department of sociology. His leadership, however, was not easy as he drew much criticism for his leftist political leanings during the German Revolution in 1918 and 1919. In 1920, Weber contracted the Spanish flu and died from complications related to the illness.
However, the seventeen-year span beginning with his resumed teaching and lasting until his death from cancer in 1920 is identified as Weber’s most prolific period. The writings he produced during this time include The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, The Religion of China: Confucianism and Taoism, and an essay titled Politics as a Vocation. The first and last writings are widely identified as one of his most significant scholarly and political contributions.
Throughout his lifetime, Weber was active with the German liberal political groups. Weber supported democracies that protected the guaranteed rights of citizens. This meant that he objected to the current German political structure, an empire governed by Wilhelm II. Weber’s political forthrightness often drew criticism from the students he taught, which were more often than not quite conservative.
Weber’s liberalism, however, is not the same political system as the term denotes today. Rather than viewing the state as beholden to its citizens, Weber viewed the state as supreme. This meant that the security and prominence of a state was more important than individual citizen.
In his works, Weber identified three types of governmental leadership: charismatic, traditional and legal. The first refers to control obtained through familial or religious means, traditional leadership refers to a feudalistic society and legal leadership are those societies that operate according to modern law. His teachings emphasized how one type of leadership developed into another. Because of this, this theory is often considered to be a description of social evolution.
Weber considered himself first and foremost an economist and historian. To Weber, a capitalist society and religious beliefs were intertwined. Motivation, wherever derived from, to work hard is the reason why capitalist societies are successful. In his famous economic treatise The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, published in 1905, Weber discusses how the Protestant work ethic that preached against acquiring possessions and encouraged hard work actually created a free-market society. Hard work, after all, must produce some result, and in modern societies that result was often in the form of physical goods. Weber did not apply this same theory to Catholicism due to its less rigid stance on acquiring possessions. For this view, Weber was criticized as having established a system for valuing labor.
Weber’s economic views connected the strong work ethic instilled by his Calvinist mother and capitalist society. Unfortunately, it often led him to devote himself almost entirely to his work. Many scholars believe that this work ethic may have been a factor in his nervous breakdowns. As this work ethic was the central aspect of his treatise, however, his beliefs are often interpreted as having influenced his work.
Weber strongly criticized socialism. In his view, socialism will inevitably fail because it overlooks the bureaucracy inherent in government functioning. Without motivation, Weber argued, a socialist society could never produce enough to survive. This inefficiency, he stated, would result in socialist political structures eventually collapsing. Due to its relationship with socialism, Weber was also an opponent to Marxism, holding that government management of the economy would not produce more goods or provide motivation to citizens.
Weber’s writings focused on religion, sociology and politics. Weber’s religious works analyzed Confucianism, Taoism, Judiasm, Buddhism and Catholicism. In addition to The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Weber’s political covered topics covered the three types of political rule, discussed previously, as well as the Russian Revolution and the Sociology of Rulership and Religion. Weber also authored a work titled Basic Concepts in Sociology, which discussed the main methods for the scientific field, including his stance on assuming a neutral view when analyzing subjects. This work was accompanied by the Definitions of Sociology, a dictionary of sorts of common sociological terms. Weber’s political books, such as The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, tended to focus on the reasons society’s developed as they had. For example, in The Protestant Sects and the Spirit of Capitalism Weber discussed his views on capitalism in the United States.
Although he viewed himself as a historian and economist, today Weber is viewed as a sociologist. His study of the human motivations behind production and modern politics represent some of the first sociological works. Of course, there is also the fact of his managing the first school of sociology.
Weber is often associated with Karl Marx and Emilie Durkheim. The main credit to his research, however, is his encouragement to scientists to take a subjective view of social action, particularly as it related to motivation. Weber used this method when analyzing political systems and religions. To Weber, it was the motivation that was more important than the end result because it revealed the sustainability of a social structure. To Weber, the less variable a source of motivation was, the more likely the social structure had of surviving social evolution.
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