Max Weber Guide, Meaning , Facts, Information and Description
- ''This article is about the economist and sociologist. For the Swiss Federal Councilor, see Max Weber (politician); for the American cubist painter, see Max Weber (artist).
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2 Achievements 3 Works 4 References 5 See also 6 External links |
Life and career
Weber (pronounced "VAY-bur") was born in Erfurt, Germany, the eldest of seven children of Max Weber Sr., a prominent politician and civil servant, and his wife Helene Fallenstein. His younger brother Alfred Weber was also a sociologist and economist.
Because of his father's engagement with public life, Weber grew up in a household immersed in politics, and his father received a long list of prominent scholars and public figures in his salon. At the same time, Weber proved to be intellectually precocious at a very young age. His Christmas present to his parents in 1876 -- when he was thirteen years old -- took the form of two historical essays entitled "About the Course of German History, with Special Reference to the Positions of the Emperor and the Pope" and "About the Roman Imperial Period from Constantine to the Migration of Nations" It seemed clear, then, that Weber would apply himself to the social sciences.
In 1882 Weber enrolled in the University of Heidelberg as the student of law while serving intermittently with the German army. In 1886 Weber passed the exmination to qualify as a Referendar -- a junior barrister qualified to practice law. Throughout the late 1880s Weber continued his study of history. He earned his doctorate in law in 1889 by writing a doctoral dissertation on legal history entitled The History of Medieval Business Organisations in 1889. Two years later, Weber completed his Habilitation (Habiliatationschrift), Die Römische Agrargeschichte in ihrer Bedeutung für das Staats- und Privatrecht (The Roman Agrarian History and its Significance for Public and Private Law). Having habilitated, Weber was now qualified to hold a full academic appointment.
In the years between the completion of his dissertation and habilitation, however, Weber also began pondering contemporary social policy. In 1888 he had joined the Verein fur Sozialpolitik, a sort of independent think tank of scholars who studied social issues. In 1890 the Verein established a research program to examine 'the Polish question' -- the influx of foreign farm workers into eastern Germany as local laborers migrated to Germany's rapidly industrializing cities. Weber was put in charge of the study and wrote a large part of its results. The final report was widely acclaimed as an excellent piece of empirical research, and cemented Weber's reputation as an expert on agrarian economics.
Weber thus experienced considerable success in the 1890s. In 1893 he married his distant cousin Marianne Schnitger, and intellectual and feminist who was well known in her own right as an author. The next year he briefly took at position as a professor of economics at Freiburg University before moving to a position at the University of Heidelberg in 1896. He was forced to reduce and eventually halt his regular academic work due to an illness in 1897, and did not recover until 1901. The illness was likely a mental breakdown caused by death of his father.
In 1903 he became an associate editor of the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik (Archives for Social Science and Social Welfare). Weber felt however that he was unable to resume regular teaching at that time, and contined on as a private scholar, helped by an inheritance in 1907. In 1904 he visited the United States and participated in the Congress of Arts and Sciences held in connection with the World's Fair at St. Louis.
In 1905 he published his The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism essay. It became one of his most famous works ever, and laid foundations to his later research on impact of cultures and religions on the development of economic systems.
During the First World War he served for a time as a director of the army hospitals in Heidelberg. In 1918 he became a consultant to the German Armistice Commission in Treaty of Versailles and to the commission charged with drafting the Weimar Constitution.
From 1918 he resumed teaching, first at the University of Vienna, then in 1919 at the University of Munich (where he lead the first ever German institute of sociology).
Max Weber died of pneumonia in Munich, Germany on June 14, 1920. It should be noted that many of his today-famous works have been collected, revised and published posthumously.
Max Weber was along with Karl Marx, Vilfredo Pareto and Emile Durkheim one of the founders of modern sociology. Whereas Pareto and Durkheim, following Comte, worked in the positivist tradition, Weber worked - like Werner Sombart, his friend and then the most famous representative of German sociology - in the idealist or hermeneutic tradition.
Weber early work was related to the industrial sociology, but he is most famous for his later work on the sociology of religion and sociology of government.
His sociology of religion started with the essay The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, and followed with the analysis of (), () and (Ancient Judaism). His works on Islam and other religions were interrupted by his sudden death.
His three main themes were to examine the effect of religious ideas on economic activities, to analyze the relation between social stratification and religious ideas, and to ascertain and explain the distinguishable characteristics of Western civilisation.
His goal was to find reasons for the different development paths of the cultures of Occident and Orient. In the analysis of his findings Weber maintained that Puritan (and more widely, Christianity) religious ideas had had a major impact on the development of economic system in Europe and United States, but noted that they were not the only factor responsible for this phenomena. Other notable factors mentioned by Weber included the rationalism in scientific pursuit, merging observation with mathematics, science of scholarship and jurisprudence, rational systematisation of government administration and economic enterprise. In the end, the study of sociology of religion, according to Weber, merely explored one phase of the emancipation from magic, that disenchantment of the world that he regarded as an important distinguishing aspect of Western culture.
The phrase, work ethic used in contemporary commentary is a derivative of the protestant ethic discussed by Weber. It was adopted when the idea was generalised to apply to Japanese, Jews and other non-Christians.
Weber distinguished three pure types of political leadership, domination and authority (tripartite classification of authority): charismatic domination (familial and religious), traditional domination (patriarchs, patrimonalism, feudalism) and legal domination (modern law and state, bureaucracy). In his view every historical relation between rulers and ruled contained elements that can be analyzed on the basis of the above distinction.
Weber is also well-known for his study of bureaucratization of society; many aspects of modern public administration go back to him, and a classic, hierarchically organized civil service of the Continental type is - if basically mistakenly - called "Weberian civil service". In his work, Weber lays out a famous description of bureaucratization as a shift from value-oriented organization and action (traditional authority charismatic authority) to goal-oriented organization and action (legal-rational authority). The result, according to Weber, is a "polar night of icy darkness", in which increasing bureaucratization of human life-activity traps individuals in an "iron cage" of rule-based, rational control. Weber's bureaucracy studies also led him to his analysis - correct, as it would turn out - that socialism in Russia would, due to the abolishing of the free market and its mechanisms, necessarily lead to over-bureaucratization and not the "withering away of the state" (as Karl Marx had predicted would happen in communist sociey).
While Max Weber is best known and recognized today as one of the leading scholars and founders of modern sociology, he also accomplished much in the field of economy. However, during his life no such distinctions really existed and thus he may be seen as an "economist" in that light.
From the point of view of the economists, he is a representative of the "Youngest" German Historical School. His most valued contributions to the field of economy is his famous work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. This is a seminal essay on the differences between religions and the relative wealth of their followers. Weber's work is parallel to Sombart's treatise of the same phenomenon, which however located the rise of Capitalism in Judaism. Weber's other main contributions to economics (as well as to social sciences in general) is his work on methodology: his theory of Verstehen (known as the Interpretative Sociology) and his theory of positivism.
The doctrine of Interpretative Sociology is as well-known as it is controversial and debated. This thesis states that social, economic and historical research can never be fully inductive or descriptive as one must always approach it with a conceptual apparatus. This apparatus Weber identified as the "Ideal Type". The idea can be summarised as follows: an ideal type is formed from characteristics and elements of the given phenomena but it is not meant to correspond to all of the characteristics of any one particular case.
Weber admitted employing "Ideal Types" was an abstraction but claimed it was nonetheless essential if one were to understand any particular social phenomena because, unlike physical phenomena, it involved human behavior which must be interpreted by ideal types. This can be viewed as the methodological justification for the assumption of "rational economic man". (Typologically, see as well Ferdinand Toennies' outspoken different concept of "Normal Type".)
Weber's work on positivism or rather his controversial belief in "value-free" social science, is also still debated. Weber's other contributions to economics were several: these include a (seriously researched) economic history of Roman agrarian society, his work on the dual roles of idealism and materialism in the history of capitalism in his (1914) which present Weber's anti-Marxian views. Finally, his thoroughly researched General Economic History (1923) is perhaps the Historical School at its empirical best
Note: Weber wrote his books in German. Original titles printed after his death (1920) are most likely compilations of his unfinished works (note the 'Collected Essays...' form in titles). Many translations are made of parts or selections of various German originals, and the names of the translations often dont reveal what part of German work they contain.
Below is the chronological list of original titles with dates of publications and title translation given when possible, then a list of works translated into English with the earliest found date of the translated publication. The list of translations is most likely incomplete.
Texts of Weber works:
This is an Article on Max Weber. Page Contains Information, Facts Details or Explanation Guide About Max Weber Achievements
Sociology of religion
Sociology of politics and government
In that field Weber's most significat essay is likely his Politics as a Vocation. Therein, Weber unveils the definition of the state that has become so pivotal to Western social thought: that the state is that entity which possesses a monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force, which it may nonetheless elect to delegate as it sees fit. Politics is to be understood as any activity in which the state might engage itself in order to influence the relative distribution of force. Politics thus comes to obtain to power-based concepts, to be understood as deriving of power. A politician must also not be a man of the "true Christian ethic" (understood by Weber as being the "Ethic of the Sermon of the Mount" - that is to say, the heeding of the injunction to turn the other cheek). An adherent of such an ethic ought be understood to be a saint (for it is only a saint, by Weber, that should find such an ethic a rewarding one). The political realm is no realm for saints. A politician ought marry the ethic of ultimate ends and the ethic of responsibility, and must possess both passion for his avocation and the capacity to distance himself from the subject of his exertions (the governed). Economy
Max Weber formulated a three-component theory of stratification, with social class, status class and party class (or politial class) as conceptually distinct elements.
All three dimensions have consequences for what Weber called "life chances".Works
Originals
Translated
Unknown date of translation:References
See also
External links
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