Max weber theory
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26 Biography of Weber
Overview
Max, full name Maximilian Karl Emil, Weber was born in Erfurt, a bustling commercial city in what is now central Germany, on April 21, 1864. Weber spent his life in a rapidly industrializing and increasing militaristic Germany, living through the devastations of the first World War, and witnessing the rise of fascism during the early years of the Weimar Republic. Like many writers and thinkers of his day, he was interested in how this new industrial society came to be. His most famous work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, was a partial answer to that question. Weber would also come to create a particular approach to sociological inquiry, more focused on interpretation and less focused on policy proposals than Durkheim’s.
Social Background/Family
Weber was the first of eight children, born to a wealthy statesman (Max Weber, Sr.) and his somewhat devout wife Helene (Fallenstein). The Webers had been a prosperous family for many generations, making their money in the linen trade. Max grew up in bourgeois comfort, in
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Max Weber
1. Life and Career
Maximilian Carl Emil “Max” Weber (1864–1920) was born in the Prussian city of Erfurt to a family of notable heritage. His father, Max Sr., came from a Westphalian family of merchants and industrialists in the textile business and went on to become a lawyer and National Liberal parliamentarian in Wilhelmine politics. His mother, Helene, came from the Fallenstein and Souchay families, both of the long illustrious Huguenot line, which had for generations produced public servants and academicians. His younger brother, Alfred, was an influential political economist and sociologist, too. Evidently, Max Weber was brought up in a prosperous, cosmopolitan, and cultivated family milieu that was well-plugged into the political, social, and cultural establishment of the German Bürgertum [Roth 2000]. Also, his parents represented two, often conflicting, poles of identity between which their eldest son would struggle throughout his life – worldly statesmanship and ascetic scholarship.
Educated mainly at the universities of Heidelb
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Max Weber was one of the founding fathers of sociology. In his most famous book, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, he claimed that the seeds of capitalism were in the Protestant work ethic.
But Weber was also an economist who saw the distinctive feature of advanced capitalism, as in his pre–World War I Germany, in the extensive division of labor and a hierarchical administration that resembled the political bureaucracy. The two features together had created a new middle class whose position depended on neither physical capital nor labor, but on their human capital. Even in advanced capitalism, though, Weber considered the major source of progress to be risk taking by businessmen and entrepreneurs (see entrepreneurship).
Weber accepted Ludwig von Mises’s criticism of socialist economic planning and added his own argument. He believed that under socialism workers would still work in a hierarchy, but that hierarchy would be fused with government. Instead of dictatorship of the worker, he foresaw dictatorship of the official.
Like David Hume before him
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