WEBER MAX 1864 - 1920 SOCIAL SCIENTIST

Lecture notes taken on Ernst Immanuel Becker's lecture on the history of Roman Law at Heidelberg University. Also a printed syllabus.

Max Weber 1864 - 1920

Max Weber was the son of a wealthy liberal politician and a Calvinist mother. He was educated at Heidelburg, Berlin and Gottingen universities. In 1893 he became a jurist in Berlin. In 1895, 1897 and 1919 he was appointed professor of economics at Freiburg, Heidelburg and Munich universities. After his father's death in 1897, Weber suffered a nervous collapse. He eventually recovered and his most famous work The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism was published in 1904. This work examined the relationship between Calvinist morality, compulsive labour, bureaucracy and economic success under capitalism. Weber also wrote about social phenomena such as charisma and mysticism, which he saw as antithetical to the modern world and its underlying process of rationalisation. His efforts helped establish sociology as an academic discipline in Germany. Through his insistence on the need for objectivity and his analysis of human action in terms of motivation, he profoundly influenced sociological theory.

His publications include:

• Roman Agrarian History (1891)
• The Objectivity of the Sociological and Social-Political Knowledge" (1904)
• The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904)
• Economy and Society (1914)
• Politics as a Vocation (1918)
• General Economic History (1923)
• The Methodology of the Social Sciences (1949)

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