Course:SOCI1110/Max Weber

Max Weber

Early Life and Education

Karl Emil Maximilian "Max" Weber was born on April 21, 1864 in Erfurt, Prussia (present day Germany). His father, Max Weber Sr., was greatly involved in public life due to being a politically active lawyer and so his home was constantly immersed in both politics and academics which stimulated the boy’s intellectual interests at an early age. Weber Sr. often enjoyed “earthly pleasures”, unlike his his ascetic wife Helene Fallenstein Weber, their conflicting influences had actually played an important part on the younger Max which he has often cited.

Weber did not begin his life as an economist but instead as a jurist. He first studied jurisprudence at the Universities of Heidelberg, Strassburg, Berlin, and Gottingen, then became Gerichtsreferendar or court clerk, and took his doctor's degree at Berlin in 1888. He didn’t stay too long as he left the Prussian judicial service some time later, with the rank of Assessor, and in 1892 became a lecturer on Roman and commercial law at the University of Berlin, where he was appointed professor of commercial and German law in 1893.

Early Works

Max Weber eventually got a job teaching economics at the Freiburg University in Germany in 1984, before returning to Heidelberg in 1896 as a professor. Unfortunately in 1897 Max had a falling out with his father two months before his death, which was never resolved and after his father’s death in 1897, Weber suffered a mental breakdown. He became plagued by depression, insomnia, and nervousness which made it impossible for him to continue his career as a professor leaving his autumn course in 1899 unfinished and so he spent the next five years in and out of sanatoriums. Weber resumed his scholarly activities in 1903, becoming the co-editor of the “Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft” and in 1904 Weber began to publish his own scholarly work; from this time on he lived as a private scholar, mostly in the city of Heidelberg, returning only briefly to more formal work in Munich and Vienna; while in 1907 an inheritance had finally made him financially independent. He did not teach again until after The First World War.

Weber’s work reveals extraordinary intellectual tensions, as he was a political realist and a nationalist who nevertheless criticized his country with detachment and treated national shibboleths with derision. He was also an analyst of power politics who examined constitutional problems with the spirit of political engineering, and yet he was deeply concerned with the ethical problems and with the cultural significance of the power struggles. There are also further contradictions with his work, he was a monarchist who openly denounced the Kaiser, later, a liberal with a pessimistic view of the masses and awareness of the need for personal leadership and a passionate individualist faced with the rising forces of collectivism. His work bristles with an awareness of the unresolved paradoxes of the human condition which Weber sought to understand on the basis of his extraordinary historical knowledge and to conceptualize at a level between historical description and a theory of sociological universals.

Later Works and Major Contributions

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Historical World Events during His Lifetime

1860-1870:

Second Schleswig War in Germany, The United States was torn by the Civil War, President Lincoln was assassinated, novelist Benjamin Disraeli became Britain's prime minister, and hero of the Civil War Ulysses S. Grant became president of the United States.

1870-1880:

Bismarck provoked the Franco-Prussian War, Yellowstone became the first National Park, Stanley found Livingstone, Custer met his end at the Little Bighorn, and the 1876 presidential election was most likely stolen.

1870-1890:

The Great Game was played out in the Second Anglo-Afghan War, Gladstone became prime minister, The Brooklyn Bridge opened with a huge celebration, Krakatoa erupted, the Statue of Liberty arrived in New York Harbor.

1890-1900:

Lizzie Borden was charged with an axe murder, Yosemite became a National Park, the Panic of 1893 devastated the economy, the first modern Olympics were held in Greece,and Teddy Roosevelt charged up San Juan Hill.

1900-1910:

The first flight by the Wright brothers, Henry Ford's first Model-T, and Einstein's Theory of Relativity, the Boxer Rebellion and the San Francisco Earthquake.

1910-1920:

World War I, huge changes during the Russian Revolution and the beginning of Prohibition, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, the sinking of the Titanic and the Spanish flu killed millions around the world.

Last Years

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References

Dirk Käsler (1988). “Max Weber: an introduction to his life and work.” University of Chicago Press.ISBN 978-0-226-42560-3
Johnson, A. (1995). The Blackwell Dictionary of Sociology. Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers.
Biography.com http://www.biography.com/people/max-weber-9526066
THE LIFE AND WORK OF MAX WEBER. (1923). Quarterly Journal of Economics, 38(1), 87-107.
Ho (24 August 2007). "Max Weber". Encyclopaedia of Philosophy. Stanford. Retrieved 17 February 2010.
Max Weber; Richard Swedberg (1999). Essays in economic sociology. Princeton University Press. p. 7. ISBN 978-0-691-00906-3.
Bendix (1977). Max Weber. p. 2. ISBN 978-0-520-03194-4.
Weber, Max The Protestant Ethic and "The Spirit of Capitalism" (1905). Transl. by Stephen Kalberg (2002), Roxbury Publ. Co