Maximilian Carl Emil Weber is a German sociologist and political economist. He is best known for his thesis on "Protestant ethics", the connection of Protestantism with capitalism and reflections on the bureaucracy. His deep influence on sociological theory is due to his exactingness on scientific objectivity and analysis of the motives of human actions.
Early biography
Max Weber was born 04/21/1864 in Erfurt (Prussia). He was the eldest of 7 children of Helen and Max Weber. Father was a wealthy liberal politician who soon joined the more loyal pro-Bismarck "national liberals." The family moved from Erfurt to Berlin, where Weber Sr. became a member of the Prussian Chamber of Deputies (1868-97) and the Reichstag (1872-84). He entered the Berlin high society and hosted prominent politicians and scientists.
The sociologist's mother was brought up in strict Calvinist traditions. Although her attitude towards religion gradually became more tolerant, Puritan morality remained with her forever. Her husband's social activity alienated her from him, especially when he did not support her long mourning after the death of two of their children. In turn, the father traditionally authoritarianly treated his family and demanded absolute submission. Apparently, the grim situation in the family of Max Weber and the conflict of his parents became the causes of mental suffering that haunted him in adulthood.
Years of study
Weber left the house to enter the University of Heidelberg in 1882. After 2 years, he interrupted his studies in order to spend a year on military service in Strasbourg. During this time, he became close to the family of his aunt Ida Baumgarten and her husband, a historian who had a profound influence on the intellectual development of Weber.
However, at the end of his military service, his father asked him to continue his studies at the University of Berlin so that he could study law and economic history while living at home. Perhaps because he considered the influence of the Baumgarten subversive. From 1884 until marriage in 1893, Weber left the house only for a semester of study in Göttingen in 1885 and several times for military service.
Carier start
Thus, most of his early biography Max Weber lived in his parents' house, where he was constantly in the center of family conflict. Since he also trained as an assistant lawyer at the university, he could not afford to live separately until the autumn of 1893. At that time, he received a temporary position as a professor of law at the University of Berlin and married a second cousin Marianne Schnitger.
After his wedding and his return to Berlin in 1894, Weber worked hard and hard. Only such a disciplined work, in his opinion, could overcome his laziness and prevent an emotional and spiritual crisis.
Weber's ability for intense intellectual work and his undeniable talent became the reasons for the rapid growth of his professional career. A year later, after his appointment in Berlin, he became a professor of political economy in Freiburg, and in 1896 received a similar place in Heidelberg.
His scientific work was devoted to the agrarian history of Ancient Rome and the evolution of medieval trading societies. Weber then made a comprehensive analysis of the agrarian problems of East Germany for one of the country's most important academic societies - the Union for Social Policy. He also wrote an essay on the German stock exchange and the social decline of ancient civilization.
The early biography of Max Weber is marked by political activity - he collaborated with the left-liberal Protestant social union.
Speech in Freiburg
The culmination of Weber's early scientific career was his inaugural address in Freiburg in 1895, in which the results of his 5 years of research on the agrarian problems of Germany east of the Elbe became an indictment of the historically obsolete cadet aristocracy. However, in his opinion, the existing liberal parties could not challenge them. The working class was also not ready to accept responsibility. Only the nation as a whole, politically matured due to the conscious policy of overseas imperial expansion, could lead Germany to the level of political maturity achieved by the French in the revolutionary and Napoleonic era and the British during their imperial expansion in the 19th century. In this regard, the Freiburg speech promoted the ideology of “liberal imperialism”, attracting the support of such important liberal publicists as Friedrich Nauman and Hans Delbrück.
After the death of his father in August 1897, the biography of Max Weber marked the beginning of problems with the nervous system. His return to teaching in the fall led to a short respite, which ended in early 1898 with the first signs of a nervous breakdown that made him inoperative between 1898 and 1903. For 5 years, he periodically fell into medical institutions, suffering from sudden relapses after a slow recovery and futile efforts to break these cycles with travel. At the height of his illness, he left teaching at Heidelberg.
Late work
In 1903, Weber was able to resume scientific activity, and the inheritance received in 1907 made him financially independent. He did not teach until the end of World War I. The nature of his most important work after a partial recovery suggests that his prolonged illness led him to a brilliant understanding of the relationship between Calvinist morality and compulsive labor, the relationship between various religious ethics and socio-economic processes, and many other important issues. He wrote his most significant work for 17 years between the peak of illness and death.
It’s hard to overestimate the intellectual breadth of Weber’s sociology. He surpassed the achievements of such predecessors as Karl Marx and Emil Durkheim. Unsatisfied with the intellectual traditions of social sciences and law at German and Western universities, Weber sought to develop a scientific approach that would overcome their shortcomings. Although he never completely defined a systematic research program explaining his comparative methodology, his essays on the historical development of eastern and western societies make it possible to get a general idea of it. Weber has demonstrated that the comparative method is important because the behavior of institutions in societies cannot be understood in isolation. Even his popular work on the connection between Puritanism and the development of capitalism in the West cannot be fully understood without reference to his writings on such institutions - for example, the study of Asian religions and ancient Judaism.
In preparation for writing his main work, which he never completed, the German philosopher created the ideal type - a methodological tool for comparative sociology. Weber, analyzing the history of Western societies, focused on rationalism as a unique and central force that forms all Western institutions, including economics, politics, religion, family, sections of society and music. These typologies had a decisive influence on the development of subsequent, more specialized sociological queries.
Sociology of religion
“Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Capitalism” (1904-05) is Weber's most famous and most controversial work, which illustrates the general tendency of his thinking. Initially, the author notes the statistical correlation in Germany of the success of capitalist enterprises with a Protestant background. He then relates this connection to the random psychological consequences of the notions of predestination and the calling of Puritan theology. Calvin's wording of the doctrine of predestination suggests that sinful humanity cannot know why, nor anyone to whom God's grace of salvation extends. In The Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Capitalism, Weber suggested that the psychological insecurity that this doctrine imposed on believers in hellish flames led to the search for signs that indicate the direction of God's will in everyday life. The consequence of this was an ethics of unceasing commitment to one’s worldly vocation (any failure would indicate that grace was in question) and ascetic abstinence from the pleasure of the profits made as a result of such labor. The practical result of such beliefs and practices was, according to Max Weber's theory, the most rapid accumulation of capital.
The German sociologist published his dissertation on Protestant ethics in a journal that he began to edit, Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik. From 1905 to 1910, Weber published criticism of his dissertation and answers to it. He did not refute the fact that highly developed capitalist enterprises existed centuries before Calvin. Weber was also aware of other premises, both material and psychological, that contributed to the development of modern capitalism. He responded to these comments by the fact that, prior to Calvinism, the capitalist enterprise and the accumulation of wealth were always passively or actively subjected to hostility from the religious system. If some capitalists, due to their skepticism, could escape the guilty feelings that religious ethos dictates, the fact is that no other religious tradition has ever forced people to see in the accumulation of capital (economy) a sign of God's eternal grace.
The Puritans, according to Weber, voluntarily accepted the cloak of worldly asceticism as a means of alleviating an otherwise unbearable spiritual burden. Nevertheless, in this way they helped to create a huge structure of a modern economic institution, which continued to predetermine the life and values of all who were born in it.
Politics and Government
Around the time he published his work on Protestant ethics, the middle-class German culture in which Weber was brought up experienced the first spasms of decay. Protestant morality, adopted by him as an inalienable fate, was attacked by the youth movement, avant-garde literary circles centered on the poet Stefane Gheorghe, neo-romantic Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud, as well as Slavic cultural ideals, examples of which are the works of Leo Tolstoy and Fedor Dostoevsky. The German philosopher made a decisive distinction between charismatic, traditional and legal forms of power, which was reflected in Weber's later published work, Politics as a Vocation and a Profession.
Charismatic power or charisma refers to the gift of spiritual inspiration that underlies the power of religious prophets or extraordinary political leaders. In the study of charisma, Weber dealt with those that Nietzsche first touched upon.
Rationalism and methodology
His keen interest in social phenomena, such as mysticism, which contradicts the modern world and the rationalism underlying it, runs parallel to the late awakening of Weber's aesthetic and erotic talents. In 1910, after the destruction of the public order of the European middle class, he began a series of important discussions with George and his close pupil, the poet Friedrich Gundolf. Around the same time, Weber entered into extramarital affairs, having received, perhaps, the first experience of sexual intimacy. One of his most brilliant late essays, “Religious Denials of the World and Their Directions,” contains an analysis of the conflicting relationships between eroticism, asceticism, and mystical forms of religiosity and the general process of rationalization.
At the same time, the German philosopher tried to strengthen respect for sociology as a discipline by defining a methodology for it and analyzing the religious cultures of India and China in comparison with Western religious tradition. Critically important in the last period of his biography, Max Weber was stoically engaged in considering the conditions and consequences of rationalizing political and economic life in the West. This was done in the work "Economics and Society" (1922) and journal articles.
At the origins of the Weimar Republic
In the last years of his life, Max Weber had a significant influence on his contemporaries when from 1916 to 1918 he resolutely opposed the aggressive military objectives of Germany and in favor of strengthening the parliament. He bravely advocated sobriety in politics and teaching against the apocalyptic sentiments of right-wing students in the first months after the defeat of Germany in World War I.
In 1919, Weber's work Politics as a Vocation and a Profession, in which he defined the state as an institution with a monopoly on violence, was released.
After participating in the creation of a new constitution and the Democratic Party of Germany, Weber fell ill with the flu and died of pneumonia in June 1920.
Heritage
The German sociologist had a great influence on his colleagues, many of whom were his friends in Heidelberg or Berlin. However, the main works of Max Weber were not published in book form, but only in specialized magazines, so they became widely known only after his death. The only exceptions were his wording of “liberal imperialism” in 1895, his widely discussed thesis of Protestantism and capitalism, and his criticism of German foreign and domestic policies during World War I on the pages of Frankfurter Zeitung, which stimulated liberal sentiments against government military plans and led to the fact that General Erich Ludendorff considered Weber a traitor.
Finally
In general, the great merit of the German philosopher is that he led the social sciences in Germany, which until then dealt mainly with national problems, to a direct critical confrontation with the international giants of European thought of the XIX century, Marx and Nietzsche. Thanks to this, Weber helped create a methodology and literature dealing with the sociology of religion, political parties and economics, as well as start research on formal organizations, the behavior of small groups and the philosophy of history.