Max Weber - Wikipedia

9/24/2017 Max Weber - Wikipedia
Max Weber
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Maximilian Karl Emil "Max" Weber (German: [maks

veb]; 21 April 1864 14 June 1920) was a German Max Weber
sociologist, philosopher, jurist, political economist. His
ideas profoundly influenced social theory and social
research.[4] Weber is often cited, with mile Durkheim
and Karl Marx, as among the three founders of
sociology.[5][6][7][8][9] Weber was a key proponent of
methodological antipositivism, arguing for the study of
social action through interpretive (rather than purely
empiricist) means, based on understanding the purpose
and meaning that individuals attach to their own
actions. Unlike Durkheim, he did not believe in
monocausality and rather proposed that for any
outcome there can be multiple causes.[10]
Weber's main intellectual concern was understanding

the processes of rationalisation, secularisation, and
"disenchantment" that he associated with the rise of Weber in 1894
capitalism and modernity,[11] and which he saw as the
result of a new way of thinking about the world.[12] Born Maximilian Karl Emil Weber
Weber is best known for his thesis combining 21 April 1864
economic sociology and the sociology of religion, Erfurt, Province of Saxony, Prussia
elaborated in his book The Protestant Ethic and the Died 14 June 1920 (aged 56)
Spirit of Capitalism, in which he proposed that ascetic Munich, Bavaria, Germany
Protestantism was one of the major "elective affinities"
associated with the rise in the Western world of Nationality Prussia (18641871)
market-driven capitalism and the rational-legal nation- German Empire (18711918)
state. He argued that it was in the basic tenets of Weimar Republic (19181920)
Protestantism to boost capitalism. Thus, it can be said Alma mater University of Berlin
that the spirit of capitalism is inherent to Protestant University of Heidelberg
religious values.
Known for Weberian bureaucracy
Against Marx's historical materialism, Weber Disenchantment Ideal type
emphasised the importance of cultural influences Iron cage Life chances
embedded in religion as a means for understanding the Methodological individualism
genesis of capitalism.[13] The Protestant Ethic formed Monopoly on violence
the earliest part in Weber's broader investigations into Protestant work ethic
world religion; he went on to examine the religions of
Rationalisation Social action
China, the religions of India and ancient Judaism, with
Three-component stratification
particular regard to their differing economic
consequences and conditions of social stratification.[a] Tripartite classification of authority
In another major work, "Politics as a Vocation", Weber Verstehen
defined the state as an entity that successfully claims a Scientific career
"monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force
Fields Economics sociology history law
within a given territory". He was also the first to
politics philosophy
categorise social authority into distinct forms, which he
labelled as charismatic, traditional, and rational-legal. Institutions Universities of Berlin Freiburg
His analysis of bureaucracy emphasised that modern Heidelberg Vienna Munich
state institutions are increasingly based on rational-
Doctoral Levin Goldschmidt
legal authority.
advisor
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Weber 1/28
Weber also made a variety of other contributions in Influences Hermann Baumgarten[1]

economic history, as well as economic theory and Immanuel Kant Friedrich Nietzsche
methodology. Weber's analysis of modernity and Wilhelm Dilthey
rationalisation significantly influenced the critical Heinrich Rickert Georg Simmel
theory associated with the Frankfurt School. After the
Werner Sombart[2]
First World War, Max Weber was among the founders
of the liberal German Democratic Party. He also ran Influenced Karl Jaspers Georg Simmel
unsuccessfully for a seat in parliament and served as Talcott Parsons Ludwig von Mises
advisor to the committee that drafted the ill-fated Gyrgy Lukcs Theodor W. Adorno
democratic Weimar Constitution of 1919. After Carl Schmitt Jrgen Habermas
contracting Spanish flu, he died of pneumonia in 1920, Joseph Schumpeter C. Wright Mills
aged 56.[5] Cornelius Castoriadis Ludwig
Lachmann Karl Polanyi
Contents
1 Biography
1.1 Early life and family background
1.2 Education
1.3 Early work
1.4 Later work
1.5 Political involvements
1.6 Last years
2 Max Weber's thought
2.1 Max Weber's bureaucratic model
(rational-legal model)
2.2 Inspirations
2.3 Methodology
2.4 Rationalisation
2.5 Sociology of religion
2.5.1 The Protestant Ethic and
the Spirit of Capitalism
2.5.2 The Religion of China:
Confucianism and Taoism
2.5.3 The Religion of India: The
Sociology of Hinduism and
Buddhism
2.5.4 Ancient Judaism
2.5.5 Economy and Society
2.5.6 Theodicy of fortune and
misfortune
2.6 Politics and government
2.6.1 Social stratification
2.7 Study of the city
2.8 Economics
2.8.1 Methodological
individualism
2.8.2 Marginalism and
psychophysics
2.8.3 Economic history
2.8.4 Economic calculation
3 Legacy
4 Critical responses to Weber
5 Works
6 See also
7 References
7.1 Sources
8 Further reading
9 External links
Biography
Early life and family background
Karl Emil Maximilian Weber was born in 1864, in Erfurt, Province of Saxony, Prussia.[5] He was the oldest of
the seven children of Max Weber Sr., a wealthy and prominent civil servant and member of the National Liberal
Party, and his wife Helene (Fallenstein), who partly descended from French Huguenot immigrants and held
strong moral absolutist ideas.[5][14]
Weber Sr.'s involvement in public life immersed his home in both politics and academia, as his salon welcomed
many prominent scholars and public figures.[5] The young Weber and his brother Alfred, who also became a
sociologist and economist, thrived in this intellectual atmosphere. Weber's 1876 Christmas presents to his
parents, when he was thirteen years old, were 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".[15] In class, bored and unimpressed with the teachers
who in turn resented what they perceived as a disrespectful attitude he secretly read all forty volumes of
Goethe,[16][17] and it has been recently argued that this was an important influence on his thought and
methodology.[18] Before entering the university, he would read many other classical works.[17] Over time,
Weber would also be significantly affected by the marital tension between his father, "a man who enjoyed
earthly pleasures", and his mother, a devout Calvinist "who sought to lead an ascetic life".[19][20]
Education
In 1882 Weber enrolled in the University of Heidelberg as a law student.[21]

After a year of military service, he transferred to the University of Berlin.[16]
After his first few years as a student, during which he spent much time
"drinking beer and fencing", Weber would increasingly take his mother's side in
family arguments and grew estranged from his father.[19][20][22] Simultaneously
with his studies, he worked as a junior lawyer.[16] In 1886 Weber passed the
examination for Referendar, comparable to the bar association examination in
the British and American legal systems. Throughout the late 1880s, Weber
continued his study of law and history.[16] He earned his law doctorate in 1889
by writing a dissertation on legal history titled The history of commercial
Max Weber and his brothers, partnerships in the Middle Ages. This work was used as part of a longer work
Alfred and Karl, in 1879 On the History of Trading Companies in the Middle Ages, based on South-
European Sources, published in the same year.[23] Two years later, Weber
completed his Habilitationsschrift, Roman Agrarian History and its
Significance for Public and Private Law, working with August Meitzen.[24][25] Having thus become a
Privatdozent, Weber joined the University of Berlin's faculty, lecturing and consulting for the government.[26]
Early work
In the years between the completion of his dissertation and habilitation, Weber took an interest in contemporary
social policy. In 1888 he joined the Verein fr Socialpolitik,[27] a new professional association of German
economists affiliated with the historical school, who saw the role of economics primarily as finding solutions to
the social problems of the age and who pioneered large scale statistical studies of economic issues. He also
involved himself in politics, joining the left-leaning Evangelical Social Congress.[28] In 1890 the Verein
established a research program to examine "the Polish question" or Ostflucht: the influx of Polish farm workers
into eastern Germany as local labourers migrated to Germany's rapidly industrialising cities.[5] Weber was put
in charge of the study and wrote a large part of the final report,[5][27] which generated considerable attention
and controversy and marked the beginning of Weber's renown as a social scientist.[5] From 1893 to 1899 Weber
was a member of the Alldeutscher Verband (Pan-German League), an organization that campaigned against the
influx of the Polish workers; the degree of Weber's support for the Germanisation of Poles and similar
nationalist policies is still debated by modern scholars.[29][30] In some of his work, in particular his provocative
lecture on "The Nation State and Economic Policy" delivered in 1895, Weber criticises the immigration of
Poles and blames the Junker class for perpetuating Slavic immigration to serve their selfish interests.[31]
Also in 1893 he married his distant cousin Marianne Schnitger, later a feminist
activist and author in her own right,[5][32] who was instrumental in collecting
and publishing Weber's journal articles as books after his death, while her
biography of him is an important source for understanding Weber's life.[33][34]
They would have no children and it is usually acknowledged that their marriage
was never consummated.[22] The marriage granted long-awaited financial
independence to Weber, allowing him to finally leave his parents'
household.[20] The couple moved to Freiburg in 1894, where Weber was
appointed professor of economics at the university,[25][26] before accepting the
same position at the University of Heidelberg in 1896.[25][26] There Weber
became a central figure in the so-called "Weber Circle", composed of other
intellectuals such as his wife Marianne, Georg Jellinek, Ernst Troeltsch, Werner
Sombart and Robert Michels.[5] Weber also remained active in the Verein and
the Evangelical Social Congress.[5] His research in that period was focused on Max Weber and his wife
economics and legal history.[35] Marianne in 1894
In 1897 Max Weber Sr. died two months after a severe quarrel with his son that
was never resolved.[5][36] After this, Weber became increasingly prone to depression, nervousness and
insomnia, making it difficult for him to fulfill his duties as a professor.[16][25] His condition forced him to
reduce his teaching and eventually leave his course unfinished in the autumn of 1899. After spending months in
a sanatorium during the summer and autumn of 1900, Weber and his wife travelled to Italy at the end of the
year and did not return to Heidelberg until April 1902. He would again withdraw from teaching in 1903 and not
return to it till 1919. Weber's ordeal with mental illness was carefully described in a personal chronology that
was destroyed by his wife. This chronicle was supposedly destroyed because Marianne Weber feared that Max
Weber's work would be discredited by the Nazis if his experience with mental illness were widely known.[5][37]
Later work
After Weber's immense productivity in the early 1890s, he did not publish any papers between early 1898 and
late 1902, finally resigning his professorship in late 1903. Freed from those obligations, in that year he accepted
a position as associate editor of the Archives for Social Science and Social Welfare,[38] where he worked with
his colleagues Edgar Jaff and Werner Sombart.[5][39] His new interests would lie in more fundamental issues
of social sciences; his works from this latter period are of primary interest to modern scholars.[35] In 1904,
Weber began to publish some of his most seminal papers in this journal, notably his essay The Protestant Ethic
and the Spirit of Capitalism, which became his most famous work[40] and laid the foundations for his later
research on the impact of cultures and religions on the development of economic systems.[41] This essay was
the only one of his works from that period that was published as a book during his lifetime. Some other of his
works written in the first one and a half decades of the 20th century published posthumously and dedicated
primarily from the fields of sociology of religion, economic and legal sociology are also recognised as among
his most important intellectual contributions.[5]
Also in 1904, he visited the United States and participated in the Congress of Arts and Sciences held in
connection with the World's Fair (Louisiana Purchase Exposition) in St. Louis. A monument to his visit was
placed at the home of relatives whom Weber visited in Mt. Airy, North Carolina.[42]
Despite his partial recovery evident in America, Weber felt that he was unable to resume regular teaching at
that time and continued on as a private scholar, helped by an inheritance in 1907.[26][38] In 1909, disappointed
with the Verein, he co-founded the German Sociological Association (Deutsche Gesellschaft fr Soziologie, or
DGS) and served as its first treasurer.[5] He would, however, resign from the DGS in 1912.[5] In 1912, Weber
tried to organise a left-wing political party to combine social-democrats and liberals. This attempt was
unsuccessful, in part because many liberals feared social-democratic revolutionary ideals.[43]
Political involvements
At the outbreak of World War I, Weber, aged 50, volunteered for service
and was appointed as a reserve officer and put in charge of organizing
the army hospitals in Heidelberg, a role he fulfilled until the end of
1915.[38][44] Weber's views on the war and the expansion of the German
empire changed during the course of the conflict.[43][44][45] Early on he
supported the nationalist rhetoric and the war effort, though with some
hesitation as he viewed the war as a necessity to fulfill German duty as
a leading state power. In time, however, Weber became one of the most
Max Weber (foreground) in 1917 with
Ernst Toller (facing)
prominent critics of German expansionism and of the Kaiser's war
policies.[5] He publicly attacked the Belgian annexation policy and
unrestricted submarine warfare and later supported calls for
constitutional reform, democratisation and universal suffrage.[5]
Weber joined the worker and soldier council of Heidelberg in 1918. He then served in the German delegation to
the Paris Peace Conference and as advisor to the Confidential Committee for Constitutional Reform, which
drafted the Weimar Constitution.[38] Motivated by his understanding of the American model, he advocated a
strong, popularly elected presidency as a constitutional counterbalance to the power of the professional
bureaucracy.[5] More controversially, he also defended the provisions for emergency presidential powers that
became Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution. These provisions were later used by Adolf Hitler to subvert the
rest of the constitution and institute rule by decree, allowing his regime to suppress opposition and gain
dictatorial powers.[46]
Weber also ran, unsuccessfully, for a parliamentary seat, as a member of the liberal German Democratic Party,
which he had co-founded.[5][47] He opposed both the leftist German Revolution of 19181919 and the
ratification of the Treaty of Versailles, principled positions that defied the political alignments in Germany at
that time,[5] and which may have prevented Friedrich Ebert, the new social-democratic President of Germany,
from appointing Weber as minister or ambassador.[44] Weber commanded widespread respect but relatively
little influence.[5] Weber's role in German politics remains controversial to this day.
In the case of Weber's critique of the left, he complained that the leaders of the leftist Spartacus League which
was led by Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg and controlled the city government of Berlin while Weber
was campaigning for his party: "We have this [German] revolution to thank for the fact that we cannot send a
single division against the Poles. All we see is dirt, muck, dung, and horse-playnothing else. Liebknecht
belongs in the madhouse and Rosa Luxemburg in the zoological gardens. [48] Weber was at the same time
critical of the Versailles Treaty which he believed unjustly assigned "war guilt" to Germany when it came to
World War I. Weber believed that many countries were guilty of starting World War I, not just Germany. In
making this case, Weber argued that In the case of this war there is one, and only one power that desired it
under all circumstances through its own will and, according to their political goals required: Russia. It never
crossed [my] mind that a German invasion of Belgium [in 1914] was nothing but an innocent act on the part of
the Germans."[49]
Later that same month, in January 1919, after Weber and Weber's party were defeated for election, Weber
delivered one of his greatest academic lectures, "Politics as a Vocation", which was a reflection on the inherent
violence and dishonesty found among the politicians, a profession in which only recently Weber was so
personally active. About the nature of politicians, he concluded that "In nine out of ten cases they are windbags
puffed up with hot air about themselves. They are not in touch with reality, and they do not feel the burden they
need to shoulder; they just intoxicate themselves with romantic sensations."[50]
Last years
Frustrated with politics, Weber resumed teaching during this time, first
at the University of Vienna, then, after 1919, at the University of
Munich.[5][26][38] His lectures from that period were collected into
major works, such as the General Economic History, Science as a
Vocation and Politics as a Vocation.[5] In Munich, he headed the first
German university institute of sociology, but never held a professorial
position in sociology. Many colleagues and students in Munich attacked
his response to the German Revolution and some right-wing students
held protests in front of his home.[43] Max Weber contracted the
Spanish flu and died of pneumonia in Munich on 14 June 1920.[5] At
the time of his death, Weber had not finished writing his magnum opus
on sociological theory: Economy and Society. His widow Marianne Weber's grave in Heidelberg
helped prepare it for its publication in 192122.
Max Weber's thought

Max Weber's bureaucratic theory or model is sometimes also known as the "rational-legal" model. The model
tries to explain bureaucracy from a rational point of view via nine main characteristics or principles; these are
as follows:[51]
Max Weber's bureaucratic model (rational-legal model)
Weber wrote that the modern bureaucracy in both the public and private sector relies on the following
principles.
"First, it is based on the general principle of precisely defined and organized across-the-board competencies of
the various offices. These competencies are underpinned by rules, laws, or administrative regulations."[52] For
Weber, this means[53]
1. A rigid division of labor is established which clearly identifies the regular tasks and duties of the
particular bureaucratic system.
2. There are firmly established chains of command, and the duties and capacity to coerce others to comply
is described by regulation.
3. Regular and continuous execution of the assigned duties is undertaken by hiring people with particular
qualifications which are certified.
Weber notes that these three aspects "constitute the essence of bureaucratic administration...in the public sector.
In the private sector, these three aspects constitute the essence of a bureaucratic management of a private
company."[54]
Main principles (characteristics):
1. Specialized roles.
2. Recruitment based on merit (e.g. tested through open competition).
3. Uniform principles of placement, promotion, and transfer in an administrative system.
4. Careerism with systematic salary structure.
5. Hierarchy, responsibility and accountability.
6. Subjection of official conduct to strict rules of discipline and control.
7. Supremacy of abstract rules.
8. Impersonal authority (e.g. office bearer does not bring the office with him).
9. Political neutrality.
Merits: As Weber himself noted, real bureaucracy will be less optimal and effective than his ideal-type model.
Each of Weber's principles can degenerateand more so, when they are used to analyze the individual level in
an organization. But, when implemented in a group setting in an organization, some form of efficiency and
effectiveness can be achieved, especially with regard to better output. This is especially true when the
Bureaucratic model emphasizes qualification (merits), specialization of job-scope (labour), hierarchy of power,
rules and discipline.[55]
Demerits: However, competencies, efficiency and effectiveness can be unclear and contradictory, especially
when dealing with oversimplified matters. In a dehumanized bureaucracy, inflexible in distributing the job-
scope, with every worker having to specialize from day one without rotating tasks for fear of decreasing output,
tasks are often routine and can contribute to boredom. Thus, employees can sometimes feel that they are not
part of the organization's work vision and missions. Consequently, they do not have any sense of belonging in
the long term. Furthermore, this type of organization tends to invite exploitation and underestimate the potential
of the employees, as creativity of the workers is brushed aside in favour of strict adherence to rules, regulations
and procedures.[51]
Inspirations
Weber's thinking was strongly influenced by German idealism and particularly by neo-Kantianism, to which he
had been exposed through Heinrich Rickert, his professorial colleague at the University of Freiburg.[5]
Especially important to Weber's work is the neo-Kantian belief that reality is essentially chaotic and
incomprehensible, with all rational order deriving from the way in which the human mind focuses its attention
on certain aspects of reality and organises the resulting perceptions.[5] Weber's opinions regarding the
methodology of the social sciences show parallels with the work of contemporary neo-Kantian philosopher and
pioneering sociologist Georg Simmel.[56]
Weber was also influenced by Kantian ethics, which he nonetheless came to think of as obsolete in a modern
age lacking in religious certainties. In this last respect, the influence of Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophy is
evident.[5] According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the "deep tension between the Kantian moral
imperatives and a Nietzschean diagnosis of the modern cultural world is apparently what gives such a darkly
tragic and agnostic shade to Weber's ethical worldview".[5] Another major influence in Weber's life was the
writings of Karl Marx and the workings of socialist thought in academia and active politics. While Weber
shares some of Marx's consternation with bureaucratic systems and maligns them as being capable of
advancing their own logic to the detriment of human freedom and autonomy, Weber views conflict as perpetual
and inevitable and does not host the spirit of a materially available utopia.[57] Though the influence of his
mother's Calvinist religiosity is evident throughout Weber's life and work, and though he maintained a deep,
lifelong interest in the study of religions, Weber was open about the fact that he was personally
irreligious.[58][59]
As a political economist and economic historian, Weber belonged to the "youngest" German historical school
of economics, represented by academics such as Gustav von Schmoller and his student Werner Sombart. But,
even though Weber's research interests were very much in line with that school, his views on methodology and
the theory of value diverged significantly from those of other German historicists and were closer, in fact, to
those of Carl Menger and the Austrian School, the traditional rivals of the historical school.[60][61] (See section
on Economics.)
Methodology
Unlike some other classical figures (Comte, Durkheim) Weber did not attempt, consciously, to create any
specific set of rules governing social sciences in general, or sociology in particular.[5] In comparison with
Durkheim and Marx, Weber was more focused on individuals and culture and this is clear in his
methodology.[16] Whereas Durkheim focused on the society, Weber

concentrated on the individuals and their actions (see structure and
action discussion) and whereas Marx argued for the primacy of the
material world over the world of ideas, Weber valued ideas as
motivating actions of individuals, at least in the big picture.[16][62][63]
Sociology, for Max Weber, is:
... a science which attempts the interpretive understanding

of social action in order thereby to arrive at a causal
explanation of its course and effects.
Max Weber[64]
Weber was concerned with the question of objectivity and

subjectivity.[5] Weber distinguished social action from social behavior,
noting that social action must be understood through how individuals A page from the typescript of the
subjectively relate to one another.[5][65] Study of social action through sociology of law within Economy and
interpretive means (Verstehen) must be based upon understanding the Society
subjective meaning and purpose that individuals attach to their
actions.[5][35] Social actions may have easily identifiable and objective
means, but much more subjective ends and the understanding of those ends by a scientist is subject to yet
another layer of subjective understanding (that of the scientist).[5] Weber noted that the importance of
subjectivity in social sciences makes creation of fool-proof, universal laws much more difficult than in natural
sciences and that the amount of objective knowledge that social sciences may achieve is precariously limited.[5]
Overall, Weber supported the goal of objective science, but he noted that it is an unreachable goal although
one definitely worth striving for.[5]
There is no absolutely "objective" scientific analysis of culture.... All knowledge of cultural reality
... is always knowledge from particular points of view.... an "objective" analysis of cultural events,
which proceeds according to the thesis that the ideal of science is the reduction of empirical reality
to "laws", is meaningless ... [because] ... the knowledge of social laws is not knowledge of social
reality but is rather one of the various aids used by our minds for attaining this end.
Max Weber, "Objectivity" in Social Science, 1904[66]
The principle of "methodological individualism", which holds that social scientists should seek to understand
collectivities (such as nations, cultures, governments, churches, corporations, etc.) solely as the result and the
context of the actions of individual persons, can be traced to Weber, particularly to the first chapter of Economy
and Society, in which he argues that only individuals "can be treated as agents in a course of subjectively
understandable action".[61][65] In other words, Weber argued that social phenomena can be understood
scientifically only to the extent that they are captured by models of the behaviour of purposeful individuals,
models that Weber called "ideal types", from which actual historical events will necessarily deviate due to
accidental and irrational factors.[61] The analytical constructs of an ideal type never exist in reality, but provide
objective benchmarks against which real-life constructs can be measured.[67]
We know of no scientifically ascertainable ideals. To be sure, that makes our efforts more arduous
than in the past, since we are expected to create our ideals from within our breast in the very age of
subjectivist culture.
Max Weber, 1909[68]
Weber's methodology was developed in the context of a wider debate about methodology of social sciences, the
Methodenstreit.[35] Weber's position was close to historicism, as he understood social actions as being heavily
tied to particular historical contexts and its analysis required the understanding of subjective motivations of
individuals (social actors).[35] Thus Weber's methodology emphasises the use of comparative historical
analysis.[69] Therefore, Weber was more interested in explaining how a certain outcome was the result of
various historical processes rather than predicting an outcome of those processes in the future.[63]
Rationalisation
Many scholars have described rationalisation and the question of individual freedom in an increasingly rational
society, as the main theme of Weber's work.[5][70][71][72] This theme was situated in the larger context of the
relationship between psychological motivations, cultural values and beliefs (primarily, religion) and the
structure of the society (usually determined by the economy).[63]
By rationalisation, Weber understood first, the individual cost-benefit calculation, second, the wider,
bureaucratic organisation of the organisations and finally, in the more general sense as the opposite of
understanding the reality through mystery and magic (disenchantment).[72]
The fate of our times is characterised by rationalisation and intellectualisation and, above all, by
the "disenchantment of the world"
Max Weber[73]
Weber began his studies of the subject in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, in which he argued
that the redefinition of the connection between work and piety in Protestantism and especially in ascetic
Protestant denominations, particularly Calvinism, shifted human effort towards rational efforts aimed at
achieving economic gain.[74][75] In Protestant religion, Christian piety towards God was expressed through
one's secular vocation (secularisation of calling).[75] The rational roots of this doctrine, he argued, soon grew
incompatible with and larger than the religious and so the latter were eventually discarded.[76]
Weber continued his investigation into this matter in later works, notably in his studies on bureaucracy and on
the classification of legitimate authority into three types rational-legal, traditional and charismatic of which
the rational-legal (through bureaucracy) is the dominant one in the modern world.[5] In these works Weber
described what he saw as society's movement towards rationalisation.[5] Similarly, rationalisation could be seen
in the economy, with the development of highly rational and calculating capitalism.[5] Weber also saw
rationalisation as one of the main factors setting the European West apart from the rest of the world.[5]
Rationalisation relied on deep changes in ethics, religion, psychology and culture; changes that first took place
in the Western civilisation.[5]
What Weber depicted was not only the secularisation of Western culture, but also and especially
the development of modern societies from the viewpoint of rationalisation. The new structures of
society were marked by the differentiation of the two functionally intermeshing systems that had
taken shape around the organisational cores of the capitalist enterprise and the bureaucratic state
apparatus. Weber understood this process as the institutionalisation of purposive-rational economic
and administrative action. To the degree that everyday life was affected by this cultural and societal
rationalisation, traditional forms of life which in the early modern period were differentiated
primarily according to one's trade were dissolved.
Jrgen Habermas, Modernity's Consciousness of Time, 1990 [1985][11]
Features of rationalisation include increasing knowledge, growing impersonality and enhanced control of social
and material life.[5] Weber was ambivalent towards rationalisation; while admitting it was responsible for many
advances, in particular, freeing humans from traditional, restrictive and illogical social guidelines, he also
criticised it for dehumanising individuals as "cogs in the machine" and curtailing their freedom, trapping them
in the bureaucratic iron cage of rationality and bureaucracy.[5][70][77][78] Related to rationalisation is the process
of disenchantment, in which the world is becoming more explained and less mystical, moving from polytheistic
religions to monotheistic ones and finally to the Godless science of modernity.[5] Those processes affect all of
society, removing "sublime values... from public life" and making art less creative.[79]
In a dystopian critique of rationalisation, Weber notes that modern society is a product of an individualistic
drive of the Reformation, yet at the same time, the society created in this process is less and less welcoming of
individualism.[5]
How is it at all possible to salvage any remnants of "individual" freedom of movement in any sense
given this all-powerful trend?
Max Weber[5]
Sociology of religion
Weber's work in the field of sociology of religion started with the essay The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of
Capitalism and continued with the analysis of The Religion of China: Confucianism and Taoism, The Religion
of India: The Sociology of Hinduism and Buddhism and Ancient Judaism. His work on other religions was
interrupted by his sudden death in 1920, which prevented him from following Ancient Judaism with studies of
early Christianity and Islam.[80] His three main themes in the essays were the effect of religious ideas on
economic activities, the relation between social stratification and religious ideas and the distinguishable
characteristics of Western civilisation.[81]
Weber saw religion as one of the core forces in society.[69] His goal was to find reasons for the different
development paths of the cultures of the Occident and the Orient, although without judging or valuing them,
like some of the contemporary thinkers who followed the social Darwinist paradigm; Weber wanted primarily
to explain the distinctive elements of the Western civilisation.[81] In the analysis of his findings, Weber
maintained that Calvinist (and more widely, Protestant) religious ideas had had a major impact on the social
innovation and development of the economic system of the West, but noted that they were not the only factors
in this development. Other notable factors mentioned by Weber included the rationalism of scientific pursuit,
merging observation with mathematics, science of scholarship and jurisprudence, rational systematisation and
bureaucratisation of government administration and economic enterprise.[81] In the end, the study of the
sociology of religion, according to Weber, focused on one distinguishing part of the Western culture, the decline
of beliefs in magic, or what he referred to as "disenchantment of the world".[81]
Weber also proposed a socioevolutionary model of religious change, showing that in general, societies have
moved from magic to polytheism, then to pantheism, monotheism and finally, ethical monotheism.[82]
According to Weber, this evolution occurred as the growing economic stability allowed professionalisation and
the evolution of ever more sophisticated priesthood.[83] As societies grew more complex and encompassed
different groups, a hierarchy of gods developed and as power in the society became more centralised, the
concept of a single, universal God became more popular and desirable.[84]
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
Weber's essay The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism is his most famous work.[40] It is argued that
this work should not be viewed as a detailed study of Protestantism, but rather as an introduction into Weber's
later works, especially his studies of interaction between various religious ideas and economic behaviour as
part of the rationalisation of the economic system.[85] In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism,
Weber put forward the thesis that Calvinist ethic and ideas influenced the
development of capitalism.[85] He noted the post-Reformation shift of Europe's
economic centre away from Catholic countries such as France, Spain and Italy,
and toward Protestant countries such as the Netherlands, England, Scotland and
Germany. Weber also noted that societies having more Protestants were those
with a more highly developed capitalist economy.[86] Similarly, in societies
with different religions, most successful business leaders were Protestant.[85]
Weber thus argued that Roman Catholicism impeded the development of the
capitalist economy in the West, as did other religions such as Confucianism and
Buddhism elsewhere in the world.[85]
The development of the concept of the calling quickly gave to the

modern entrepreneur a fabulously clear conscience and also
industrious workers; he gave to his employees as the wages of their Cover of a German edition of
ascetic devotion to the calling and of co-operation in his ruthless The Protestant Ethic and the
exploitation of them through capitalism the prospect of eternal Spirit of Capitalism
salvation.
Max Weber[75]
Christian religious devotion had historically been accompanied by rejection of mundane affairs, including
economic pursuit.[87] Weber showed that certain types of Protestantism notably Calvinism were supportive
of rational pursuit of economic gain and worldly activities dedicated to it, seeing them as endowed with moral
and spiritual significance.[74] Weber argued that there were many reasons to look for the origins of modern
capitalism in the religious ideas of the Reformation.[88] In particular, the Protestant ethic (or more specifically,
Calvinist ethic) motivated the believers to work hard, be successful in business and reinvest their profits in
further development rather than frivolous pleasures.[85] The notion of calling meant that each individual had to
take action as an indication of their salvation; just being a member of the Church was not enough.[75]
Predestination also reduced agonising over economic inequality and further, it meant that a material wealth
could be taken as a sign of salvation in the afterlife.[85][89] The believers thus justified pursuit of profit with
religion, as instead of being fuelled by morally suspect greed or ambition, their actions were motivated by a
highly moral and respected philosophy.[85] This Weber called the "spirit of capitalism": it was the Protestant
religious ideology that was behind and inevitably led to the capitalist economic system.[85] This theory is
often viewed as a reversal of Marx's thesis that the economic "base" of society determines all other aspects of
it.[74]
Weber abandoned research into Protestantism because his colleague Ernst Troeltsch, a professional theologian,
had begun work on the book The Social Teachings of the Christian Churches and Sects. Another reason for
Weber's decision was that Troeltsch's work already achieved what he desired in that area: laying the
groundwork for a comparative analysis of religion and society.[90]
The phrase "work ethic" used in modern commentary is a derivative of the "Protestant ethic" discussed by
Weber. It was adopted when the idea of the Protestant ethic was generalised to apply to the Japanese people,
Jews and other non-Christians and thus lost its religious connotations.[91]
The Religion of China: Confucianism and Taoism
The Religion of China: Confucianism and Taoism was Weber's second major work on the sociology of religion.
Hans H. Gerth edited and translated this text into English, with an introduction by C. K. Wang.[92] Weber
focused on those aspects of Chinese society that were different from those of Western Europe, especially those
aspects that contrasted with Puritanism. His work also questioned why capitalism did not develop in China.[93]
He focused on the issues of Chinese urban development, Chinese patrimonialism and officialdom and Chinese
religion and philosophy (primarily, Confucianism and Taoism), as the areas in which Chinese development
differed most distinctively from the European route.[93]
According to Weber, Confucianism and Puritanism are mutually exclusive types of rational thought, each
attempting to prescribe a way of life based on religious dogma.[94] Notably, they both valued self-control and
restraint and did not oppose accumulation of wealth.[94] However, to both those qualities were just means to the
final goal and here they were divided by a key difference.[89] Confucianism's goal was "a cultured status
position", while Puritanism's goal was to create individuals who are "tools of God".[94] The intensity of belief
and enthusiasm for action were rare in Confucianism, but common in Protestantism.[94] Actively working for
wealth was unbecoming a proper Confucian.[89] Therefore, Weber states that it was this difference in social
attitudes and mentality, shaped by the respective, dominant religions, that contributed to the development of
capitalism in the West and the absence of it in China.[94]
The Religion of India: The Sociology of Hinduism and Buddhism
The Religion of India: The Sociology of Hinduism and Buddhism was Weber's third major work on the
sociology of religion. In this work he deals with the structure of Indian society, with the orthodox doctrines of
Hinduism and the heterodox doctrines of Buddhism, with modifications brought by the influence of popular
religiosity and finally with the impact of religious beliefs on the secular ethic of Indian society.[95] In Weber's
view, Hinduism in India, like Confucianism in China, was a barrier for capitalism.[89] The Indian caste system
made it very difficult for individuals to advance in the society beyond their caste.[89] Activity, including
economic activity, was seen as unimportant in the context of the advancement of the soul.[89]
Weber ended his research of society and religion in India by bringing in insights from his previous work on
China to discuss similarities of the Asian belief systems.[96] He notes that the beliefs saw the meaning of life as
otherworldly mystical experience.[96] The social world is fundamentally divided between the educated elite,
following the guidance of a prophet or wise man and the uneducated masses whose beliefs are centered on
magic.[96] In Asia, there was no Messianic prophecy to give plan and meaning to the everyday life of educated
and uneducated alike.[96] Weber juxtaposed such Messianic prophecies (also called ethical prophecies), notably
from the Near East region to the exemplary prophecies found on the Asiatic mainland, focused more on
reaching to the educated elites and enlightening them on the proper ways to live one's life, usually with little
emphasis on hard work and the material world.[96][97] It was those differences that prevented the countries of
the Occident from following the paths of the earlier Chinese and Indian civilisations. His next work, Ancient
Judaism was an attempt to prove this theory.[96]
Ancient Judaism
In Ancient Judaism, his fourth major work on the sociology of religion, Weber attempted to explain the factors
that resulted in the early differences between Oriental and Occidental religiosity.[98] He contrasted the
innerworldly asceticism developed by Western Christianity with mystical contemplation of the kind developed
in India.[98] Weber noted that some aspects of Christianity sought to conquer and change the world, rather than
withdraw from its imperfections.[98] This fundamental characteristic of Christianity (when compared to Far
Eastern religions) stems originally from ancient Jewish prophecy.[99]
Weber claimed that Judaism not only fathered Christianity and Islam, but was crucial to the rise of the modern
Occidental state; Judaism's influence was as important as Hellenistic and Roman cultures.
Weber's premature death in 1920 prevented him from following his planned analysis of Psalms, the Book of
Job, Talmudic Jewry, early Christianity and Islam.
Economy and Society
Weber's magnum opus Economy and Society is a collection of his essays which he was working on at the time
of his death in 1920. After his death, the final organization and editing of the book fell to his widow Marianne
Weber. The final German form published in 1921 reflected very much Marianne Weber's work and intellectual
commitment. Beginning in 1956, the German jurist Johannes Wincklemann began editing and organizing the
German edition of Economy and Society based on his study of the papers that Weber left at his death.
English versions of Economy and Society were published as a collected volume in 1968 as edited by Gunther
Roth and Claus Wittich. As a result of the various editions in German and English, there are differences
between the organization of the different volumes.
Economy and Society includes a wide range of essays dealing with Weber's views regarding Sociology, Social
Philosophy, Politics, Social Stratification, World Religion, Diplomacy, and other subjects. The book is typically
published in a two volume set in both German and English, and is more than 1000 pages long.
Theodicy of fortune and misfortune
The theodicy of fortune and misfortune within sociology is the theory, as Weber suggested, of how "members
of different social classes adopt different belief systems, or theodices, to explain their social situation".[100]
The concept of theodicy was expanded mainly with the thought of Weber and his addition of ethical
considerations to the subject of religion. There is this ethical part of religion, including "(1) soteriology and (2)
theodicy. These mean, respectively, how people understand themselves to be able to be in a correct relationship
with supernatural powers, and how to explain evil or why bad things seem to happen to those who seem to be
good people".[101] There is a separation of different theodicies with regard to class. "Theodicies of misfortune
tend to the belief that wealth and other manifestations of privilege are indications or signs of evil.... In contrast,
theodicies of fortune emphasise the notion that privileges are a blessing and are deserved."[101] Weber also
writes that "the affluent embrace good fortune theodicies, which emphasise that prosperity is a blessing of
God...[while] theodices of misfortune emphasise that affluence is a sign of evil and that suffering in this world
will be rewarded in the next."[100] Thus these two distinctions can be applied not only to class structure within
society but denomination and racial segregation within religion.
Weber defines the importance of societal class within religion by examining the difference between the two
theodicies and to what class structures they apply. The concept of "work ethic" is attached to the theodicy of
fortune; thus, because of the Protestant "work ethic", there was a contribution of higher class outcomes and
more education among Protestants.[102] Those without the work ethic clung to the theodicy of misfortune,
believing wealth and happiness were granted in the afterlife. Another example of how this belief of religious
theodicy influences class, is that those of lower status, the poor, cling to deep religiousness and faith as a way to
comfort themselves and provide hope for a more prosperous future, while those of higher status cling to the
sacraments or actions that prove their right of possessing greater wealth.[100]
These two theodicies can be found in the denominational segregation within the religious community. The main
division can be seen between the mainline Protestant and evangelical denominations and their relation to the
class into which their particular theodicy pertains. For example, mainline churches, with their upper class
congregations, "promote[d] order, stability, and conservatism, and in so doing proved to be a powerful source
of legitimation of the status quo and of existing disparities in the distribution of wealth and power" because
much of the wealth of the church comes from the congregation.[103] In contrast, Pentecostal churches adopted
the theodicy of misfortune. They instead "advocated change intended to advance the cause of justice and
fairness".[103] Thus the learned and upper class religious churches who preach the theodicy of fortune,
ultimately support capitalism and corporation, while the churches who adopted the theodicy of misfortune,
instead preached equality and fairness.
Politics and government
In political sociology, one of Weber's most influential contributions is his "Politics as a Vocation" (Politik als
Beruf) essay. Therein, Weber unveils the definition of the state as that entity that possesses a monopoly on the
legitimate use of physical force.[104][105][106] Weber wrote that politics is the sharing of state's power between
various groups, and political leaders are those who wield this power.[105] A politician must not be a man of the
"true Christian ethic", understood by Weber as being the ethic of the Sermon on the Mount, that is to say, the
injunction to turn the other cheek.[107] An adherent of such an ethic ought rather to be understood to be a saint,
for it is only saints, according to Weber, that can appropriately follow it.[107] The political realm is no realm for
saints; a politician ought to marry the ethic of attitude and the ethic of responsibility ("Verantwortungsethik vs
Gesinnungsethik"[108]) and must possess both a passion for his vocation and the capacity to distance himself
from the subject of his exertions (the governed).[107]
Weber distinguished three ideal types of political leadership (alternatively referred to as three types of
domination, legitimisation or authority):[51][109]
1. charismatic domination (familial and religious),

2. traditional domination (patriarchs, patrimonialism, feudalism) and
3. legal domination (modern law and state, bureaucracy).[110]
In his view, every historical relation between rulers and ruled contained such elements and they can be analysed
on the basis of this tripartite distinction.[111] He notes that the instability of charismatic authority forces it to
"routinise" into a more structured form of authority.[77] In a pure type of traditional rule, sufficient resistance to
a ruler can lead to a "traditional revolution". The move towards a rational-legal structure of authority, utilising a
bureaucratic structure, is inevitable in the end.[112] Thus this theory can be sometimes viewed as part of the
social evolutionism theory. This ties to his broader concept of rationalisation by suggesting the inevitability of a
move in this direction.[77]
Bureaucratic administration means fundamentally domination through knowledge.
Max Weber[113]
Weber described many ideal types of public administration and government in his masterpiece Economy and
Society (1922). His critical study of the bureaucratisation of society became one of the most enduring parts of
his work.[77][113] It was Weber who began the studies of bureaucracy and whose works led to the popularisation
of this term.[114] Many aspects of modern public administration go back to him and a classic, hierarchically
organised civil service of the Continental type is called "Weberian civil service".[115] As the most efficient and
rational way of organising, bureaucratisation for Weber was the key part of the rational-legal authority and
furthermore, he saw it as the key process in the ongoing rationalisation of the Western society.[77][113]
Weber listed several preconditions for the emergence of the bureaucracy:[116] The growth in space and
population being administered, the growth in complexity of the administrative tasks being carried out and the
existence of a monetary economy these resulted in a need for a more efficient administrative system.[116]
Development of communication and transportation technologies made more efficient administration possible
(and popularly requested) and democratisation and rationalisation of culture resulted in demands that the new
system treat everybody equally.[116]
Weber's ideal bureaucracy is characterised by hierarchical organisation, by delineated lines of authority in a

fixed area of activity, by action taken (and recorded) on the basis of written rules, by bureaucratic officials
needing expert training, by rules being implemented neutrally and by career advancement depending on
technical qualifications judged by organisations, not by individuals.[113][116]
The decisive reason for the advance of the bureaucratic organisation has always been its purely
technical superiority over any other form of organisation.
Max Weber[115]
While recognising bureaucracy as the most efficient form of organisation and even indispensable for the
modern state, Weber also saw it as a threat to individual freedoms and the ongoing bureaucratisation as leading
to a "polar night of icy darkness", in which increasing rationalisation of human life traps individuals in the
aforementioned "iron cage" of bureaucratic, rule-based, rational control.[113][117] In order to counteract
bureaucrats, the system needs entrepreneurs and politicians.[113]
Social stratification
Weber also formulated a three-component theory of stratification, with social class, social status and political
party as conceptually distinct elements.[118] The three-component theory of stratification is in contrast to Karl
Marx simpler theory of social class which ties all social stratification to what people own. In Weber's theory,
issues of honour and prestige are important. This distinction is most clearly described in Weber's essay
"Classes, Staende, Parties" which was first published in his book Economy and Society.[119] The three
components of Weber's theory are:
Social Class which is based on economically determined relationship to the market (owner, renter,
employee etc.).
Status (or in German Stand) which is based on non-economic qualities like honour, prestige and religion.
Party which refers to affiliations in the political domain.
All three dimensions have consequences for what Weber called "life chances" (opportunities to improve one's
life).[118]
Weber scholars recognize that it is important to maintain a sharp distinction between the terms "status" and
"class," even though they tend to be used interchangeably in popular usage.[120]
Study of the city
As part of his overarching effort to understand the unique development of the Western world, Weber produced a
detailed general study of the city as the characteristic locus of the social and economic relations, political
arrangements, and ideas that eventually came to define the West. This resulted in a monograph titled The City,
which was probably compiled from research conducted in 191113, and which was published posthumously in
1921. In 1924 it was incorporated into the second part of his Economy and Society, as chapter XVI, "The City
(Non-legitimate Domination)".
According to Weber, the city as a politically autonomous organisation of people living in close proximity,
employed in a variety of specialised trades, and physically separated from the surrounding countryside, only
fully developed in the West and to a great extent shaped its cultural evolution:
The origin of a rational and inner-worldly ethic is associated in the Occident with the appearance
of thinkers and prophets [...] who developed in a social context that was alien to the Asiatic
cultures. This context consisted of the political problems engendered by the bourgeois status-group
of the city, without which neither Judaism, nor Christianity, nor the development of Hellenistic
thinking are conceivable.
Max Weber[121]
Weber argued that Judaism, early Christianity, theology, and later the political party and modern science, were
only possible in the urban context that reached a full development in the West alone.[122] He also saw in the
history of medieval European cities the rise of a unique form of "non-legitimate domination" that successfully
challenged the existing forms of legitimate domination (traditional, charismatic, and rational-legal) that had
prevailed until then in the Medieval world.[123] This new domination was based on the great economic and
military power wielded by the organised community of city-dwellers ("citizens").
Economics
Weber regarded himself primarily as a "political economist",[124][125][126] and all of his professorial
appointments were in economics, though today his contributions in that field are largely overshadowed by his
role as a founder of modern sociology. As an economist, Weber belonged to the "youngest" German historical
school of economics.[127] The great differences between that school's interests and methods on the one hand
and those of the neoclassical school (from which modern mainstream economics largely derives) on the other,
explain why Weber's influence on economics today is hard to discern.[128]
Max Weber was a pioneer in delineating a connection between capitalism and exceptionalism. In earlier texts,
Maximiliano Korstanje explores the American exceptionalism and its effects on the current means of
productions. This contribution to the existent literature is of paramount importance because of two main
reasons. The first and most important, he relates capitalism to Protestantism. This is of course nothing new,
since Max Weber did it in the past. However, Korstanje adds, though Weber was in the correct side by
confirming the connection of Reform and Capitalism, the key role played by Norse Mythology was left behind.
In effect, the concept of predestination as it has been discussed by Weber did not come from Luther alone. It
was rather enrooted in the core of Norse Culture. Secondly, this impossibility to understand the future led to
English speaking societies to construct a risk-prone culture, which resulted in what Ulrich Beck dubbed the
Risk Society. The criticism exerted in the uneven distribution of Capitalism should be explained by the
economy of salved peoples formulated by Weber.[129][130][131][132]
Methodological individualism
Though his research interests were always in line with those of the German historicists, with a strong emphasis
on interpreting economic history, Weber's defence of "methodological individualism" in the social sciences
represented an important break with that school and an embracing of many of the arguments that had been
made against the historicists by Carl Menger, the founder of the Austrian School of economics, in the context
of the academic Methodenstreit ("debate over methods") of the late 19th century.[61] The phrase
"methodological individualism", which has come into common usage in modern debates about the connection
between microeconomics and macroeconomics, was coined by the Austrian-American economist Joseph
Schumpeter in 1908 as a way of referring to the views of Weber.[61] According to Weber's theses, social
research cannot be fully inductive or descriptive, because understanding some phenomenon implies that the
researcher must go beyond mere description and interpret it; interpretation requires classification according to
abstract "ideal (pure) types".[127] This, together with his antipositivistic argumentation (see Verstehen), can be
taken as a methodological justification for the model of the "rational economic man" (homo economicus),
which is at the heart of modern mainstream economics.[61][127]
Marginalism and psychophysics
Unlike other historicists, Weber also accepted the marginal theory of value (also called "marginalism") and
taught it to his students.[60][133] In 1908, Weber published an article in which he drew a sharp methodological
distinction between psychology and economics and attacked the claims that the marginal theory of value in
economics reflected the form of the psychological response to stimuli as described by the Weber-Fechner law.
Max Weber's article has been cited as a definitive refutation of the dependence of the economic theory of value
on the laws of psychophysics by Lionel Robbins, George Stigler,[134] and Friedrich Hayek, though the broader
issue of the relation between economics and psychology has come back into the academic debate with the
development of "behavioral economics".[135]
Economic history
Weber's best known work in economics concerned the preconditions for capitalist development, particularly the
relations between religion and capitalism, which he explored in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of
Capitalism as well as in his other works on the sociology of religion.[127] He argued that bureaucratic political
and economic systems emerging in the Middle Ages were essential in the rise of modern capitalism (including
rational book-keeping and organisation of formally free labour), while they were a hindrance in the case of
ancient capitalism, which had a different social and political structure based on conquest, slavery, and the
coastal city-state.[136] Other contributions include his early work on the economic history of Roman agrarian
society (1891) and on the labour relations in Eastern Germany (1892), his analysis of the history of commercial
partnerships in the Middle Ages (1889), his critique of Marxism, the discussion of the roles of idealism and
materialism in the history of capitalism in his Economy and Society (1922) and his General Economic History
(1923), a notable example of the kind of empirical work associated with the German Historical School.[127]
Although today Weber is primarily read by sociologists and social philosophers, Weber's work did have a
significant influence on Frank Knight, one of the founders of the neoclassical Chicago school of economics,
who translated Weber's General Economic History into English in 1927.[137] Knight also wrote in 1956 that
Max Weber was the only economist who dealt with the problem of understanding the emergence of modern
capitalism "from the angle which alone can yield an answer to such questions, that is, the angle of comparative
history in the broad sense".[133]
Economic calculation
Weber, like his colleague Werner Sombart, regarded economic calculation and especially the double-entry
bookkeeping method of business accounting, as one of the most important forms of rationalisation associated
with the development of modern capitalism.[138] Weber's preoccupation with the importance of economic
calculation led him to develop a critique of socialism as a system that lacked a mechanism for allocating
resources efficiently in order to satisfy human needs.[139] Socialist intellectuals like Otto Neurath had realised
that in a completely socialised economy, prices would not exist and central planners would have to resort to in-
kind (rather than monetary) economic calculation.[139][140] According to Weber, this type of coordination
would be inefficient, especially because it would be incapable of solving the problem of imputation (i.e. of
accurately determining the relative values of capital goods).[139][140] Weber wrote that, under full socialism,
In order to make possible a rational utilisation of the means of production, a system of in-kind
accounting would have to determine "value" indicators of some kind for the individual capital
goods which could take over the role of the "prices" used in book valuation in modern business
accounting. But it is not at all clear how such indicators could be established and in particular,
verified; whether, for instance, they should vary from one production unit to the next (on the basis
of economic location), or whether they should be uniform for the entire economy, on the basis of
"social utility", that is, of (present and future) consumption requirements [...] Nothing is gained by
assuming that, if only the problem of a non-monetary economy were seriously enough attacked, a
suitable accounting method would be discovered or invented. The problem is fundamental to any
kind of complete socialisation. We cannot speak of a rational "planned economy" so long as in this
decisive respect we have no instrument for elaborating a rational "plan".
Max Weber[141]
This argument against socialism was made independently, at about the same time, by Ludwig von
Mises.[139][142] Weber himself had a significant influence on Mises, whom he had befriended when they were
both at the University of Vienna in the spring of 1918,[143] and, through Mises, on several other economists
associated with the Austrian School in the 20th century.[144] Friedrich Hayek in particular elaborated the
arguments of Weber and Mises about economic calculation into a central part of free market economics's
intellectual assault on socialism, as well as into a model for the spontaneous coordination of "dispersed
knowledge" in markets.[145][146][147]
Legacy
The prestige of Max Weber among European social scientists would be difficult to over-estimate.
He is widely considered the greatest of German sociologists and ... has become a leading influence
in European and American thought.
Hans Heinrich Gerth and C. Wright Mills, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology,
1946/1991[6]
Weber's most influential work was on economic sociology, political sociology, and the sociology of religion.
Along with Karl Marx and mile Durkheim,[125] he is commonly regarded as one of the founders of modern
sociology. But whereas Durkheim, following Comte, worked in the positivist tradition, Weber was instrumental
in developing an antipositivist, hermeneutic, tradition in the social sciences.[148] In this regard he belongs to a
similar tradition as his German colleagues Werner Sombart, Georg Simmel, and Wilhelm Dilthey, who stressed
the differences between the methodologies appropriate to the social and the natural sciences.[148]
Weber presented sociology as the science of human social action; action that he separated into traditional,
affectional, value-rational and instrumental.[149][150]
[Sociology is] the science whose object is to interpret the meaning of social action and thereby
give a causal explanation of the way in which the action proceeds and the effects which it
produces. By "action" in this definition is meant the human behaviour when and to the extent that
the agent or agents see it as subjectively meaningful [...] the meaning to which we refer may be
either (a) the meaning actually intended either by an individual agent on a particular historical
occasion or by a number of agents on an approximate average in a given set of cases, or (b) the
meaning attributed to the agent or agents, as types, in a pure type constructed in the abstract. In
neither case is the "meaning" to be thought of as somehow objectively "correct" or "true" by some
metaphysical criterion. This is the difference between the empirical sciences of action, such as
sociology and history and any kind of a priori discipline, such as jurisprudence, logic, ethics, or
aesthetics whose aim is to extract from their subject-matter "correct" or "valid" meaning.[151]
Max Weber, The Nature of Social Action, 1922
In his own time, however, Weber was viewed primarily as a historian and an economist.[125][126] The breadth
of Weber's topical interests is apparent in the depth of his social theory:
The affinity between capitalism and Protestantism, the religious origins of the Western world, the
force of charisma in religion as well as in politics, the all-embracing process of rationalisation and
the bureaucratic price of progress, the role of legitimacy and of violence as the offspring of
leadership, the "disenchantment" of the modern world together with the never-ending power of
religion, the antagonistic relation between intellectualism and eroticism: all these are key concepts
which attest to the enduring fascination of Weber's thinking.
Joachim Radkau, Max Weber: A Biography, 2005[152]
Many of Weber's works famous today were collected, revised and published posthumously. Significant
interpretations of his writings were produced by such sociological luminaries as Talcott Parsons and C. Wright
Mills. Parsons in particular imparted to Weber's works a functionalist, teleological perspective; this personal
interpretation has been criticised for a latent conservatism.[153]
Weber has influenced many later social theorists, such as Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Gyrgy Lukcs
and Jrgen Habermas.[5] Different elements of his thought were emphasised by Carl Schmitt, Joseph
Schumpeter, Ludwig Lachmann, Leo Strauss, Hans Morgenthau, and Raymond Aron.[5] According to Austrian
economist Ludwig von Mises, who had met Weber during his time at the University of Vienna,
The early death of this genius was a great disaster for Germany. Had Weber lived longer, the
German people of today would be able to look to this example of an "Aryan" who would not be
broken by National Socialism.
Ludwig von Mises, 1940[154]
Weber's friend, the psychiatrist and existentialist philosopher Karl Jaspers, described him as "the greatest
German of our era". Weber's untimely death felt to Jaspers "as if the German world had lost its heart".[155] Paul
Tillich, University Professor at Harvard, observed about Weber that he was "perhaps the greatest scholar in
Germany of the nineteenth century". (Paul Tillich, "A History of Christian Thought", 1968, p. 233)
Critical responses to Weber

Weber's explanations are highly specific to the historical periods he analysed.[156] Some academics disagree,
pointing out that, despite the fact that Weber did write in the early twentieth century, his ideas remain alive and
relevant for understanding issues like politics, bureaucracy, and social stratification today.[157]
Many scholars, however, have disagreed with specific claims Weber makes in his historical analysis. For
example, the economist Joseph Schumpeter argued that capitalism did not begin with the Industrial Revolution
but in 14th century Italy.[158] In Milan, Venice and Florence, the small city-state governments led to the
development of the earliest forms of capitalism.[159] In the 16th century, Antwerp was a commercial centre of
Europe. Also, the predominantly Calvinist country of Scotland did not enjoy the same economic growth as the
Netherlands, England and New England. It has been pointed out that the Netherlands, which had a Calvinist
majority, industrialised much later in the 19th century than predominantly Catholic Belgium, which was one of
the centres of the Industrial Revolution on the European mainland.[160] Emil Kauder expanded Schumpeter's
argument by arguing the hypothesis that Calvinism hurt the development of capitalism by leading to the
development of the labour theory of value.[161]
Works
For an extensive list of Max Weber's works, see Max Weber bibliography.
Weber wrote in German. Original titles printed after his death (1920) are most likely compilations of his
unfinished works (of the Collected Essays form). Many translations are made of parts or sections of various
German originals and the names of the translations often do not reveal what part of German work they contain.
Weber's work is generally quoted according to the critical Max Weber-Gesamtausgabe (https://www.mohr.de/e
n/multi-volume-work/max-weber-gesamtausgabe-323700000) (Collected Works edition), which is published by
Mohr Siebeck in Tbingen.
See also
Interpretations of Weber's liberalism
Instrumental and value-rational action
Robert Michels
Sociology of law
Speeches of Max Weber
Weber and German politics
Werturteilsstreit
References
1. Bellamy, Richard (1992), Liberalism and Modern Society, Polity, p. 165.
2. Bendix, Reinhard; Roth, Guenther (1971), Scholarship and Partisanship: Essays on Max Weber (https://b
ooks.google.com/books?id=ottM0fiTnO8C), University of California Press, p. 244,
ISBN 9780520041714.
3. "Deutsche Biographie" (http://www.deutsche-biographie.de/sfz6881.html) (in German). Retrieved
25 September 2014.
4. "Max Weber" (http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/638565/Max-Weber), Encyclopdia
Britannica (online ed.), 20 April 2009.
5. Kim, Sung Ho (24 August 2007). "Max Weber" (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/weber/). Encyclopaedia
of Philosophy. Stanford. Retrieved 17 February 2010.
6. Max Weber; Hans Heinrich Gerth; Bryan S. Turner (7 March 1991). From Max Weber: essays in
sociology (https://books.google.com/books?id=Y_pqZS5q72UC&pg=PR1). Psychology Press. p. 1.
ISBN 978-0-415-06056-1. Retrieved 22 March 2011.
7. Radkau, Joachim and Patrick Camiller (2009). Max Weber: A Biography. Trans. Patrick Camiller. Polity
Press. ISBN 978-0-74564147-8.
8. Giddens, Anthony (1971). Capitalism and Modern Social Theory: an Analysis of the Writings of Marx,
Durkheim and Max Weber. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-52109785-1.
9. Auguste Comte, Marx and Weber: Benton, Ted (1977). Philosophical Foundations of the Three
Sociologies. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. ISBN 0-71008593-1.
10. Tiryakian, Edward A. (2009). For Durkheim: Essays in Historical and Cultural Sociology. Routledge.
p. 321. ISBN 0-75467155-0.
11. Habermas, Jrgen, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (originally published in German in 1985),
Polity Press (1990), ISBN 0-7456-0830-2, p. 2.
12. Macionis, John J. (2012). Sociology (14th ed.). Boston: Pearson. p. 88. ISBN 978-0-205-11671-3.
13. Weber, Max The Protestant Ethic and "The Spirit of Capitalism" (1905). Transl. by Stephen Kalberg
(2002), Roxbury Publ. Co., pp. 19, 35; Weber's references on these pages to "Superstructure" and "base"
are unambiguous references to Marxism's base/superstructure theory.
14. "Max Weber", Sociology, 250, September 1999.
15. Sica, Alan (2004). Max Weber and the New Century. London: Transaction Publishers, p. 24. ISBN 0-
7658-0190-6.
16. Craig J. Calhoun (2002). Classical sociological theory (https://books.google.com/books?id=6mq-H3EcU
x8C&pg=PA165). Wiley-Blackwell. p. 165. ISBN 978-0-631-21348-2. Retrieved 19 March 2011.
17. Dirk Ksler (1988). Max Weber: an introduction to his life and work (https://books.google.com/books?id
=v915AC-dflsC&pg=PA2). University of Chicago Press. p. 2. ISBN 978-0-226-42560-3. Retrieved
24 March 2011.
18. McKinnon, AM (2010), "Elective affinities of the Protestant ethic: Weber and the chemistry of
capitalism" (http://aura.abdn.ac.uk/bitstream/2164/3035/1/McKinnon_Elective_Affinities_final_non_for
mat.pdf) (PDF), Sociological Theory, ABDN, 28 (1): 10826, doi:10.1111/j.1467-9558.2009.01367.x (htt
ps://doi.org/10.1111%2Fj.1467-9558.2009.01367.x).
19. George Ritzer (29 September 2009). Contemporary Sociological Theory and Its Classical Roots: The
Basics (https://books.google.com/books?id=pX6pPwAACAAJ). McGraw-Hill. p. 32. ISBN 978-0-07-
340438-7. Retrieved 22 March 2011.
20. Lutz Kaelber Max Weber's Personal Life, 18861893 (http://www.uvm.edu/~lkaelber/research/weber2.ht
ml)
21. Bendix, Reinhard (1 July 1977). Max Weber: An Intellectual Portrait (https://books.google.com/?id=63s
C9uaYqQsC&pg=PA1&lpg=PA1). University of California Press. p. 1. ISBN 0-520-03194-6.
22. Allan, Kenneth D. (2 November 2005). Explorations in Classical Sociological Theory: Seeing the Social
World. Pine Forge Press. p. 146. ISBN 978-1-4129-0572-5.
23. Weber, Max. Political Writings. Cambridge University Press, 1994, p. ix.
24. Lutz Kaelber, Max Weber's Dissertation (http://www.uvm.edu/~lkaelber/research/weber1.html)
25. Bendix (1977). Max Weber (https://books.google.com/?id=63sC9uaYqQsC&pg=PA2&lpg=PA2). p. 2.
ISBN 978-0-520-03194-4.
26. Ludwig M. Lachmann (1970). The legacy of Max Weber (https://books.google.com/books?id=pxAlydwrv

cAC&pg=PA143). Ludwig von Mises Institute. p. 143. ISBN 978-1-61016-072-8. Retrieved 22 March
2011.
27. Gianfranco Poggi (2006). Weber: a short introduction (https://books.google.com/books?id=c5a2LWRh7u
EC&pg=PA5). Polity. p. 5. ISBN 978-0-7456-3489-0. Retrieved 22 March 2011.
28. Wolfgang Justin Mommsen (1984). Max Weber and German Politics, 18901920. University of Chicago
Press. p. 19. ISBN 0-226-53399-9.
29. Wolfgang J. Mommsen; Michael Steinberg (25 July 1990). Max Weber and German Politics, 18901920
(https://books.google.com/books?id=a99RC3rJoIgC&pg=PA54). University of Chicago Press. pp. 5456.
30. Eric J. Hobsbawm (1987). The age of empire, 18751914 (https://books.google.com/books?id=Xc4NAQ
AAMAAJ). Pantheon Books. p. 152. ISBN 978-0-394-56319-0. Retrieved 22 March 2011.
31. Weber, Max. Political Writings. University of Cambridge Press, 1994. pp. 128.
32. Marianne Weber (https://web.archive.org/web/20020620111309/http://www.webster.edu/~woolflm/webe
r.html). Last accessed on 18 September 2006. Based on Lengermann, P.; Niebrugge-Brantley, J. (1998).
The Women Founders: Sociology and Social Theory, 18301930. Boston: McGraw-Hill. ISBN 0-07-
037169-5.
33. Hartmut Lehmann; Guenther Roth (29 September 1995). Weber's Protestant Ethic: Origins, Evidence,
Contexts (https://books.google.com/books?id=HF3jdg0peNYC&pg=PA95). Cambridge University Press.
p. 95. ISBN 978-0-521-55829-7. Retrieved 24 March 2011.
34. Paul Honigsheim; Alan Sica (2003). The unknown Max Weber (https://books.google.com/books?id=YoH
SBnN9DY4C&pg=PA86). Transaction Publishers. p. 86. ISBN 978-0-7658-0953-7. Retrieved 24 March
2011.
36. Max Weber; Richard Swedberg (1999). Essays in economic sociology (https://books.google.com/books?i
d=WaV7Q35jy_AC&pg=PA7). Princeton University Press. p. 7. ISBN 978-0-691-00906-3. Retrieved
22 March 2011.
37. "Why Work? The New Yorker" (http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/11/29/041129crbo_books).
newyorker.com. Retrieved 25 September 2014.
38. Bendix (1977). Max Weber (https://books.google.com/?id=63sC9uaYqQsC&pg=PA3&lpg=PA2). p. 3.
ISBN 978-0-520-03194-4.
39. Roth, Guenther (1979). "History and Sociology in the Work of Max Weber". British Journal of
Sociology. 27 (3): 306318. JSTOR 589618 (https://www.jstor.org/stable/589618).
40. Max Weber; Richard Swedberg (1999). Essays in economic sociology (https://books.google.com/books?i
d=WaV7Q35jy_AC&pg=PA22). Princeton University Press. p. 22. ISBN 978-0-691-00906-3. Retrieved
22 March 2011.
41. Iannaccone, Laurence (1998). "Introduction to the Economics of Religion". Journal of Economic
Literature. 36 (3): 14651496. JSTOR 2564806 (https://www.jstor.org/stable/2564806).
42. Michael Wise, "Max Weber Visits America: A Review of the Video," Sociation Today, volume 4, number
2, Fall 2006.
43. Wolfgang J. Mommsen, The Political and Social Theory of Max Weber, University of Chicago Press,
1992, ISBN 0-226-53400-6, Google Print, p. 81 (https://books.google.com/books?vid=ISBN0226534006
&id=kgF9bjMoocYC&pg=PA81&lpg=PA81&dq=Weber+1912+socialist&sig=AeL6fb399L7S_Mg0xvw
igRHnZsQ) p. 60, (https://books.google.com/books?vid=ISBN0226533999&id=fcNJc-p2bjwC&pg=PA6
0&lpg=PA60&vq=Poland&dq=Max+Weber+hospital&sig=l3OeQlt7f9ePLosslRvI8gNY87Q) p. 327 (htt
ps://books.google.com/books?vid=ISBN0226533999&id=fcNJc-p2bjwC&pg=PA327&lpg=PA327&dq=
Weber+Munich+left+1919&sig=kdzDUJ3wQb6DDhBiKmypM6S-XcY)
44. Kaesler, Dirk (1989). Max Weber: An Introduction to His Life and Work. University of Chicago Press, p.
18. (https://books.google.com/books?vid=ISBN0226425606&id=shR9fsW9W8oC&pg=PA18&lpg=PA1
8&dq=Max+Weber+hospital&sig=38uV8JO6Z_TpXVF_FnjO9HdY3KE) ISBN 0-226-42560-6
45. Gerth, H.H; Mills, C. Wright (1948), From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, London: Routledge,
ISBN 0-415-17503-8.
46. Sven Eliaeson, "Constitutional Caesarism: Weber's Politics in their German Context", in Turner, Stephen
(ed) (2000). The Cambridge Companion to Weber. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 142. (http
s://books.google.com/books?vid=ISBN052156753X&id=XfGZ3ivPR4cC&pg=PA142)
47. P. G. C. van Schie; Gerrit Voermann (2006). The dividing line between success and failure: a comparison
of liberalism in the Netherlands and Germany in the 19th and 20th centuries (https://books.google.com/b
ooks?id=PWFMt03C6h0C&pg=PA64). LIT Verlag Mnster. p. 64. ISBN 978-3-8258-7668-5. Retrieved
22 March 2011.
48. Radkau, Joachim (2009), Max Weber, A Biography, New York: Polity Press, p. 209.
49. Waters & Waters 2015, p. 20.
50. Waters & Waters 2015, pp. 21, 196.
51. Jeong Chun Hai @Ibrahim, & Nor Fadzlina Nawi. (2012). Principles of Public Administration:
Malaysian Perspectives. Kuala Lumpur: Pearson Publishers. ISBN 978-967-349-233-6
52. Weber 2015:76, in Weber's Rationalism and Modern Society, Edited and Translated by Tony Waters and
Dagmar Waters, New York: Palgrave Macmillan
53. Weber 2015:76 in Weber's Rationalism and Modern Society, Edited and Translated by Tony Waters and
Dagmar Waters, New York: Palgrave Macmillan
54. Weber 2015:7677 in Weber's Rationalism and Modern Society, Edited and Translated by Tony Waters
and Dagmar Waters, New York: Palgrave Macmillan
55. James W. Fesler. (1965). "Bureaucratic Phenomena". Administrative Science Quarterly, Volume 10,
September 1965, p. 163.
56. Frisby, David (2002). Georg Simmel. Key Sociologists (Second ed.). London: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-
28535-6.
57. Weber, Max. Political Writings. Cambridge University Press, 1994, p. 288.
58. H. H. Gerth and C. W. Mills, "A Biographical View" (https://books.google.com/books?id=Y_pqZS5q72
UC&pg=PA25) in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology.
59. Mittleman, Alan (1999). "Leo Strauss and Relativism: the Critique of Max Weber". Religion. 29: 1527.
doi:10.1006/reli.1999.0176 (https://doi.org/10.1006%2Freli.1999.0176).
60. Richard Swedberg, "Max Weber as an Economist and as a Sociologist: Towards a Fuller Understanding
of Weber's View of Economics Critical Essay (http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0254/is_4_58/ai_
58496750/) Archived (https://web.archive.org/web/20110430173530/http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi
_m0254/is_4_58/ai_58496750/) 30 April 2011 at the Wayback Machine.", American Journal of
Economics and Sociology, (1999).
61. "Methodological individualism", (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/methodological-individualism/)
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved 30 January 2010
64. Robert B. Denhardt (2 March 2010). Theories of Public Organization (https://books.google.com/books?i
d=0mt5MF9EBJgC&pg=PA27). Cengage Learning. p. 27. ISBN 978-1-4390-8623-0. Retrieved 14 April
2011.
66. Max Weber, Sociological Writings (http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/webe
r.htm), Excerpts
68. Quoted in Roth, Guenther and Claus Wittich. 1978. Economy and Society: an outline of interpretive
sociology. University of California Press, Google Print, p. xxxiii (https://books.google.com/books?hl=en
&lr=&id=pSdaNuIaUUEC&oi=fnd&pg=PR25&dq=Economy+Society+Weber&ots=Up5aqLGHvp&sig
=J6WB3OKaxTo2kpBXzjeFvnp9xNs#PPR33,M1)
73. Basit Bilal Koshul (2005). The postmodern significance of Max Weber's legacy: disenchanting
disenchantment (https://books.google.com/books?id=BZwEI-o3PCIC&pg=PA11). Macmillan. p. 11.
74. Bendix (1977). Max Weber (https://books.google.com/?id=63sC9uaYqQsC&pg=PA60&lpg=PA60&vq=
Calvinism). pp. 6061. ISBN 978-0-520-03194-4.
76. Andrew J. Weigert (July 1991). Mixed emotions: certain steps toward understanding ambivalence (http
s://books.google.com/books?id=uH0srBp2W4YC&pg=PA110). SUNY Press. p. 110. ISBN 978-0-7914-
Basics (https://books.google.com/books?id=pX6pPwAACAAJ). McGraw-Hill. pp. 3842. ISBN 978-0-
07-340438-7. Retrieved 22 March 2011.
World. Pine Forge Press. pp. 151152. ISBN 978-1-4129-0572-5.
80. Bendix (1977). Max Weber (https://books.google.com/?id=63sC9uaYqQsC&pg=PA285&lpg=PA285).
p. 285. ISBN 978-0-520-03194-4.
81. Bendix (1977). "IX: Basic Concepts of Political Sociology". Max Weber (https://books.google.com/?id=6
3sC9uaYqQsC&pg=PA285&lpg=PA285). ISBN 978-0-520-03194-4.
07-340438-7. Retrieved 22 March 2011.
86. Weber The Protestant Ethic..., pp. 1516
87. Bendix (1977). Max Weber (https://books.google.com/?id=63sC9uaYqQsC&pg=PA57&lpg=PA57&vq=
mundane+affairs). p. 57. ISBN 978-0-520-03194-4.
88. Bendix. Max Weber. p. 54.
07-340438-7. Retrieved 22 March 2011.
p. 49. ISBN 978-0-520-03194-4.
91. Richard Swedberg; Ola Agevall (2005). The Max Weber dictionary: key words and central concepts (http
s://books.google.com/books?id=_c3Mcnh8hCgC&pg=PA310). Stanford University Press. p. 310.
92. Max Weber, The Religion of China, New York: Free Press, 1968.
pp. 9899. ISBN 978-0-520-03194-4.
pp. 135141. ISBN 978-0-520-03194-4.
pp. 142158. ISBN 978-0-520-03194-4.
p. 199. ISBN 978-0-520-03194-4.
97. Reinhard Bendix (1977). Max Weber: an intellectual portrait (https://books.google.com/books?id=65IUL
-VaFGsC&pg=PA90). University of California Press. p. 90. ISBN 978-0-520-03194-4. Retrieved 5 April
2011.
pp. 200201. ISBN 978-0-520-03194-4.
pp. 204205. ISBN 978-0-520-03194-4.
100. Plye, Davidson, Ralph, James. "Stratification" (http://hirr.hartsem.edu/ency/stratification.htm).

Encyclopedia of Religion and Society. Retrieved 27 May 2012.
101. Christiano, Swatos, Kivisto, Kevin, William, Peter (2008). Sociology of Religion. New York: Rowman &
Littlefield Publishers Inc. p. 7. ISBN 9780742561113.
104. Weber, Max (1919/2015) "Politics as Vocation" in Weber's Rationalism and Modern Society,edited and
translated by Tony Waters and Dagmar Waters, pp. 129198
105. Daniel Warner (1991). An ethic of responsibility in international relations (https://books.google.com/boo
ks?id=jNc4mc_MYdIC&pg=PA9). Lynne Rienner Publishers. pp. 910. ISBN 978-1-55587-266-3.
Retrieved 5 April 2011.
106. Phelps, Martha Lizabeth (December 2014). "Doppelgangers of the State: Private Security and
Transferable Legitimacy" (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/polp.12100/abstract). Politics &
Policy. 42 (6): 824849. doi:10.1111/polp.12100 (https://doi.org/10.1111%2Fpolp.12100).
107. Randal Marlin (2002). Propaganda and the ethics of persuasion (https://books.google.com/books?id=Zp
38Ot2g7LEC&pg=PA155). Broadview Press. p. 155. ISBN 978-1-55111-376-0. Retrieved 5 April 2011.
108. Politik als Beruf Gesinnungsethik vs. Verantwortungsethik (1919) (http://www.textlog.de/2296.html)
109. pp. 135136 in "Politics as Vocation" by Max Weber in Weber's Rationalism and Modern Society, edited
and translated by Tony Waters and Dagmar Waters. New York: Palgrave MacMillan 21919/2015
110. Wolfgang J. Mommsen (1992). The Political and Social Theory of Max Weber: Collected Essays (https://
books.google.com/books?id=kgF9bjMoocYC&pg=PA46). University of Chicago Press. p. 46. ISBN 978-
0-226-53400-8. Retrieved 22 March 2011.
p. 296. ISBN 978-0-520-03194-4.
112. Bendix (November 1998). Max Weber (https://books.google.com/?id=C_j_2nOUIpcC&pg=PA303&lpg=
PA303). pp. 303305. ISBN 978-0-415-17453-4.
s://books.google.com/books?id=_c3Mcnh8hCgC&pg=PA19). Stanford University Press. pp. 1821.
114. Marshall Sashkin; Molly G. Sashkin (28 January 2003). Leadership that matters: the critical factors for
making a difference in people's lives and organisations' success (https://books.google.com/books?id=q12
zbgs-jyYC&pg=PA52). Berrett-Koehler Publishers. p. 52. ISBN 978-1-57675-193-0. Retrieved 22 March
2011.
115. Liesbet Hooghe (2001). The European Commission and the integration of Europe: images of governance
(https://books.google.com/books?id=e15KnRiGipYC&pg=PA40). Cambridge University Press. p. 40.
117. George Ritzer, Enchanting a Disenchanted World: Revolutionizing the Means of Consumption, Pine
Forge Press, 2004, ISBN 0-7619-8819-X, Google Print, p. 55 (https://books.google.com/books?vid=ISB
N076198819X&id=DznT_TbfKzMC&pg=PA55&lpg=PA55&dq=rationalization+%22iron+cage%22+%
22polar+night+of+icy+darkness%22&sig=T4GVWJHDLYKbPVBg7lXN5KJFSb4)
pp. 8587. ISBN 978-0-520-03194-4.
119. Max Weber, "The Distribution of Power Within the Gemeinschaft: Classes, Staende, Parties" pp. 5972
in Weber's Rationalism and Modern Society, edited and translated by Tony Waters and Dagmar Waters.
120. Waters, Tony (2016). "Are the terms "socio-economic status" and "class status" a warped form of
reasoning for Max Weber? Palgrave Communications. http://www.palgrave-
journals.com/articles/palcomms20162
121. Quoted in Bendix, Reinhard (1 July 1977). Max Weber: An Intellectual Portrait (https://books.google.co
m/?id=63sC9uaYqQsC&pg=PA1&lpg=PA79). University of California Press. p. 79. ISBN 0-520-03194-
6.
s://books.google.com/books?id=_c3Mcnh8hCgC&pg=PA283). Stanford University Press. p. 283.
ISBN 978-0-8047-5095-0. Retrieved 30 October 2011.
ISBN 978-0-8047-5095-0. Retrieved 30 October 2011.
124. M. Weber, "Science as a Vocation (https://web.archive.org/web/20000708094747/http://www.ne.jp/asahi/
moriyuki/abukuma/weber/lecture/science_frame.html)", lecture given in 1918 at Munich University
125. William Petersen, Against the Stream, Transaction Publishers, ISBN 0-7658-0222-8, 2004, Google Print,
p. 24 (https://books.google.com/books?vid=ISBN0765802228&id=FHlTJ6HbY50C&pg=PA29&lpg=PA
29&dq=weber+founder+of+sociology&sig=zxYCUTaFFvrlqcIX4guqG8pPyfU)
126. Peter R. Baehr, Founders Classics Canons, Transaction Publishers, 2002, ISBN 0-7658-0129-9, Google
Print, p. 22 (https://books.google.com/books?vid=ISBN0765801299&id=iRrnCPe66PYC&pg=PA22&lp
g=PA22&dq=weber+founder+of+sociology&sig=2j-I_jptUjtqaKbiCjJpQgt0ohM)
127. Max Weber, 18641920 (https://web.archive.org/web/20110411170016/http://www.newschool.edu/nssr/h
et/profiles/weber.htm), New School for Social Research
128. "The German Historical School" (http://homepage.newschool.edu/~het/schools/historic.htm), New
School for Social Research
129. Skoll, G. R., & Korstanje, M. E. (2012). Risks, totems, and fetishes in Marx and Freud. Sincrona, (2),
1127.
130. Skoll, G. R.; Korstanje, M. E. (2013). "Constructing an American fear culture from red scares to
terrorism". International Journal of Human Rights and Constitutional Studies. 1 (4): 341364.
doi:10.1504/ijhrcs.2013.057302 (https://doi.org/10.1504%2Fijhrcs.2013.057302).
131. Korstanje, M. E. (2014). Why Risk-Research is More Prominent in English Speaking Countries in the
Digital Society. International Journal of Cyber Warfare and Terrorism (IJCWT), 4(1), 818.
132. Korstanje M. (2015) A Difficult World: examining the roots of Capitalism. New York, Nova Science
Publishers.
133. Schweitzer, Arthur (1975). "Frank Knight's Social Economics". History of Political Economics. 7 (3):
279292. doi:10.1215/00182702-7-3-279 (https://doi.org/10.1215%2F00182702-7-3-279).
134. Stigler, George (1950). "The Development of Utility Theory. Ii". The Journal of Political Economy. 58
(5): 373. JSTOR 1825710 (https://www.jstor.org/stable/1825710). doi:10.1086/256980 (https://doi.org/1
0.1086%2F256980).
135. Mass, Harro (2009). "Disciplining Boundaries: Lionel Robbins, Max Weber, and the Borderlands of
Economics, History, and Psychology" (http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=o
nline&aid=6773500). Journal of the History of Economic Thought. 31: 500.
136. Weber, Max. Selections in Translation. Trans. Eric Matthews. Ed. W. G. Runciman. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press. "Urbanisation and Social Structure in the Ancient World", pp. 290314.
137. Ross B. Emmett (2005). Frank Knight and the Chicago School in American Economics (https://books.go
ogle.com/books?id=h0iLWOEln-EC&pg=PA111). Routledge. pp. 111123. ISBN 9780415775007.
Retrieved 1 April 2011.
139. Keith Tribe (1995). Strategies of Economic Order: German Economic Discourse, 17501950 (https://boo
ks.google.com/books?id=Y3Z4V9A8LzoC&pg=PA140). Cambridge University Press. pp. 140168.
140. Jordi Cat, "Political Economy: Theory, Practice, and Philosophical Consequences" (http://plato.stanford.e
du/entries/neurath/political-economy.html), supplement to "Otto Neurath", Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy (Fall 2010 Edition).
141. Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology (https://books.google.com/book
s?id=pSdaNuIaUUEC), Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich, eds. (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1978), vol. I, ch. 2., sec. 12, pp. 10003.
142. Jrg Guido Hlsmann (1995). Mises: The Last Knight of Liberalism (https://mises.org/books/lastknight.p
df) (PDF). Ludwig von Mises Institute. pp. 392396. ISBN 1-933550-18-X. Retrieved 30 March 2011.
143. F. A. Hayek, Introduction (https://mises.org/books/memoirs_mises.pdf) to Mises's Memoirs, pp. xvixvii
(1977).
144. "Between Mises and Keynes: An Interview with Gottfried von Haberler (19001995), The Austrian
Economics Newsletter, 20 (1), 2000. Mises.org (https://mises.org/journals/aen/aen20_1_1.asp)
145. Friedrich Hayek, "Socialist Calculation (https://mises.org/daily/4590/media.aspx?action=author&ID=42
5)", in Individualism and Economic Order, (University of Chicago Press, 1948).
146. Interview (http://vimeo.com/4063439) with F. A. Hayek, 1985
147. Press release (http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/1974/press.html), Nobel Memorial

Prize in Economics for 1974.
148. John K. Rhoads, Critical Issues in Social Theory, Penn State Press, 1991, ISBN 0-271-00753-2, Google
Print, p. 40 (https://books.google.com/books?vid=ISBN0271007532&id=XVhOtKF3fKsC&pg=PA40&l
pg=PA40&dq=Weber+antipositivist&sig=ZLl08PAGOCL2Z-B-aEn9zhhldfI)
149. Joan Ferrante, Sociology: A Global Perspective, Thomson Wadsworth, 2005, ISBN 0-495-00561-4,
Google Print, p. 21 (https://books.google.com/books?vid=ISBN0495005614&id=Idjxdi1IlFAC&pg=PA2
1&lpg=PA21&dq=Weber+Traditional+affectional+value+rational+instrumental&sig=Ib8EP0Ze_EPQgij
7ns6lUSbNs2U)
151. Weber, Max The Nature of Social Action, in Runciman, W.G., Weber: Selections in Translation,
Cambridge University Press, 1991. p. 7.
152. Radkau, Joachim Max Weber: A Biography. 1995. Polity Press. (Inside sleeve)
153. Fish, Jonathan S. 2005. Defending the Durkheimian Tradition. Religion, Emotion and Morality
Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing.
154. Ludwig von Mises, Memoirs (https://mises.org/books/memoirs_mises.pdf), (Mises Institute, Auburn, AL,
2009), p. 88.
155. Quoted in Peter Baehr, "The Grammar of Prudence: Arendt, Jaspers and the Appraisal of Max Weber (htt
ps://books.google.com/books?id=uN__U6VdHEgC&pg=PA410)", in Hannah Arendt in Jerusalem,
edited by Steven E. Aschheim (University of California Press, 2001), p. 410.
157. Waters & Waters 2015, pp. 118.
158. Schumpeter, Joseph (1954). History of Economic Analysis. Oxford University Press.
159. Rothbard, Murray N. (1995). Economic Thought Before Adam Smith. Ludwig von Mises Press. p. 142.
160. Evans, Eric J. (1983). The Forging of the Modern State: Early Industrial Britain, 17831870. Longman.
p. 114. ISBN 0-582-48969-5.
161. Kauder, Emil (1953). "The Retarded Acceptance of the Marginal Utility Theory". Quarterly Journal of
Economics. 67 (4): 56475. JSTOR 1883602 (https://www.jstor.org/stable/1883602).
doi:10.2307/1883602 (https://doi.org/10.2307%2F1883602).
Sources
Waters, Tony; Waters, Dagmar (2015), Weber's Rationalism and Modern Society, New York: Palgrave-
Macmillan.[1] (https://www.academia.edu/12107148/Webers_Rationalism_and_Modern_Society_New_
Translations_on_Politics_Bureaucracy_and_Social_Stratification)
Further reading
Ankerl, Guy (1972). Sociologues allemands. Avec le dictionnaire de "l'Ethique protestante et l'esprit du
capitalisme" de Max Weber (in French). Neuchtel: A la Baconnire.
Bruun, Hans Henrik (2007). Science, values, and politics in Max Weber's methodology (https://www.ama
zon.com/gp/reader/0754645290). Rethinking classical sociology. Aldershot, Ashgate. p. 298.
Green, Robert, ed. (1959). Problems in European Civilization, Protestantism and Capitalism: The Weber
Thesis and Its Critics. Boston: Heath.
Haidenko, Piama; trans. H. Campbell Creighton (1989). "The Sociology of Max Weber". In Kon, Igor. A
History of Classical Sociology (https://web.archive.org/web/20110514104128/http://su-ltd.mylivepage.r
u/file/2715/6547_Kon_History_of_Classical_Sociology.zip). Moscow: Progress Publishers. pp. 255311.
ISBN 5-01-001102-6. Archived from the original (http://su-ltd.mylivepage.ru/file/2715/6547_Kon_Histo
ry_of_Classical_Sociology.zip) (DOC, DjVu) on 2011-05-14.
Kemple, Thomas (2014). Intellectual work and the spirit of capitalism : Weber's calling (https://books.go
ogle.com/?id=-VvvngEACAAJ). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 9781137377135.
Kolko, Gabriel (1959). "A Critique of Max Weber's Philosophy of History" (https://web.archive.org/web/
20130530204109/http://www.scribd.com/doc/93720222/Kolko-A-Critique-of-Max-Weber-s-Philosophy-
of-History). Ethics. 70 (1): 2136. JSTOR 2379612 (https://www.jstor.org/stable/2379612).
doi:10.1086/291239 (https://doi.org/10.1086%2F291239). Archived from the original (https://www.scrib

d.com/doc/93720222/Kolko-A-Critique-of-Max-Weber-s-Philosophy-of-History) on 2013-05-30.
Korotayev, Andrey; Malkov, A.; Khaltourina, D. (2006). "Chapter 6: Reconsidering Weber: Literacy and
"the Spirit of Capitalism" ". Introduction to Social Macrodynamics (https://web.archive.org/web/2016123
0000000/https://books.google.com/?id=tyoryrjrzUMC&printsec=frontcover&dq=ISBN5484004144).
Moscow: URSS. ISBN 5-484-00414-4. Archived from the original (https://books.google.com/?id=tyoryrj
rzUMC&printsec=frontcover&dq=ISBN5484004144#v=onepage&q&f=false) (Google Books) on 30
December 2016.
Marra, Realino (1992), Dalla comunit al diritto moderno. La formazione giuridica di Max Weber. 1882
1889, Giappichelli, Torino
Marra, Realino (1995), La libert degli ultimi uomini. Studi sul pensiero giuridico e politico di Max
Weber, Giappichelli, Torino
Marra, Realino (2002), Capitalismo e anticapitalismo in Max Weber. Storia di Roma e sociologia del
diritto nella genesi dell'opera weberiana, il Mulino, Bologna
Mitzman, Arthur (1985) [1970]. The Iron Cage: An Historical Interpretation of Max Weber. New
Brunswick NJ: Transaction Books. ISBN 0-87855-984-1.
Quensel, Bernhard K. (2007), Max Webers Konstruktionslogik. Sozialkonomik zwischen Geschichte und
Theorie, Nomos, ISBN 978-3-8329-2517-8 [Revisiting Weber's concept of sociology against the
background of his juristic and economic provenance within the framework of "social economics"]
Radkau, Joachim (2009) [2005]. Max Weber: a Biography (https://books.google.com/books?id=dqzZAA
AAMAAJ). trans. Camiller. Cambridge: Polity. ISBN 978-0-7456-4147-8. [The most important work on
Weber's life and torments since the biography by Marianne Weber]
Rheinstein, Max; Shils, Edward (1954). Max Weber on Law in Economy and Society. Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard U.P. ISBN 978-0-674-55651-5. [Translation, with long introduction, of Weber's main writings
on law]
Ritzer, George, ed. (1996). "Sociological Theory". Max Weber (fourth ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill.
ISBN 0-07-114660-1.
Roth, Guenther (2001), Max Webers deutsch-englische Familiengeschichte, J. C. B. Mohr (Paul
Siebeck), ISBN 3-16-147557-7
Korstanje Maximiliano (2015) A Difficult World: examining the roots of capitalism. New York, Nova
Science Publishers.
Lawrence A. Scaff: Max Weber in America, Princeton University Press, Princeton/Oxford, England 2011
ISBN 978-0-691-14779-6
Stapelfeldt, Gerhard (2004). Kritik der konomischen Rationalitt (in German).
Swatos, William H., ed. (1990). Time, Place, and Circumstance: Neo-Weberian Studies in Comparative
Religious History. New York: Greenwood Press. ISBN 0-313-26892-4.
Swedberg, Richard (1998). Max Weber and the Idea of Economic Sociology. Princeton: Princeton
University Press. ISBN 0-691-07013-X.
Swedberg, Richard (October 1999). "Max Weber as an Economist and as a Sociologist" (http://articles.fin
darticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0254/is_4_58/ai_58496750). American Journal of Economics and
Sociology. 58 (4): 561582. doi:10.1111/j.1536-7150.1999.tb03385.x (https://doi.org/10.1111%2Fj.1536-
7150.1999.tb03385.x).
Weber, Marianne (1988) [1926]. Max Weber: a Biography. trans. Harry Zohn. New Brunswick:
Transaction Books. ISBN 0-471-92333-8.
Weber, Marianne (1926). Max Weber. Ein Lebensbild (in German) (https://books.google.com/books?id=
ADKgjgEACAAJ). Mohr.
Weber, Marianne (1975). Max Weber (https://books.google.com/books?id=2G26AAAAIAAJ). Wiley.
ISBN 978-0-471-92333-6.
External links
Texts of his works
Works by or about Max Weber (https://archive.org/search.php?query=%28%28subject%3A%22Weber%

2C%20Max%22%20OR%20subject%3A%22Max%20Weber%22%20OR%20creator%3A%22Weber%2
C%20Max%22%20OR%20creator%3A%22Max%20Weber%22%20OR%20creator%3A%22Weber%2
C%20M%2E%22%20OR%20title%3A%22Max%20Weber%22%20OR%20description%3A%22Webe
r%2C%20Max%22%20OR%20description%3A%22Max%20Weber%22%29%20OR%20%28%221864-
1920%22%20AND%20Weber%29%29%20AND%20%28-mediatype:software%29) at Internet Archive
Works by Max Weber (https://librivox.org/author/663) at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
Large collection of the German original texts (http://www.zeno.org/Soziologie/M/Weber,%20Max)
A collection of English translations (http://www.cpm.ehime-u.ac.jp/AkamacHomePage/Akamac_E-text_
Links/Weber.html)
Max Weber Reference Archive (http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/weber/index.htm)
Max Weber, On Politics (http://www.panarchy.org/weber/politics.html) (1919)
Large collection of the German original texts (https://web.archive.org/web/20020207003432/http://www.
uni-potsdam.de/u/paed/Flitner/Flitner/Weber/index.htm)
A comprehensive collection of English translations and secondary literature (https://web.archive.org/we
b/20060630121301/http://www.sociosite.net/topics/weber.php)
Notes on several of Weber's works, merged into one text file (https://web.archive.org/web/200402101014
59/http://ssr1.uchicago.edu/PRELIMS/Theory/weber.html)
Analysis of his works
Protestant Ethic Thesis by the Swatos' Encyclopedia of Religion and Society (http://hirr.hartsem.edu/enc
y/Protestantism.htm)
Max Weber Studies (http://mws.quotus.org/) journal
McKinnon, AM (2010). "Elective affinities of the Protestant ethic: Weber and the chemistry of
capitalism" (http://aura.abdn.ac.uk/bitstream/2164/3035/1/McKinnon_Elective_Affinities_final_non_for
mat.pdf) (PDF). Sociological Theory. 28 (1): 108126. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9558.2009.01367.x (https://do
i.org/10.1111%2Fj.1467-9558.2009.01367.x).
Other encyclopedic entries
Sung Ho Kim. "Max Weber" (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/weber/). Stanford Encyclopedia of

Philosophy.
Max Weber (18641920) (http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/bios/Weber.html). The Concise
Encyclopedia of Economics. Library of Economics and Liberty (2nd ed.). Liberty Fund. 2008.
SocioSite: Famous Sociologists Max Weber (http://www.sociosite.net/sociologists/weber_max.php)
Information resources on life, academic work and intellectual influence of Max Weber. Editor: dr. Albert
Benschop (University of Amsterdam).
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Max_Weber&oldid=801822404"
This page was last edited on 22 September 2017, at 02:21.

Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may
apply. By using this site, you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Wikipedia is a registered
trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., a non-profit organization.

Max Weber - Wikipedia

Caricato da

Informazioni sul documento

Copyright

Formati disponibili

Condividi questo documento

Condividi o incorpora il documento

Opzioni di condivisione

Hai trovato utile questo documento?

Questo contenuto è inappropriato?

Copyright:

Formati disponibili

Max Weber - Wikipedia

Caricato da

Copyright:

Formati disponibili

9/24/2017 Max Weber - Wikipedia

Maximilian Karl Emil "Max" Weber (German: [maks

Weber's main intellectual concern was understanding

Weber also made a variety of other contributions in Influences Hermann Baumgarten[1]

In 1882 Weber enrolled in the University of Heidelberg as a law student.[21]

Max Weber's thought

Max Weber's bureaucratic model (rational-legal model)

Main principles (characteristics):

methodology.[16] Whereas Durkheim focused on the society, Weber

Sociology, for Max Weber, is:

... a science which attempts the interpretive understanding

Weber was concerned with the question of objectivity and

Max Weber, "Objectivity" in Social Science, 1904[66]

Max Weber, 1909[68]

Jrgen Habermas, Modernity's Consciousness of Time, 1990 [1985][11]

The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

The development of the concept of the calling quickly gave to the

The Religion of China: Confucianism and Taoism

The Religion of India: The Sociology of Hinduism and Buddhism

Economy and Society

Theodicy of fortune and misfortune

Politics and government

1. charismatic domination (familial and religious),

Bureaucratic administration means fundamentally domination through knowledge.

Weber's ideal bureaucracy is characterised by hierarchical organisation, by delineated lines of authority in a

Study of the city

Marginalism and psychophysics

Max Weber, The Nature of Social Action, 1922

Joachim Radkau, Max Weber: A Biography, 2005[152]

Ludwig von Mises, 1940[154]

Critical responses to Weber

26. Ludwig M. Lachmann (1970). The legacy of Max Weber (https://books.google.com/books?id=pxAlydwrv

100. Plye, Davidson, Ralph, James. "Stratification" (http://hirr.hartsem.edu/ency/stratification.htm).

147. Press release (http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/1974/press.html), Nobel Memorial

doi:10.1086/291239 (https://doi.org/10.1086%2F291239). Archived from the original (https://www.scrib

Works by or about Max Weber (https://archive.org/search.php?query=%28%28subject%3A%22Weber%

Analysis of his works

Other encyclopedic entries

Sung Ho Kim. "Max Weber" (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/weber/). Stanford Encyclopedia of

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Max_Weber&oldid=801822404"

This page was last edited on 22 September 2017, at 02:21.

Potrebbero piacerti anche