weber

max weber

Max Weber (German: Max Weber, April 21, 1864 - June 14, 1920), male, famous German sociologist, political scientist, economist and philosopher, is one of the most vital and influential thinkers in modern times. Weber studied in Heidelberg University and began his teaching career in Berlin University. He also taught in Vienna University, Munich University and other universities. He had a great influence on German politics at that time. He went to the Versailles conference to negotiate on behalf of Germany, and participated in the drafting and design of the Weimar verfassung constitution. Weber is in the same historical period with Taylor and Fayol, and has made outstanding contributions to the establishment of Western classical management theory. He is recognized as one of the most important founders of classical sociological theory and public administration, and is known as the "father of organization theory" by later generations. His younger brother is Alfred Weber, another famous German economist. His publications include Protestant Ethics and the spirit of capitalism, Chinese Religion: Confucianism and Taoism, Indian Religion: Sociology of Hinduism and Buddhism, and Ancient Judaism.

Personal life

Max Weber was born in Erfurt, Turing, Germany, on April 21, 1864, and soon his family moved to Berlin. His father was a jurist from the family of textile industrialist and wholesaler in Westphalia. He was a well-known local politician. His father's career created a good political atmosphere for the family. In his youth, Weber met many outstanding intellectuals and politicians in his parents' living room, such as Dilthey, Momsen, jubel and tretch K and Kapp et al. In 1882, Weber entered the law department of Heidelberg University. Like his father, Weber chose law as his main field of study, and joined the club his father had joined when he was in college. Besides studying law, young Weber also studied economics, medieval history and theology. In addition, he joined the Bundeswehr in Strasbourg for a short time.

In 1882, he entered Heidelberg University to study law. In 1883, he served in Strasbourg for one year. In the autumn of 1884, Weber returned to his hometown and studied in Berlin University. In the next eight years, Weber stayed in Berlin for further study, except for studying in Gottingen University for one semester and taking short-term military service. Weber lived with his parents. In addition to continuing his studies, Weber also worked as an intern lawyer and finally as a lecturer at the University of Berlin. In 1886, Weber passed the "Referendar" test and became an intern judge. In the late 1880s, Weber continued his study of history. In 1889, he completed a doctoral dissertation entitled "the history of medieval business organizations" and obtained his doctorate in law. Two years later, Weber wrote a book entitled "the history of agriculture in Rome and its importance to public and private law" and completed his qualification test. Weber became an official university professor.

In the year when Weber was about to finish his doctoral dissertation, Weber also began to be interested in social policy at that time. In 1888, he joined a group called "vereinf ü r social politik". Most of the members of this professional group were German economists who belonged to the school of economic history at that time. They regarded economy as the main method to solve a wide range of social problems at that time, and carried out large-scale statistical research on the German economy at that time. In 1890, the alliance set up a special research program to examine the increasingly serious problem of Eastern migration at that time. Weber was in charge of the study and wrote down many of the findings. The final report was well evaluated and widely regarded as an outstanding observational study, thus consolidating Weber's position as an expert in agricultural economics.

In 1893, Weber married a distant cousin, Marianne schnitger, who later became a feminist and writer. The newlyweds moved to Freiburg in 1894, where Weber was employed as a professor of economics at Freiburg University. In 1896, Weber was also employed as a professor of his alma mater Heidelberg University. One year later, Weber's father died. Two months before his death, there happened to be a fierce quarrel between the father and son. The quarrel without reconciliation became Weber's lifelong regret. After that, Weber suffered from insomnia, and his personality became more and more neurotic, which made him more and more incompetent as a professor. His mental condition forced him to reduce the amount of teaching, and in 1899, he left on vacation in the middle of the semester. Weber rested for several months in the summer and autumn of 1900 at the mental health center, then traveled to Italy with his wife at the end of the year, and did not return to Heidelberg until April 1902.

After several years of frequent works in the early 1890s, Weber did not publish any more works from 1898 to the end of 1902, and finally resigned as a professor in the autumn of 1903. After getting rid of the shackles of the school, Weber and his colleague Werner Sombart founded a sociological journal named "sociology and social welfare archives" that year, with Weber as the associate editor. In 1904, Weber began to publish some of his most important articles in this journal, especially a series of papers entitled "Protestant Ethics and the spirit of capitalism", which later became the most famous work of his life, and also laid the foundation for many later studies on the influence of culture and religion on the economic system. This paper is the only one that has been published in his lifetime. It was also that year that Weber traveled to the United States and participated in the social and scientific conference held in St. Louis at that time - one of the conferences related to the World Expo. Although Weber's performance became more and more successful, he still felt that he was no longer competent for the regular teaching work, so he continued to maintain his identity as a private scholar. In 1907, Weber obtained a considerable legacy, which also enabled him to continue to concentrate on his research without worrying about economic problems. In 1912, Weber tried to organize a left-wing political party to combine social democrats and liberals, but failed, mainly because the Liberals at that time were still worried about the revolutionary idea of social democracy.

After the outbreak of the war in 1914, Max Weber joined the army and was responsible for several hospitals in Heidelberg until the end of 1915, during which part of the economic ethics of World Religions (preface and Confucianism and Taoism) was published. In 1916, he went to Brussels, Vienna and Budapest many times to carry out various unofficial secret missions. He tried his best to persuade German leaders to avoid expanding the war. At the same time, he also asserted that Germany was responsible for world politics and that Russia was the main threat.

In 1919, he was employed to teach at the University of Munich, succeeding Professor Brentano. From 1919 to 1920, he taught the history of general economics, which was published in 1924. Weber supported the Republic, but not enthusiastically. He participated in the revolutionary dictatorship of Kurt Eisner in Munich and was a member of the Weimar constitution Drafting Committee.

On June 14, 1920, Weber died in Munich.

(source: Atlas of Max Weber in his youth)

Personal life

Wife: Marianne schnitger, a cousin of Weber's distant relatives;

Brother: Alfred Weber, a famous German economist.

Academic achievements

Max Weber, Karl Marx and Emile Durkheim were listed as the three founders of modern sociology, although he was mainly regarded as a historian and economist at that time. Durkheim followed the way of Comte and studied it with sociological positivism. Weber and his colleague Werner Sombart (also the most famous representative of German Sociology) adopted the anti positivism line. These works started the revolution of anti positivism in the Social Sciences, emphasizing the essential differences between social sciences and natural sciences, because they believed that human social behavior was too complex to use traditional natural sciences We should study it in a new way.

Weber's early works are usually related to industrial sociology, but his most famous contribution is his later research on religious sociology and political sociology. Weber started his research in Protestant Ethics and the spirit of capitalism, in which he showed that some ascetic Protestant sects, especially Calvinists, gradually changed their doctrines to strive for rational economic profits, in order to express their blessing by God. Weber argues that capitalism, supported by this rational doctrinal foundation, will soon grow larger and larger, and will conflict with the original religion, and eventually religion will inevitably be abandoned. Weber continued to study this phenomenon in his later works, especially in his classification of bureaucracy and political authority. In these works, he vaguely points out that the rationalization of society is an inevitable trend.

Sociology of religion

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