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German sociologist Max Weber was born in Erfurt, Thuringia, April 21, 1864. He studied history, economics, and philosophy at the University of Heidelberg in preparation for a career in law. However, after receiving his doctorate and briefly practicing law he decided to take up an academic career.

Early in his marriage to Marianne Schnitger, a distant cousin, he took an academic appointment in economics at Freiburg, soon to be followed by his appointment to the professorial chair in political economy at Heidelberg in 1896. In the following year he suffered a psychological breakdown and was unable to resume scholarly work until 1902. Beginning in 1903 he authored several ”methodological” essays. The most important of these was his 1904 ”’Objectivity’ in Social Science and Social Policy,” in which he presented his notion of ”ideal-type” concepts, conceived as instruments for representing the most relevant aspects of a given object (e.g., ”city” or ”capitalism”) for purposes of social-scientific inquiry. Ideal-type concepts are central to Weber’s methodological perspective, which has been variously characterized as methodological individualism, atomism, constructivism, or nominalism.

In addition to the ”objectivity” essay, written to inaugurate his editorship of the social science journal, Archiv fur Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik (Archives for Social Science and Social Policy), Weber published in the same journal in 1904-5 ”The Protestant ethic and the ‘spirit’ of capitalism,” eventually to become his best known work. Over the next few years he wrote further on religious sects in North America, conducted research on the psychophysics of industrial work, and wrote about agrarian conditions in ancient Roman society.

Beginning around 1910 Weber began to identify his academic work and interests with the emerging discipline of sociology while retaining his interests in the historical dimensions of social and cultural phenomena, including the legal, political, economic, and religious spheres. He took an academic appointment at Munich in 1919-20, lecturing on economic history and sociology. He had completed revisions to his ”The Protestant Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism” when he contracted pneumonia and died in Munich on June 14, 1920.

In addition to being claimed as a leading founder of sociology and a major contributor to modern political science, public administration, and political theory, Weber has been recognized for significant contributions to the fields of economic history, historical jurisprudence, the study of ancient civilizations, and the field of the comparative study of religions.

Weber was a historian who became a sociologist, a sociologist who remained an economist, a serious student of ancient society who contributed significantly to the understanding of modern western culture. He was equally captivated by the study of economics and religion, of material and ideal factors, of social structure and individual action. In sociology his contributions are recognized especially in the areas of law, religion, and the economy; in the study of social stratification, political, urban, and rural sociology, and the sociology of culture. In terms of the method and general conception of sociology, Weber insisted that social action is the conceptual foundation of our understanding of societal structures. Insofar as action carries meaning it is intelligible through the use of Verstehen (understanding) in the context of interaction and of sociological observation. As important as action is, Weber gave even more attention to what he called order and to what sociologists later came to view as social structure. Action and structure, for Weber, interact in complex loops, with structure emanating either directly or indirectly as a result of action, yet with subsequent action both enabled and constrained by existing structure. Weber is rightly regarded as the founder of structural sociology (stratification, institutions) as well as the sociology of action.

Weber’s sociology was largely historical and comparative, conceived as a complement to the historical study of economics, politics, and religion. His greatest substantive contributions to sociology came through two great macro-sociological projects of the last decade of his life.

Economy and Society in World-Historical Perspective

Weber’s first major project became known as Economy and Society. Published posthumously, this comprehensive reference work, called by Guenther Roth a kind of ”sociologist’s world history,” represents an achievement of encyclopedic scholarship with a global reach. There he presented a vision of ”interpretive” sociology based on both the understanding and the causal explanation of intelligible human conduct. Weber regarded ”social action,” which is subjectively meaningful to the acting individual and oriented toward other people, as the core of human social life. Any social action has subjective meaning and objective conditions, both important in sociological explanation. Weber’s dualistic conception of social action can be understood as a synthesis of two scholarly traditions: hermeneutics, emphasizing the understanding of meaning, and positivism, focusing on the causal explanation of empirically observable conditions.

Economy and Society includes many abstract typologies, ranging from types of social action and social relationships to organizations, institutional structures, and social stratification. The best known is the threefold typology of political authority or legitimate domination (Herrschaft). Rational-legal authority rests on a belief in the legality of a framework of enacted rules by which rulers are selected and by which they govern. Traditional authority rests on a belief in the time-honored sanctity of traditions. Finally, charismatic authority rests on a belief in the special qualities (charisma or ”gift of grace”) of a person to rule.

Also in Economy and Society Weber elaborated his well-known concept of bureaucracy. He was interested primarily in the role of bureaucracy in modern western societies where he found it to be particularly consonant with the rational-legal type of political domination. All the designated properties of bureaucracy, especially its governance of action by impersonal standards and systematic procedures, its organization of work activities in the name of efficiency, and its codification of rules and records, were consistent with rational-legal domination as opposed to traditional or charismatic rule.

In Weber’s view the development of bureaucratic forms of organization in the modern west was part of a marked trend toward bureaucratization across a broad range of institutions, and as part of a historical process of rationalization, viewed as the extension of various types of rationality. Bureaucracy represents formal, as opposed to substantive, rationality, given the character of bureaucracy as merely an instrument or tool that can serve virtually any set of ends or purposes.

The Comparative Studies of Civilizations: The Economic Ethic of the World Religions

Weber’s second major project was conceived under the rubric of The Economic Ethic of the World Religions. This study focused on each of several ”world religions” including Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism, Hinduism, ancient Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. These were comparative civilizational studies, showing how religion is implicated in all the major spheres of society and culture. The starting point of this comparative-historical project can be traced to his renowned study of the relation of the Protestant ethic to the ”spirit” of modern capitalism, dating from 1904-5.

In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism Weber sought to find the contribution made by Protestant religious beliefs and practices to the development of modern (”rational”) capitalism as found in Western Europe and the USA. Marking this modern form of capitalism as new were especially the emphasis on the systematic organization of work done by laborers hired on a formally free market, and enterprises devoted to the pursuit of increasing profit without the constraints of traditionalism.

Weber found the historical origins of capitalism’s ascetic, yet secular, modern spirit, an ethos prescribing the acquisition of money from one’s occupational activity while abjuring consumption and luxury as waste of time or money, to lie in early Protestantism, especially Calvinism. The central Calvinistic doctrine was the belief in the ”predestination” of one’s soul to ultimate salvation or damnation, a fate that the individual believer could neither know nor change. Individuals were admonished to avoid self-doubt regarding their status as members of ”the elect,” for such doubts could be the devil’s work. The best way to sustain self-assurance of one’s salvation was to work tirelessly in one’s chosen economic vocation.

In Weber’s interpretation the significant result of following such religious counsel was the production of a this-worldly rational asceticism – this-worldly in being visible in the mundane world of work; rational in that the individual took control over one’s actions and life course; ascetic in that self-discipline and avoidance of temptations (idleness, pleasure, materialism) through complete devotion to labor came to dominate one’s everyday life.

According to Weber, this Protestant asceticism nourished the secular spirit of capitalism exemplified by Benjamin Franklin in the late eighteenth century. With this new spirit employers and workers were more likely to dedicate themselves to the program of capitalistic enterprise free of the distractions of the world outside the factory, the workshop, or the firm. To the extent that Calvinism actually had these effects, they were, paradoxically, unintended consequences of the religious doctrines. By the twentieth century, Weber noted, the motivation to work had devolved into a mere compulsion in order to support an ever more prosperous and materialistic lifestyle, a compulsion likened by Weber to a ”steel-hard casing.”

Bibliography:

Kalberg, S. (1994) Max Weber’s Historical-Comparative Sociology. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL.
Weber, M. (1946) From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, trans. and ed. H. H. Gerth and C. W. Mills. Oxford University Press, New York.
Weber, M. (1968) Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, 3 vols., ed. G. Roth & C. Wittich, trans. E. Fischoff, H. H. Gerth, et al. Bedminster Press, New York.
Weber, M. (1988) Max Weber: A Biography, trans. and ed. H. Zohn. Transaction Books, New Brunswick, NJ.
Weber, M. (2009) The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism with Other Writings on the Rise ofthe West, 4th edn., trans. and intro. S. Kalberg. Oxford University Press, New York.