Weber, Max

(born April 21, 1864, Erfurt, Prussia—died June 14, 1920, Munich, Ger.) German sociologist and political economist. Son of a wealthy liberal politician and a Calvinist mother, Weber was a compulsively diligent scholar who suffered occasional nervous collapses. Insights derived from his own experience inform his most famous and controversial work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904–05), which examines the relationship between Calvinist (or Puritan) morality, compulsive labour, bureaucracy, and economic success under capitalism (see Protestant ethic). Weber also wrote penetratingly on social phenomena such as charisma and mysticism, which he saw as antithetical to the modern world and its underlying process of rationalization. His efforts helped establish sociology as an academic discipline in Germany, and his work continues to stimulate scholarship. Through his insistence on the need for objectivity and his analysis of human action in terms of motivation, he profoundly influenced sociological theory. His voluminous writings, mostly published posthumously, include Economy and Society (2 vol., 1922–25) and General Economic History (1923).

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