Maximilian Carl Emil Weber (IPA: [maks ˈveːbɐ]) (April 21, 1864 – June 14, 1920) was a German political economist and sociologist who is considered one of the founders of the modern study of sociology and public administration. He began his career at the University of Berlin, and later worked at Freiburg University, University of Heidelberg, University of
Vienna and University of Munich. He was influential in
contemporary German politics, being an advisor to Germany's negotiators at the Treaty of Versailles and to the commission charged with drafting the Weimar Constitution.
His major works deal with rationalisation in sociology of religion and government, but he also
contributed much in the field of economics.[1] His most famous work is his essay The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, which began his
work in the sociology of religion. In this work, Weber argued that religion was one of the
non-exclusive reasons for the different ways the cultures of the Occident and the
Orient have developed, and stressed importance of particular characteristics of
ascetic Protestantism which led to the development of
capitalism, bureaucracy and the rational-legal state in the West. In another major work,
Politics as a Vocation, Weber defined the state as an entity which claims a monopoly on
the legitimate use of physical force, a definition that became pivotal to the study of modern Western political science. His most known contributions are often referred to as the 'Weber Thesis'.
Biography
Weber was born in Erfurt in Thuringia, Germany, the eldest of seven children of Max Weber Sr., a prominent liberal politician and civil servant, and Helene Fallenstein, a moderate Calvinist. [2] Weber Sr.'s engagement with public life immersed the family
home in politics, as his salon received many prominent scholars and public figures.
The young Weber and his brother Alfred, who also became a sociologist and economist,
thrived in this intellectual atmosphere. Max'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".[3] At the age of fourteen, he
wrote letters studded with references to Homer, Virgil,
Cicero, and Livy, and he had an extended knowledge of
Goethe, Spinoza, Kant, and Schopenhauer before he began university studies. It
seemed clear that Weber would pursue advanced studies in the social sciences.
Max Weber and his brothers, Alfred and Karl, in 1879
In 1882 Weber enrolled in the University of Heidelberg as a
law student.[4]
Weber joined his father's duelling fraternity, and chose as his major study Weber Sr.'s field of law. Along with his law
coursework, young Weber attended lectures in economics and studied medieval history and theology. Intermittently, he served with the
German army in Strasbourg.
In the fall of 1884, Weber returned to his parents' home to study at the University of Berlin. For the next eight years of his life, interrupted only by a term at
the University of Goettingen and short periods of further military
training, Weber stayed at his parents' house; first as a student, later as a junior barrister, and finally as a Dozent at the
University of Berlin. 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 history. He earned his law doctorate in 1889 by writing a doctoral dissertation on legal history entitled The History of Medieval Business Organisations.[4] Two years later, Weber completed his
"Habilitationsschrift", The Roman Agrarian History and its Significance
for Public and Private Law.[5]
Having thus become a "Privatdozent", Weber was now qualified to hold a German
professorship.
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
für Socialpolitik",[6] the new professional
association of German economists affiliated with the historical school,
who saw the role of economics primarily as the solving of the wide-ranging social problems of the age, and who pioneered
large-scale statistical studies of economic problems. He also involved himself in politics, joining the left leaning
Evangelical Social Congress.[7] In 1890 the "Verein" established a research program to examine "the Polish question" or
Ostflucht, meaning the influx of foreign farm workers into eastern Germany as local labourers migrated to Germany's rapidly industrialising cities. Weber was put in charge of the study, and wrote a large part of its
results.[6] The final report was widely acclaimed
as an excellent piece of empirical research, and cemented Weber's reputation as an expert in
agrarian economics.
Max Weber and his wife Marianne in 1894
In 1893 he married his distant cousin Marianne Schnitger, later a feminist and author in her own right,[8] who was instrumental in collecting and publishing Weber's journal articles as books after his
death. The couple moved to Freiburg in 1894, where Weber was appointed professor of economics at Freiburg University,[5] before accepting the same position at the University of Heidelberg in 1896.[5] Next year, Max Weber Sr. died, two months after a severe quarrel with his
son that was never resolved.[9] After this,
Weber became increasingly prone to nervousness and insomnia, making it difficult for him to fulfill his duties as a
professor.[5] His condition forced him to
reduce his teaching, and leave his last course in the fall of 1899 unfinished. After spending months in a sanatorium during the
summer and fall of 1900, Weber and his wife traveled to Italy at the end of the year, and did not return to Heidelberg until
April 1902.
After Weber's immense productivity in the early 1890s, he did not publish a single paper between early 1898 and late 1902,
finally resigning his professorship in fall 1903. Freed from those obligations, in that year he accepted a position as associate
editor of the Archives for Social Science and Social
Welfare[10] next to his colleagues
Edgar Jaffé and Werner Sombart.[11] 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. It became his most famous work,[12] and laid the foundations for his later research on the impact of cultures and religions on the development of economic systems.[13] This essay
was the only one of his works that was published as a book during his lifetime. Also that year, he visited United States and participated in the Congress of Arts and Sciences held
in connection with the World's Fair (Louisiana Purchase Exposition) at St. Louis.
Despite his successes, 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.[10] In 1912, Weber tried to organise a left-wing political party to combine social-democrats and
liberals. This attempt was unsuccessful, presumably because many liberals feared social-democratic revolutionary ideals at the
time.[14]
During the First World War, Weber served for a time as director of the army hospitals in
Heidelberg.[15][10] In 1915 and 1916 he sat on commissions that tried to retain German
supremacy in Belgium and Poland after the war. Weber's views on war, as well as on expansion of the German empire, changed
throughout the war.[15][14][16] He became a member of the worker and soldier council of
Heidelberg in 1918. In the same year, Weber became a consultant to the German Armistice
Commission at the Treaty of Versailles and to the commission charged
with drafting the Weimar Constitution.[10] He argued in favour of inserting Article 48 into the Weimar
Constitution.[17] This article was later used by
Adolf Hitler to institute rule by decree, thereby allowing his government to suppress
opposition and obtain dictatorial powers. Weber's contributions to German politics remain a controversial subject to this day.
Weber resumed teaching during this time, first at the University of Vienna, then
in 1919 at the University of Munich.[10] In Munich, he headed the first German university institute of
sociology, but ultimately never held a personal sociology appointment. Weber left politics due to right-wing agitation in 1919
and 1920. Many colleagues and students in Munich argued against him for his speeches and left-wing attitude during the
German Revolution of 1918 and 1919, with some right-wing students holding protests in
front of his home.[14] Max Weber died of
pneumonia in Munich on June 14, 1920.
Achievements
Along with Karl Marx and Émile Durkheim,[18] Weber is regarded as one of the founders of modern
sociology, although in his times he was viewed primarily as a historian and an economist.[18][19] Whereas Durkheim, following Comte, worked in the
positivist tradition, Weber created and worked – like Werner Sombart, his friend and then the most famous representative of German
sociology – in the antipositivist tradition.[20] Those works started the antipositivistic revolution in social sciences, which stressed the difference between the social sciences and natural sciences,[20] especially due to human social actions (which Weber differentiated into traditional,
affectional, value-rational and
instrumental[21]). Weber's early work was related to industrial
sociology, but he is most famous for his later work on the sociology of
religion and sociology of government.
Max Weber began his studies of rationalisation in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, in which he
shows how the aims of certain ascetic Protestant
denominations, particularly Calvinism,[22] shifted towards the rational means of economic
gain as a way of expressing that they had been blessed. The rational roots of this doctrine, he argued, soon grew incompatible
with and larger than the religious, and so the latter were eventually discarded.[23] Weber continues his investigation into this matter in later
works, notably in his studies on bureaucracy and on the classifications of authority. In these works he alludes to an inevitable move towards rationalization.
It should be noted that many of his works famous today were collected, revised, and published posthumously. Significant interpretations of Weber's writings were produced by such sociological luminaries
as Talcott Parsons and C. Wright Mills.
Sociology of religion
Weber's work on the 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 General 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
Psalms, Book of Jacob, Talmudic Jewry, early Christianity and Islam.[24] His
three main themes were the effect of religious ideas on economic activities, the relation between social stratification and religious ideas, and the distinguishable characteristics of Western
civilization.[25]
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 contemporary thinkers who followed the social Darwinist paradigm; Weber
wanted primarily to explain the distinctive elements of the Western
civilization.[25] In the
analysis of his findings, Weber maintained that Calvinist (and more widely, Christian) religious ideas had had a major impact on the social
innovation and development of the economic system of Europe and the United States, 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 of government
administration, and economic enterprise.[25] In the end, the study of the
sociology of religion, according to Weber, merely explored one phase of the freedom from magic, that "disenchantment of the world" that he regarded as an important distinguishing aspect of
Western culture.[25]
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
Weber's essay The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of
Capitalism (Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus) is his most famous work.[12] 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. In The Protestant
Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Weber puts forward the thesis that Calvinist ethic and ideas influenced the development
of capitalism. This theory is often viewed as a reversal of Marx's thesis that the economic
"base" of society determines all other aspects of it. [22] Religious devotion has usually been accompanied by rejection of mundane affairs, including
economic pursuit.[26] Why was that not the
case with Protestantism? Weber addresses that paradox in his essay.
Among the universal tendencies identified by Weber that those individuals had to fight were the desire to profit. After defining
the spirit of capitalism, Weber argues that there are many reasons to look for its origins in the religious ideas of the
Reformation. Many observers like William
Petty, Montesquieu, Henry Thomas Buckle, John Keats, and others have commented on
the affinity between Protestantism and the development of the commercial spirit.[27]
Weber showed that certain types of Protestantism – notably Calvinism – favoured rational pursuit of economic gain and worldly
activities which had been given positive spiritual and moral meaning.[22] It was not the goal of those religious ideas, but rather a byproduct – the inherent logic of
those doctrines and the advice based upon them both directly and indirectly encouraged planning and self-denial in the pursuit of
economic gain. A common illustration is in the cobbler, hunched over his work, who devotes his entire effort to the praise of
God. In addition, the Reformation view "calling" dignified even the mundanest professions as being those that added to the common
good and were blessed by God, as much as any "sacred" calling could. This Reformation view, that all the spheres of life were
sacred when dedicated to God and His purposes of nurturing and furthering life, profoundly affected the view of work.
Weber stated that he abandoned research into Protestantism because his colleague Ernst
Troeltsch, a professional theologian, had initiated work on the book The Social Teachings of the Christian Churches and Sects. Another reason for Weber's decision was that
the essay has provided the perspective for a broad comparison of religion and society, which he continued in his later
works.[28] 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 Japanese, Jews and other non-Christians.
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. Weber focused on those aspects of Chinese society that were different from those of Western Europe and
especially contrasted with Puritanism, and posed a question why capitalism did not develop in
China. In Hundred Schools of Thought Warring States Period, he concentrated on the early period of Chinese history, during which
the major Chinese schools of thoughts (Confucianism and Taoism) came to the fore.[29]
By 200 BC, the Chinese state had developed from a loose federation of feudal states into a unified empire with patrimonal rule, as described in the Warring States Period.[29] As in Europe, Chinese cities had been founded as forts
or leaders' residences, and were the centres of trade and crafts.
However, they never received political autonomy and its citizens had no special
political rights or privileges. This is due to the strength of kinship ties, which stems from
religious beliefs in ancestral spirits. Also, the guilds competed against each other for the
favour of the Emperor, never uniting in order to fight for more rights. Therefore, the residents
of Chinese cities never constitute a separate status class like the residents of European
cities.[30]
Early unification of the state and the establishment of central officialdom meant that the
focus of the power struggle changed from the distribution of land to the distribution of offices, which with their fees and taxes were the most prominent
source of income for the holder, who often pocketed up to 50% of the revenue. The imperial government depended on the services of
those officials, not on the service of the military (knights) as in Europe.[30]
Weber emphasised that Confucianism tolerated a great number of popular cults without any effort to systematise them into a
religious doctrine. Instead of metaphysical conjectures, it taught adjustment to the world. The
"superior" man (literati) should stay away from the pursuit of wealth (though not from
wealth itself). Therefore, becoming a civil servant was preferred to becoming a
businessman and granted a much higher status.[31]
Chinese civilisation had no religious prophecy nor a powerful priestly class. The emperor was the high priest of the state religion and the supreme ruler, but popular cults
were also tolerated (however the political ambitions of their priests were curtailed). This forms a sharp contrast with medieval
Europe, where the Church curbed the power of secular rulers
and the same faith was professed by rulers and common folk alike.
According to Confucianism, the worship of great deities is the affair of the state, while ancestral worship is required of
all, and the multitude of popular cults is tolerated. Confucianism tolerated magic
and mysticism as long as they were useful tools for controlling the masses; it denounced them
as heresy and suppressed them when they threatened the established order (hence the opposition to
Buddhism). Note that in this context, Confucianism can be referred to as the state cult, and
Taoism as the popular religion.[32]
Weber argued that while several factors favoured the development of a capitalist economy (long periods of peace, improved
control of rivers, population growth, freedom to acquire land and move outside of native community, free choice of occupation)
they were outweighed by others (mostly stemming from religion):
- technical inventions were opposed on the basis of religion, in the sense that the disturbance of ancestral spirits was argued
to lead to bad luck, and adjusting oneself to the world was preferred to changing it.
- sale of land was often prohibited or made very difficult.
- extended kinship groups (based on the religious importance of family ties and ancestry)
protected its members against economic adversities, therefore discouraging payment of debts, work discipline, and rationalisation
of work processes.
- those kinship groups prevented the development of an urban status class and hindered developments towards legal institutions,
codification of laws, and the rise of a lawyer class.[29]
According to Weber, Confucianism and Puritanism represent two comprehensive but mutually exclusive types of rationalisation,
each attempting to order human life according to certain ultimate religious beliefs. Both encouraged sobriety and self-control
and were compatible with the accumulation of wealth. However, Confucianism aimed at attaining and preserving "a cultured status
position" and used as means adjustment to the world, education, self-perfection, politeness and familial piety. Puritanism used
those means in order to create a "tool of God", creating a person that would serve the God and master the world. Such intensity
of belief and enthusiasm for action were alien to the aesthetic values of Confucianism. Therefore, Weber states that it was the
difference in prevailing mentality that contributed to the development of capitalism in the West and the absence of it in
China.[33]
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.[34]
The ancient Indian social system was shaped by the concept of caste. It directly linked religious
belief and the segregation of society into status groups. Weber describes the caste system,
consisting of the Brahmins (priests), the Kshatriyas
(warriors), the Vaisyas (merchants) and the Shudras (labourers).
Then he describes the spread of the caste system in India due to conquests, the marginalisation of certain tribes and the subdivision of castes.[34]
Weber pays special attention to Brahmins and analyses why they occupied the highest place in
Indian society for many centuries. With regard to the concept of dharma he concludes that the
Indian ethical pluralism is very different both from the universal ethic of Confucianism
and Christianity. He notes that the caste system prevented the development of urban status
groups.[35]
Next, Weber analyses the Hindu religious beliefs, including asceticism and the Hindu world
view, the Brahman orthodox doctrines, the rise and fall of Buddhism in India, the Hindu
restoration, and the evolution of the guru. Weber asks the question whether religion had any
influence upon the daily round of mundane activities, and if so, how it impacted economic conduct. He notes the idea of an
immutable world order consisting of the eternal cycles of rebirth and the deppreciation of the
mundane world, and finds that the traditional caste system, supported by the religion, slowed economic development; in other
words, the "spirit" of the caste system militated against an indigenous development of capitalism.[35]
Weber concludes his study of society and religion in India by combining his findings with his previous work on China. He notes
that the beliefs tended to interpret the meaning of life as otherworldly or mystical
experience, that the intellectuals tended to be apolitical in their orientation, and that the social
world was fundamentally divided between the educated, whose lives were oriented toward the exemplary conduct of a
prophet or wise man, and the uneducated masses who remained caught in their daily rounds and
believed in magic. In Asia, no Messianic prophecy appeared that could have given "plan and
meaning to the everyday life of educated and uneducated alike." He argues that it was the Messianic prophecies in the countries
of the Near East, as distinguished from the prophecy of the Asiatic mainland, that prevented Western countries from following the paths of China and India, and his next work,
Ancient Judaism was an attempt to prove this theory.[36]
Ancient Judaism
In Ancient Judaism, his fourth major work on the sociology of religion,
Weber attempted to explain the "combination of circumstances" which resulted in the early differences between Oriental and Occidental religiosity.[37] It
is especially visible when the interworldly asceticism developed by Western Christianity is contrasted with mystical contemplation of the kind developed in India.[37] Weber noted
that some aspects of Christianity sought to conquer and change the world, rather than withdraw from its imperfections.[37] This fundamental characteristic of
Christianity (when compared to Far Eastern religions) stems originally from ancient Jewish
prophecy.[38] Stating his reasons for investigating ancient Judaism, Weber wrote that
Anyone who is heir to the traditions of modern European civilisation will approach the problems of universal history with a set of questions, which to him appear both inevitable and legitimate. These
questions will turn on the combination of circumstances which has brought about the cultural phenomena that are uniquely Western
and that have at the same time (…) a universal cultural significance.[37]
Further on he adds:
"For the Jew (…) the social order of the world was conceived to have been turned into the opposite of that promised for the
future, but in the future it was to be overturned so that Jewry could be once again dominant. The world was conceived as neither
eternal nor unchangeable, but rather as being created. Its present structure was a product of man's actions, above all those of
the Jews, and God's reaction to them. Hence the world was a historical product designed to give way to the truly God-ordained
order (…). There existed in addition a highly rational religious ethic of social conduct; it was free of magic and all forms of
irrational quest for salvation; it was inwardly worlds apart from the path of salvation offered by Asiatic religions. To a large
extent this ethic still underlies contemporary Middle Eastern and European ethic. World-historical interest in Jewry rests upon
this fact. (…) Thus, in considering the conditions of Jewry's evolution, we stand at a turning point of the whole cultural
development of the West and the Middle East".[38]
Weber analyses the interaction between the Bedouins, the cities, the herdsmen and the
peasants, including the conflicts between them and the rise and fall of the United
Monarchy. The time of the United Monarchy appears as a mere episode, dividing the period of confederacy since the Exodus and the settlement of the Israelites in Canaan from the period of political decline following the
Division of the Monarchy. This division into periods has major implications for religious
history. Since the basic tenets of Judaism were formulated during the time of Israelite confederacy and after the fall of the
United Monarchy, they became the basis of the prophetic movement that left a lasting impression on the Western
civilisation.[39]
Weber discusses the organisation of the early confederacy, the unique qualities of the Israelites' relations to
Yahweh, the influence of foreign cults, types of religious ecstasy, and the struggle of the
priests against ecstasy and idol worship. He goes on to describe the times of the Division of the Monarchy, social aspects of
Biblical prophecy, the social orientation of the prophets, demagogues and pamphleteers, ecstasy and politics, and the ethic and
theodicity of the prophets. Weber notes that Judaism not only fathered Christianity and Islam, but was crucial to the rise of
modern Occident state, as its influence were as important to those of Hellenistic and Roman cultures. Reinhard Bendix, summarising Ancient Judaism, writes that
free of magic and esoteric speculations, devoted to the study of law, vigilant in the effort to do what was right in the eyes
of the Lord in the hope of a better future, the prophets established a religion of faith that subjected man's daily life to the
imperatives of a divinely ordained moral law. In this way, ancient Judaism helped create the moral rationalism of Western
civilisation.[40]
Sociology of politics and government
In the sociology of politics and government, one of Weber's most significant contribution is his Politics as a Vocation essay. Therein, Weber unveils the definition of the state that has become so pivotal to Western social thought: that the state is that
entity which possesses a monopoly on the legitimate use of
physical force,[41] which it may
nonetheless elect to delegate as it sees fit. In this essay, Weber wrote that politics is to be understood as any activity in
which the state might engage itself in order to influence the relative distribution of force. Politics thus comes to be
understood as deriving from power. 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. 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. The political
realm is no realm for saints. A politician ought to marry the ethic of ultimate ends and the ethic of responsibility, and must
possess both a passion for his avocation and the capacity to distance himself from the subject of his exertions (the
governed).[42]
Weber distinguished three pure types of political leadership, domination and authority:
charismatic domination (familial and religious), traditional domination (patriarchs, patrimonalism, feudalism), and legal domination (modern law and state, bureaucracy).[43] 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.[44] He also notes that the instability of charismatic authority inevitably
forces it to "routinize" into a more structured form of authority. Likewise he notes that in a pure type of traditional rule,
sufficient resistance to a master can lead to a "traditional revolution". Thus he alludes to an inevitable move towards a
rational-legal structure of authority, utilising a bureaucratic
structure.[45] 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.
Weber is also well-known for his critical study of the bureaucratisation of society, the rational ways in which formal social
organizations apply the ideal type characteristics of a bureaucracy. It was Weber who began the studies of bureaucracy and whose
works led to the popularization of this term.[46] 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", although this is only one ideal type of public administration and government described in his
magnum opus Economy and Society (1922), and
one that he did not particularly like himself – he only thought it particularly efficient and successful. In this work, Weber
outlines a description, which has become famous, of rationalization (of which bureaucratization is a part) as a shift from a
value-oriented organisation and action (traditional authority and charismatic authority) to a goal-oriented organization and
action (legal-rational authority). The result, according to Weber, is a "polar night of icy darkness", in which increasing
rationalization of human life traps individuals in an "iron cage" of rule-based, rational
control.[47] Weber's bureaucracy studies also
led him to his analysis – correct, as it would turn out, after Stalin's takeover – that
socialism in Russia would lead to over-bureaucratization
rather than to the "withering away of the state" (as Karl
Marx had predicted would happen in communist society).[48]
Economics
While Max Weber is best known and recognised today as one of the leading scholars and founders of modern sociology, he also
accomplished much in other fields, notably economics. During his life no such distinctions
really existed, and Weber considered himself a historian and an economist first, sociologist distant second.[18][19]
From the point of view of the economists, he is a representative of the "Youngest" German historical school of economics.[49] His most valued contributions to the field of economics is his famous work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. This is a
seminal essay on the differences between religions and the relative wealth of their followers. Weber's work is parallel to
Sombart's treatise of the same phenomenon, which however located the rise of Capitalism
in Judaism. Weber's other main contribution to economics (as well as to social sciences in
general) is his work on methodology: his theories of "Verstehen" (known as understanding or Interpretative
Sociology) and of antipositivism (known as humanistic
sociology).[49]
The doctrine of Interpretative Sociology is one of the main sociological paradigms, with many supporters as well as critics. This thesis states that social,
economic and historical research can never be fully inductive or descriptive as one must always approach it with a conceptual apparatus, which Weber termed "Ideal Type".[49] The idea can
be summarised as follows: an ideal type is formed from characteristics and elements of the given phenomena but it is not meant to correspond to all of the characteristics of any one particular case. Weber's
Ideal Type became one of the most important concepts in social sciences, and led to the creation of such concepts as
Ferdinand Tönnies' "Normal Type".
Weber conceded that employing "Ideal Types" was an abstraction but claimed that it was
nonetheless essential if one were to understand any particular social phenomena because, unlike physical phenomena, they involve
human behaviour which must be interpreted by ideal types. This, together with his antipositivistic argumentation can be viewed as
the methodological justification for the assumption of the "rational economic man"
(homo economicus).[49]
Max Weber formulated a three-component theory of
stratification, with Social class, Social
status and party (or politicals) as conceptually distinct elements.[50]
- Social class is based on economically determined relationship to the market (owner, renter, employee etc.).
- Status is based on non-economical qualities like honour, prestige and religion.
- Party refers to affiliations in the political domain.
All three dimensions have consequences for what Weber called "life chances".[50]
Weber's other contributions to economics were several: these include a (seriously researched) economic history of Roman agrarian society, his
work on the dual roles of idealism and materialism in the
history of capitalism in his Economy and Society (1914) which
present Weber's criticisms (or according to some, revisions) of some aspects of Marxism.
Finally, his thoroughly researched General Economic History (1923) can be
considered the Historical School at its empirical best.[49]
See also
