Who is weber

When defeat came in , Germany found in Weber a public intellectual leader, even possibly a future statesman, with relatively solid liberal democratic credentials who was well-positioned to influence the course of post-war reconstruction.

He was invited to join the draft board of the Weimar Constitution as well as the German delegation to Versaille; albeit in vain, he even ran for a parliamentary seat on the liberal Democratic Party ticket. In those capacities, however, he opposed the German Revolution all too sensibly and the Versaille Treaty all too quixotically alike, putting himself in an unsustainable position that defied the partisan alignments of the day. By all accounts, his political activities bore little fruit, except his advocacy for a robust plebiscitary presidency in the Weimar Constitution.

Frustrated with day-to-day politics, he turned to his scholarly pursuits with renewed vigour. All these reinvigorated scholarly activities ended abruptly in , however, when he succumbed to the Spanish flue and died suddenly of pneumonia in Munich. Max Weber was fifty six years old. Putting Weber in the context of philosophical tradition proper is not an easy task.

For all the astonishing variety of identities that can be ascribed to him as a scholar, he was certainly no philosopher at least in the narrow sense of the term. His reputation as a Solonic legislator of modern social science also tends to cloud our appreciation of the extent to which his ideas were embedded in the intellectual tradition of the time.

In other words, Weber belonged to a generation of self-claimed epigones who had to struggle with the legacies of Darwin, Marx, and Nietzsche. As such, the philosophical backdrop to his thoughts will be outlined here along two axes: epistemology and ethics.

Weber encountered the pan-European cultural crisis of his time mainly as filtered through the jargon of German Historicism [Beiser ]. Arguably, however, it was not until Weber grew acquainted with the Baden or Southwestern School of Neo-Kantians, especially through Wilhelm Windelband, Emil Lask, and Heinrich Rickert his one-time colleague at Freiburg , that he found a rich conceptual template suitable for the clearer elaboration of his own epistemological position.

In opposition to a Hegelian emanationist epistemology, briefly, Neo-Kantians shared the Kantian dichotomy between reality and concept.

Not an emanent derivative of concepts as Hegel posited, reality is irrational and incomprehensible, and the concept, only an abstract construction of our mind. Nor is the concept a matter of will, intuition, and subjective consciousness as Wilhelm Dilthey posited. According to Hermann Cohen, one of the early Neo-Kantians, concept formation is fundamentally a cognitive process, which cannot but be rational as Kant held. If our cognition is logical and all reality exists within cognition, then only a reality that we can comprehend in the form of knowledge is rational — metaphysics is thereby reduced to epistemology, and Being to logic.

As such, the process of concept formation both in the natural Natur - and the cultural-historical sciences Geisteswissenschaften has to be universal as well as abstract, not different in kind but in their subject matters.

The latter is only different in dealing with the question of values in addition to logical relationships. For Windelband, however, the difference between the two kinds of knowledge has to do with its aim and method as well. Cultural-historical knowledge is not concerned with a phenomenon because of what it shares with other phenomena, but rather because of its own definitive qualities. For values, which form its proper subject, are radically subjective, concrete and individualistic.

Turning irrational reality into rational concept, it does not simply paint abbilden a picture of reality but transforms umbilden it.

Occupying the gray area between irrational reality and rational concept, then, its question became twofold for the Neo-Kantians. One is in what way we can understand the irreducibly subjective values held by the historical actors in an objective fashion, and the other, by what criteria we can select a certain historical phenomenon as opposed to another as historically significant subject matter worthy of our attention.

Value-judgment Werturteil as well as value Wert became a keen issue. In so positing, however, Rickert is making two highly questionable assumptions. One is that there are certain values in every culture that are universally accepted within that culture as valid, and the other, that a historian free of bias must agree on what these values are. An empirical study in historical science, in the end, cannot do without a metaphysics of history.

German Idealism seems to have exerted another enduring influence on Weber, discernible in his ethical worldview more than in his epistemological position. This was the strand of Idealist discourse in which a broadly Kantian ethic and its Nietzschean critique figure prominently.

The way in which Weber understood Kant seems to have come through the conceptual template set by moral psychology and philosophical anthropology. In conscious opposition to the utilitarian-naturalistic justification of modern individualism, Kant viewed moral action as simultaneously principled and self-disciplined and expressive of genuine freedom and autonomy. On this Kantian view, freedom and autonomy are to be found in the instrumental control of the self and the world objectification according to a law formulated solely from within subjectification.

Furthermore, such a paradoxical compound is made possible by an internalization or willful acceptance of a transcendental rational principle, which saves it from falling prey to the hedonistic subjectification that Kant found in Enlightenment naturalism and which he so detested. Kant in this regard follows Rousseau in condemning utilitarianism; instrumental-rational control of the world in the service of our desires and needs just degenerates into organized egoism.

Instrumental transformation of the self is thus the crucial benchmark of autonomous moral agency for Kant as well as for Locke, but its basis has been fundamentally altered in Kant; it should be done with the purpose of serving a higher end, that is, the universal law of reason. Weber was keenly aware of the fact that the Kantian linkage between growing self-consciousness, the possibility of universal law, and principled and thus free action had been irrevocably severed.

Kant managed to preserve the precarious duo of non-arbitrary action and subjective freedom by asserting such a linkage, which Weber believed to be unsustainable in his allegedly Nietzschean age. Although they deeply informed his thoughts to an extent still under-appreciated, his main preoccupation lay elsewhere.

He was after all one of the founding fathers of modern social science. GARS forms a more coherent whole since its editorial edifice was the work of Weber himself; and yet, its relationship to his other sociologies of, for instance, law, city, music, domination, and economy, remains controvertible.

Accordingly, his overarching theme has also been variously surmised as a developmental history of Western rationalism Wolfgang Schluchter , the universal history of rationalist culture Friedrich Tenbruck , or simply the Menschentum as it emerges and degenerates in modern rational society Wilhelm Hennis. The first depicts Weber as a comparative-historical sociologist; the second, a latter-day Idealist historian of culture reminiscent of Jacob Burckhardt; and the third, a political philosopher on a par with Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Rousseau.

Important as they are for in-house Weber scholarship, however, these philological disputes need not hamper our attempt to grasp the gist of his ideas. Suffice it for us to recognize that, albeit with varying degrees of emphasis, these different interpretations all converge on the thematic centrality of rationality, rationalism, and rationalization in making sense of Weber.

For example:. Taken together, then, the rationalization process as Weber narrated it seems quite akin to a metahistorical teleology that irrevocably sets the West apart from and indeed above the East. At the same time, nonetheless, Weber adamantly denied the possibility of a universal law of history in his methodological essays.

It was meant as a comparative-conceptual platform on which to erect the edifying features of rationalization in the West. If merely a heuristic device and not a universal law of progress, then, what is rationalization and whence comes his uncompromisingly dystopian vision? For instance, modern capitalism is a rational mode of economic life because it depends on a calculable process of production. This search for exact calculability underpins such institutional innovations as monetary accounting especially double-entry bookkeeping , centralization of production control, separation of workers from the means of production, supply of formally free labour, disciplined control on the factory floor, and other features that make modern capitalism qualitatively different from all other modes of organizing economic life.

The enhanced calculability of the production process is also buttressed by that in non-economic spheres such as law and administration. Legal formalism and bureaucratic management reinforce the elements of predictability in the sociopolitical environment that encumbers industrial capitalism by means of introducing formal equality of citizenship, a rule-bound legislation of legal norms, an autonomous judiciary, and a depoliticized professional bureaucracy.

Further, all this calculability and predictability in political, social, and economic spheres was not possible without changes of values in ethics, religion, psychology, and culture. The outcome of this complex interplay of ideas and interests was modern rational Western civilization with its enormous material and cultural capacity for relentless world-mastery. On a more analytical plateau, all these disparate processes of rationalization can be surmised as increasing knowledge, growing impersonality, and enhanced control [Brubaker , 32—35].

First, knowledge. Rational action in one very general sense presupposes knowledge. It requires some knowledge of the ideational and material circumstances in which our action is embedded, since to act rationally is to act on the basis of conscious reflection about the probable consequences of action.

As such, the knowledge that underpins a rational action is of a causal nature conceived in terms of means-ends relationships, aspiring towards a systematic, logically interconnected whole. From on he was a private scholar, mostly in Heidelberg.

David R. Henderson is the editor of The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics. He is also an emeritus professor of economics with the Naval Postgraduate School and a research fellow with the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He earned his Ph. Max Weber Max grew up in bourgeois comfort, in a home devoted to politics and intellectual pursuits. By all accounts he led an active social life in college, visiting other bourgeois families, drinking, fencing, and even dueling from which he suffered a distinctive scar on his face for the rest of his life.

Marianne tells us he had no talent for saving money and would often ask for increases to his allowance. In his second year, he took time off to serve in the military, but found military life difficult. He returned to university and eventually earned a law degree in , with a dissertation on the history of trading companies in the Middle Ages.

For seven years he lived in the family home, studying further and teaching classes when he could. He did not leave home until his marriage in , to his cousin Marianne Schnitger.

During this time, Marianne tells us, he felt oppressed by his father, who ran his house with strong authority, requiring obedience of his children and his wife, who suffered a great deal. He repressed everything.

When his cousin came to visit, moving from the country to the city, they quickly became attached. Here is how Marianne tells the story of their engagement:. The seriousness of their relationship was lightened by their sparkling humor and impish banter. I would never have thought I was beaming so. In , the newly married couple moved to Freiburg, where Weber was appointed Professor of Economics.

In , they moved to the Heidelberg, where Weber continued as an Economics Professor. He spent his time researching and writing on economics and legal history. Max and Marianne had no children. Weber studied legal and economic history at several German universities. After a brief period as a legal assistant and on completion of his doctoral dissertation, he was appointed professor first at the University of Freiburg and then at Heidelberg.

Despite a severe nervous breakdown several years later, Weber produced a body of work that established him as the foremost figure in social thought of the twentieth century. Weber's study was in three main areas. His study of the sociology of religion led to his celebrated book, Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus ; translated as The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, , in which he linked the psychological effects of Calvinism and Lutheranism with the development of European capitalism.

Secondly, his interest in political sociology, presented in such works as the unfinished Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft ; translated as Economy and Society, , led him to major discussions on types of economic activity and the relationship between social and economic organization. Finally, he laid down various systems of inquiry in authoritative essays published posthumously in translation as Methodology of the Social Sciences In all his work Weber tried to trace links between different types of social activity and stressed that the bureaucratization of political and economic society was the most significant development in the modernization of western civilization.