Create a new account

It's simple, and free.

Max Weber

Max Weber was born in 1864 and died in 1920. He was a German social scientist and one of the founders of modern sociology. He studied in several German universities before working for a time as a legal assistant. He completed his doctoral dissertation and became a professor at the University of Freiburg in 1894, then professor at the University of Heidelberg in 1896. When he was in his thirties, he was nearly incapacitated by a nervous breakdown. Still, he managed to turn out a considerable body of work in spite of his infirmity. He is best known for his work in three areas of inquiry. He conducted studies in the sociology of religion and analyzed the influence of Lutheranism and Calvinism on the development of capitalism. He offered a political sociology that has become the foundation for much modern analysis of politics, social stratification, and bureaucracy. He offered a methodology of the social sciences that was influential in the development of systems of inquiry into the nature of social science (Gerth and Mills 3-31).

One of Weber's most important works on the specific character of modern capitalism is The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, a work in which the author defines capitalism in terms of the rational organization of formally free labor, something which differentiated Western society in Weber's time from those of earlier historical periods and form other parts of the world. The spirit of modern capitalism developed as human beings came to be dominated by the making of money, which was itself no longer subordinated to man as the means for satisfying his material needs. Weber helped to explain how this came to be by reference to the ascetic nature of Puritanism, and the idea of the calling from God as expressed by the Puritans came to be the calling to amass wealth (Weber xii).

In this work, Weber tries to show the beginnings of capitalism and to relate this to the spirit of the Reformation...

Page 1 of 4 Next >

More on Max Weber...

Loading...
APA     MLA     Chicago
Max Weber. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 10:03, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1694892.html