Maximilian Karl Emil Weber (/ˈveɪbər/; German: [ˈveːbɐ]; 21 April 1864 – 14 June 1920) was a German sociologist, historian, jurist, and political economist regarded as among the most important theorists of the development of modern Western society. His ideas profoundly influence social theory and research. While Weber did not see himself as a sociologist, he is recognized as one of the fathers of sociology along with Auguste Comte, Karl Marx, and Émile Durkheim.

Unlike Durkheim, Weber did not believe in monocausal explanations, proposing instead that for any outcome there can be multiple causes.[Also unlike Durkheim, Weber was a key proponent of methodological anti-positivism, arguing for the study of social action through interpretive rather than purely empiricist methods, based on a subjective understanding of the meanings that individuals attach to their own actions. Weber's main intellectual concern was in understanding the processes of rationalisation, secularisation, and the ensuing sense of "disenchantment". He formulated a thesis arguing that such processes are associated with the rise of capitalism and modernity.

Weber is also known for his thesis combining economic sociology and the sociology of religion, emphasising the importance of cultural influences embedded in religion as driving factors of capitalism. This is in contrast to Marx's historical materialism, which considers religion as derivative of capitalism. Weber would first elaborate his theory in his seminal work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905), where he attributed ascetic Protestantism as one of the major "elective affinities" leading to the rise of market-driven capitalism and the rational-legal systems of practice in the Western world. Protestant Ethic would form the earliest part in Weber's broader investigations into world religions, as he later examined the religions of China and India, as well as ancient Judaism, with particular regard to their differing economic consequences and conditions of social stratification. In another major work, "Politics as a Vocation", Weber defined "the state" as an entity that successfully claims a "monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory". He would also be the first to categorise social authority into distinct forms: charismatic, traditional, and rational-legal. Weber's analysis of bureaucracy emphasized that modern institutions are increasingly based on rational-legal authority. Weber made a variety of other contributions in economic history, theory, and methodology. His analysis of modernity and rationalisation would significantly influence the critical theory associated with the Frankfurt School.

After the First World War, Weber was among the founders of the liberal German Democratic Party. He also ran unsuccessfully for a seat in parliament and served as advisor to the committee that drafted the ill-fated democratic Weimar Constitution of 1919. After contracting Spanish flu, he died of pneumonia in 1920, aged 56.

Personal life

Maximilian Karl Emil Weber was born on 21 April 1864 in Erfurt, Province of Saxony, Prussia, but his family moved to Berlin in 1869. He would be the oldest of eight children to Max Weber Sr. and his wife Helene Fallenstein. Over the course of his life, Weber Sr. held posts as a lawyer, a civil servant, and a parliamentarian for the National Liberal Party in the Prussian Landtag and German Reichstag. Fallenstein partly descended from French Huguenot immigrants and came from a wealthy background. Over time, Weber Jr. would be affected by the marital and personality tensions between his father, "a man who enjoyed earthly pleasures" while overlooking religious and philanthropic causes, and his mother, a devout Calvinist "who sought to lead an ascetic life" and held moral absolutist ideas.

Weber Sr.'s involvement in public life immersed his home in both politics and academia, as his salon welcomed scholars and public figures like philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey and jurist Levin Goldschmidt.[19] The young Weber and his brother Alfred, who also became a sociologist and economist, passed their formative years in this intellectual atmosphere. For Christmas in 1877, a thirteen-year-old Max Weber gifted his parents 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 Period".

In class, bored and unimpressed with teachers – who, in turn, resented what they perceived as a disrespectful attitude – Weber secretly read all forty volumes by writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and it has been argued that this was an important influence on his thought and methodology. Before entering university, he would read many other classical works, including those by philosopher Immanuel Kant.

In 1893, Weber married his distant cousin Marianne Schnitger, later a feminist activist and author in her own right, who was instrumental in collecting and publishing Weber's journal articles as books after his death, while her biography of him is an important source for understanding Weber's life. They would have no children. The marriage granted long-awaited financial independence to Weber, allowing him to finally leave his parents' household.