Max Weber: Encyclopedia II - Max Weber - Life and career

Max Weber - Life and career

Weber was born in Erfurt in Thuringia, Germany, the eldest of seven children of Max Weber Sr., a prominent politician and civil servant, and his wife Helene Fallenstein. His younger brother Alfred Weber was also a sociologist and economist. Because of his father's engagement with public life, Weber grew up in a household immersed in politics, and his father received a long list of prominent scholars and public figures in his salon. At the same time, Weber proved to be intellectually precocious. His Christmas present to his parents in 1876, when he was thirteen years old, took the form of 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". It seemed clear, then, that Weber would apply himself to the social sciences. 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 entered university studies.

In 1882 Weber enrolled in the University of Heidelberg as a law student. Weber joined his father's duelling fraternity and chose as his major study his father's field of law. Apart from his work in law, he attended lectures in economics and studied medieval history. In addition, Weber read a great deal in 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 in Berlin courts, and finally as a Dozent at the University of Berlin. In 1886 Weber passed the examination for "Referendar", comparable to the bar examination in the American legal system. Throughout the late 1880s, Weber continued his study of history. He earned his doctorate in law in 1889 by writing a doctoral dissertation on legal history entitled The History of Medieval Business Organisations. Two years later, Weber completed his "Habilitationsschrift", The Roman Agrarian History and its Significance for Public and Private Law. 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, however, Weber also began pondering contemporary social policy. In 1888 he had joined the "Verein für Socialpolitik", the new professional association of German economists affiliated with the Historical school who saw the role of economics primarily in the solving of the wide-ranging social problems of the age, and who pioneered large-scale statistical studies of economic problems. In 1890 the "Verein" established a research program to examine "the Polish question", 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. The final report was widely acclaimed as an excellent piece of empirical research, and cemented Weber's reputation as an expert on agrarian economics.

In 1893 he married his distant cousin Marianne Schnitger, later a feminist and author in her own right, who after his death in 1920 was decisive in collecting and publishing Weber's works as books which previously had only appeared as articles in journals. In 1894 the couple moved to Freiburg, where Weber was appointed professor of economics at Freiburg University, before accepting the same position at the University of Heidelberg in 1897. During the same year, Max Weber Sr., his father, died, two months after a severe quarrel with his son, leaving the quarral unresolved. Following this incident Weber become increasingly prone to "nervousness" and insomnia making it more and more difficult for him to lecture and fulfill his duties as a professor. His condition forced him reduce his teaching and give his last course in the fall of 1899 unfinished. After months in a sanatorium in summer and fall of 1900, Max Weber and his wife Marianne travelled to Italy at the end of the year, not to return to Heidelberg until April 1902.

After his immense productivity in the early 1890s he did not publish a single paper between early 1898 and the end of the year 1902 and finally resigned as a professor in the fall of 1903. However, being freed of this burden he accepted a position as associate editor of the Archives for Social Science and Social Welfare next to his colleagues Edgar Jaffé and Werner Sombart. In 1904 Max 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, and laid the foundations for his later research on the impact of cultures and religions on the development of economic systems. Incidentally this essay was the only one of his works that was published as a book during his lifetime.

In 1912, Weber tried to organise a left-wing political party to combine social-democrats and liberals. This attempt was unsuccessful because many liberals feared social-democratic revolutionary ideals.

During the First World War, Weber served for a time as director of the army hospitals in Heidelberg. In 1915 and 1916 he was a member of commissions that tried to retain German supremacy in Belgium and Poland after the war. Weber was a German imperialist and wanted to enlarge the German empire to the east and the west. He became a member of the worker and soldier council of Heidelberg in 1918.

In 1918 Weber became a consultant to the German Armistice Commission at the Treaty of Versailles and to the commission charged with drafting the Weimar Constitution. He argued in favour of inserting Article 48 into the Weimar Constitution. This article was later used by Adolf Hitler to declare martial law and seize dictatorial powers.

From 1918, Weber resumed teaching, first at the University of Vienna, then in 1919 at the University of Munich. In Munich, he headed the first German University institute of sociology, but he never held a personal sociology appointment in his life. Weber left politics due to right wing agitation in 1919 and 1920. Many colleagues and students in Munich despised him for his speeches and left wing attitude during the German revolution of 1918 and 1919. Right-wing students protested at his home.

Max Weber died of pneumonia in Munich on June 14, 1920. 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.

Max Weber - Weber and German politics

Max Weber described himself as a left-wing liberal. He can be regarded as a social liberal. 19th century liberal elements in his view is his staunch nationalism based on classical republicanism. A nation with freedom for individuals is maintained by the virtues and character of its citizens. Another element is the strong belief in the benefits of capitalism. The social element in his thinking is that he wanted to turn the members of the German working class into responsible citizens with virtue and character. This means that the workers must be educated by giving them political responsibility.

Weber started his career as a German celebrity in 1894. Max Weber had a large influence on German policy towards the germanisation of Eastern Germany. He proposed closing the border to Polish workers from Russia and Austria-Hungary in his speech at the V. Evangelical Social Congress in 1894. He feared that Germany would eventually lose these eastern territories. He advocated the recolonisation of empty lands on the large estates of the Prussian Junkers by German settlers from the west, who would start small farms. The congress was mainly against Weber's demands because it supported the Prussian Junkers, but Weber influenced his friends and allies, including the pastor Friedrich Naumann, who later became an influential politician and one of the founders of the liberal Deutsche Demokratische Partei after WW I.

In 1905, Weber changed his mind. He was impressed by the attitude of the Russian liberal party, which wanted to change Russian nationalism by accepting ethnic minorities as Russians. Weber wanted the Germans to absorb other ethnic groups, especially the Poles, who should have become a part of a huge German empire. Weber thought that the only way that German culture would survive was by creating an empire. Power politics was to be the basis for defending the German culture and economy and to prevent it from becoming a powerless country like Switzerland.

Weber disliked the empty nationalist ideas of many German nationalists. He thought that power alone was not an acceptable goal, that politicians should stand for certain ideas but that they need a strong will to power to win. This idea of the will to power is originally from Nietzsche who was very popular in the Germany of the 1890s. But Nietzsche meant a strictly individual will to power and not a will to power to make a collective (like Germany) stronger as advocated by Weber. Weber wanted Germany to strengthen its economy by creating a huge empire. He was afraid of the huge world population that would lead to German unemployment in the long run and believed that the only way to support the German workers was to create an empire. He was afraid that an end would come to economic expansion and that countries would protect their own ecomomy with tariff walls. He did not foresee the technological advances and the profits of international trade for the national economy in the twentieth century.

Weber wanted the end of the power of the nobility. He despised the red scare of the middle classes, because the middle classes let the nobility rule.

In his opinion, the socialist parties were harmless, because they would turn into middle classes in due time. The nobility was only holding Germany up to become a major power in the world. In his opinion, which he expressed in the media and his politics, the middle classes should have united against the aristocracy. This led to a lot of dismay in right wing Germany. Weber was against the student fraternities which idolised military ranks. He wanted to stop the agrarian lobby damaging the regulations in the stock exchange. He was especially against the buying of titles and noble land by the upper class of the bourgeoisie. Weber wanted unlimited economic growth. Not military ranks, but ability and talent should be important for one's prospects. Money should be put into a company and not wasted in a useless piece of land. Weber feared the inefficiency of the economy in Roman Catholic, non-puritanical countries and was afraid that Germany would become like Austria: 'Verösterreicherung Deutschlands'.

Weber was against the German annexation plans during the First World War, but he was also against a dishonourable peace. He didn't believe that Germany could dominate the ethnic minorities after the war was won but that Germany should work together with German-dominated nations and make them enthusiastic about German imperialism.

Weber wrote a series of newspaper articles in 1917, entitled "Parliament and Government in a Re-constructed Germany." These articles called for democratic reforms to the 1871 constitution of the German Empire.

Weber argued that Germany's political problems were essentially a problem of leadership. Otto von Bismarck had created a constitution that preserved his own power, but limited the ability of another powerful leader to succeed him, because of the limited experience of the political establishment with decision-making. In January, 1919, Weber's brother was a founding member of the German Democratic Party.

Weber advocated democracy as a means for selecting strong leaders. Weber viewed democracy as a form of charismatic leadership where the "demagogue imposes his will on the masses." For this reason, the European left is highly critical of Weber for, albeit unwittingly, "preparing the intellectual groundwork for the leadership position of Adolf Hitler."

Like Nietzsche, Weber was strongly anti-socialist. He despised the anti-nationalist stance of the Marxist parties. Weber thought that the socialist society was impossible. He was surprised that the communists in Russia (who dissolved the old elite and bureaucracy) could survive for more than half a year. Weber died in 1920. It is unknown what his opinion about communism would have been after its survival. It would have probably been very negative, given Weber's emphasis on freedom and the German nation.

His view on the social-democratic party was different. He thought that the social-democrats would become liberals after a while and get rid of their revolutionary ideals. Weber wanted to make the working classes enthusiastic about Germany and German imperialism, but later on he realized that this was impossible. Later on he changed his mind and realized that the imperial expansion of Germany was not in the interest of the working classes and only strengthened the power of the German establishment. Only the middle classes could make Germany into a huge empire. Weber wanted to unify Germany and to give the German working classes coresponsibility in the German government, but not out of an ideal of equality. He was against compassion. He wanted to create responsibility. Hard work and efficiency should bring wealth for successful members of the working classes. The socialist society was impossible according to him. Making an end to capitalism and enlarging of the bureaucracy would only lead to more enslavement of the workers. The only possible way for salvation would be the capitalist system and the application of new technics. Weber openly supported strikes and labour unions, while right-wing Germans were very opposed to this. +

Weber was very opposed to the conservatives that tried to hold back the democratic liberation of the working classes. Weber further dismayed the left when one of his students, Carl Schmitt (1888-1985), incorporated Weber's theories into a corpus of Nazi legal propaganda. Weber's personal and professional letters show considerable disgust for the anti-semitism of his day. It is doubtful that Weber would have supported the Nazis, had he lived long enough to see their doings.

Weber was very critical of German conservatives and the German emperor. Before the First World War he believed that emperor William II was a weak leader, who with the conservatives were destroying Germany's diplomatic position. The 1908 Daily Telegraph interview of William II especially was a great disappointment in his view. During the First World War, Weber was very critical of the German government. He thought that the right-wing Alldeutscher Verband and the German army leaders were making Germany lose the war. He was against the undemocratic views of the right-wing, which alienated the working class and resulted in strikes and revolution. He was opposed to unlimited submarine warfare, which resulted in a declaration of war from the United States.

Weber was opposed to the request of the majority of the German parliament for peace negotiations and strongly advocated continuing the war in many newspaper articles. At the same time, the right-wing, supported by the army, was agitating against the parliament's decision. When he found that peace was requested because of the near collapse of Austria, which had been kept secret from the press, he became enraged, for the army had known about the coming collapse of Austria. Weber strongly denounced the German emperor and the German army and advocated peace in a speech at a mass meeting in Munich accompanied by a social-democratic speaker. This speech led to sympathy among socialists for Max Weber.

Weber openly advocated resistance to the allies in 1918. He hoped that the battle would go on until the whole of Germany was occupied, and wanted to defend the eastern cities of Thorn, Danzig and Reichenberg against the Poles and the Czechs. He tried to win over the working classes who didn't want to continue the war and hoped for international revolution. Weber was against the revolution of 1918 because he feared that a strong right-wing reaction would follow. He tactically called himself a socialist, but the revolting workers regarded him as old-fashioned. President Ebert of Germany wanted him as minister of interior in November 1918, but he later chose Hugo Preuss. Ebert then wanted Weber as ambassador in Vienna, but Weber's anti-government attitude in speeches made this impossible. In early 1919 he lost a possible seat in the German parliament because of his alienation from the revolution in 1918.

Weber was a member of the German delegation during the peace negotiations in Versailles. Weber first wanted Germany not to sign the treaty, but he feared that this would only make things worse for Germany after a while and doubted for months what would be the best solution: signing or not.

In America, Weber's politics are less well known. Apologists claim that Weber's distinction between "evaluative" politics and "value-neutral" science shields his sociology from the harsh realpolitik of his personal convictions. The debate over Weber's politics continues to this day.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Life and career", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki