Max Weber

Max Weber was born in 1864, the oldest of seven siblings, to a wealthy civil servant and an ascetic Calvinist mother. His father’s status as a public figure resulted in Weber growing up steeped in intellectual conversations about social development and politics. Weber was intelligent beyond his years and, as a result, was bored by school. Instead of doing his assignments, he read every volume of work that Goethe ever wrote, which reportedly shaped his thought for the rest of his life. In 1882, Weber began his secondary education, from which he graduated as a junior lawyer. In 1889, Weber earned his doctorate by writing an economic history of the Middle Ages. Within a few years, he became a lecturer at the University of Berlin and started consulting with the German government as an economist. He became involved in politics and social action, joining the leftist Evangelical Social Congress and arguing against Polish immigration into Germany, which he believed to be motivated by the wrong ideals. Other researches contracted him to study the economic aspects of the migration, and Weber began his rise to fame as a social scientist. In 1893, Weber married his cousin Marianne, who herself was an author, activist, and feminist, and organized and published much of his work after his death. Four years later, Weber’s father died only weeks after they had a terrible argument that remained unresolved. His father’s death and his own guilt seemed to contribute to severe and sudden depression and insomnia. Weber’s bout of mental illness forced him to leave his professorship and spend several months in a sanatorium in 1900. Weber returned to teaching a few years later, but soon had to leave again on account of his mental illness. However, during this time Weber produced his most famous works as he shifted his full focus to social science and understanding the modern age through historical developments. In 1904, Weber published the first version of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, which marked the beginning of his study of religion as a primary social force. Weber continued as an independent academic until World War I, where he volunteered to serve as a reserve officer, in charge of logistics for Germany’s army hospitals. Although Weber initially supported the German war effort, before its end he became one of the leading critics of German imperialism. After the war, he made an unsuccessful political run, and then resumed his professorship in 1919. The following year, Weber contracted influenza and died of pneumonia at the young age of 56.