Max Weber

Max weber

Weber was born in Erfurt in Thuringia, Germany, the eldest of seven children of Max Weber Sr., a prominent liberal politician and civil servant, and Helene Fallenstein, a moderate Calvinist. Weber Sr.'s engagement with public life immersed the family home in politics, as his salon received many prominent scholars and public figures. He involved himself in politics, joining the left leaning Evangelical Social Congress.. During the First World War, Weber served for a time as director of the army hospitals in Heidelberg.In 1915 and 1916 he sat on commissions that tried to retain German supremacy in Belgium and Poland after the war. one of Weber's most significant contribution is his Politics as a Vocation essay. Weber distinguished three pure types of political leadership, domination and authority: charismatic domination (familial and religious), traditiona domination (patriarchs, patrimonalism, feudalism), and legal domination (modern law and state, bureaucracy). In his view, every historical relation between rulers and ruled contained such elements and they can be analysed on the basis of this tripartite distinction. Weber is also well-known for his critical study of the bureaucratisation of society, the rational ways in which formal social organizations apply the ideal type characteristics of a bureaucracy. It was Weber who began the studies of bureaucracy and whose works led to the popularization of this term. Max Weber is known as one of the leading scholars and founders of modern sociology, but Weber also accomplished much economic work in the style of the "youngest" German Historical School. Max Weber formulated a three-component theory of stratification, with Social class, Social status and party (or politicals) as conceptually distinct elements. Weber's other main contributions to economics (as well as to social sciences in general) was his work on methodology. There are two aspects to this: his theory of Verstehen, or "Interpretative" Sociology and his theory of positivism. Max Weber's position as an economist has been debated, and indeed, it is generally accepted now that it is in sociology that his impact was greatest. However, he comes at the end of the German Historical School where no such distinctions really existed and thus must be seen as an "economist" in that light.