Abstract
Max Weber is one of the Promethean figures of social thought. Born in 1864 into a Protestant upper-middle-class family, his ancestors included German merchants and businessmen on his father’s side of the family and French Huguenots on his mother’s side. A successful lawyer and National Liberal politician in Berlin, Weber’s father, Max Weber Senior, introduced his son to the exhilarating world of European politics and statesmanship in the age of Bismarck. An educated woman with strong religious beliefs and commitments to social welfare, his mother, Helene, encouraged his intellectual and spiritual development. The poles of young Max’s existence were thus clearly marked: either pursuit of power and a life of public affairs, or devotion to Geist and the life of the mind. These alternatives shaped the entire course of Weber’s life and work, culminating in his brilliant last testimonial: the speeches on politics and science as vocations.
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Notes
Max Weber, “‘Objectivity” in Social Science and Social Policy,’ in E. Shils and H. Finch (eds), The Methodology of the Social Sciences (New York: Free Press, 1949), pp. 68, 103.
On Liberty’ in J. Gray (ed.), On Liberty and Other Essays ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991 ), p. 65.
G. Roth and C. Wittich (ed.) Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretative Sociology (New York: Bedminister, 1968) vol. 1, p. 244; Weber’s original title for this unfinished work read literally, ‘The Economy and the Social Orders and Powers,’ and it was intended as a contribution to the Handbook of Social Economics for which he served as chief editor.
Noise: The Political Economy of Music tr. B. Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), pp. 3, 111; with a foreword by E Jameson that acknowledges Weber’s contribution.
See Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer and Theda Skocpol (eds) Bringing the State Back In (Cambridge University Press, 1985);
and Walter W. Powell and Paul J. DiMaggio (eds) The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis ( Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991 ).
For an exception and perhaps a harbinger of a new approach to Weber, see Neil J. Smelser and Richard Swedberg, ‘The Sociological Perspective on the Economy,’ in Smelser and Swedberg (ed.) Handbook of Economic Sociology ( Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994 ), pp. 3–26.
Robert M. Solow, ‘How Did Economics Get That Way and What Did It Get?’ Daedalus 126 (Winter 1997): 54.
Weber’s untitled study, published posthumously in 1921, was translated as The Rational and Social Foundations of Music, tr. Martindale et al. ( Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1958 ).
The outstanding exception is the untranslated study of Christoph Braun, Max Webers ‘Musiksoziologie’ ( Laaber: Laaber-Vrlag, 1992 ).
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© 1998 Lawrence Scaff
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Scaff, L.A. (1998). Max Weber. In: Stones, R. (eds) Key Sociological Thinkers. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-26616-6_3
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