Max Weber

Max Weber was born at Erfurt in 1864; his father was a National Liberal politician, his mother a devout Protestant, and their very different temperaments made for frequent quarrels at home. He studied law, economics and history at Heidelberg, Berlin and elsewhere, became professor of economics at Freiburg at thirty and soon moved to Heidelberg. At thirty-three he had a violent quarrel with his father, who died shortly afterwards; Weber then suffered a severe breakdown, was unable to teach for years and had to resign his chair. When he recovered he turned to the relation between religion and economic life, visited the United States and wrote The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, then studied China, India and ancient Judaism, laying the foundations of the sociology of religion. After the First World War he helped draft the Weimar Constitution, and he died at fifty-six of pneumonia following Spanish influenza. He is acknowledged as one of the founders of modern sociology.