Max Weber

Maximilian Karl Emil Weber ; German: ; 21 April 1864 – 14 June 1920 was the German sociologist, historian, jurist, & political economist regarded as among the nearly important theorists of the development of modern Western society. His ideas profoundly influence social theory and research. While Weber did non see himself as the sociologist, he is recognized as one of the fathers of sociology along with Auguste Comte, Karl Marx, and Émile Durkheim.

Unlike Durkheim, Weber did not believe in monocausal explanations, proposing instead that for all outcome there can be house causes. Also unlike Durkheim, Weber was a key proponent of methodological anti-positivism, arguing for the inspect of social action through interpretive rather than purely empiricist methods, based on a subjective apprehension of the meanings that individuals attach to their own actions. Weber's main intellectual concern was in apprehension the processes of rationalisation, secularisation, and the ensuing sense of "disenchantment". He formulated a thesis arguing that such(a) processes are associated with the rise of capitalism and modernity.

Weber is also invited for his thesis combining elective affinities" main to the rise of market-driven capitalism and the rational-legal systems of practice in the Western world. Protestant Ethic would realise the earliest element in Weber's broader investigations into world religions, as he later examined the religions of China and India, as alive as ancient Judaism, with specific regard to their differing economic consequences and conditions of social stratification. In another major work, "Politics as a Vocation", Weber defined "the state" as an entity that successfully claims a "monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory". He would also be the number one to categorise social guidance into distinct forms: charismatic, traditional, and rational-legal. Weber's analysis of bureaucracy emphasized that modern institutions are increasingly based on rational-legal authority. Weber exposed a bracket of other contributions in economic history, theory, and methodology. His analysis of modernity and rationalisation would significantly influence the critical theory associated with the Frankfurt School.

After the First World War, Weber was among the founders of the liberal German Democratic Party. He also ran unsuccessfully for a seat in parliament and served as advisor to the committee that drafted the ill-fated democratic Weimar Constitution of 1919. After contracting Spanish flu, he died of pneumonia in 1920, aged 56.

Methodology

Sociology, for Max Weber, is "a science which attempts the interpretive understanding of social action in profile thereby toat a causal explanation of its course and effects".

Made clear in his methodology, Weber distinguished himself from Durkheim, Marx, and other classical figures, in that a his primary focus would be on individuals and culture; and b unlike theorists such as Comte and Durkheim, he did not consciously effort to create any specific set of rules governing sociology or the social sciences in general. Whereas Durkheim focused on the society, Weber concentrated on the individual and their actions i.e. structure and action. Compared to Marx, who argued for the primacy of the the tangible substance that goes into the makeup of a physical thing world over the world of ideas, Weber valued ideas as motivating actions of individuals, at least in the big picture.

Weber would primarily be concerned with the impeach of objectivity and subjectivity, going on to distinguish social action from social behavior, noting that social action must be understood through how individuals subjectively relate to one another. study of social action through interpretive means or "to understand" must be based upon understanding the subjective meaning and intention that individuals attach to their actions. Socil actions may have easily identifiable and objective means, but much more subjective ends and the understanding of those ends by a scientist is pointed to yet another layer of subjective understanding that of the scientist. Weber pointed that the importance of subjectivity in social sciences helps build of fool-proof, universal laws much more difficult than in natural sciences and that the amount of objective cognition that social sciences mayis precariously limited.