Maximilian Karl Emil Weber

Maximilian Karl Emil Weber was born on April 21 ,1864 and he died on June 14 ,1920. He

was a German sociologist, historian, jurist and political economist, who is referred to as one

of the most important theorists of the development of Modern Western Society. His ideas

profoundly influence social theory and research. Despite being recognized as one of the

fathers of sociology along with Auguste Comte, Karl Marx, and É mile Durkheim, Max Weber

saw himself not as a sociologist but as an historian.

Max Weber is best known for his other thesis combining economic sociology and

the sociology of religion, emphasizing the importance of cultural influences embedded in

religion as a means for understanding the genesis of capitalism (in contrast to

Marx's historical materialism). Weber would first elaborate his theory in his seminal

work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905), where he

attributed ascetic Protestantism as one of the major "elective affinities" involved in the rise

of market-driven capitalism and the rational-legal nation-state in the Western

world. Arguing the boosting of capitalism as a basic tenet of Protestantism, Weber

suggested that the spirit of capitalism is inherent in Protestant religious values. Protestant

Ethic would form the earliest part in Weber's broader investigations into world religion, as

he later examined the religions of China and India, as well as ancient Judaism, with

particular 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 first to categorize social authority into distinct
forms: charismatic, traditional, and rational-legal. Among these categories, Weber's

analysis of bureaucracy emphasized that modern state institutions are increasingly based

on the latter (rational-legal authority).