Max Weber

Max Weber (1864 to 1920) was a German sociologist, historian, jurist and political economist, regarded as one of the founding figures of sociology and of the social sciences more generally. Born in Erfurt, he studied law and history in Berlin, Göttingen and Heidelberg, took a doctorate in law in 1889 and a habilitation in 1891, and taught in Berlin, Freiburg and Heidelberg before a breakdown in 1897 ended his teaching for several years. His legal training shaped his work: he wrote a legal history dissertation on joint liability in the general partnership and a habilitation on Roman agrarian history and its significance for public and private law, and he is counted a founder of the sociology of law, which studies the effects of legal rules on social behaviour as distinct from jurisprudence, which studies their internal logic. He classified legitimate authority as charismatic, traditional and rational-legal, wrote The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, advised on the drafting of the Weimar Constitution and left Economy and Society unfinished when he died of pneumonia in 1920.