Weber, Max

Karl Emil Maximilian Weber (1864-1920) was one of the most influential German thinkers of the early twentieth century. An important political economist and social historian, he is best known as one of the founders of modern sociology. The first of eight children, Weber was born in Erfurt, now central Germany. His father, Max Weber, Sr., was a lawyer and government magistrate there, who later relocated to Berlin to pursue a notable political career. Weber's mother, Helene Fallenstein, came from a well-established family of international merchants and professionals, and lived an ethically aware and constrained life of Pietist propriety which strongly influenced the ideas of her eldest son. This contrasted sharply with the pragmatic realpolitik that her husband exemplified while helping to shape the new German nationstate. Weber's early life followed the pattern immortalized by Thomas Mann in Buddenbrooks (1902), that of the highly educated, monied bourgeoisie with cosmopolitan interests. Surprisingly, until he finished undergraduate school in 1885, Weber did not seem exceptional, having been bored by conventional schooling. Yet his parents' home in Berlin did provide a cultural setting that suited a sickly young man (weakened by meningitis) with bookish tendencies, since it offered not only enormous “cultural capital,” but also a regular stream of notables, political and scholarly, whom Weber got to know personally as he matured, listening in at his parents' social events.