Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Chapter 1 Max Weber Invents Himself
- Chapter 2 Weber's Dissertation and Habilitation
- Chapter 3 Max Weber and the “Agrarian Crisis” 1892– 1902
- Chapter 4 Charisma and the Spirit of Capitalism
- Chapter 5 Max Weber's Sociology of Civilizations: A Preliminary Investigation into Its Major Methodological Concepts
- Chapter 6 Weber's Foray into Geopolitics
- Chapter 7 Max Weber in the United States
- Chapter 8 Max Weber on Russia's Long Road to Modernity
- Chapter 9 The Religion of China and the Prospects of Chinese
- Chapter 10 Politics without Magic: Max Weber in Weimar Germany
- Chapter 11 The Relevance of Max Weber for Political Theory Today
- Notes on Contributors
- Index
Chapter 1 - Max Weber Invents Himself
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 July 2017
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Chapter 1 Max Weber Invents Himself
- Chapter 2 Weber's Dissertation and Habilitation
- Chapter 3 Max Weber and the “Agrarian Crisis” 1892– 1902
- Chapter 4 Charisma and the Spirit of Capitalism
- Chapter 5 Max Weber's Sociology of Civilizations: A Preliminary Investigation into Its Major Methodological Concepts
- Chapter 6 Weber's Foray into Geopolitics
- Chapter 7 Max Weber in the United States
- Chapter 8 Max Weber on Russia's Long Road to Modernity
- Chapter 9 The Religion of China and the Prospects of Chinese
- Chapter 10 Politics without Magic: Max Weber in Weimar Germany
- Chapter 11 The Relevance of Max Weber for Political Theory Today
- Notes on Contributors
- Index
Summary
“Those who would think about the nature of society and history in our time have been living off the big men of the nineteenth century. There has not yet appeared any twentieth- century political theorist, sociologist, historian, or economist whose work is truly up to their level.” C. Wright Mills, “Introduction” to W. E. H. Lecky's History of European Morals from Augustus to Charlemagne (Mills, 1955)
The Budding Classicist
Max Weber fashioned himself into a historian and economist of ancient Rome by means, it can be argued, of pointed scholarly disputes with a set of accomplished and much older scholars – one in particular. This protracted, genteel set of disagreements amounted to a modified Oedipus tale not unlike, yet more important for his research than the famous one that erupted between Weber and his father when he evicted Max Weber Sr. from his home in 1897, six weeks before the latter's sudden death in a foreign city. As is well documented (Marianne Weber, 1975: 230– 264; Radkau, 2009: 64– 69, 145ff), the latter dispute ignited endless emotional trouble for Weber during the remaining 22 years of his life. Yet the former set of disagreements, I think it can be shown, inspired his early writing and gave him a lifelong impetus to work extremely hard at his scholarship.
A hint of all this comes from his wife's indispensable biography:
At the beginning of 1877, before his fourteenth birthday, Max wrote – evidently as a belated Christmas present – two historical essays “after numerous sources,” one “About the Course of German History, with Special Regard to the Positions of the Emperor and the Pope,” the other “About the Roman Imperial Period from Constantine to the Migration of Nations”; the latter was “Dedicated by the Author to his Own Insignificant Self as well as to his Parents and Siblings.” The text of the second essay is illustrated with a sketch of Constantinople, the family tree of Constantius Chlorus [Constantius I, “The Pale”] and daintily drawn heads of the Caesares and Augusti, apparently copied from antique coins the boy was collecting at the time. (Marianne Weber, 1975: 46)
All the key ingredients of his modus operandi are here if one were to work backward in Weber's life from his Agrarian Sociology of Ancient Civilizations (1909) to these memorable pieces of juvenilia 32 years before.
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- Information
- The Anthem Companion to Max Weber , pp. 1 - 26Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2016