Weber, Max

Max Weber was born in Germany in 1864. His father was a jurist and politician and his mother, a humanist and liberal activist for social causes of her day. Following a privileged German childhood and adolescence, Weber enrolled at the University of Heidelberg in 1882. After three semesters of study he left to fulfill a year of military service. After release from the military, Weber went back to school and in 1886 took his first examination in law. Continuing his education, he wrote his doctoral thesis on the history of trading companies during the Middle Ages. The year was 1889 and in 1890 he passed his second law exam. In 1893 he married a distant cousin, Marianne Schnitger and the couple settled into the middle class life of a young academic in Berlin. Weber’s early career included a professorship of economics at the University of Freiburg followed by a similar position at the University of Heidelberg (Gerth and Mills 1946, p. 11). He would rise to prominence as one of the most...