Max weber biography and theories of personality

To that extent, it is little wonder that his name figures not only prominently but also uniquely in the pantheon of political realists [Galston ]. From this nuanced realist premise, Weber famously moved on to identify three ideal types of legitimate domination based on, respectively, charisma, tradition, and legal rationality. Roughly, the first type of legitimacy claim depends on how persuasively the leaders prove their charismatic qualities, for which they receive personal devotions and emotive followings from the ruled.

The second kind of claim can be made successfully when certain practice, custom, and mores are institutionalized to re produce a stable pattern of domination over a long duration of time. In contrast to these crucial dependences on personality traits and the passage of time, the third type of authority is unfettered by time, place, and other forms of contingency as it derives its legitimacy from adherence to impersonal rules and general principles that can only be found by suitable legal-rational reasoning.

It is, along with the traditional authority, a type of domination that is inclined towards the status quo in ordinary times as opposed to the charismatic authority that represents extraordinary, disruptive, and transformative forces in history. For one, his theory of legitimacy is seen as endorsing a cynical and unrealistic rejection of universal morality in politics that makes it hard to pass an objective and moral evaluative judgment on legitimacy claims, a charge that is commonly leveled at political realism at large.

That is to say, it allows scant, or ambiguous, a conceptual topos for democracy. In fact, it seems as though Weber is unsure of the proper place of democracy in his schema. At one point, democracy is deemed as a fourth type of legitimacy because it should be able to embrace legitimacy from below whereas his three ideal types all focus on that from above [Breuer in Schroeder ed.

At other times, Weber seems to believe that democracy is simply non-legitimate, rather than another type of legitimate domination, because it aspires to an identity between the ruler and the ruled i. Too recalcitrant to fit into his overall schema, in other words, these historical prototypes of democracy simply fall outside of his typology of domination as non- or not-legitimate at all.

The best example is the Puritan sect in which authority is legitimated only on the grounds of a consensual order created voluntarily by proven believers possessing their own quantum of charismatic legitimating power. Rather than an outright non-legitimate or fourth type of domination, here, democracy comes across as an extremely rare subset of a diffused and institutionalized form of charismatic legitimacy.

It seems as though one of the most influential political thinkers of the twentieth century cannot come to clear terms with its zeitgeist in which democracy, in whatever form, shape and shade, emerged as the only acceptable ground for political legitimacy.

Max weber biography and theories of personality: German sociologist and political economist best

If the genuine self-rule of the people is impossible, according to his unsentimental outlook on democracy, the only choice is one between leaderless and leadership democracy. When advocating a sweeping democratization of defeated Germany, thus, Weber envisioned democracy in Germany as a political marketplace in which strong charismatic leaders can be identified and elected by winning votes in a free competition, even battle, among themselves.

Preserving and enhancing this element of struggle in politics is important since it is only through a dynamic electoral process that national leadership strong enough to control the otherwise omnipotent bureaucracy can be made. The primary concern for Weber in designing democratic institutions has, in other words, less to do with the realization of democratic ideals, such as freedom, equality, justice, or self-rule, than with cultivation of certain character traits befitting a robust national leadership.

In addition to the free electoral competition led by the organized mass parties, Weber saw localized, yet public associational life as a breeding ground for such an imputation of charisma. Insofar as a vibrant civil society functions as an effective medium for the horizontal diffusion of charismatic qualities among lay people, his notion of charismatic leadership can retain a strongly democratic tone to the extent that he also suggested associational pluralism as a sociocultural ground for the political education of the lay citizenry from which genuine leaders would hail.

Like the contemporary advocates of partisanship, Weber is critical of the conventional communitarian view that simply equates civil society with voluntary associational life itself. Political capital can be acquired by living political experiences daily. From such an agonistic perspective, the best that can be expected is some kind of mixture of those partial claims — a compromise wherein lies the true meaning of political virtue.

For neither too unprincipled as in opportunistic power-seekers nor too principled as in moral zealotsgood partisan citizens welcome a political compromise, notwithstanding their passionate value convictions, because they know that some reasonable disagreements are permanent. It is this type of political virtue that Weber wants to instill at the citizenship as well as leadership level, and the site of this political education is a pluralistically organized civil society in which leaders and citizens can experience the dynamic and institutionalized politicization re produced by partisan politics.

According to the ethic of responsibility, on the one hand, an action is given meaning only as a cause of an effect, that is, only in terms of its causal relationship to the empirical world. The virtue lies in an objective understanding of the possible causal effect of an action and the calculated reorientation of the elements of an action in such a way as to achieve a desired consequence.

An ethical question is thereby reduced to a question of technically correct procedure, and free action consists of choosing the correct max weber biography and theories of personality. By emphasizing the causality to which a free agent subscribes, in short, Weber prescribes an ethical integrity between action and consequences, instead of a Kantian emphasis on that between action and intention.

These two kinds of reasoning represent categorically distinct modes of rationality, a boundary further reinforced by modern value fragmentation. This ultimate decision and the Kantian integrity between intention and action constitute the essence of what Weber calls an ethic of conviction. It is often held that the gulf between these two types of ethics is unbridgeable for Weber.

This frank admission, nevertheless, cannot be taken to mean that he privileged the latter over the former as far as political education is concerned. Weber keenly recognized the deep tension between consequentialism and deontology, but he still insisted that they should be forcefully brought together. The former recognition only lends urgency to the latter agenda.

In fact, he also called this synthetic ethic as that of responsibility without clearly distinguishing it from the merely consequentialist ethic it sought to overcome, thus creating an interpretive debate that continues to this day [de Villiers47—78]. This synthetic political virtue seems not only hard to achieve, but also without a promise of felicitous ending.

Walzer ; Coady ]. It was in this much earlier work —5 that Weber first outlined the basic contours of the ethic of vocation Berufsethik and a person of vocation Berufsmensch and the way those work practices emerged historically in the course of the Reformation and faded away subsequently. Hennis ]. It is too formal or empty to be an Aristotelean virtue ethics, and it is too concerned with moral character to be a Kantian deontology narrowly understood.

It culminates in an ethical characterology or philosophical anthropology in which passion and reason are properly ordered by sheer force of individual will. In this abiding preoccupation with statecraft-cum-soulcraft, Weber was a moralist and political educator who squarely belonged to the venerable tradition that stretches back to the ancient Greeks down to Rousseau, Hegel, and Mill.

His dystopian and pessimistic assessment of rationalization drove him to search for solutions through politics and science, which broadly converge on a certain practice of the self.

Max weber biography and theories of personality: Maximilian Carl Emil er was a

It is also in this entrenched preoccupation with an ethical characterology under modern circumstances that we find the source of his enduring influences on twentieth-century political and social thought. Even the postmodernist project of deconstructing the Enlightenment subjectivity finds, as Michel Foucault does, a precursor in Weber. The first editorial committee of consisted of Horst Baier, M.

This monumental project consists of a total of forty-five plus two index volumes in three divisions, i. Writings and Speeches, II. Correspondences, and III. Lectures and Lecture Notes. Primary Texts in English Translation In English, new translations have appeared since the turn of the century. Reflecting the latest Weber scholarship, both editions have many virtues, especially in terms of enhanced readability and adequate contextualization.

Hans Henrik Bruun and Sam Whimster, trans. Hans Henrik Bruun, Routlege, The earlier anthology, for all its uneven quality of translation, is still used in this article for the same reason of availability. Weber, Max. Lassman and R. Speirs ed. Oakes trans. Shils and H. Finch ed. Parsons trans. Giddens introLondon: Routledge. Economy and Society, 2 volumes, G.

Verstehen There are three main points to social action theory. The essence of verstehen is that to understand the cause of action, someone has to understand the meaning attached to it by the individual Weber, Weber distinguished between two types of Verstehen: the verstehen that resulted from direct observation, and that sociologists can apply when trying to understand the motives that give rise to a particular action.

Weber argued that the best way to achieve empathetic understanding is by taking the place of the max weber biography and theories of personality doing the activity Weber, Four Types of Social Action Weber believed that sociologists can generalize the motivations for human action into four basic categories. These are custom, affective social action, rational social action with values, and rational-instrumental social action.

Traditional social actions, or customs, are expected rituals performed in particular situations. These have two further subcategories: customs and habits. Both are familiar practices that are normally doone and popularized within a culture. Affective social action, otherwise known as emotional action, is the second motivation for human action that Weber proposes.

Emotional actions take place when someone acts impulsively, acting without thinking about the consequences. These can be either uncontrolled — when someone takes account of their own feelings over those of others — or the result of emotional tension — the frustration that a person may have when not fulfilling their goals, and the reactions to dissatisfaction that result.

People, according to Weber, can either carry out rational social actions because of their values — like the dictates of their religion — or in order to achieve a specific goal. These social actions are called value-based and rational-instrumental social actions, respectively Weber, Weber acknowledges, however, that there can still exist a lot of variation within these groups.

The City Max Weber also made significant strides in the study of urban culture. In his notable work, The CityWeber examined the role of the city as the carrier of the modern capitalist economy and as a precursor to the modern state. In this work, Max Weber argued that the city served as a historical precedent and basis to modern systems of political and economic power.

To do this, Weber provides a history of the city, beginning with the typical medieval occidental city. Weber then focuses on the features and distribution of political power in different historical cases, before considering the struggle between different groups for power in the city, and how these power struggles are essentially similar throughout different periods of history.

Finally, in the last chapter, Weber extrapolated this historical analysis to an explanation of how modern political systems work Weber, Bureaucratic Theory One widely-used Weberian theory today is Bureaucratic theory. Bureaucracy, as defined by Weber, is an organizational structure characterized by many rules, standardized processes, procedures, and requirements, as well as a clear and meticulous division of labor, clear hierarchies and professional and almost impersonal interactions between employees.

These bureaucracies have six major components: task specialization, formal selection, impersonality, hierarchy, rules, and career orientation. On the other hand, another With the methodology of the ideal type, which Weber used to emphasise one-sided perspectives about different civilisations as well as to classify and compare them, and with his characterisation of the Oriental self as a non-personality, Weber arguably deployed both orientalist dispositives; something that Said did not fail to notice.

His characterisation of the polar opposite of the charismatic political leader, namely the bureaucrat, which Weber despised as an element of disempowerment of German politics, was also informed by a deeply orientalist rationale. An orientalist rationale was thus operating at the very heart of his political theory and agenda. More recently, see Camic et al.

Instead, the reader will notice that this book proposes a different order. It starts from a discussion of the conceptualisation of personality in the methodological writings and the section on religion in Economy and Society. It then moves to consider, in order: the studies of Protestantism, ancient Judaism, Hinduism and Buddhism, and finally Confucianism and Taoism.

In other words, the type of self that Weber saw as originating from Confucianism and the Chinese socio-historical formation was the most distant from the ideal type of the Puritan personality. Hence, the organisation of the chapters follows a thematic and theoretically informed order, in order to disclose hitherto neglected elements, rather than a philological and chronological one.

Summary of the Chapters In when he gradually went back to intellectual work, after the parenthesis of inactivity that kept him far from university rooms, Weber published a number of metholodological studies and, in those same years, the famous essay The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Integrating into his thought numerous aspects from the main figures of the neo-Kantian school of Heidelberg — Windelband, Rickert and Lask — Weber went further and radically re-elaborated one of their key-concepts, namely, the notion of the historical individual [historische Individuum].

This concept had both represented the legacy of a long philosophical tradition that conceived of max weber biography and theories of personality as a theatre of manifestations of the spirit in individualised forms Iggersand emerged from the process of singularisation of the concept of history that was at the origin of the distinction between Natur- and Geisteswisseschaften Koselleck This chapter shows that it is the notion of historische Individuum in the thought of the neo-criticists of Baden that became the foundation upon which Weber constructed his theory of personality.

Weber thus intervened in the debate on the status of the subjectivity of the German bourgeoisie in a moment in which the traditional models of individuation, in particular the religious models, were in crisis. The Freiburg Address of outlined themes that Weber would reconsider and deepen in the writings on Protestantism: namely, the role of religious factors for the explanation of the different economic behaviours of Protestants and Catholics; the critique of historical materialism; the link between political-economic leadership and the concept of Beruf.

Fascinated by the dynamics of Anglo-Saxon capitalism, Weber argued that the versions of Protestantism that had emerged there particularly Puritanism and the personality formation to which they led, were the key for understanding the nature of Western modernity and capitalism. Here lies the centrality of the notion of Puritan personality as harmonious unity of the self which develops autonomously from authoritarian societal structures and engages in self-direction: according to Weber, it was the Puritan personality, in the end, that which had demonstrated that it was able to go through and to lead the epochal transition towards a society dominated by capital.

Weber emphasised primarily what he termed a double-standard morality within Judaism, one that he saw as having led to a form of particularism in the From this combination of aspects — gregariousness, economic particularism and forms of pariahcollectivism that failed to develop a proper individualist ideology — Weber saw the Jewish religion as inhibiting the rise of a Protestant type of personality.

As with his other comparative studies, the aim of Weber in the Sociology of India was to reconstruct the features of the interior habitus, or the specific type of personality, that had been produced by the socio-economic structures of the subcontinent. In order to analyse the ways in which the type of rationalisation that had occurred within Hinduism contributed to the formation of a distinctive type of personality, Weber concentrated essentially on three elements: caste dharma, and the doctrinary principles of samsara and karma.

The reading of the interconnection between these elements, in his view, led to paradoxical results. On the other hand, beside the promotion of practical action that maintained the characteristic of corporative action, the search for salvation was a private affair. Not only the strict observance of ritual duty, but also the emphasis put by Hinduism on individual responsibility for the achievement of reincarnation, promoted the paradoxes of religious individualism.

The structure of the self that was shaped by Hinduism, therefore, was for Weber egotistic and conformist, and thus poles apart from that which structured the Puritan personality. Though Weber had initially thought that Confucianism constituted the religious ethic closest to Puritanism, he finally arrived at the conclusion that it was, rather, the most different one see Schluchter By reconstructing the complex equilibrium between centre and periphery and the central role played by Mandarins in imperial China, and by scrutinising the nature of Confucian doctrine in terms of an ethic rather than a religion, Weber portrayed the image of a country that could be the potential theatre of formal rationalisation and that, instead, had stopped at the level of a state bureaucracy.

Weber believed a fundamentally ritualist and conformist self had been produced in such a context. The lack within Confucianism of a tension between God and the world, or of a level of transcendence, in particular, Only this type of tension, however, could lead to the depreciation of worldly matters and as a consequence to the possibility of thinking their change.

There was no psychological reward for the Confucian that was not that of the acquisition of eudemonistic goods through a sober, decorous and exterior conduct. He regarded the German Revolution of — as having been responsible for Germany's inability to fight against Poland 's claims on its eastern territories. He spent several hours unsuccessfully trying to convince Ludendorff to surrender himself to the Allies.

Weber thought that the German high command had failed, while Ludendorff regarded Weber as a democrat who was partially responsible for the revolution.

Max weber biography and theories of personality: Arguably the foremost social theorist of

Weber tried to disabuse him of that notion by expressing support for a democratic system with a strong executive. Since he held Ludendorff responsible for Germany's defeat in the war and having sent many young Germans to die on the battlefield, Weber thought that he should surrender himself and become a political martyr. However, Ludendorff was not willing to do so and instead wanted to live off of his pension.

He accepted the appointment in order to be closer to his mistress, Else von Richthofen. The student transcriptions of it were later edited and published as the General Economic History by Siegmund Hellmann [ de ] and Melchior Palyi [ de ] in In response to that, right-wing students disrupted his classes and protested in front of his home.

They met in the Munich town hall and debated for two days. While neither of them were able to convince the other of their points, Weber was more cautious and careful in his arguments against Spengler than the other debaters were. Afterwards, the students did not feel that the question of how to resolve Germany's post-war issues had been answered.

Weber thought positively of it, as he thought that her suicide was justified and that suicide in general could be an honourable act. He was uncomfortable with his newfound role as a father figure, but he thought that Marianne was fulfilled as a woman by this event.