HIST363: Global Perspectives on Industrialization

Max Weber was - along with Karl Marx, Vilfredo Pareto, and Émile Durkheim - one of the founders of modern sociology. Whereas Pareto and Durkheim, following Comte, worked in the positivist tradition, Weber created and worked, like Werner Sombart, in the antipositivist, idealist, and hermeneutic tradition. Those works started the antipositivistic revolution in social sciences, which stressed the difference between the social sciences and natural sciences, especially due to human social actions. Weber's early work was related to industrial sociology, but he is most famous for his later work on the sociology of religion and sociology of government.

Max Weber began his studies of rationalization in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, in which he showed how the aims of certain Protestant denominations, particularly Calvinism, shifted towards the rational means of economic gain as a way of expressing that they had been blessed. The rational roots of this doctrine, he argued, soon grew incompatible with and larger than the religious, and so the latter were eventually discarded. Weber continued his investigation into this matter in later works, notably in his studies on bureaucracy and on the classifications of authority.