Legacy of Max Weber

Weber’s significance during his lifetime was considerable among German social scientists, many of whom were his friends in Heidelberg or Berlin; but because so little of his work was published in book form during his lifetime, and because most of the journals in which he published had restricted audiences of scholarly specialists, his major impact was not felt until after his death. The only exceptions were his formulation of “liberal imperialism” in 1895, his widely discussed thesis on Protestantism and capitalism, and his extensive attack on German foreign and domestic policies during World War I in the pages of the Frankfurter Zeitung, which stimulated liberal sentiment against the government’s war aims and led Gen. Erich Ludendorff to view Weber as a traitor.

In general, Weber’s greatest merit as a thinker was that he brought the social sciences in Germany, hitherto preoccupied largely with national problems, into direct critical confrontation with the international giants of 19th-century European thought—Marx and Nietzsche; and, through this confrontation, Weber helped create a methodology and a body of literature dealing with the sociology of religion, political parties, and the economy, as well as studies of formal organizations, small-group behaviour, and the philosophy of history. His work continues to stimulate scholarship.