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 respected intellectuals of his time.

In order to understand Weber’s scholarly contributions, which are many, it is also important to understand his fragile psychological state. As a young man, he was bothered by his Lutheran religious heritage and his strained relationship with his father (Lehmann and Roth 1995, p. 83). Max Sr. was a man who held his emotions in check and failed in many ways to connect on a human level with either his wife or his children. Tensions between father and son eventually erupted in a heated argument in 1897. The elder Weber died sometime after the encounter and Max, blaming himself, was overwhelmed with a deep sense of guilt. During a trip to Spain later that summer he experienced a psychic event accompanied by persistent insomnia that would continue for the rest of his life. Anxiety and depression affected his ability to work fulltime and he lived as a private scholar until World War I when he resumed his teaching duties (Martindale 1981, p. 376).

His mental state may have contributed to a worldview often described as tragic and dark. According to a distant cousin, Paul Honigsheim, Weber’s system of moral standards was consumed with tensions between Kantian ethics and the cultural nihilism of Nietzsche (Sica 2003, p. 113). Weber’s apocalyptic image of modernity, the iron cage, reflects a climate of fear regarding loss of individual freedom and autonomy during the era in which he lived and worked (Kim 2012). The future, according to Weber, would be no better and perhaps even more chaotic. He believed worldly turmoil would lead to a collective loss of faith in God (Holton 1996, p. 41). He argued that one of the problems for individuals living in the modern world included a decline in strong communities grounded in moral principles. Weber predicted that individuals interested only in the material world would replace individuals seeking moral accountability and spiritual enlightenment.

Individuals in Weber’s analysis of the modern world were reduced to cogs in a machine, a direct result of formal rationalization. Weber remarks in a passage from The Spirit of Capitalism and the Protestant Ethic (1904–05/2002, p. 121) that no one can predict who will end up living in the iron cage. Additionally it is impossible to tell whether new prophets will emerge along with a rebirth of old ideals to help save the day. He goes on to say that “mechanization dressed up with desperate self-importance” will set in and the last “men” standing through this “monstrous” cultural development will delude themselves into thinking they have achieved a higher stage of development. His notion represents the fate of modernity for human societies. Certainly, as far as Weber was concerned, “men” were free to make their own decisions but without guidance from a higher moral order he argued that they lose the capacity to achieve a more stable and balanced life.

Martindale suggests that throughout his adult life Weber exhibited a tragic sense of “disenchantment” with the world (1981, p. 271). Weber’s theory often employed troublesome interactions between institutional structure and human agency. In part, this psychic tension between structure and action may have been influenced by his adult onset depression and childhood experiences in a patriarchal German family. Weber’s first documented episode of a major depressive disorder occurred when he was 33 years old. He may have also experienced extreme anxiety following the death of his father, precipitating his psychotic break and bleak outlook on life that informed much of his scholarly work.

Interestingly, Weber portrays the “bureaucrat” as a hapless official chained to a fixed and static administrative apparatus (Gerth and Mills 1946, p. 228). He goes on to say that it is the responsibility of bureaucrats to oil the apparatus/machine and keep it functioning. The rest of society learns to depend on the machine and not question its authority. In contrast to earlier eras, Weber’s modern apparatus is impersonal, vested with maintaining the status quo as its primary goal. This theme permeates Weber’s approach to explaining modernity and the evolution of bureaucratic institutions. It may also reflect his troubling relationship with his father who was not only an authoritarian personality but who also made a living as a German bureaucrat during the Bismarck era (Martindale 1981, p. 375).

Prior to the age of Darwin, the world was held together by an all-powerful, all-mighty God. Max Weber was born 5 years after Darwin’s Origin of Species was first published. He was raised in the Lutheran Church and following Lutheran dogma, the Weber children were taught that salvation comes by the grace of God and faith in Jesus Christ. It appears that Weber was influenced by these beliefs during the course of his life, even though he expressed some misgivings about the strict doctrines of the church. Acknowledging his mental illness, Weber stated that it enabled him to be more tolerant of the human condition. Throughout his life he was concerned with order amid chaos, the need for a spiritual connection beyond bureaucratic social control, and the task of humanizing intensely rationalized social institutions. His extensive portfolio of scholarship also attests to a work ethic that transcended physical and mental constraints and continues to influence a new generation of social scientists.

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