Max Weber

Max Weber was born in Erfurt in 1864 into a family of the Protestant liberal bourgeoisie and died in Munich in 1920, aged 56. He trained in law and economic history and became professor of economics at Freiburg and then Heidelberg, but a breakdown around 1898 interrupted his teaching for years. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904–05) made his name. With Werner Sombart and Edgar Jaffé he edited an influential social-science journal, and his Heidelberg circle included Georg Lukács and Robert Michels.

During and after the First World War Weber wrote on German politics, arguing for parliamentarisation and stronger political leadership. He was invited to take part in drafting the Weimar Constitution, served on the German delegation to Versailles, and ran unsuccessfully for the National Assembly for the German Democratic Party. In January 1919 he delivered the lectures 'Science as a Vocation' and 'Politics as a Vocation' in Munich. His vast Economy and Society was published posthumously in 1922.

• The state. Weber defined the modern state as 'a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory'. The definition is about means, not ends: states pursue all kinds of purposes, but what distinguishes them is their claim to legitimate coercion.
• Three types of legitimate authority. People obey because they believe a command is legitimate. Weber distinguished traditional authority, resting on established custom; charismatic authority, resting on devotion to the extraordinary qualities of a leader; and legal-rational authority, resting on belief in impersonal rules enacted through correct procedure. Real regimes mix the types, and charisma tends to be 'routinised' into tradition or bureaucracy.
• Bureaucracy. Legal-rational authority is administered by bureaucracies of trained, salaried officials working under written rules, a hierarchy of offices and a separation of office from person. Bureaucracy is technically superior to other forms of administration, but formal rationalisation can trap individuals in an 'iron cage' (stahlhartes Gehäuse) of rules and calculation.
• Leadership democracy. Because bureaucracy tends to escape control, Weber favoured a 'leadership democracy' in which strong leaders chosen in competitive elections and tested in parliament direct the administration. He argued for a powerful, popularly elected president in the Weimar constitution.
• Two ethics. Politicians face a tension between an ethic of conviction, which judges acts by fidelity to ultimate values, and an ethic of responsibility, which judges them by foreseeable consequences; mature politics combines both. Politics is 'a strong and slow boring of hard boards'.

Weber's typology of legitimacy is the starting point of most empirical work on why people accept authority, and his definition of the state is used across political science and international relations. His ideal type of bureaucracy shaped public administration and organisation theory, and his analysis of party machines and plebiscitary leadership influenced Michels's 'iron law of oligarchy' and Schumpeter's competitive theory of democracy.

His questions are central to debates on AI in government. Automated decision systems can be read as an extreme form of legal-rational administration — rule-bound, impersonal, calculable — raising his concerns about the 'iron cage', the loss of individual judgement and the difficulty of holding expert administration accountable. Discussions of 'algorithmic legitimacy' ask whether acceptance of such systems can rest on procedural correctness alone, or requires the forms of contestation and leadership responsibility Weber emphasised.

• Plebiscitary leadership. Critics, notably Wolfgang Mommsen, argued that Weber's case for a strong, charismatic president contributed to the design of Article 48 and a presidency later used to dismantle Weimar democracy; defenders reply that he wanted leaders checked by parliament.
• Elitism. His view of mass democracy as a method for selecting leaders, rather than for expressing popular will, is criticised by participatory democrats.
• Ideal types. Sociologists debate whether ideal types clarify or distort reality, and whether the threefold typology captures non-Western and modern forms of legitimacy such as performance or democratic legitimacy.
• Value neutrality. His insistence on separating facts from value judgements in science is contested by those who see social science as inherently normative.

• The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904–1905)
• 'Parliament and Government in a Reconstructed Germany' (1918)
• 'Politics as a Vocation' and 'Science as a Vocation' (lectures, 1919) — in H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (eds), From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (1946)
• Economy and Society (1922, posthumous)
• Overview: Sung Ho Kim, 'Max Weber', Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy