Max Weber

Max Weber is best known as one of the leading scholars and founders of modern sociology, but but Weber also accomplished much economic work in the style of the "youngest" German Historical School. Another words, Weber is founder of modern sociology. This is because, he draws the conceptual frame of modern sociology, develops logical philosophy of social science and determine the fundamental characteristic of modern industry society. Max Weber contributes the new concepts to literature. Although these points, Weber never analyses about the community. Weber is the defective science man with this characteristic.

Weber says that Protestant ethic raises the capitalism in the most famous work , The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905). According to Weber, the idea of "capitalist accumulation" was born directly out of the Protestant ethic - not because the Protestant churches and doctrines condoned acquisitiveness as such (quite the contrary), but rather quite inadvertently through its claim to productive dedication to beruf and thriftiness in consumption. The subsequent ethical "legitimization" of capitalist acquisitiveness in later society under the rubric of "greed is good" was simply a distorted statement of what was already a fact. In no sense, claimed Weber, is the capitalist ethic of "greed" the creator of "capitalist society" (however much it might later be a propagator), but, rather, quite the opposite.

His Verstehen doctrine is as well-known as it is controversial and debated. His main thesis is that social, economic and historical research can never be fully inductive or descriptive as one should always approach it with a conceptual apparatus. This apparatus Weber identified as the "Ideal Type". The idea was essentially this: to try to understand a particular economic or social phenomena, one must "interpret" the actions of its participants and not only describe them. But interpretation poses us a problem for we cannot know it other than by trying to classify behavior as belonging to some prior "Ideal Type". Weber gave us four categories of "Ideal Types" of behavior: zweckrational (rational means to rational ends), wertrational (rational means to irrational ends), affektual (guided by emotion) and traditional (guided by custom or habit).

Works of Weber

Roman Agrarian History, 1891.

"Roscher and Knies and the Logical Problem of Historical Economics", 1903-5, Schmoller's Jahrbuch.

"The Objectivity of the Sociological and Social-Political Knowledge", 1904, .

The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism,1905.

Economy and Society, 1914.

"Politics as a Vocation",1918.

General Economic History, 1923. - (1).

The Methodology of the Social Sciences, 1949. - (1).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Weber
http://cepa.newschool.edu/het/profiles/weber.htm
Bürokrasi ve Otorite M. Weber