Max Weber was a German economist and sociologist who is considered one of the founders of modern sociology. He is best known for his thesis of the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, which argued that the Protestant ethic played a major role in the economic success of the West. Weber also wrote extensively on bureaucracy and its effects on modern society.
What is the most famous quote by Max Weber ?
In a democracy the people choose a leader in whom they trust. Then the chosen leader says, 'Now shut up and obey me.' People and party are then no longer free to interfere in his business.
— Max Weber
What can you learn from Max Weber (Life Lessons)
- Max Weber taught that hard work and dedication are essential to achieving success and that one should always strive to be the best they can be.
- He also emphasized the importance of understanding the social and cultural contexts of one's work and the need to maintain a sense of balance and perspective.
- Finally, Weber believed in the power of education and knowledge, and that one should never stop learning and developing their skills.
The most lavish Max Weber quotes that will transform you to a better person
Following is a list of the best quotes, including various Max Weber inspirational quotes, and other famous sayings by Max Weber.
The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the disenchantment of the world.
Politics means striving to share power or striving to influence the distribution of power, either among states or among groups within a state.
A fully developed bureaucratic mechanism stands in the same relationship to other forms as does the machine to the non-mechanical production of goods. Precision, speed, clarity, documentary ability, continuity, discretion, unity, rigid subordination, reduction of friction and material and personal expenses are unique to bureaucratic organization.
The experience of the irrationality of the world has been the driving force of all religious revolution.
No sociologist should think himself too good, even in his old age, to make tens of thousands of quite trivial computations in his head and perhaps for months at a time.
Culture' is a finite segment of the meaningless infinity of the world process, a segment on which human beings confer meaning and significance.
Every scientific fulfillment raises new questions; it asks to be surpassed and outdated.
Charisma is the gift from above where a leader knows from inside himself what to do.
Socioeconomic analysis. quotes by Max Weber
The impulse to acquisition, pursuit of gain, of money, of the greatest possible amount of money, has in itself nothing to do with capitalism. This impulse exists and has existed among waiters, physicians, coachmen, artists, prostitutes, dishonest officials, soldiers, nobles, crusaders, gamblers, and beggars.
The organization of ofices follows the principle of hierarchy .
.. each lower office is under the control and supervision of a higher one
Puritanism carried the ethos of the rational organization of capital and labor.
It took over from the Jewish ethic only what was adapted to this purpose.
The so-called materialistic conception of history, with the crude elements of genius of the early form which appeared, for instance, in the Communist Manifesto, still prevails only in the minds of laymen and dilettantes.
However many people complain about the "red tape," it would be sheer illusion to think ... continuous administrative work can be carried out in any field except by means of officials working in offices.... The choice is only that between bureaucracy and dillettantism.
The nation is burdened with the heavy curse on those who come afterwards.
The generation before us was inspired by an activism and a naive enthusiasm, which we cannot rekindle, because we confront tasks of a different kind from those which our fathers faced.
The ethic of conviction and the ethic of responsibility are not opposites.
They are complementary to one another.
Only by strict specialization can the scientific worker become fully conscious, for once and perhaps never again in his lifetime, that he has achieved something that will endure. A really definitive and good accomplishment is today always a specialized act.
Daily and hourly, the politician inwardly has to overcome a quite trivial and all-too-human enemy: a quite vulgar vanity.
A highly developed stock exchange cannot be a club for the cult of ethics.
The career of politics grants a feeling of power.
The knowledge of influencing men, of participating in power over them, and above all, the feeling of holding in one's hands a nerve fiber of historically important events can elevate the professional politician above everyday routine even when he is placed in formally modest positions.
Those human groups that entertain a subjective belief in their common descent because of similarities of physical type or of customs or both, or because of memories of colonization and migration; this belief must be important for group formation; furthermore it does not matter whether an objective blood relationship exists.
Precision, speed, unambiguity, knowledge of files, continuity, discretion, unity, strict subordination, reduction of friction and of material and personal costs - these are raised to the optimum point in the strictly bureaucratic administration.
[In] the realm of science, ... what we have achieved will be obsolete in ten, twenty or fifty years. That is the fate, indeed, that is the very meaning of scientific work. ... Every scientific "fulfillment" raises new "questions" and cries out to be surpassed rendered obsolete. Everyone who wishes to serve science has to resign himself to this.
All research in the cultural sciences in an age of specialization, once it is oriented towards a given subject matter through particular settings of problems and has established its methodological principles, will consider the analysis of the data as an end in itself.
The summum bonum of this [Puritan] ethic is the earning of more and more money combined with the strict avoidance of all enjoyment.
One cannot with impunity try to transfer this task entirely to mechanical assistants if one wishes to figure something, even though the final result is often small indeed.
Only on the assumption of belief in the validity of values is the attempt to espouse value-judgments meaningful. However, to judge the validity of such values is a matter of faith .
It is not astonishing that there are many journalists who have become human failures and worthless men. Rather, it is astonishing that, despite all this, this very stratum includes such a great number of valuable and quite genuine men, a fact that outsiders would not so easily guess.
Social economic problems do not exist everywhere that an economic event plays a role as cause or effect - since problems arise only where the significance of those factors is problematical and can be precisely determined only through the application of methods of social-economics.
One can say that three pre-eminent qualities are decisive for the politician: passion, a feeling of responsibility, and a sense of proportion.
Politics is a strong and slow boring of hard boards.
Not everyone realises that to write a really good piece of journalism is at least as demanding intellectually as the achievement of any scholar.
Laws are important and valuable in the exact natural sciences, in the measure that those sciences are universally valid.
The decisive means for politics is violence.
Within the confines of the lecture hall, no other virtue exists but plain intellectual integrity.
Every type of purely direct concrete description bears the mark of artistic portrayal.
The purely emotional form of Pietism is, as Ritschl has pointed out, a religious dilettantism for the leisure class.
Power is the chance to impose your will within a social context, even when opposed and regardless of the integrity of that chance.
specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart;
this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved.
The great virtue of bureaucracy - indeed, perhaps its defining characteristic ~ was that it was an institutional method for applying general rules to specific cases, thereby making the actions of government fair and predictable.
Nothing is worthy of man as man unless he can pursue it with passionate devotion.
Only by strict specialization can the scientific worker become fully conscious, for once and perhaps never again in his lifetime, that he has achieved something that will endure. A really definitive and good accomplishment is today always a specialized ac
In the midst of a culture that is rationally organized for a vocational workaday life, there is hardly any room for the cultivation of acosmic brotherliness, unless it is among strata who are economically carefree. Under the technical and social conditions of rational culture, an imitation of the life of Buddha, Jesus, or Francis seems condemned to failure for purely external reasons.
Either one lives for politics or one lives off politics.
Whenever known and sufficient causes are available, it is anti-scientific to discard them in favour of a hypothesis that can never be verified.
Causal analysis provides absolutely no value judgment, and a value judgment is absolutely not a causal explanation.
The primary task of a useful teacher is to teach his students to recognize 'inconvenient' facts - I mean facts that are inconvenient for their party opinions.
The Truth is the Truth.
All the analysis of infinite reality which the finite human mind can conduct rests on the tacit assumption that only a finite portion of this reality constitutes the object of scientific investigation, and that only it is 'important' in the sense of being 'worthy of being known.
Only he has the calling for politics who is sure that he will not crumble when the world from his point of view is too stupid or base for what he wants to offer. Only he who in the face of all this can say In spite of all! has the calling for politics.