Max Weber

Max Weber was a German jurist, economist and historian who broke down at thirty-three, recovered slowly, and became the founder of modern sociology, writing on the religions of China, India and ancient Israel, on bureaucracy, authority and the state. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism argued that Calvinist anxiety about salvation produced the disciplined pursuit of profit, and gave the world the iron cage. The lectures Politics as a Vocation and Science as a Vocation, given to students in the chaos after 1918, are the sober statement of what the disenchanted modern world asks of those who must act in it. He died of influenza at fifty-six.