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Peukert, Helge --- "Max Weber (1864-1920)" [1999] ELECD 55; in Backhaus, G. Jürgen (ed), "The Elgar Companion to Law and Economics" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 1999)

Book Title: The Elgar Companion to Law and Economics

Editor(s): Backhaus, G. Jürgen

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781858985169

Section: Chapter 48

Section Title: Max Weber (1864-1920)

Author(s): Peukert, Helge

Number of pages: 12

Extract:

48 Max Weber (1864-1920)
Helge Peukert


The man, his life and sociology
Max Weber was born in 1864 in Erfurt (Thuringen) and died in Munich in
1920. His father came from a family of industrialists and tradespeople. He
was a lawyer (and after 1866 became a city advisor in Berlin) and without
doubt stimulated his son's early studies in the history of commercial law and
his emergence as one of the major personalities in a new generation of
historical political economists in Germany in the 1890s. In 1892, he became
extraordinary professor in commercial and German law at Berlin University.
In 1894, a switch from law to economics took place: he was appointed to a
chair in political economy at Freiburg, the town where, in 1882, he had begun
to study law, economics, philosophy and some theology; his special interests
as a student were already history of late antiquity, modern commercial law
and contemporary history of constitutional law.
Although Weber is mainly considered as a founding father of sociology (a
term he began to use not long before the 191Os), his writings deal with the
interpenetration of law, economy and society. Turner and Factor (1994) put
forward an interpretation of Weber as being mainly a translator of Rudolf von
Ihering's legal philosophy into sociology, see also Loos (1 970), Marra (1992),
Breuer and Treiber (1984), Rehbinder and Tieck (1987), Zippelius (1991),
and the introductions by Winckelmann (1960) and Rheinstein (1954); a gen-
eral overview about the debate ...