Max Weber (21 April 1864 - 14 June 1920)
Born in Erfurt, he studied in Heidelberg, Strassburg, Göttingen and Berlin. In 1889 he completed his doctorate on a legal-historical topic in Berlin. After his habilitation on “Roman Agrarian History: In Its Relation to Roman Public and Civil Law” (1891), he worked as an associate professor in Berlin and from 1894 as a professor of macroeconomics in Freiburg. In 1896 he obtained the Heidelberg chair of macroeconomics, as the successor of Karl Knies. In the same year he was an active participant in public and political life, as a leading member of the Verein fuer Socialpolitik and with contributions to discussions in the Christian social movement amongst others. Due to health reasons he was released from his teaching obligations in 1903. In 1904 he took over the editorial office of the Archive for Social Science and Social Policy. He was a founding member of the German Sociological Association in 1909. In 1918 he worked as a professor of macroeconomics at the University of Vienna. In 1919 he was offered a chair in Munich where he then moved. There he died after a short illness in 1920. Copies of parts of Weber’s far-flung academic correspondence are available in the Archive. An index of the letters is available. The acquisition of the copies was partially enabled by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation.