In 1903 Weber was able to resume scholarly work, and an inheritance in 1907 made him financially independent. He did not teach again until after World War I. The nature of his most important work after his partial recovery suggests that his prolonged agony had led him to develop brilliant insights into the relationship of Calvinist morality and compulsive labour, into the relationship between various religious ethics and social and economic processes, and into many other questions of lasting importance. Indeed, Weber produced his most important work in the 17 years between the worst part of his illness and his death.
Weber’s intellectual breadth in the study of societies can hardly be overestimated; it surpassed that of his predecessors, mainly Karl Marx and Émile Durkheim. Dissatisfied with the intellectual traditions of the social sciences and law in German and Western universities, Weber sought to develop a scientific approach that overcame their deficiencies. Although he never fully defined a systematic research program explaining his comparative methodology, his essays on the historical development of Eastern and Western societies suggest what such an approach might entail. Weber demonstrated that the comparative method was essential because the behaviour of institutions in societies could not be understood in isolation. (Even his popular work on the connection between Puritanism and the development of capitalism in the West cannot be fully understood without reference to his work on comparative institutions—e.g., his studies of Asiatic religions and ancient Judaism.)
In preparation for work that he contemplated but never completed, Weber developed the ideal type as a methodological tool for comparative sociology. In analyzing the history of Western societies, Weber focused on rationalism as a unique and central force shaping all Western institutions, including economics, politics, religion, family, stratification systems, and music. These typologies have had a decisive impact on the development of subsequent, more specialized sociological inquiries.
A brief glance at Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus (1904–05; The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism), Weber’s best known and most controversial work, illustrates the general trend of his thinking. Weber began by noting the statistical correlation in Germany between interest and success in capitalist ventures on the one hand and Protestant background on the other. He then attributed this relationship between capitalism and Protestantism to certain accidental psychological consequences of the notions of predestination and calling in Puritan theology.
In Calvin’s formulation the doctrine of predestination stated that sinful humanity could know neither why nor to whom God had extended the grace of salvation. Weber inferred that the psychological insecurity that this doctrine imposed on Calvin’s followers, stern believers in hellfire, was such that they began to look for signs indicating the direction of God’s will in daily life. The consequence was an ethic of unceasing commitment to one’s worldly calling (any lapse would indicate that one’s state of grace was in doubt) and ascetic abstinence from any enjoyment of the profit reaped from such labours. The practical result of such beliefs and practices was, in Weber’s estimation, the most rapid possible accumulation of capital.
Weber had published his thesis on the Protestant ethic in the journal he had just begun to edit, Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik. From 1905 to 1910 he published a number of exchanges between himself and critics of his thesis in the Archiv. He never denied his critics’ claims that highly developed capitalist enterprises existed centuries before Calvin. Weber was also aware of other preconditions, both material and psychological, that contributed to the development of modern capitalism. He responded to these criticisms by arguing that, before Calvinism, capitalist enterprise and wealth accumulation were always fettered by the passive or active hostility of the prevalent religious order. If some capitalists were, by virtue of their skepticism, able to escape the guilt feelings that the prevailing religious ethos dictated, it was nevertheless a fact that no other religious tradition had ever caused people to see the accumulation of capital (saving money) as a sign of God’s everlasting grace.
The Puritans, Weber argued, had accepted the cloak of worldly asceticism voluntarily, as a means of alleviating otherwise unbearable spiritual burdens. In so doing, however, they helped to create the enormous structure of the modern economic institution, which proceeded to determine the life and values of everyone born into it.
Around the time he published his work on the Protestant ethic, the middle-class German culture in which Weber had been nurtured experienced its first spasms of disintegration. The Protestant morality that he had come to accept as inescapable destiny came under attack from the youth movement, from avant-garde literary circles such as the one centred on the poet Stefan George, from Neoromantics influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud, and from Slavic cultural ideals, exemplified in the works of Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky. In this setting Weber developed his political sociology, which makes the crucial distinction between charismatic, traditional, and legal forms of authority.
Charismatic authority, or charisma, refers to the gift of spiritual inspiration underlying the power of religious prophets or extraordinary political leaders. In probing charisma Weber touched, sometimes explicitly, on themes that had first been broached by Nietzsche. His acute interest in social phenomena such as mysticism, which are antithetical to the modern world and its underlying process of rationalization, paralleled a late awakening of Weber’s aesthetic and erotic faculties. In 1910, amid the crumbling social order of European middle-class society, Weber began a series of important discussions with George and his close disciple, the poet Friedrich Gundolf. At roughly the same time, Weber began an extramarital affair, probably his first experience of sexual intimacy; one of his most brilliant later essays (“Theorie der Stufen und Richtungen religioser Weltablehnung,” 1916; “Religious Rejections of the World and Their Directions”) contains an analysis of the conflicting relationships between eroticism, ascetic and mystical modes of religiosity, and the general process of rationalization.
During this same period Weber attempted to build respect for sociology as a discipline by defining a value-free methodology for it and by analyzing the religious cultures of India and China for comparison with the Western religious tradition. Also of critical importance in his last decade was his stoic examination of the conditions and consequences of the rationalization of political and economic life in the West in Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (1922; Economy and Society) and journal articles.
Indeed, Weber’s most powerful impact on his contemporaries came in the last years of his life, when, from 1916 to 1918, he argued powerfully against Germany’s annexationist war goals and in favour of a strengthened parliament. He stood bravely for sobriety in politics and scholarship against the apocalyptic mood of right-wing students in the months following Germany’s defeat in World War I. After assisting in the drafting of the new constitution and in the founding of the German Democratic Party, Weber died of a lung infection in June 1920.