Max Weber as an Economist: Revisiting Max Weber’s Legacy 100 Years after His Passing

This article presents Max Weber as an economist and as a social scientist. Weber’s relations to economics, philosophy and sociology are discussed. Max Weber has more in common with economists than it might seem at first sight. His principle of value neutrality has become the foundation of the methodology of social sciences, including economics. The second point shared by Max Weber with standard economics is methodological individualism. The third point which a modern economist can learn from Max Weber is the concept of the ideal type.

Max Weber as a Political Economist

Max Weber’s path to economic science was impacted to a large degree by political motives. The question emerges how the depiction, which has been maintained by historians of economics, of Weber as a methodologist – who demands objectivity and value freedom in scientific analysis – is compatible with the view of a young, politically-minded economist who, even from the university lectern, did not shy away from personal value judgments? The manuscripts first published recently in the context of the Max Weber-Gesamtausgabe on his lectures Praktische Nationalökonomie (1895 – 1899) reveal that Weber distinguished sharply between value judgments and scientific analysis – not in order to suppress the former, but in order to be clear about his ultimate goals and its consequences at all times and to elevate these to guide his thinking in practical questions of political economy.