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There are several good reasons for dividing Max Weber's professional life into three sections: first he was a lawyer, then a political economist, and finally he became a sociologist. He was educated as a jurist and his first professorship was in law. When he took up the chair in national economy at Freiburg, he entered a different area of specialization and, within an extraordinarily short time, became an expert in economics (Weber 2009a: viii, 2). While he was one of the founders of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Soziologie, Weber initially had rather ambivalent feelings about sociology. Not until 1913 did he begin to refer to the work that would become Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft as "my sociology," and it was much later still that he admitted in a letter to Robert Liefmann dated March 1920 that he had become a 'sociologist" (Schluchter 2009a: 70; Weber 2012a: 946). However, Weber's professional life cannot be divided so neatly, and because of three important reasons. First, his legal, economic, and cultural interests overlapped throughout his life. Second, he objected to much of what was called 'sociology." Third, his concern with economics in general and capitalism in particular was shared with a number of important scholars, however, his attitude and approach toward these topics differed considerably from those of his colleagues.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137454799_2

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