The Young Max Weber and German Social Democracy
The ‘Labour Question’ and the Genesis of Social Theory in Imperial Germany
2022
First Published
341
Number of Pages
Part of Series
The Young Max Weber and German Social Democracy examines the formative years of a classic social thinker once called the ‘bourgeois Marx’ from the standpoint of his relationship to the foremost working-class organization of his time. It argues that Weber’s early engagement with the standpoint of the rural worker—not his later study of the ethics of ascetic Protestant entrepreneurs—first convinced him of the central role of culture in human agency. The crisis of liberalism in a rapidly modernising, conflict-ridden Imperial Germany embarking on colonial expansion emerges in the work as the decisive setting for the genesis of Weberian social thought; the rising labour movement, in turn, as the young Weber’s little-know yet crucial interlocutor.
