20th century · 1864–1920
Who influenced Max Weber?
Influences and legacy
Disenchanted the world: bureaucracy, charisma, and the Protestant work ethic as fate.
Max Weber was influenced by Immanuel Kant and Karl Marx, and went on to influence Niklas Luhmann and Jürgen Habermas. That is 4 lines of the 448 documented lines of influence between the 279 thinkers on this map.
Read on Wikipedia Portrait: Ernst Gottmann, Public domain See the whole map
Who was Max Weber?
Born in Erfurt, Weber studied law and history and taught in Berlin, Freiburg and Heidelberg until a breakdown in 1897 stopped his teaching. After recovering he wrote The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, arguing that the Protestant work ethic helped create modern capitalism. After the First World War he co-founded the German Democratic Party and advised on the Weimar Constitution; he died in 1920.
His work centres on rationalisation and the disenchantment of the world as the marks of modernity. He defined the state by its monopoly on the legitimate use of force, distinguished charismatic, traditional and rational-legal authority, and argued for interpretive rather than purely empirical study of social action. He is counted with Marx and Durkheim among the founders of sociology.
Summarized from the lead of the Wikipedia article.
Who influenced Max Weber?
2 direct influences on this map, earliest first.
- Immanuel Kant 1724–1804
- Karl Marx 1818–1883
Who did Max Weber influence?
2 thinkers on this map draw directly on Max Weber.
- Niklas Luhmann 1927–1998
- Jürgen Habermas 1929–2026
The line of teachers behind Max Weber
The longest documented line of influence ending at Max Weber runs 25 generations back, to Thales of Miletus.
- Thales of Miletus
- Anaximenes of Miletus
- Anaxagoras
- Socrates
- Antisthenes
- Diogenes of Sinope
- Crates of Thebes
- Zeno of Citium
- Seneca
- Tertullian
- Augustine of Hippo
- Anselm of Canterbury
- Peter Lombard
- Thomas Aquinas
- René Descartes
- Thomas Hobbes
- Baruch Spinoza
- Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
- Christian Wolff
- Immanuel Kant
- Johann Gottlieb Fichte
- F. W. J. Schelling
- Georg W. F. Hegel
- Ludwig Feuerbach
- Karl Marx
- Max Weber
Two steps away from Max Weber
Indirect influences
Contemporaries of Max Weber
Thinkers on this map born within 25 years of Max Weber, with no direct line between them.
- Lev Shestov 1866–1938
- W. E. B. Du Bois 1868–1963
- Henri Bergson 1859–1941
- John Dewey 1859–1952
- Edmund Husserl 1859–1938
- Georg Simmel 1858–1918
- Kitarō Nishida 1870–1945
- Nikolay Lossky 1870–1965
Max Weber by the numbers
- Direct influences
- 2
- Direct followers
- 2
- Thinkers upstream
- 93
- Thinkers downstream
- 2
- Wikipedia languages
- 140 — #3 of 84 among 20th-century philosophers
- Card rarity
- Legendary
Questions about Max Weber
- Who influenced Max Weber?
- Immanuel Kant and Karl Marx.
- Who did Max Weber influence?
- Niklas Luhmann and Jürgen Habermas.
- When did Max Weber live?
- 1864–1920. The map files Max Weber under the 20th century.
- How rare is the Max Weber card?
- Wikipedia carries an article on Max Weber in 140 languages, which makes it a Legendary card. Legendary starts at 100 languages, Epic at 50 and Rare at 25.
More 20th-century philosophers
- Jean-Paul Sartre 1905–1980
- Albert Camus 1913–1960
- Simone de Beauvoir 1908–1986
- Bertrand Russell 1872–1970
- Ludwig Wittgenstein 1889–1951
- Martin Heidegger 1889–1976
- Umberto Eco 1932–2016
- Antonio Gramsci 1891–1937