This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (November 2008)

Authority (from the Latin auctoritas) is a right conferred by recognized social position. Authority often refers to power vested in an individual or organization by the state. Authority can also refer to recognized expertise in an area of academic knowledge. An Authority (capitalized) refers to a governing body upon which certain authority (with lower case a) is vested; for example, the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority.

Authority in various settings[link]

Politics[link]

In government, authority is the scope of an entity's legitimate power (Cline n.d.) when acting on behalf of the government. This power is conferred through officially recognized channels within the government, and represents a portion of the government's overall power. For example, a government might have the authority to execute criminals. The government could then contain a jury authorized to determine if a citizen is a criminal or a non-criminal; a judge authorized to sentence criminals to execution; and an executioner authorized to kill criminals who have been sentenced to execution. In contrast, a mob of citizens might have the power to do all of the above things, but still lack the authority because the actions would not be legitimate.

Political authority can also be seen in situations that are typically considered apolitical. (Agarwal n.d.) In truth bestowing authority is a function of any social institution. A corporation, for example, must hire employees as a standard function of its existence. However, most of the corporation's members are not authorized to hire employees. This authority is passed down through the corporation to specific individuals without government involvement. This same phenomenon can be found in religious organizations, charities, fraternities, etc.

Academia[link]

A person (or group) may be considered an "authority" on a subject matter if their expertise is well established. This means that any statements the person makes, with regard to their field of expertise, will have the burden of proof in their favor. That is, if a professor of mathematics makes a statement about numbers, it will be assumed to be true in the absence of evidence to the contrary. This will also overrule any unsupported objections by an individual without such expertise. Professional scholars are common examples of this, but they are not the only examples. A carpenter might be considered an authority on wood, for example.

Religion[link]

Authority can be understood to have been exercised by God toward man as the Scriptures are consulted for direction from a statement or command, an example of action that is seen to be apporved by God, or when it is obvious that God intended common sesne to infer needed direction to obey an understood command. The Lord's Supper was directly spoken about by Jesus as being expected for His followers to participate in, the day of the week in seen in an example of believers partaking of the elements on the first day of the week, and it is clear that every week has a first day so that the frequency, day, and necessity of taking the Lord's supper(the communion) is what the author rules to happen.

Governmental agencies[link]

Every state has a number of institutions which exercise authority based on longstanding practices. Apart from this, every state sets up agencies which are competent in dealing with one particular matter. All this is set up within its charter. One example would be a port authority like the Port of London. They are usually created by special legislation and are run by a board of directors. Several agencies and institutions are created along the same lines and they exercise authority in certain matters. They are usually required to support themselves through property taxes or other forms of collection or fees for services.

Controversy[link]

In contemporary social science, the nature of authority is a matter of debate. According to Michaels, in the Encyclopedia of Social Sciences, authority is the capacity, innate or acquired for exercising ascendancy over a group. Other scientists argue that authority is not a capacity but a relationship. It is sanctioned power, institutionalized power.

In political philosophy, the jurisdiction of political authority, the location of sovereignty, the balancing of freedom and authority (cf. Cristi 2005), and the requirements of political obligations have been core questions from Plato and Aristotle to the present. In many democratic societies, there is an ongoing discussion regarding the legitimate extent of governmental authority in general. In the United States, for instance, there is a widespread belief that the political system as it was instituted by the Founding Fathers should accord the populace as much freedom as reasonable, and that government should limit its authority accordingly.^{[citation needed]}

See also[link]

Look up authority in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• Authority (sociology)
• Authority (management)
• Anti-authoritarian
• Appeal to authority
• Auctoritas
• Authoritarianism
• Cognitive authority
• Dominance (ethology)
• Milgram experiment
• Petty authority

References[link]

• Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception (2005)
• Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future (New York, Viking, 1961) "The Concept of Authority"
• Józef Maria Bocheński, Was ist Autorität? (1974)
• Renato Cristi, Hegel on Freedom and Authority (2005)
• Stuart Lachs, Means of Authorization: Establishing Hierarchy in Ch'an/Zen Buddhism in America (1999)
• Rafael Domingo Osle, Auctoritas (1999)
• Karl Popper, On the Sources of Knowledge and of Ignorance (1960)
• Max Weber, Economy and Society (1922)
• Austin Cline, What is Authority? Differentiating Authority, Power, and Legitimacy (n.d.)
• Ashish Agarwal, What is Authority? Trace out the different types of Authority (n.d.)

External links[link]

Look up authority in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Authority

• Authority entry by Tom Christiano in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• Qualitionary - Legal Definitions - Authority
• Appeal to Authority Breakdown

This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. No cleanup reason has been specified. Please help improve this article if you can; the talk page may contain suggestions. (May 2010)

John Mellencamp
John Mellencamp in 2007
Background information
Also known as	Johnny Cougar John Cougar John Cougar Mellencamp
Born	(1951-10-07) October 7, 1951 (age 60) Seymour, Indiana, United States
Genres	Rock, heartland rock, roots rock, folk rock, hard rock, folk
Occupations	Musician, singer-songwriter
Instruments	Vocals, guitar, harmonica
Years active	1976–present
Labels	MCA Riva Mercury Columbia Island Universal Republic Hear UMe
Associated acts	Crepe Soul Trash Mason Brothers Mitch Ryder James McMurtry Me'Shell Ndegeocello Chuck D India.Arie Trisha Yearwood Little Big Town Joan Baez
Website	JohnMellencamp.com

John Mellencamp,(born October 7, 1951) is an American rock singer-songwriter, musician, painter and occasional actor known for his catchy, populist brand of heartland rock which emphasizes traditional instrumentation. He has sold over 40 million albums worldwide and has amassed 22 Top 40 hits in the United States. In addition, he holds the record for the most tracks by a solo artist to hit number-one on the Hot Mainstream Rock Tracks chart, with seven, and has been nominated for 13 Grammy Awards, winning one. His latest album, No Better Than This, was released on August 17, 2010 to widespread critical acclaim.

Mellencamp is also one of the founding members of Farm Aid, an organization that began in 1985 with a concert in Champaign, Illinois to raise awareness about the loss of family farms and to raise funds to keep farm families on their land. The Farm Aid concerts have remained an annual event over the past 26 years, and as of 2012 the organization has raised over $39 million to promote a strong and resilient family farm system of agriculture.

Mellencamp was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on March 10, 2008 by Billy Joel.^[1] His biggest musical influences are Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie, Buddy Holly and The Rolling Stones.^[2] Said longtime Rolling Stone contributor Anthony DeCurtis: "Mellencamp has created an important body of work that has earned him both critical regard and an enormous audience. His songs document the joys and struggles of ordinary people seeking to make their way, and he has consistently brought the fresh air of common experience to the typically glamour-addled world of popular music."^[3]

Early life[link]

Mellencamp was born in Seymour, Indiana. He is the son of Richard and the late Marilyn Mellencamp. Mellencamp was born with a mild form of spina bifida that necessitated a lengthy stay in the hospital as a baby.^[4] He is descended from German immigrant Johann Herman Möhlenkamp, who came to the White Creek area of Bartholomew County, Indiana, in 1855.^[5] He grew up in his hometown of Seymour, Indiana.

He formed his first band, Crepe Soul, at the age of 14^[4] and later played in the local bands Trash, Snakepit Banana Barn and the Mason Brothers. He eloped with his pregnant girlfriend Priscilla Esterline at the age of 18^[4] and became a father in December 1970, six months after he graduated from high school. His daughter Michelle became a mother at age 19, making John a grandfather at 37.

Mellencamp attended Vincennes University, a two-year college in Vincennes, Indiana, starting in 1972. During this time he experimented with drugs and alcohol, stating in a 1986 Rolling Stone interview, "When I was high on pot, it affected me so drastically that when I was in college there were times when I wouldn't get off the couch. I would lie there, listening to Roxy Music, right next to the record player so I wouldn't have to get up to flip the record over. I'd listen to this record, that record. There would be four or five days like that when I would be completely gone."^[2]

Upon graduating from Vincennes University in 1974, Mellencamp played in a couple of local bands, including the aforementioned glitter-band Trash, which was named after a New York Dolls song, and he later got a job in Seymour installing telephones. At this time, Mellencamp, who had given up drugs and alcohol for good before graduating from Vincennes University, decided to pursue a career in music.

Music career[link]

Performing as Johnny Cougar & John Cougar (1976–1982)[link]

After about 18 months of traveling back and forth from Indiana to New York City in 1974 and 1975, Mellencamp finally found someone receptive to his music and image in Tony DeFries of MainMan Management.^[2] DeFries insisted that Mellencamp's first album, Chestnut Street Incident, a collection of covers and a handful of original songs, be released under the stage name Johnny Cougar, suggesting that the bumpy German name "Mellencamp" was too hard to market. Mellencamp reluctantly agreed, but the album was a complete failure, selling only 12,000 copies.

Mellencamp recorded The Kid Inside, the follow-up to Chestnut Street Incident, in 1977, but DeFries eventually decided against releasing the album and Mellencamp was dropped from MCA records (DeFries finally released The Kid Inside in early 1983, after Mellencamp broke through to stardom). Mellencamp drew interest from Rod Stewart's manager, Billy Gaff, after parting ways with DeFries and was signed to the tiny Riva Records label. At Gaff's request, Mellencamp moved to London, England for nearly a year to record, promote and tour behind 1978's A Biography. The record wasn't released in the United States, but it yielded a hit in Australia with "I Need a Lover".^[2] Riva Records added "I Need a Lover" to Mellencamp's next album released in the United States, 1979's John Cougar, where the song became a No. 28 single in late 1979. Pat Benatar recorded "I Need a Lover" on her debut album In the Heat of the Night.

In 1980, Mellencamp returned with the Steve Cropper-produced Nothin' Matters and What If It Did, which yielded two Top 40 singles — "This Time" (No. 27) and "Ain't Even Done With the Night" (No. 17). "The singles were stupid little pop songs," he told Record Magazine in 1983. "I take no credit for that record. It wasn't like the title was made up — it wasn't supposed to be punky or cocky like some people thought. Toward the end, I didn't even go to the studio. Me and the guys in the band thought we were finished, anyway. It was the most expensive record I ever made. It cost $280,000, do you believe that? The worst thing was that I could have gone on making records like that for hundreds of years. Hell, as long as you sell a few records and the record company isn't putting a lot of money into promotion, you're making money for 'em and that's all they care about. PolyGram loved Nothin' Matters. They thought I was going to turn into the next Neil Diamond."

In 1982, Mellencamp released his breakthrough album, American Fool, which contained the singles "Hurts So Good," an uptempo rock tune that spent four weeks at No. 2 and 16 weeks in the top 10, and "Jack & Diane," which was a No. 1 hit for four weeks. A third single, "Hand to Hold On To," made it to No. 19. "Hurts So Good" went on to win the Grammy Award for Best Male Rock Vocal Performance at the 25th Grammys. "To be real honest, there's three good songs on that record, and the rest is just sort of filler," Mellencamp told Creem Magazine of American Fool in 1984. "It was too labored over, too thought about, and it wasn't organic enough. The record company thought it would bomb, but I think the reason it took off was – not that the songs were better than my others – but people liked the sound of it, the 'bam-bam-bam' drums. It was a different sound."

Performing as John Cougar Mellencamp (1983–1990)[link]

With some commercial success under his belt, Mellencamp had enough clout to force the record company to add his real surname, Mellencamp, to his stage moniker. The first album recorded under his new name John Cougar Mellencamp was 1983's Uh-Huh, a Top-10 album that spawned the Top 10 singles "Pink Houses,"and "Crumblin' Down" as well as the No. 14 hit "Authority Song," which he said is "our version of "I Fought the Law.'" During the recording of Uh-Huh, Mellencamp's backing band settled on the lineup it would retain for the next several albums: Kenny Aronoff on drums and percussion, Larry Crane and Mike Wanchic on guitars, Toby Myers on bass and John Cascella on keyboards. In 1988, Rolling Stone magazine called this version of Mellencamp's band "one of the most powerful and versatile live bands ever assembled." On the 1984 Uh-Huh Tour, Mellencamp opened his shows with cover versions of songs he admired growing up, including Elvis Presley's "Heartbreak Hotel," the Animals' "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood," Lee Dorsey's "Ya Ya" and the Left Banke's "Pretty Ballerina."

Since college, Mellencamp has, with the exception of his continuing devotion to nicotine, lived a drug and alcohol-free lifestyle. In 1984, when asked about his views on drugs, he told Bill Holdship of Creem magazine, "If you want to stick needles in your arms, go ahead and fucking do it. You're the one that's going to pay the consequences. I don't think it's a good idea, and I sure don't advocate it, but I'm not going to judge people. Hell, if that was the case, you wouldn't like anyone in the music business because everyone's blowing cocaine."

In 1985, Mellencamp released Scarecrow, which peaked at No. 2 in the fall of '85 and spawned five Top 40 singles: "Lonely Ol' Night" (No. 6), "Small Town" (No. 6), and "R.O.C.K. in the U.S.A. (A Salute to '60s Rock)" (No. 2), "Rain on the Scarecrow" (No. 21) and "Rumbleseat" (No. 28). According to the February 1986 edition of Creem Magazine, Mellencamp wanted to incorporate the sound of classic '60s rock into Scarecrow, and he gave his band close to a hundred old singles to learn "almost mathematically verbatim" prior to recording album.

"Learning those songs did a lot of positive things," Mellencamp explained to Creem writer Bill Holdship. "We realized more than ever what a big melting pot of all different types of music the '60s were. Take an old Rascals song for example – there's everything from marching band beats to soul music to country sounds in one song. Learning those opened the band's vision to try new things on my songs. It wasn't let's go back and try to make this part fit into my song, but I wanted to capture the same feeling – the way those songs used to make you feel. After a while, we didn't even have to talk about it anymore. If you listen to the lead Larry [Crane] plays on 'Face The Nation', he never would have played that 'cause he didn't really know who the Animals were. He's young, and he grew up on Grand Funk Railroad. You hear it, and it's like 'where did that come from?' It had to be from hearing those old records."

Scarecrow was the first album Mellencamp recorded at his own recording studio "Belmont Mall," located in Belmont, Indiana and built in 1984. Mellencamp sees Scarecrow as the start of the alternative country genre: "I think I invented that whole 'No Depression' thing with the Scarecrow album, though I don’t get the credit," he told Classic Rock magazine in October 2008.

Shortly after finishing Scarecrow, Mellencamp helped organize the first Farm Aid benefit concert with Willie Nelson and Neil Young in Champaign, Illinois on September 22, 1985. The Farm Aid concerts remain an annual event and have raised over $39 million for struggling family farmers as of 2011.

Prior to the 1985–86 Scarecrow Tour, during which he covered some of the same 1960s rock and soul songs he and his band rehearsed prior to the recording of Scarecrow, Mellencamp added fiddle player Lisa Germano to his band. Germano would remain in Mellencamp's band until 1994, when she left to pursue a solo career.

Mellencamp's next LP, 1987's The Lonesome Jubilee, included the singles "Paper in Fire," (No. 9) "Cherry Bomb," (No. 8), "Check It Out," (No. 14) and "Rooty Toot Toot" (No. 61) along with the popular album tracks "Hard Times for an Honest Man" and "The Real Life," both of which garnered significant radio airplay even though they didn't achieve any chart position. "We were on the road for a long time after Scarecrow, so we were together a lot as a band," Mellencamp said in a 1987 Creem Magazine feature. "For the first time ever, we talked about the record before we started. We had a very distinct vision of what should be happening here. At one point, The Lonesome Jubilee was supposed to be a double album, but at least 10 of the songs I'd written just didn't stick together with the idea and the sound we had in mind. So I just put those songs on a shelf, and cut it back down to a single record. Now, in the past, it was always 'Let's make it up as we go along' – and we did make some of The Lonesome Jubilee up as we went along. But we had a very clear idea of what we wanted it to sound like, even before it was written, right through to the day it was mastered."

As Frank DiGiacomo of Vanity Fair wrote in 2007, "The Lonesome Jubilee was the album in which Mellencamp defined his now signature sound: a rousing, crystalline mix of acoustic and electric guitars, Appalachian fiddle, and gospel-style backing vocals, anchored by a crisp, bare-knuckle drumbeat and completed by his own velveteen rasp."

During the 1987-88 Lonesome Jubilee Tour, Mellencamp was joined onstage by surprise guest Bruce Springsteen at the end of his May 26, 1988 gig in Irvine, California, for a duet of Bob Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone", which Mellencamp performed as the penultimate song during each show on that tour.

After the Lonesome Jubilee Tour, Mellencamp divorced his second wife, Vicki.

In 1989, Mellencamp released the personal album Big Daddy, with the key tracks "Jackie Brown," "Big Daddy of Them All" and "Void in My Heart" accompanying the Top 15 single "Pop Singer." The album, which Mellencamp called at the time the most "earthy" record he'd ever made, is also the last to feature the "Cougar" moniker.

Mellencamp was heavily involved in painting at this time in his life and decided not to tour behind Big Daddy, stating: "What's the point?... This other step that people keep wanting me to take to become another level of recording artist - to be Madonna? To sell out? To bend over? To kiss somebody's ass? I ain't gonna do it."^[6] In his second painting exhibition, at the Churchman-Fehsenfeld Gallery in Indianapolis in 1990, Mellencamp's portraits were described as always having sad facial expressions and conveying "the same disillusionment found in his musical anthems about the nation's heartland and farm crisis."^[7]

Performing as John Mellencamp (1991–1997)[link]

Mellencamp's 1991 album, Whenever We Wanted, was the first with a cover billed to John Mellencamp—the Cougar was now gone forever. Whenever We Wanted yielded the Top 40 hits "Get a Leg Up" and "Again Tonight," but "Last Chance," "Love and Happiness" and "Now More Than Ever" all garnered significant airplay on rock radio. "It's very rock 'n' roll," Mellencamp said of Whenever We Wanted. "I just wanted to get back to the basics."

In 1993, he released Human Wheels, and the title track peaked at No. 48 on the Billboard singles chart. "To me, this record is very urban," Mellencamp told Billboard magazine of Human Wheels in the summer of '93. "We had a lot of discussions about the rhythm and blues music of the day. We explored what a lot of these (current) bands are doing — these young black bands that are doing more than just sampling."

Mellencamp's 1994 Dance Naked album included a cover of Van Morrison's "Wild Night" as a duet with Meshell Ndegeocello. "Wild Night" became Mellencamp's biggest hit in years, peaking at No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100. The album also contained two protest songs in "L.U.V." and "Another Sunny Day 12/25", in addition to the title track, which hit No. 41 on the Hot 100 in the summer of 1994. "This is as naked a rock record as you're going to hear," Mellencamp said of Dance Naked in a 1994 Billboard magazine interview. "All the vocals are first or second takes, and half the songs don't even have bass parts. Others have just one guitar, bass, and drums, which I haven't done since American Fool."

With guitarist Andy York now on board as Larry Crane's full-time replacement, Mellencamp launched his Dance Naked Tour in the summer of 1994, but a minor heart attack suffered after a show at Jones Beach in New York on August 8 of that year eventually forced him to cancel the last few weeks of the tour. "I was up to 80 cigarettes a day," Mellencamp told the Boston Herald in September 1996 about the habits that led to his heart malfunction two years prior. "We'd finish a show and I'd go out and have steak and french fries and eggs at 4 in the morning and then go to sleep with all that in my gut. It was just a terrible lifestyle."

He returned to the concert stage in early 1995 by playing a series of dates in small Midwestern clubs under the pseudonym Pearl Doggy.

In September 1996, the experimental album Mr. Happy Go Lucky, which was produced by Junior Vasquez, was released to critical acclaim. "It's been fascinating to me how urban records use rhythm and electronics, and it's terribly challenging to make that work in the context of a rock band," Mellencamp told Billboard magazine in 1996. "But we took it further than an urban record. The arrangements are more ambitious, with programs and loops going right along with real drums and guitars."

Mr. Happy Go Lucky spawned the No. 14 single "Key West Intermezzo (I Saw You First)" (Mellencamp's last Top 40 hit) and "Just Another Day," which peaked at No. 46.

Recording for Columbia (1998–2003)[link]

After the release of Mr. Happy Go Lucky and a subsequent four-month tour from March–July 1997 to promote it, Mellencamp signed a four-album deal with Columbia Records, although he wound up making only three albums for the label.

Issued a day before his 47th birthday in 1998, his self-titled debut for Columbia Records included the singles "Your Life is Now" and "I'm Not Running Anymore," along with standout album tracks such as "Eden Is Burning," "Miss Missy," "It All Comes True" and "Chance Meeting At The Tarantula." The switch in labels coincided with Dane Clark replacing Aronoff on drums. "On this record, we ended up quite a-bit away from where we started," Mellencamp told Guitar World Acoustic in 1998. "Initially, I wanted to make a record that barely had drums on it. Donovan made a record (in 1966), Sunshine Superman, and I wanted to start with that same kind of vibe—Eastern, very grand stories, fairy tales."

He released a book of his early paintings, titled Paintings and Reflections, in 1998.

In 1999, Mellencamp covered his own songs as well as those by Bob Dylan and the Drifters for his album Rough Harvest (recorded in 1997), one of two albums he owed Mercury Records to fulfill his contract (the other was The Best That I Could Do, a best-of collection). In May 2000, he gave the Indiana University commencement address, in which he advised graduates to "play it like you feel it!" and that "you'll be all right." Following the delivery of his address, Indiana University bestowed upon him an honorary doctorate of Musical Arts.

In August 2000, Mellencamp played a series of unannounced free concerts in major cities on the East Coast and in the Midwest as a way of giving back to fans who had supported him the previous 24 years. With a lo-fi setup that included portable amps and a battery-powered P.A. system, Mellencamp, armed with an acoustic guitar and accompanied only by an accordionist and a violist, dubbed the jaunt "Live In The Streets: The Good Samaritan Tour." At these dozen shows, which ranged in length from 45 to 60 minutes, Mellencamp covered a number of rock and folk classics and sprinkled in a few of his own songs. "Nobody's selling anything, there's no souvenirs--except what's in everybody's heart," Mellencamp told Billboard magazine. "Think about it: Isn't that where music started? To anybody who's said thank you to me, I say, 'You're very nice, but, really, thank you.'" ^[8]

The early 21st century also found Mellencamp teaming up with artists such as Chuck D and India.Arie to deliver his second Columbia album, Cuttin' Heads and the single "Peaceful World." Cuttin' Heads also included a duet with Trisha Yearwood on a love song called "Deep Blue Heart." "He played me this song," Yearwood told Country.com, "and he said, 'I kind of have an idea of like when Emmylou Harris sang on Bob Dylan's record, just kind of harmony all the way through.'"

Mellencamp embarked on the Cuttin' Heads Tour in the summer of 2001, before the album was even released. He opened each show on this tour with a cover of the Rolling Stones' "Gimme Shelter" and also played a solo acoustic version of the Cuttin' Heads track "Women Seem" at each show.

In 2003, he released Trouble No More, a quickly-recorded collection of folk and blues covers originally done by artists such as Robert Johnson, Son House, Lucinda Williams and Hoagie Carmichael. The album was also dedicated to Mellencamp's friend, Billboard magazine editor-in-chief Timothy White, who died from a heart attack in 2002. In October 2002, Mellencamp performed the Robert Johnson song "Stones In My Passway" at two benefit concerts for White. Columbia Records executives, who were in attendance at the benefit shows, were so impressed with Mellencamp's live renditions of "Stones In My Passway" that they convinced him to record an album of vintage American songs, which ultimately became Trouble No More. Mellencamp sang the gospel song "Will The Circle Be Unbroken" at White's funeral on July 2, 2002. Trouble No More spent several weeks at #1 on Billboard's Blues Album charts.

Words and Music and Freedom's Road (2004–2007)[link]

Mellencamp participated in the Vote for Change tour in October 2004 leading up to the 2004 U.S. Presidential election. That same month he released the two-disc career hits retrospective Words & Music: John Mellencamp's Greatest Hits, which contained 35 of his radio singles (including all 22 of his Top 40 hits) along with two new tunes, "Walk Tall" and "Thank You" — both produced by Babyface but written by Mellencamp.

In 2005, Mellencamp toured with Donovan and John Fogerty. The first leg of what was called the Words and Music Tour in the spring of '05 featured Donovan playing in the middle of Mellencamp's set. Mellencamp would play a handful of songs before introducing Donovan and then duetting with him on the 1966 hit "Sunshine Superman." Mellencamp would leave the stage as Donovan played seven or eight of his songs (backed by Mellencamp's band) and then return to finish off his own set after Donovan departed. On the second leg of the tour in the summer of '05, Fogerty co-headlined with Mellencamp at outdoor amphitheaters across the United States. Fogerty would join Mellencamp for duets on Fogerty's Creedence Clearwater Revival hit "Green River" and Mellencamp's "Rain on the Scarecrow."

Mellencamp (right) and his band perform at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in 2007.

Mellencamp released Freedom's Road, his first album of original material in over five years, on January 23, 2007. He intended for Freedom's Road to have a 1960s rock sound while still remaining contemporary, and he feels that goal was achieved. "We wanted to make sure that it had the same feeling of some of the great songs from the '60s but also had the message of today and had the backbeat of today. I think we came up with a pretty timeless sounding album," Mellencamp told his online radio station in late 2006. "Our Country," the first single from Freedom's Road, was played as the opening song on Mellencamp's 2006 spring tour, and the band that opened for him on that tour, Little Big Town, was called on to record harmonies on the studio version of "Our Country," as well as seven other songs on Freedom's Road. Although Mellencamp had always been outspoken and adamant about not selling any of his songs to corporations to use in commercials, he changed his stance and let Chevrolet use "Our Country" in Chevy Silverado TV commercials that began airing in late September 2006.

"I agonized," Mellencamp told USA Today's Edna Gundersen in 2007 over his decision to license "Our Country" to Chevrolet. "I still don't think we should have to do it, but record companies can't spend money to promote records anymore, unless you're U2 or Madonna. I'm taking heat because no one's ever done this before. People have licensed songs that have already been hits, but nobody's licensed a brand-new song to a major company, and people don't know how to react."

Mellencamp sang "Our Country" to open Game 2 of the 2006 World Series, and the song was nominated for a 2008 Grammy Award in the category Best Solo Rock Vocal Performance but lost out to Bruce Springsteen's "Radio Nowhere." Freedom's Road peaked at No. 5 on the Billboard 200 album chart by selling 56,000 copies in its first week on the market.

The T-Bone Burnett Era (2008–present)[link]

On August 13, 2007, Mellencamp began recording his 18th album of original material, titled Life, Death, Love and Freedom. The album, which was released on July 15, 2008, was produced by acclaimed roots producer T-Bone Burnett. The first song with video, "Jena," was introduced on Mellencamp's website in October 2007. In an interview with the Bloomington Herald-Times in March 2008, Mellencamp dubbed Life, Death, Love and Freedom "The best record I've ever made." He signed with Starbucks' Hear Music label to distribute the album and said, "they think it's a fucking masterpiece." The album's first single was "My Sweet Love." A video for the song was filmed in Savannah, GA on June 9, 2008. Karen Fairchild of Little Big Town is featured in the video. She harmonizes with Mellencamp on "My Sweet Love" and provides background vocals to three other songs on Life, Death, Love and Freedom, which became the ninth Top 10 album of Mellencamp's career when it debuted at No. 7 on the Billboard 200 the week of August 2, 2008. It sold 56,000 copies in its first week on the market. In its list of the 50 best albums of 2008, Rolling Stone magazine named Life, Death, Love and Freedom No. 5 overall and also dubbed "Troubled Land" No. 48 among the 100 best singles of the year.

Mellencamp made a guest appearance at Billy Joel's July 16, 2008 concert at Shea Stadium in New York. Mellencamp sang "Pink Houses" in front of a sold-out crowd of nearly 60,000 people.

John Mellencamp and Sheryl Crow perform Mellencamp's 2008 single "My Sweet Love" in the Hunter Valley, New South Wales, Australia on Nov. 29, 2008.

On September 3, 2008, Mellencamp made available on his website a home-video recording of his solo acoustic cover of Bob Dylan's "The Times They Are A-Changin'" as a sign that the 2008 Presidential Election is going to bring about change in America.

On September 23, 2008, Mellencamp filmed a concert at the Crump Theatre in Columbus, Indiana for a new A&E Biography series called "Homeward Bound." The show features performers returning to small venues they performed at during the early stages of their careers. Mellencamp had last played at the Crump Theatre on October 4, 1976. The program aired on December 11, 2008 and also featured an in-depth documentary tracing Mellencamp's roots.

For the first time since 1992, Mellencamp toured Australia and New Zealand with opening act Sheryl Crow from November 15 – December 7, 2008. Crow joined Mellencamp on stage to duet on "My Sweet Love" during the last seven shows.

Mellencamp participated in a tribute concert for Pete Seeger's 90th birthday on May 3, 2009 at Madison Square Garden in New York City which raised funds for an environmental organization founded by Seeger to preserve and protect the Hudson River. Mellencamp performed solo acoustic renditions of Seeger and Lee Hays' "If I Had a Hammer" and his own "A Ride Back Home."

In the summer of 2009, Mellencamp embarked on a tour of minor league ballparks with Bob Dylan and Willie Nelson that ran from July 2–August 15.

While he was on tour, Mellencamp recorded a new album, titled No Better Than This, that was again produced by T-Bone Burnett. The tracks for the album were recorded at historic locations, such as the First African Baptist Church in Savannah, Georgia as well as at the Sun Studio in Memphis and the Sheraton Gunter Hotel in San Antonio, where blues pioneer Robert Johnson recorded "Sweet Home Chicago" and "Crossroad Blues". Mellencamp recorded the album using a 1955 Ampex portable recording machine and only one microphone, requiring all the musicians to gather together around the mic. The album was recorded in mono. Mellencamp wrote over 30 songs for the record (only 13 made the final cut), and he wrote one song specifically for Room 414 at the Gunter Hotel. "It's called 'Right Behind Me'. I wrote it just for this room." Mellencamp told the San Antonio Express-News. "I could have done this in my studio. But I want to do it this way, and if I can't do what I want at this point, I'm not going to do it. If it's not fun, I'm not going to do it. I'm through digging a ditch." No Better Than This was released on August 17, 2010 and peaked at No. 10 on the Billboard 200, becoming the 10th Top 10 album of his career. No Better Than This is the first mono-only release to make the top 10 since James Brown's Pure Dynamite! Live At The Royal, which peaked at #10 in April 1964.

On December 6, 2009, Mellencamp performed "Born in the U.S.A." as a tribute to Bruce Springsteen, who was one of the honorees at the 2009 Kennedy Center Honors. "I was very proud and humbled to have been able to play 'Born in the U.S.A.' in a different fashion that I think was true to the feelings that Bruce had when he wrote it," Mellencamp said. He performed "Down By The River" on January 29, 2010 in Los Angeles in tribute to Neil Young, who was honored at the 20th annual MusiCares Person of the Year gala. Mellencamp sang the hymn "Keep Your Eyes on the Prize" at "In Performance at the White House: A Celebration of Music from the Civil Rights Movement" on February 9, 2010.

A career-spanning box set of album tracks and demos titled On the Rural Route 7609 was released on June 15, 2010, nine weeks before No Better Than This hit stores. "If you didn’t get deeper into the original albums and know these songs, it will be like discovering new material," Mellencamp said about On the Rural Route 7609.

Mellencamp, who co-headlined 11 shows in the summer of 2010 with Bob Dylan, launched the No Better Than This theater tour on October 29, 2010 in his hometown of Bloomington, Indiana. On this tour, which ran through the fall of 2011 and covered the entire United States, Mellencamp opened each concert with a showing of a Kurt Markus documentary about the making of No Better Than This called "It's About You" before hitting the stage to play three different sets: a stripped-down acoustic set with his band, a solo acoustic set, and a fully electrified rock set. "It'll be like Alan Freed, like the old Moondog shows," Mellencamp told Billboard magazine prior to the tour. "When you went to see his shows, there was a movie, like 'The Girl Can't Help It' or something, and then three or four bands played. I'm gonna come out and play with upright bass and cocktail [drum] kits and a lot of acoustic instruments. I'll play for, like, 40 minutes that way. Then the band will leave and it'll just be me with an acoustic guitar for 40 minutes, and then there'll be 40 minutes of rock 'n' roll. You'll get three different types of John Mellencamp, and you'll get a movie." Mellencamp played for over two hours and included 24 songs in his setlist on the tour. He brought the No Better Than This tour to Europe in the summer of 2011, opening in Copenhagen on June 24. One reviewer called the opening gig of the European leg of the tour "maybe the best rock-performance ever in Denmark."^[9] The No Better Than This Tour returned to the U.S. for one final round of shows from Oct. 25-Nov. 19, 2011. The tour will conclude with a tour of Canada in the summer of 2012.

In addition to taking part in two Woody Guthrie tribute concerts as part of a year-long celebration surrounding 100-year anniversary of the folk icon's birth, Mellencamp plans to release an album of obscure cover songs in 2012.^[10]

[edit] Ghost Brothers of Darkland County

Mellencamp has been working on a musical with horror author Stephen King, entitled Ghost Brothers of Darkland County, since 2000. The Alliance Theatre in Atlanta, GA announced on March 30, 2011 that the musical will debut in the spring of 2012 and will be directed by Alliance artistic director Susan V. Booth. A three-CD/book package of Ghost Brothers of Darkland County will be released on May 22, 2012 by Hear Music, after the musical completes its run in Atlanta (it runs from April 4-May 13, 2012).^[11] Production on the CD/book package began on June 15, 2009, when T Bone Burnett, who is serving as the project's musical producer, began laying down tracks in Los Angeles, California for the songs Mellencamp wrote for the musical. The recording will have a book containing the full text, two discs featuring the entire production of the spoken word script and songs performed by the cast, and a third CD of the songs only. Mellencamp said the soundtrack includes Rosanne Cash, Sheryl Crow, Elvis Costello, Taj Mahal and Neko Case among others singing the songs he wrote.

In November 2010, Mellencamp told the Chicago Tribune: "T Bone and I and Stephen King are working on a musical. All the music has been recorded. We had Kris Kristofferson, Neko Case, Elvis Costello, Taj Mahal, all singing different characters’ roles. I wrote all the songs, 17 songs. (T Bone) produced. It sounds like the 'Sgt. Pepper' of Americana to me. Forget about the play, just the songs, the way these people sing them. I’m sitting there listening to it and thinking, “Did Rosanne Cash just kill that song or what!” The play is called “Ghost Brothers of Darkland County,” about two brothers who hate each other. If you could imagine Tennessee Williams meets Stephen King. They’re recording the dialogue now and we’re putting out a record of the entire show before it comes out. Right now, Elvis Costello, Meg Ryan, Kris Kristofferson and Matthew McConaughey are doing table readings like an old radio play. So you’ll get all the dialogue, all the sound effects, and all the songs sung by different people so you can follow the story. The CD will come out ahead of time. So many people are involved, it’s taken a long time. But we don’t have to worry about money or record companies – it’s our own money we’re putting into it, so we said, let’s just make something beautiful."

Ryan D'Agostino of Esquire stated in a review of a New York rehearsal of Ghost Brothers of Darkland County in the fall of 2007, "Musicals aren't usually a guy thing. This one, though, is not only tolerable, it's good. It may be the first-ever musical written by men for men. There's no orchestra, just two twangy acoustic guitars, an accordion, and a fiddle. The songs are both haunting and all-American."^[12]

The Alliance describes the show as a "Southern Gothic musical fraught with mystery, tragedy and ghosts of the past."

The official description of Ghost Brothers of Darkland County from the Alliance Theatre website:

In the tiny town of Lake Belle Reve, Mississippi in 1957, a terrible tragedy took the lives of two brothers and a beautiful young girl. During the next forty years, the events of that night became the stuff of local legend. But legend is often just another word for lie. Joe McCandless knows what really happened; he saw it all. The question is whether or not he can bring himself to tell the truth in time to save his own troubled sons, and whether the ghosts left behind by an act of violence will help him – or tear the McCandless family apart forever.

Movie career[link]

Mellencamp has made several forays into acting over the years, appearing in four films: Falling from Grace (which he also directed) (1992), Madison (2001, narration only), After Image (2001), and Lone Star State of Mind (2002). His older brother, Joe Mellencamp, appears in Falling from Grace as the bandleader during the country club scene.

In 1980, Mellencamp turned down the lead role in the movie The Idolmaker because, as he told the Toledo Blade in 1983, "I was afraid that if I made too much money, I'd have no motivation to make records anymore."

Mellencamp told VH1 that he was originally offered the Brad Pitt role in Thelma and Louise: "You know they used to want me to be an actor all the time and I used to get more movie role offers. That's when I was – believe it or not, I used to not be as ugly as I am now. And they gave me this script called Thelma & Louise and they said, 'The guy wrote the part with you in mind, John, you really gotta do this part.' And I read the script and I thought, 'Yeah, I get it but I don't want to take my shirt off.' So Brad Pitt took his shirt off and look what happened to Brad Pitt. I was that close."^[13]

In April 2007, Mellencamp was a "guest critic" on At the Movies, filling in for Roger Ebert.

Personal life[link]

Mellencamp lives five miles outside of Bloomington, Indiana on the shores of Lake Monroe,^[14] but he also has vacation homes in Daufuskie Island, South Carolina and Tybee Island, Georgia.^[15] He married former supermodel Elaine Irwin Mellencamp on September 5, 1992, but on December 30, 2010, Mellencamp announced that he and Irwin had separated after 18 years of marriage.^[16] Their divorce became official on Aug. 12, 2011, with the couple negotiating "an amicable settlement of all issues involving property and maintenance rights, the custody and support of their children, and all other issues," according the settlement agreement.^[17] Mellencamp has five children from his three marriages: Michelle from his first marriage to Priscilla Esterline (1970–81); daughters Teddi Jo and Justice from his second marriage to Victoria Granucci (1981–89); and sons Hud and Speck from his marriage to Irwin. He has since gone public with his relationship with actress Meg Ryan.^[18]

Collaboration with George Green[link]

Mellencamp co-wrote several of his best-known songs with his childhood friend, George Green, who, like Mellencamp, was born and raised in Seymour, Indiana. Green was a gifted lyricist and contributed lyrics to numerous Mellencamp radio hits, including “Human Wheels,” “Minutes to Memories,” “Hurts So Good,” “Crumblin’ Down,” “Rain on the Scarecrow,” "Your Life is Now" and “Key West Intermezzo,” in addition to songs recorded by Barbra Streisand, Hall & Oates, Jude Cole, Vanessa Williams, Ricky Skaggs, Sue Medley and The Oak Ridge Boys among others. Mellencamp and Green's final collaboration was "Yours Forever," a song that was included on the soundtrack to the 2000 movie, The Perfect Storm. Mellencamp and Green had a falling out in the early 2000s, and Green ultimately moved from Bloomington, Indiana to Taos, New Mexico in 2001. "Like when you're married, when you're friends with somebody for a long time, the more things build up the more things can go wrong," Mellencamp said in the liner notes to his 2010 box set, On the Rural Route 7609. "There were personal problems, cross-pollinated with professional issues. George has written some great lyrics and we've written some great songs together, but I just couldn't do it any more."

On August 28, 2011, Green died in Albuquerque, New Mexico at the age of 59 after losing a battle with a rapid-forming small cell lung cancer. “I’ve known George since we were in the same Sunday school class. We had a lot of fun together when we were kids. Later on, we wrote some really good songs together,” Mellencamp told the Bloomington Herald Times shortly after Green's death. “George was a dreamer, and I was sorry to hear of his passing.”^[19]

Politics and activism[link]

Mellencamp was critical of Ronald Reagan through his music in the 1980s and wrote some scathing lyrics about Reagan in his 1989 song "Country Gentleman:" "He ain't a-gonna help no children/He aint a-gonna help no women/He just gonna help his rich friends."^[20]

In 2003, Mellencamp became one of the first entertainers to speak out against the Iraqi War when he released the song "To Washington", which was also critical of the 2000 U.S. Presidential elections. "When the song first came out I was in the car one day and we were driving to the airport and I had my kids with me and a radio station was playing 'To Washington' and having callers call in," Mellencamp said. "Some guy comes on and says, 'I don't know who I hate the most, John Mellencamp or Osama bin Laden.'"^[21]

In an "Open Letter to America" on his website, Mellencamp stated:

The Governor of California was removed from office based on finance troubles. And yet George W. Bush has lied to us, failed to keep our own borders secure, entered a war under false pretense, endangered lives, and created financial chaos. How is it that he hasn't been recalled? Perhaps this time we could even have a real election... but that wouldn't fit the Bush administration's "take what you want and fire people later" policy. Take an election; take an oil field; take advantage of your own people – a game of political Three-Card Monte.^[22]

On his 2007 album, Freedom's Road, Mellencamp included a hidden track called "Rodeo Clown," which was a direct reference to George W. Bush ("The bloody red eyes of the rodeo clown").

In April 2007, Mellencamp performed for wounded troops at the Walter Reed Medical Center. His original intent was to duet on the Freedom's Road track, "Jim Crow," with singer and activist Joan Baez. However, Army officials barred Baez from performing. He told Rolling Stone magazine: "They didn’t give me a reason why she couldn't come. We asked why and they said, 'She can't fit here, period.' Joan Baez is a 66-year-old woman and the sweetest gal in the world."^[23]

According to a February 8, 2008, Associated Press report, Mellencamp's camp asked that the campaign for presidential candidate Sen. John McCain stop using his songs, including "Our Country" and "Pink Houses" during their campaign events. McCain's campaign responded by pulling the songs from their playlist. Mellencamp's publicist, Bob Merlis, noted to the Associated Press that "if [McCain is] such a true conservative, why [is he] playing songs that have a very populist pro-labor message written by a guy who would find no argument if you characterized him as an ardent leftist?" Merlis also noted that the same songs had been used, with Mellencamp's approval, by John Edwards's campaign; in response, the McCain campaign ceased using the songs.^[24]

Mellencamp performed "Small Town" at a Barack Obama rally in Evansville, Indiana on April 22, the night of the 2008 Pennsylvania primary. Mellencamp also performed "Our Country" at a rally for Hillary Clinton in Indianapolis, Indiana, on May 3, 2008, although he never came out in support of either Obama or Clinton during the primaries. "Neither candidate is as liberal as he would prefer, but he's happy to contribute what he can," Merlis said.

On January 18, 2009, Mellencamp performed "Pink Houses" at the Obama inaugural celebration at the Lincoln Memorial.

In 2010, Mellencamp's music was used by the National Organization for Marriage at events opposing same-sex marriage. In response, Mellencamp instructed Merlis to pen a letter to NOM stating "that Mr. Mellencamp’s views on same sex marriage and equal rights for people of all sexual orientations are at odds with NOM's stated agenda" and requesting that NOM "find music from a source more in harmony with your views than Mr. Mellencamp in the future."^[25]

Honors and awards[link]

This biographical section of an article needs additional citations for verification. Please help by adding reliable sources. Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced must be removed immediately, especially if potentially libelous or harmful. (January 2011)

Mellencamp has won one Grammy Award (Best Male Rock Performer for "Hurts So Good" in 1982) and been nominated for 12 others. He has also been bestowed with the Nordoff-Robbins Silver Clef Special Music Industry Humanitarian Award (1991), the Billboard Century Award (2001), the Woody Guthrie Award (2003), and the ASCAP Foundation Champion Award (2007). On October 6, 2008, Mellencamp won the prestigious Classic Songwriter Award at the 2008 Q Awards in London, England. Mellencamp was nominated for induction into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2009 and 2010 but was not elected either time. On September 9, 2010, Mellencamp received the Americana Lifetime Achievement Award in Nashville.

Mellencamp was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's Class of 2008. The induction ceremony took place in New York City on March 10, 2008, and Mellencamp was inducted by his good friend Billy Joel, who asked Mellencamp to induct him into the Rock Hall back in 1999 (Mellencamp had to opt out because of another commitment, so Ray Charles inducted Joel). During his induction speech for Mellencamp, Joel said:

Discography[link]

See also[link]

	Book: John Mellencamp
Wikipedia books are collections of articles that can be downloaded or ordered in print.

Indiana portal

• Best selling music artists
• List of artists who reached number one on the U.S. Mainstream Rock chart
• Bruce Robb (producer)

References[link]

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: John Mellencamp

• Mellencamp.com Official Website
• 2007 Vanity Fair Feature

v t e John Mellencamp Studio albums Chestnut Street Incident (1976) The Kid Inside (1977) A Biography (1978) John Cougar (1979) Nothin' Matters and What If It Did (1980) American Fool (1982) Uh-Huh (1983) Scarecrow (1985) The Lonesome Jubilee (1987) Big Daddy (1989) Whenever We Wanted (1991) Human Wheels (1993) Dance Naked (1994) Mr. Happy Go Lucky (1996) John Mellencamp (1998) Rough Harvest (1999) Cuttin' Heads (2001) Trouble No More (2003) Freedom's Road (2007) Life, Death, Love and Freedom (2008) No Better Than This (2010) Live albums Life, Death, Live and Freedom (2009) Compilations The Best That I Could Do 1978–1988 (1997) Words & Music: John Mellencamp's Greatest Hits (2004) 20th Century Masters: The Millennium Collection: The Best of John Mellencamp (2007) On the Rural Route 7609 (2010) Singles "I Need a Lover" "Hurts So Good" "Jack & Diane" "Crumblin' Down" "Pink Houses" "Lonely Ol' Night" "Small Town" "R.O.C.K. in the U.S.A." "Paper in Fire" "Wild Night" "Peaceful World" "Walk Tall" Other Discography Falling from Grace (1992) Ghost Brothers of Darkland County (2010) Book:John Mellencamp

Max Weber
German sociologist, philosopher, and political economist
Born	Maximilian Karl Emil Weber (1864-04-21)21 April 1864 Erfurt, Saxony, Kingdom of Prussia
Died	14 June 1920(1920-06-14) (aged 56) (pneumonia) Munich, Bavaria, Germany
Nationality	German
Fields	Economics, sociology, history, law, politics, philosophy
Institutions	University of Berlin, University of Freiburg, University of Heidelberg, University of Vienna, University of Munich
Alma mater	University of Berlin, University of Heidelberg
Doctoral advisor	Levin Goldschmidt
Known for	Bureaucracy, Disenchantment, Ideal type, Iron cage, Life chances, Methodological individualism, Monopoly on violence, Protestant work ethic, Rationalisation, Social action, Three-component theory of stratification, Tripartite classification of authority, Verstehen
Influences	Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Nietzsche, Wilhelm Dilthey, Heinrich Rickert, Georg Simmel, Werner Sombart
Influenced	Karl Jaspers, Talcott Parsons, Ludwig von Mises, György Lukács, Theodor W. Adorno, Jürgen Habermas, Joseph Schumpeter

Maximilian Karl Emil "Max" Weber (German pronunciation: [ˈmaks ˈveːbɐ]; 21 April 1864 – 14 June 1920) was a German sociologist, philosopher, and political economist who profoundly influenced social theory, social research, and the discipline of sociology itself.^[1]

Weber was a key proponent of methodological antipositivism, presenting sociology as a non-empiricist field which must study social action through interpretive means based upon understanding the meanings and purposes that individuals attach to their own actions. Weber is often cited, with Émile Durkheim and Karl Marx, as one of the three principal architects of modern social science.^[2][3][4]

Weber's main intellectual concern was understanding the processes of rationalisation, secularization, and "disenchantment" that he associated with the rise of capitalism and modernity.^[5] Weber argued that the most important difference among societies is not how people produce things but how people think about the world. In Weber’s view, modern society was the product of a new way of thinking.^[6] Weber is perhaps best known for his thesis combining economic sociology and the sociology of religion, elaborated in his book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Weber proposed that ascetic Protestantism was one of the major "elective affinities" associated with the rise of capitalism, bureaucracy and the rational-legal nation-state in the Western world. Against Marx's "historical materialism," Weber emphasised the importance of cultural influences embedded in religion as a means for understanding the genesis of capitalism.^[7] The Protestant Ethic formed the earliest part in Weber's broader investigations into world religion: he would go on to examine the religions of China, the religions of India and ancient Judaism, with particular regard to the apparent non-development of capitalism in the corresponding societies, as well as to their differing forms of social stratification.^[a]

In another major work, Politics as a Vocation, Weber defined the state as an entity which successfully claims a "monopoly on the legitimate use of violence". He was also the first to categorize social authority into distinct forms, which he labelled as charismatic, traditional, and rational-legal. His analysis of bureaucracy emphasised that modern state institutions are increasingly based on rational-legal authority. Weber also made a variety of other contributions in economic history, as well as economic theory and methodology. Weber's thought on modernity and rationalisation would come to facilitate critical theory of the Frankfurt school.

After the First World War, Max Weber was among the founders of the liberal German Democratic Party. He also ran unsuccessfully for a seat in parliament and served as advisor to the committee that drafted the ill-fated democratic Weimar Constitution of 1919. After contracting the Spanish flu, he died of pneumonia in 1920, aged 56.^[2]

Biography[link]

Early life and family background[link]

Weber was born in 1864, in Erfurt, Thuringia.^[2] He was the eldest of the seven children of Max Weber Sr., a wealthy and prominent civil servant and member of the National Liberal Party, and his wife Helene (Fallenstein), who partly descended from French Huguenot immigrants and held strong moral absolutist ideas.^[2][8] Weber Sr.'s involvement in public life immersed his home in both politics and academia, as his salon welcomed many prominent scholars and public figures.^[2] The young Weber and his brother Alfred, who also became a sociologist and economist, thrived in this intellectual atmosphere. Weber's 1876 Christmas presents to his parents, when he was thirteen years old, were two historical essays entitled "About the course of German history, with special reference to the positions of the Emperor and the Pope," and "About the Roman Imperial period from Constantine to the migration of nations."^[9] In class, bored and unimpressed with the teachers – who in turn resented what they perceived as a disrespectful attitude – he secretly read all forty volumes of Goethe.^[10][11] Before entering the university, he would read many other classical works.^[11] Over time, Weber would also be significantly affected by the marital tension between his father, "a man who enjoyed earthly pleasures," and his mother, a devout Calvinist "who sought to lead an ascetic life."^[12][13]

Max Weber and his brothers, Alfred and Karl, in 1879

Education[link]

In 1882 Weber enrolled in the University of Heidelberg as a law student.^[14] After a year of military service he transferred to University of Berlin.^[10] After his first few years as a student, during which he spent much time "drinking beer and fencing," Weber would increasingly take his mother's side in family arguments and grew estranged from his father.^[12][13][15] Simultaneously with his studies, he worked as a junior barrister.^[10] In 1886 Weber passed the examination for Referendar, comparable to the bar association examination in the British and American legal systems. Throughout the late 1880s, Weber continued his study of law and history.^[10] He earned his law doctorate in 1889 by writing a dissertation on legal history entitled The History of Medieval Business Organisations; his advisor was Levin Goldschmidt, a respected authority in commercial law.^[14][16] Two years later, Weber completed his Habilitationsschrift, The Roman Agrarian History and its Significance for Public and Private Law, working with August Meitzen.^[16][17] Having thus become a Privatdozent, Weber joined the University of Berlin's faculty, lecturing and consulting for the government.^[18]

Early work[link]

In the years between the completion of his dissertation and habilitation, Weber took an interest in contemporary social policy. In 1888 he joined the Verein für Socialpolitik,^[19] a new professional association of German economists affiliated with the historical school, who saw the role of economics primarily as finding solutions to the social problems of the age and who pioneered large scale statistical studies of economic issues. He also involved himself in politics, joining the left-leaning Evangelical Social Congress.^[20] In 1890 the Verein established a research program to examine "the Polish question" or Ostflucht: the influx of Polish farm workers into eastern Germany as local labourers migrated to Germany's rapidly industrialising cities.^[2] Weber was put in charge of the study and wrote a large part of the final report,^[2][19] which generated considerable attention and controversy and marked the beginning of Weber's renown as a social scientist.^[2] From 1893 to 1899 Weber was a member of the Alldeutscher Verband (Pan-German League), an organisation that campaigned against the influx of the Polish workers; the degree of Weber's support for the Germanisation of Poles and similar nationalist policies is still debated by modern scholars.^[21][22]

Max Weber and his wife Marianne in 1894

Also in 1893 he married his distant cousin Marianne Schnitger, later a feminist activist and author in her own right,^[2][23] who was instrumental in collecting and publishing Weber's journal articles as books after his death and her biography of him is an important source for understanding Weber's life.^[24][25] They would have no children.^[15] The marriage granted long-awaited financial independence to Weber, allowing him to finally leave his parents' household.^[13] The couple moved to Freiburg in 1894, where Weber was appointed professor of economics at the university,^[17][18] before accepting the same position at the University of Heidelberg in 1896.^[17][18] There Weber became a central figure in the so-called "Weber Circle," composed of other intellectuals such as his wife Marianne, Georg Jellinek, Ernst Troeltsch, Werner Sombart, Marc Bloch, Robert Michels and György Lukács.^[2] Weber also remained active in the Verein and the Evangelical Social Congress.^[2] His research in that period was focused on economics and legal history.^[26]

In 1897 Max Weber Sr. died, two months after a severe quarrel with his son that was never resolved.^[2][27] After this, Weber became increasingly prone to depression, nervousness and insomnia, making it difficult for him to fulfill his duties as a professor.^[10][17] His condition forced him to reduce his teaching and leave unfinished his course in the fall of 1899. After spending months in a sanatorium during the summer and fall of 1900, Weber and his wife travelled to Italy at the end of the year and did not return to Heidelberg until April 1902. He would again withdraw from teaching in 1903 and not return to it till 1919.^[2]

Later work[link]

After Weber's immense productivity in the early 1890s, he did not publish any papers between early 1898 and late 1902, finally resigning his professorship in late 1903. Freed from those obligations, in that year he accepted a position as associate editor of the Archives for Social Science and Social Welfare,^[28] where he worked with his colleagues Edgar Jaffé and Werner Sombart.^[2][29] His new interests would lie in more fundamental issues of social sciences; his works from this latter period are of primary interest to modern scholars.^[26] In 1904, Weber began to publish some of his most seminal papers in this journal, notably his essay The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, which became his most famous work^[30] and laid the foundations for his later research on the impact of cultures and religions on the development of economic systems.^[31] This essay was the only one of his works from that period that was published as a book during his lifetime. Some other of his works written in the first one and a half decades of the 20th century – published posthumously and dedicated primarily from the fields of sociology of religion, economic and legal sociology – are also recognised as among his most important intellectual contributions.^[2]

Also in 1904, he visited the United States and participated in the Congress of Arts and Sciences held in connection with the World's Fair (Louisiana Purchase Exposition) in St. Louis. Despite his partial recovery, Weber felt that he was unable to resume regular teaching at that time and continued on as a private scholar, helped by an inheritance in 1907.^[18][28] In 1909, disappointed with the Verein, he co-founded the German Sociological Association (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Soziologie, or DGS) and served as its first treasurer.^[2] He would, however, resign from the DGS in 1912.^[2] In 1912, Weber tried to organise a left-wing political party to combine social-democrats and liberals. This attempt was unsuccessful, in part because many liberals feared social-democratic revolutionary ideals.^[32]

Political involvements[link]

Max Weber (foreground) in 1917 with Ernst Toller (facing)

At the outbreak of World War I, Weber, aged 50, volunteered for service and was appointed as a reserve officer and put in charge of organising the army hospitals in Heidelberg, a role he fulfilled until the end of 1915.^[28][33] Weber's views on the war and the expansion of the German empire changed during the course of the conflict.^[32][33][34] Early on he supported the nationalist rhetoric and the war effort, believing that the fight against the backward and despotic Russian Empire was justified and that a "liberal imperialism" along the lines of the British model would help Germany to develop a more mature political class. In time, however, Weber became one of the most prominent critics of German expansionism and of the Kaiser's war policies.^[2] He publicly attacked the Belgian annexation policy and unrestricted submarine warfare and later supported calls for constitutional reform, democratisation and universal suffrage.^[2]

Weber joined the worker and soldier council of Heidelberg in 1918. He then served in the German delegation to the Paris Peace Conference and as advisor to the Confidential Committee for Constitutional Reform, which drafted the Weimar Constitution.^[28] Motivated by his understanding of the American model, he advocated a strong, popularly elected presidency as a constitutional counter-balance to the power of the professional bureaucracy.^[2] More controversially, he also defended the provisions for emergency presidential powers that became Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution. These provisions were later used by Adolf Hitler to subvert the rest of the constitution and institute rule by decree, allowing his regime to suppress opposition and gain dictatorial powers.^[35]

Weber also ran, unsuccessfully, for a parliamentary seat, as a member of the liberal German Democratic Party, which he had co-founded.^[2][36] He opposed both the leftist German Revolution of 1918–1919 and the ratification of the Treaty of Versailles, a principled position that defied the political alignments in Germany at that time^[2] and which may have prevented Friedrich Ebert, the new social-democratic President of Germany, from appointing Weber as minister or ambassador.^[33] Weber commanded widespread respect but relatively little influence.^[2] Weber's role in German politics remains controversial to this day.

Last years[link]

Weber's grave in Heidelberg

Frustrated with politics, Weber resumed teaching during this time, first at the University of Vienna, then, after 1919, at the University of Munich.^[2][18][28] His lectures from that period were collected into major works, such as the General Economic History, Science as a Vocation and Politics as a Vocation.^[2] In Munich, he headed the first German university institute of sociology, but never held a professorial position in sociology. Many colleagues and students in Munich attacked his response to the German Revolution and some right-wing students held protests in front of his home.^[32] Max Weber contracted the Spanish flu and died of pneumonia in Munich on 14 June 1920.^[2] At the time of his death, Weber had not finished writing his magnum opus on sociological theory: Economy and Society. His widow Marianne helped prepare it for its publication in 1921–22.

Weber's thought[link]

Inspirations[link]

Weber's thinking was strongly influenced by German idealism and particularly by neo-Kantianism, to which he had been exposed through Heinrich Rickert, his professorial colleague at the University of Freiburg.^[2] Especially important to Weber's work is the neo-Kantian belief that reality is essentially chaotic and incomprehensible, with all rational order deriving from the way in which the human mind focuses its attention on certain aspects of reality and organises the resulting perceptions.^[2] Weber's opinions regarding the methodology of the social sciences show parallels with the work of contemporary neo-Kantian philosopher and pioneering sociologist Georg Simmel.^[37]

Weber was also influenced by Kantian ethics, which he nonetheless came to think of as obsolete in a modern age lacking in religious certainties. In this last respect, the influence of Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophy is evident.^[2] According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the "deep tension between the Kantian moral imperatives and a Nietzschean diagnosis of the modern cultural world is apparently what gives such a darkly tragic and agnostic shade to Weber's ethical worldview."^[2] Though the influence of his mother's Calvinist religiosity is evident throughout Weber's life and work, and though he maintained a deep, life-long interest in the study of religions, Weber was open about the fact that he was personally irreligious.^[38][39]

As a political economist and economic historian, Weber belonged to the "youngest" German historical school of economics, represented by academics such as Gustav von Schmoller and his student Werner Sombart. But, even though Weber's research interests were very much in line with that school, his views on methodology and the theory of value diverged significantly from those of other German historicists and were closer, in fact, to those of Carl Menger and the Austrian School, the traditional rivals of the historical school.^[40][41] (See section on Economics.)

Methodology[link]

Unlike some other classical figures (Comte, Durkheim) Weber did not attempt, consciously, to create any specific set of rules governing social sciences in general, or sociology in particular.^[2] Compared to Durkheim and Marx, Weber was more focused on individuals and culture and this is clear in his methodology.^[10] Whereas Durkheim focused on the society, Weber concentrated on the individuals and their actions (see structure and action discussion) and whereas Marx argued for the primacy of the material world over the world of ideas, Weber valued ideas as motivating actions of individuals, at least in the big picture.^[10][42][43]

Sociology, for Max Weber, is:

...a science which attempts the interpretive understanding of social action in order thereby to arrive at a causal explanation of its course and effects.

—Max Weber^[44]

Weber was concerned with the question of objectivity and subjectivity.^[2] Weber distinguished social action from social behaviour, noting that social action must be understood through how individuals subjectively relate to one another.^[2][45] Study of social action through interpretive means (Verstehen) must be based upon understanding the subjective meaning and purpose that the individual attaches to their actions.^[2][26] Social actions may have easily identifiable and objective means, but much more subjective ends and the understanding of those ends by a scientist is subject to yet another layer of subjective understanding (that of the scientist).^[2] Weber noted that the importance of subjectivity in social sciences makes creation of fool-proof, universal laws much more difficult than in natural sciences and that the amount of objective knowledge that social sciences may achieve is precariously limited.^[2] Overall, Weber supported the goal of objective science, but he noted that it is an unreachable goal – although one definitely worth striving for.^[2]

There is no absolutely "objective" scientific analysis of culture... All knowledge of cultural reality... is always knowledge from particular points of view. ... an "objective" analysis of cultural events, which proceeds according to the thesis that the ideal of science is the reduction of empirical reality to "laws," is meaningless... [because]... the knowledge of social laws is not knowledge of social reality but is rather one of the various aids used by our minds for attaining this end.

—Max Weber, "Objectivity" in Social Science, 1897^[46]

The principle of "methodological individualism," which holds that social scientists should seek to understand collectivities (such as nations, cultures, governments, churches, corporations, etc.) solely as the result and the context of the actions of individual persons, can be traced to Weber, particularly to the first chapter of Economy and Society, in which he argues that only individuals "can be treated as agents in a course of subjectively understandable action."^[41][45] In other words, Weber argued that social phenomena can be understood scientifically only to the extent that they are captured by models of the behaviour of purposeful individuals, models which Weber called "ideal types," from which actual historical events will necessarily deviate due to accidental and irrational factors.^[41] The analytical constructs of an ideal type never exist in reality, but provide objective benchmarks against which real-life constructs can be measured.^[47]

We know of no scientifically ascertainable ideals. To be sure, that makes our efforts more arduous than in the past, since we are expected to create our ideals from within our breast in the very age of subjectivist culture.

—Max Weber, 1909^[48]

Weber's methodology was developed in the context of a wider debate about methodology of social sciences, the Methodenstreit.^[26] Weber's position was close to historicism, as he understood social actions as being heavily tied to particular historical contexts and its analysis required the understanding of subjective motivations of individuals (social actors).^[26] Thus Weber's methodology emphasises the use of comparative historical analysis.^[49] Therefore, Weber was more interested in explaining how a certain outcome was the result of various historical processes rather than predicting an outcome of those processes in the future.^[43]

Rationalisation[link]

Many scholars have described rationalisation and the question of individual freedom in an increasingly rational society, as the main theme of Weber's work.^{[2][50][51][52]} This theme was situated in the larger context of the relationship between psychological motivations, cultural values and beliefs (primarily, religion) and the structure of the society (usually determined by the economy).^[43]

By rationalisation, Weber understood first, the individual cost-benefit calculation, second, the wider, bureaucratic organisation of the organisations and finally, in the more general sense as the opposite of understanding the reality through mystery and magic (disenchantment).^[52]

The fate of our times is characterised by rationalisation and intellectualisation and, above all, by the "disenchantment of the world"

—Max Weber^[53]

Weber began his studies of the subject in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, in which he argued that the redefinition of the connection between work and piety in Protestantism and especially in ascetic Protestant denominations, particularly Calvinism, shifted human effort towards rational efforts aimed at achieving economic gain.^[54][55] In Protestant religion, Christian piety towards God was expressed through one's secular vocation (secularisation of calling).^[55] The rational roots of this doctrine, he argued, soon grew incompatible with and larger than the religious and so the latter were eventually discarded.^[56]

Weber continued his investigation into this matter in later works, notably in his studies on bureaucracy and on the classification of legitimate authority into three types – Rational-legal, traditional and charismatic – of which the legitimate (or rational) is the dominant one in the modern world.^[2] In these works Weber described what he saw as society's movement towards rationalisation.^[2] Similarly, rationalisation could be seen in the economy, with the development of highly rational and calculating capitalism.^[2] Weber also saw rationalisation as one of the main factors setting the European West apart from the rest of the world.^[2] Rationalisation relied on deep changes in ethics, religion, psychology and culture; changes that first took place in the Western civilisation.^[2]

What Weber depicted was not only the secularisation of Western culture, but also and especially the development of modern societies from the viewpoint of rationalisation. The new structures of society were marked by the differentiation of the two functionally intermeshing systems that had taken shape around the organisational cores of the capitalist enterprise and the bureaucratic state apparatus. Weber understood this process as the institutionalisation of purposive-rational economic and administrative action. To the degree that everyday life was affected by this cultural and societal rationalisation, traditional forms of life – which in the early modern period were differentiated primarily according to one's trade – were dissolved.

—Jürgen Habermas, Modernity's Consciousness of Time, 1985, ^[5]

Features of rationalisation include increasing knowledge, growing impersonality and enhanced control of social and material life.^[2] Weber was ambivalent towards rationalisation; while admitting it was responsible for many advances, in particular, freeing humans from traditional, restrictive and illogical social guidelines, he also criticised it for dehumanising individuals as "cogs in the machine" and curtailing their freedom, trapping them in the bureaucratic iron cage of rationality and bureaucracy.^{[2][50][57][58]} Related to rationalisation is the process of disenchantment, in which the world is becoming more explained and less mystical, moving from polytheistic religions to monotheistic ones and finally to the Godless science of modernity.^[2] Those processes affect all of society, removing "sublime values... from public life" and making art less creative.^[59]

In a dystopian critique of rationalisation, Weber notes that modern society is a product of an individualistic drive of the Reformation, yet at the same time, the society created in this process is less and less welcoming of individualism.^[2]

How is it at all possible to salvage any remnants of 'individual' freedom of movement in any sense given this all-powerful trend?

—Max Weber^[2]

Sociology of religion[link]

Weber's work in the field of sociology of religion started with the essay The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and continued with the analysis of The Religion of China: Confucianism and Taoism, The Religion of India: The Sociology of Hinduism and Buddhism and Ancient Judaism. His work on other religions was interrupted by his sudden death in 1920, which prevented him from following Ancient Judaism with studies of early Christianity and Islam.^[60] His three main themes in the essays were the effect of religious ideas on economic activities, the relation between social stratification and religious ideas and the distinguishable characteristics of Western civilization.^[61]

Weber saw religion as one of the core forces in the society.^[49] His goal was to find reasons for the different development paths of the cultures of the Occident and the Orient, although without judging or valuing them, like some of the contemporary thinkers who followed the social Darwinist paradigm; Weber wanted primarily to explain the distinctive elements of the Western civilisation.^[61] In the analysis of his findings, Weber maintained that Calvinist (and more widely, Protestant) religious ideas had had a major impact on the social innovation and development of the economic system of the West, but noted that they were not the only factors in this development. Other notable factors mentioned by Weber included the rationalism of scientific pursuit, merging observation with mathematics, science of scholarship and jurisprudence, rational systematisation and bureaucratisation of government administration and economic enterprise.^[61] In the end, the study of the sociology of religion, according to Weber, focused on one distinguishing part of the Western culture, the decline of beliefs in magic, or what he referred to as "disenchantment of the world".^[61]

Weber also proposed a socioevolutionary model of religious change, showing that in general, societies have moved from magic to polytheism, then to pantheism, monotheism and finally, ethical monotheism.^[62] According to Weber, this evolution occurred as the growing economic stability allowed professionalisation and the evolution of ever more sophisticated priesthood.^[63] As societies grew more complex and encompassed different groups, a hierarchy of gods developed and as power in the society became more centralised, the concept of a single, universal God became more popular and desirable.^[64]

[edit] The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

Cover of the original German edition of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

Weber's essay The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism is his most famous work.^[30] It is argued that this work should not be viewed as a detailed study of Protestantism, but rather as an introduction into Weber's later works, especially his studies of interaction between various religious ideas and economic behaviour as part of the rationalisation of the economic system.^[65] In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Weber put forward the thesis that Calvinist ethic and ideas influenced the development of capitalism.^[65] He noted the post-Reformation shift of Europe's economic centre away from Catholic countries such as France, Spain and Italy, and toward Protestant countries such as the Netherlands, England, Scotland and Germany. Weber also noted that societies having more Protestants were those with a more highly developed capitalist economy.^[66] Similarly, in societies with different religions, most successful business leaders were Protestant.^[65] Weber thus argued that Roman Catholicism impeded the development of the capitalist economy in the West, as did other religions such as Confucianism and Buddhism elsewhere in the world.^[65]

The development of the concept of the calling quickly gave to the modern entrepreneur a fabulously clear conscience – and also industrious workers; he gave to his employees as the wages of their ascetic devotion to the calling and of co-operation in his ruthless exploitation of them through capitalism the prospect of eternal salvation.

—Max Weber^[55]

Christian religious devotion had historically been accompanied by rejection of mundane affairs, including economic pursuit.^[67] Weber showed that certain types of Protestantism – notably Calvinism – were supportive of rational pursuit of economic gain and worldly activities dedicated to it, seeing them as endowed with moral and spiritual significance.^[54] Weber argued that there were many reasons to look for the origins of modern capitalism in the religious ideas of the Reformation.^[68] In particular, the Protestant ethic (or more specifically, Calvinist ethic) motivated the believers to work hard, be successful in business and reinvest their profits in further development rather than frivolous pleasures.^[65] The notion of calling meant that each individual had to take action in order to be saved; just being a member of the Church was not enough.^[55] Predestination also reduced antagonising over economic inequality and further, it meant that a material wealth could be taken as a sign of salvation in the afterlife.^[65][69] The believers thus justified pursuit of profit with religion, as instead of being fuelled by morally suspect greed or ambition, their actions were motivated by a highly moral and respected philosophy.^[65] This Weber called the "spirit of capitalism": it was the Protestant religious ideology that was behind – and inevitably lead to – the capitalist economic system.^[65] This theory is often viewed as a reversal of Marx's thesis that the economic "base" of society determines all other aspects of it.^[54]

Weber abandoned research into Protestantism because his colleague Ernst Troeltsch, a professional theologian, had begun work on the book The Social Teachings of the Christian Churches and Sects. Another reason for Weber's decision was that Troeltsch's work already achieved what he desired in that area: laying the groundwork for a comparative analysis of religion and society.^[70]

The phrase "work ethic" used in modern commentary is a derivative of the "Protestant ethic" discussed by Weber. It was adopted when the idea of the Protestant ethic was generalised to apply to the Japanese people, Jews and other non-Christians and thus lost its religious connotations.^[71]

[edit] The Religion of China: Confucianism and Taoism

The Religion of China: Confucianism and Taoism was Weber's second major work on the sociology of religion. Weber focused on those aspects of Chinese society that were different from those of Western Europe, especially those aspects which contrasted with Puritanism. His work also questioned why capitalism did not develop in China.^[72] He focused on the issues of Chinese urban development, Chinese patrimonialism and officialdom and Chinese religion and philosophy (primarily, Confucianism and Taoism), as the areas in which Chinese development differed most distinctively from the European route.^[72]

According to Weber, Confucianism and Puritanism are mutually exclusive types of rational thought, each attempting to prescribe a way of life based on religious dogma.^[73] Notably, they both valued self control and restraint and did not oppose accumulation of wealth.^[73] However, to both those qualities were just means to the final goal and here they were divided by a key difference.^[69] Confucianism's goal was "a cultured status position", while Puritanism's goal was to create individuals who are "tools of God".^[73] The intensity of belief and enthusiasm for action were rare in Confucianism, but common in Protestantism.^[73] Actively working for wealth was unbecoming a proper Confucian.^[69] Therefore, Weber states that it was this difference in social attitudes and mentality, shaped by the respective, dominant religions, that contributed to the development of capitalism in the West and the absence of it in China.^[73]

[edit] The Religion of India: The Sociology of Hinduism and Buddhism

The Religion of India: The Sociology of Hinduism and Buddhism was Weber's third major work on the sociology of religion. In this work he deals with the structure of Indian society, with the orthodox doctrines of Hinduism and the heterodox doctrines of Buddhism, with modifications brought by the influence of popular religiosity and finally with the impact of religious beliefs on the secular ethic of Indian society.^[74] Like Confucianism in China, for Weber, Hinduism in India was a barrier for capitalism.^[69] The Indian caste system made it very difficult for individuals to advance in the society beyond their caste.^[69] Activity, including economic activity, was seen as unimportant in the context of the advancement of the soul.^[69]

Weber ended his research of society and religion in India by bringing in insights from his previous work on China to discuss similarities of the Asian belief systems.^[75] He notes that the beliefs saw the meaning of life as otherworldly mystical experience.^[75] The social world is fundamentally divided between the educated elite, following the guidance of a prophet or wise man and the uneducated masses whose beliefs are centered on magic.^[75] In Asia, there was no Messianic prophecy to give plan and meaning to the everyday life of educated and uneducated alike.^[75] Weber juxtaposed such Messianic prophecies (also called ethical prophecies), notably from the Near East region to the exemplary prophecies found on the Asiatic mainland, focused more on reaching to the educated elites and enlightening them on the proper ways to live one's life, usually with little emphasis on hard work and the material world.^[75][76] It was those differences that prevented the countries of the Occident from following the paths of the earlier Chinese and Indian civilizations. His next work, Ancient Judaism was an attempt to prove this theory.^[75]

[edit] Ancient Judaism

In Ancient Judaism, his fourth major work on the sociology of religion, Weber attempted to explain the factors which resulted in the early differences between Oriental and Occidental religiosity.^[77] He contrasted the innerworldly asceticism developed by Western Christianity with mystical contemplation of the kind developed in India.^[77] Weber noted that some aspects of Christianity sought to conquer and change the world, rather than withdraw from its imperfections.^[77] This fundamental characteristic of Christianity (when compared to Far Eastern religions) stems originally from ancient Jewish prophecy.^[78]

Weber noted that Judaism not only fathered Christianity and Islam, but was crucial to the rise of the modern Occidental state; Judaism's influence was as important as Hellenistic and Roman cultures.

Weber's premature death in 1920 prevented him from following his planned analysis of Psalms, the Book of Job, Talmudic Jewry, early Christianity and Islam.

[edit] Economy and Society

In his magnum opus, Economy and Society, Weber distinguished three ideal types of religious attitudes: world-flying mysticism, world-rejecting asceticism, and inner-worldly asceticism. He defined magic as a pre-religious activity.^[79]

Politics and government[link]

In political sociology, one of Weber's most significant contributions is his Politics as a Vocation essay. Therein, Weber unveils the definition of the state as that entity which possesses a delegatable monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force.^[80] Weber wrote that politics is the sharing of state's power between various groups, and political leaders are those who wield this power.^[80] A politician must not be a man of the "true Christian ethic", understood by Weber as being the ethic of the Sermon on the Mount, that is to say, the injunction to turn the other cheek.^[81] An adherent of such an ethic ought rather to be understood to be a saint, for it is only saints, according to Weber, that can appropriately follow it.^[81] The political realm is no realm for saints; a politician ought to marry the ethic of ultimate ends and the ethic of responsibility and must possess both a passion for his vocation and the capacity to distance himself from the subject of his exertions (the governed).^[81]

Weber distinguished three ideal types of political leadership (alternatively referred to as three types of domination, legitimisation or authority):

1. charismatic domination (familial and religious),
2. traditional domination (patriarchs, patrimonialism, feudalism) and
3. legal domination (modern law and state, bureaucracy).^[82]

In his view, every historical relation between rulers and ruled contained such elements and they can be analysed on the basis of this tripartite distinction.^[83] He notes that the instability of charismatic authority forces it to "routinise" into a more structured form of authority.^[57] In a pure type of traditional rule, sufficient resistance to a ruler can lead to a "traditional revolution". The move towards a rational-legal structure of authority, utilising a bureaucratic structure, is inevitable in the end.^[84] Thus this theory can be sometimes viewed as part of the social evolutionism theory. This ties to his broader concept of rationalisation by suggesting the inevitability of a move in this direction.^[57]

Bureaucratic administration means fundamentally domination through knowledge.

—Max Weber^[85]

Weber described many ideal types of public administration and government in his masterpiece Economy and Society (1922). His critical study of the bureaucratisation of society became one of the most enduring parts of his work.^[57][85] It was Weber who began the studies of bureaucracy and whose works led to the popularisation of this term.^[86] Many aspects of modern public administration go back to him and a classic, hierarchically organised civil service of the Continental type is called "Weberian civil service".^[87] As the most efficient and rational way of organising, bureaucratisation for Weber was the key part of the rational-legal authority and furthermore, he saw it as the key process in the ongoing rationalisation of the Western society.^[57][85]

Weber listed several preconditions for the emergence of the bureaucracy:^[88] The growth in space and population being administered, the growth in complexity of the administrative tasks being carried out and the existence of a monetary economy – these resulted in a need for a more efficient administrative system.^[88] Development of communication and transportation technologies made more efficient administration possible (and popularly requested) and democratisation and rationalisation of culture resulted in demands that the new system treat everybody equally.^[88]

Weber's ideal bureaucracy is characterised by hierarchical organisation, by delineated lines of authority in a fixed area of activity, by action taken (and recorded) on the basis of written rules, by bureaucratic officials needing expert training, by rules being implemented neutrally and by career advancement depending on technical qualifications judged by organisations, not by individuals.^[85][88]

The decisive reason for the advance of the bureaucratic organisation has always been its purely technical superiority over any other form of organisation.

—Max Weber^[87]

While recognising bureaucracy as the most efficient form of organisation and even indispensable for the modern state, Weber also saw it as a threat to individual freedoms and the ongoing bureaucratisation as leading to a "polar night of icy darkness", in which increasing rationalisation of human life traps individuals in the aforementioned "iron cage" of bureaucratic, rule-based, rational control.^[85][89] In order to counteract bureaucrats, the system needs entrepreneurs and politicians.^[85]

Social stratification[link]

Weber also formulated a three-component theory of stratification, with Social class, Social status and Political party as conceptually distinct elements.^[90]

• Social class is based on economically determined relationship to the market (owner, renter, employee etc.).
• Status class is based on non-economical qualities like honour, prestige and religion.
• Party class refers to affiliations in the political domain.

All three dimensions have consequences for what Weber called "life chances" (opportunities to improve one's life).^[90]

The city[link]

As part of his overarching effort to understand the unique development of the Western world, Weber produced a detailed general study of the city as the characteristic locus of the social and economic relations, political arrangements, and ideas that eventually came to define the West. This resulted in a monograph titled The City, which was probably compiled from research conducted in 1911-1913, and which was published posthumously in 1921. In 1924 it was incorporated into the second part of his Economy and Society, as chapter XVI, "The City (Non-legitimate Domination)".

According to Weber, the city as a politically autonomous organization of people living in close proximity, employed in a variety of specialized trades, and physically separated from the surrounding countryside, only fully developed in the West and to a great extent shaped its cultural evolution:

The origin of a rational and inner-worldly ethic is associated in the Occident with the appearance of thinkers and prophets [...] who developed in a social context which was alien to the Asiatic cultures. This context consisted of the political problems engendered by the bourgeois status-group of the city, without which neither Judaism, nor Christianity, nor the development of Hellenistic thinking are conceivable.

— Max Weber ^[91]

Weber argued that Judaism, early Christianity, theology, and later the political party and modern science, were only possible in the urban context that reached a full development the West alone.^[92] He also saw in the history of medieval European cities the rise of a unique form of "non-legitimate domination" that successfully challenged the existing forms of legitimate domination (traditional, charismatic, and rational-legal) that had prevailed until then in the Medieval world.^[93] This new domination was based on the great economic and military power wielded by the organized community of city-dwellers ("citizens").

Economics[link]

Weber regarded himself primarily as a "political economist,"^[94][95][96] and all of his professorial appointments were in economics, though today his contributions in that field are largely overshadowed by his role as a founder of modern sociology. As an economist, Weber belonged to the "youngest" German historical school of economics.^[97] The great differences between that school's interests and methods on the one hand and those of the neoclassical school (from which modern mainstream economics largely derives) on the other, explain why Weber's influence on economics today is hard to discern.^[98]

Methodological individualism[link]

Though his research interests were always in line with those of the German historicists, with a strong emphasis on interpreting economic history, Weber's defence of "methodological individualism" in the social sciences represented an important break with that school and an embracing of many of the arguments that had been made against the historicists by Carl Menger, the founder of the Austrian School of economics, in the context of the academic Methodenstreit ("debate over methods") of the late 19th century.^[41] The phrase "methodological individualism," which has come into common usage in modern debates about the connection between microeconomics and macroeconomics, was coined by the Austrian-American economist Joseph Schumpeter in 1908 as a way of referring to the views of Weber.^[41] According to Weber's theses, social research cannot be fully inductive or descriptive, because understanding some phenomenon implies that the researcher must go beyond mere description and interpret it; interpretation requires classification according to abstract "ideal (pure) types".^[97] This, together with his antipositivistic argumentation (see Verstehen), can be taken as a methodological justification for the model of the "rational economic man" (homo economicus), which is at the heart of modern mainstream economics.^[41][97]

Marginalism and psychophysics[link]

Unlike other historicists, Weber also accepted the marginal theory of value (also called "marginalism") and taught it to his students.^[40][99] In 1908, Weber published an article in which he drew a sharp methodological distinction between psychology and economics and attacked the claims that the marginal theory of value in economics reflected the form of the psychological response to stimuli as described by the Weber-Fechner law. Max Weber's article has been cited as a definitive refutation of the dependence of the economic theory of value on the laws of psychophysics by Lionel Robbins, George Stigler,^[100] and Friedrich Hayek, though the broader issue of the relation between economics and psychology has come back into the academic debate with the development of "behavioral economics."^[101]

Economic history[link]

Weber's best known work in economics concerned the preconditions for capitalist development, particularly the relations between religion and capitalism, which he explored in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism as well as in his other works on the sociology of religion.^[97] He argued that bureaucratic political and economic systems emerging in the Middle Ages were essential in the rise of modern capitalism (including rational book-keeping and organization of formally free labour), while they were a hindrance in the case of ancient capitalism, which had a different social and political structure based on conquest, slavery, and the coastal city-state.^[102] Other contributions include his early work on the economic history of Roman agrarian society (1891) and on the labour relations in Eastern Germany (1892), his analysis of the history of commercial partnerships in the Middle Ages (1889), his critique of Marxism, the discussion of the roles of idealism and materialism in the history of capitalism in his Economy and Society (1922) and his General Economic History (1923), a notable example of the kind of empirical work associated with the German Historical School.^[97]

Though today read primarily by sociologists and social philosophers, Weber's work did have a significant influence on Frank Knight, one of the founders of the neoclassical Chicago school of economics, who translated Weber's General Economic History into English in 1927.^[103] Knight also wrote in 1956 that Max Weber was the only economist who dealt with the problem of understanding the emergence of modern capitalism "from the angle which alone can yield an answer to such questions, that is, the angle of comparative history in the broad sense."^[99]

Economic calculation[link]

Weber, like his colleague Werner Sombart, regarded economic calculation and especially the double-entry bookkeeping method of business accounting, as one of the most important forms of rationalisation associated the development of modern capitalism.^[104] Weber's preoccupation with the importance of economic calculation led him to develop a critique of socialism as a system that lacked a mechanism for allocating resources efficiently in order to satisfy human needs.^[105] Socialist intellectuals like Otto Neurath had realised that in a completely socialised economy, prices would not exist and central planners would have to resort to in-kind (rather than monetary) economic calculation.^[105][106] According to Weber, this type of coordination would be inefficient, especially because it would be incapable of solving the problem of imputation (i.e. of accurately determining the relative values of capital goods).^[105][106] Weber wrote that, under full socialism,

In order to make possible a rational utilisation of the means of production, a system of in-kind accounting would have to determine "value" – indicators of some kind for the individual capital goods which could take over the role of the "prices" used in book valuation in modern business accounting. But it is not at all clear how such indicators could be established and in particular, verified; whether, for instance, they should vary from one production unit to the next (on the basis of economic location), or whether they should be uniform for the entire economy, on the basis of "social utility," that is, of (present and future) consumption requirements [...] Nothing is gained by assuming that, if only the problem of a non-monetary economy were seriously enough attacked, a suitable accounting method would be discovered or invented. The problem is fundamental to any kind of complete socialisation. We cannot speak of a rational "planned economy" so long as in this decisive respect we have no instrument for elaborating a rational "plan."

—Max Weber^[107]

This argument against socialism was made independently, at about the same time, by Ludwig von Mises.^[105][108] Weber himself had a significant influence on Mises, whom he had befriended when they were both at the University of Vienna in the spring of 1918,^[109] and, through Mises, on several other economists associated with the Austrian School in the 20th century.^[110] Friedrich Hayek in particular elaborated the arguments of Weber and Mises about economic calculation into a central part of free market economics's intellectual assault on socialism, as well as into a model for the spontaneous coordination of "dispersed knowledge" in markets.^{[111][112][113]}

Legacy[link]

The prestige of Max Weber among European social scientists would be difficult to over-estimate. He is widely considered the greatest of German sociologists and... has become a leading influence in European and American thought.

— Hans Heinrich Gerth and Charles Wright Mills, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, 1991^[3]

Weber's most influential work was on economic sociology, political sociology, and the sociology of religion. Along with Karl Marx and Émile Durkheim,^[95] he is commonly regarded as one of the founders of modern sociology. But whereas Durkheim, following Comte, worked in the positivist tradition, Weber was instrumental in developing an antipositivist, hermeneutic, tradition in the social sciences.^[114] In this regard he belongs to a similar tradition as his German colleagues Werner Sombart, Georg Simmel, and Wilhelm Dilthey, who stressed the differences between the methodologies appropriate to the social and the natural sciences.^[114]

Weber presented sociology as the science of human social action; action which he separated into traditional, affectional, value-rational and instrumental.^[115][116]

[Sociology is] the science whose object is to interpret the meaning of social action and thereby give a causal explanation of the way in which the action proceeds and the effects which it produces. By "action" in this definition is meant the human behaviour when and to the extent that the agent or agents see it as subjectively meaningful [...] the meaning to which we refer may be either (a) the meaning actually intended either by an individual agent on a particular historical occasion or by a number of agents on an approximate average in a given set of cases, or (b) the meaning attributed to the agent or agents, as types, in a pure type constructed in the abstract. In neither case is the "meaning" to be thought of as somehow objectively "correct" or "true" by some metaphysical criterion. This is the difference between the empirical sciences of action, such as sociology and history and any kind of a priori discipline, such as jurisprudence, logic, ethics, or aesthetics whose aim is to extract from their subject-matter "correct" or "valid" meaning.

—Max Weber, The Nature of Social Action, 1922, ^[117]

In his own time, however, Weber was viewed primarily as a historian and an economist.^[95][96] The breadth of Weber's topical interests is apparent in the depth of his social theory:

The affinity between capitalism and Protestantism, the religious origins of the Western world, the force of charisma in religion as well as in politics, the all-embracing process of rationalisation and the bureaucratic price of progress, the role of legitimacy and of violence as the offspring of leadership, the 'disenchantment' of the modern world together with the never-ending power of religion, the antagonistic relation between intellectualism and eroticism: all these are key concepts which attest to the enduring fascination of Weber's thinking.

— Joachim Radkau, Max Weber: A Biography, 2005^[118]

Many of Weber's works famous today were collected, revised and published posthumously. Significant interpretations of his writings were produced by such sociological luminaries as Talcott Parsons and C. Wright Mills. Parsons in particular imparted to Weber's works a functionalist, teleological perspective; this personal interpretation has been criticised for a latent conservatism.^[119]

Weber has influenced many later social theorists, such as Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, György Lukács and Jürgen Habermas.^[2] Different elements of his thought were emphasized by Carl Schmitt, Joseph Schumpeter, Leo Strauss, Hans Morgenthau, and Raymond Aron.^[2] According to Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises, who had met Weber during his time at the University of Vienna,

The early death of this genius was a great disaster for Germany. Had Weber lived longer, the German people of today would be able to look to this example of an "Aryan" who would not be broken by National Socialism.

—Ludwig von Mises, 1940^[120]

Weber's friend, the psychiatrist and existentialist philosopher Karl Jaspers, described him "the greatest German of our era" and his untimely death felt to Jaspers "as if the German world had lost its heart."^[121]

Critical responses to Weber[link]

Weber's explanations are highly specific to the historical periods he analysed.^[122] This makes it more difficult to generalise from his analysis and modify his theories for other circumstances.^[122]

Many scholars, however, have disagreed with specific claims Weber makes in his historical analysis. For example, the economist Joseph Schumpeter argued that capitalism did not begin with the Industrial Revolution but in 14th century Italy.^[123] In Milan, Venice and Florence the small city-state governments led to the development of the earliest forms of capitalism.^[124] In the 16th century Antwerp was a commercial centre of Europe. Also, the predominantly Calvinist country of Scotland did not enjoy the same economic growth as the Netherlands, England and New England. It has been pointed out that the Netherlands, which had a Calvinist majority, industrialised much later in the 19th century than predominantly Catholic Belgium, which was one of the centres of the Industrial Revolution on the European mainland.^[125] Emil Kauder expanded Schumpeter's argument by arguing the hypothesis that Calvinism hurt the development of capitalism by leading to the development of the labour theory of value.^[126]

See also[link]

• Interpretations of Weber's liberalism
• Max Weber bibliography
• Sociology of law
• Speeches of Max Weber

Notes[link]

Weber wrote his books in German. Original titles printed after his death (1920) are most likely compilations of his unfinished works (of the 'Collected Essays...' form). Many translations are made of parts or sections of various German originals and the names of the translations often do not reveal what part of German work they contain. Weber's work is generally quoted according to the critical Gesamtausgabe (collected works edition), which is published by Mohr Siebeck in Tübingen. For an extensive list of Max Weber's works see list of Max Weber works.

References[link]