Weber, Max (1864–1920)

Max Weber was one of the great figures in the history of social science, and is now recognized as a political philosopher. His most famous work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, led to a larger life-long comparative project on the relation between capitalist development and religiously conditioned economic ethics. Weber also attempted to define the relations between social science and normative sciences in accordance with the fact value distinction, and to draw out the implications of the nonrationality of value choice for social science, which works with value-related descriptions, and for politics, which involves competing values