Max Webber
...n medieval trading companies in Italy and Spain. Weber was one of the founding fathers of sociology. He believed that under socialism workers would still work in a hierarchy, but that now the hierarchy would be fused with government. Instead of dictatorship of the worker, he saw dictatorship of the official. Weber believed in the possibility of value-free social science. He meant that one could not draw conclusions about the way the world should be simply from studying the way the world is. Weber did not rule out normative analysis as being feasible or worth while he believed in rational discussion of values. He simply wanted economists to distinguish between facts and values. In 1893, he married his distant cousin Marianne Schnitger, an intellectual and feminist who was well known in her own right as an author. The next year he briefly took a position as a (junior) professor of economics at Freiburg University, before moving to a position at the University of Heidelberg in 1896. He was appointed to a chair in political economy at Freiburg in 1894, and to another chair in political economy at Heidelberg in 1896. From 1904 on he was a private scholar, mostly in Heidelberg. In 1888 he had joined the "Vere in Social politics", the new professional association of German economists affiliated with the Historical school who saw the role of economics primarily in the solving of the wide-ranging social problems of the age, and who pioneered large-scale statistical studies of economic problems. He suffered a nervous breakdown in 1898 and did not continue his sch...