Describe how Max WeberSolution Webers thinking was strongly

Solution

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.[3] 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.[3] 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.[41] 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.[3] 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.\"[3] Another major influence in Weber\'s life were the writings of Karl Marx and the workings of socialist thought in academia and active politics. While Weber shares some of Marx\'s consternation with bureaucratic systems and maligns them as being capable of advancing their own logic to the detriment of human freedom and autonomy, Weber views conflict as perpetual and inevitable and does not host the spirit of a materially available utopia.[42] Though the influence of his mother\'s Calvinist religiosity is evident throughout Weber\'s life and work, and though he maintained a deep, lifelong interest in the study of religions, Weber was open about the fact that he was personally irreligious.[43][44] 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