Max Weber, the German sociologist, historian, and philosopher, was raised in Berlin. His father was a lawyer and National Liberal parliamentary deputy, his mother a woman of deep humanitarian and religious convictions. The Weber household was a meeting place for academics and liberal politicians. From 1882 to 1886 Weber studied law at the universities of Heidelberg, Berlin, and Göttingen, except for a year of military training. His doctoral dissertation (1889) was on medieval commercial law, and he continued his researches into legal history with a study of Roman agrarian law. In 1890 he was commissioned by the Verein für Sozialpolitik to investigate the social and economic plight of the east German agricultural worker. Between 1894 and 1897 he was professor of economics, first at Freiburg, then at Heidelberg. During the next four years, however, a severe nervous illness forced him into academic retirement and kept him from productive...