ABSTRACT
Max Weber was a professional academic who reached his maturity in the decades following the unification of the German nation in 1870. He was well situated within the established institutions of the time. Weber was in no sense marginalized as an individual, although his voice may be read as characteristic of liberal disillusionment in Germany around the turn of the century. A great triumph in execution for the place of “culture” in historical analysis, it also served as a tragic commentary on the very processes threatening those nontangible aspects of civilization that give life meaning. It is indeed, in Weber’s view, by two cruel twists that modernity turns back upon itself: the material necessities of maintaining a growing economy themselves turn against absolute faith, and the machinery of government required to manage and serve masses of free and equal individuals itself works towards the diminishment of those individual freedoms it was established to guarantee.
