Max Weber

(1864 - 1920)

Writing his doctoral and postdoctoral theses on medieval trading companies and on ancient Rome’s agrarian history, respectively, Max Weber became a professor at the University of Berlin in 1893; suffered a nervous breakdown in 1898; and traveled to the St. Louis World’s Fair to give a lecture in 1904, the same year he began publishing his best-known work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.