Max Weber-Gesamtausgabe

Max Weber wrote more than 200 letters between 1887 and 1894, a time which saw him juggling busy professional and academic careers. On top of his legal training, these seven years saw Weber complete his doctorate, lecture as a 29-year-old associate professor in Berlin, and then go on to become Professor of Political Economy at Freiburg University in 1894. The amount of correspondence he produced in this time provides not only a rich seam of biographical detail, but also charts the development of Weber's powers of political judgement as he clashed with the central problems of the German empire and the failure of the older »notability liberalism« to grasp the importance of the »social question« in order to achieve a stronger democracy. Weber was also actively involved in the Protestant-Social Congress and the Association for Social Politics, analysing for the latter the situation of German agricultural workers east of the River Elbe. It was this study that laid the foundations for his reputation as a political economist. The start of Weber's emotionally and intellectually intense relationship with his future wife, Marianne Schnitger, is also recorded here through letters that did not appear in the 1936 edition of his »Jugendbriefe«. The present volume fills that gap, and the Webers' engagement, first year of marriage in Berlin, and their move to Freiburg are all documented here. The expert introduction to this section of Max Weber's Collected Works is provided by Rita Aldenhoff-Hübinger, while preliminary notes, commentaries and registers complement and complete it.