Along with Marx and Durkheim, one of the three founders of modern sociology — and the one whose concerns most closely resemble those of contemporary social theory. Weber's life work is a sustained, comparative, historically dense attempt to understand what is distinctive about modern Western civilization: its rationalization, its bureaucratic organization, its capitalist economy, its "disenchanted" relation to meaning.
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905) is his most famous argument: an ascetic Protestant ethic — especially Calvinist — of methodical, worldly labor as a sign of election gave European capitalism its characteristic psychological drive. The thesis is often caricatured; Weber himself carefully presented it as one causal thread among many. But the method — tracing material outcomes back to cultural meaning — opened a whole tradition of explanation complementary (and partly opposed) to Karl Marx's materialism.
Weber's theory of authority distinguishes three "ideal types": traditional (sanctified by custom), charismatic (grounded in the extraordinary personal gift of a leader), and rational-legal (grounded in impersonal rules). The rational-legal type, embodied in modern bureaucracy, is extraordinarily effective at what it does — and it traps modern humanity in an "iron cage" of calculation and procedure that he regarded with deep ambivalence. His political writings, especially the 1919 lectures Politics as a Vocation and Science as a Vocation, remain essential on the ethics of political action, the distinction between an "ethic of conviction" and an "ethic of responsibility," and the vocation of the intellectual in a disenchanted world.