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From 1893 to 1899, Weber was a member of the Alldeutscher Verband (Pan-German League), an organization that campaigned against the influx of the Polish workers; the degree of Weber's support for the Germanisation of Poles and similar nationalist policies is still debated by modern scholars. In some of his work, in particular his provocative lecture on "The Nation State and Economic Policy" delivered in 1895, Weber criticises the immigration of Poles and blames the Junker class for perpetuating Slavic immigration to serve their selfish interests.

Weber and his wife, Marianne, moved to Freiburg in 1894, where Weber was appointed professor of economics at the Albert-Ludwigs University, before accepting the same position at the University of Heidelberg in 1896. There, Weber became a central figure in the so-called "Weber Circle", composed of other intellectuals, including his wife Marianne, as well as Georg Jellinek, Ernst Troeltsch, Werner Sombart and Robert Michels. Weber also remained active in the Verein and the Evangelical Social Congress. His research in that period was focused on economics and legal history.

Mental health concerns

In 1897, Weber Sr. died two months after a severe quarrel with his son that was never resolved. After this, Weber became increasingly prone to depression, nervousness and insomnia, making it difficult for him to fulfill his duties as a professor. His condition forced him to reduce his teaching and eventually leave his course unfinished in the autumn of 1899. After spending the summer and fall months of 1900 in a sanatorium, Weber and his wife travelled to Italy at the end of the year, not returning to Heidelberg until April 1902. He would again withdraw from teaching in 1903 and would not return until 1919. Weber's ordeal with mental illness was carefully described in a personal chronology that was destroyed by his wife. This chronicle was supposedly destroyed because Marianne feared that Weber's work would be discredited by the Nazis if his experience with mental illness were widely known.

Later work

After Weber's immense productivity in the early 1890s, he did not publish any papers between early 1898 and late 1902, finally resigning his professorship in late 1903. Freed from those obligations, in that year he accepted a position as associate editor of the Archives for Social Science and Social Welfare, where he worked with his colleagues Edgar Jaffé and Werner Sombart. His new interests would lie in more fundamental issues of social sciences; his works from this latter period are of primary interest to modern scholars. In 1904, Weber began to publish some of his most seminal papers in this journal, notably his essay The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, which became his most famous work and laid the foundations for his later research on the impact of cultures and religions on the development of economic systems. This essay was the only one of his works from that period that was published as a book during his lifetime. Some other of his works written in the first one and a half decades of the 20th century – published posthumously and dedicated primarily from the fields of sociology of religion, economic and legal sociology – are also recognised as among his most important intellectual contributions.

Also in 1904, Weber visited the United States, participating in the Congress of Arts and Sciences held in connection with the World's fair (Louisiana Purchase Exposition) in St. Louis. A monument to his visit was placed at the home of relatives whom Weber visited in Mt. Airy, North Carolina.

Despite his partial recovery evident in America, Weber felt that he was unable to resume regular teaching at that time and continued on as a private scholar, helped by an inheritance in 1907. In 1909, disappointed with the Verein, he co-founded the German Sociological Association (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Soziologie, or DGS) and served as its first treasurer, though resigning in 1912.

Political involvements

Max Weber (middle, facing right) in 1917 with Ernst Toller (middle, facing camera)

Later in 1912, Weber tried to organise a left-wing political party to combine social-democrats and liberals. This attempt was unsuccessful, in part because many liberals feared social-democratic revolutionary ideals.

World War I

At the outbreak of World War I, Weber, aged 50, volunteered for service and was appointed as a reserve officer in charge of organizing the army hospitals in Heidelberg, a role he fulfilled until the end of 1915. Weber's views on the war and the expansion of the German empire changed during the course of the conflict. Early on, he supported nationalist rhetoric and the war effort, though with some hesitation, viewing the war as a necessity to fulfill German duty as a leading state power. In time, however, Weber became one of the most prominent critics of German expansionism and of the Kaiser's war policies. Weber publicly attacked the Belgian annexation policy and unrestricted submarine warfare, later supporting calls for constitutional reform, democratisation, and universal suffrage.

Post-World War I

Weber joined the worker and soldier council of Heidelberg in 1918. He then served in the German delegation to the Paris Peace Conference and as advisor to the Confidential Committee for Constitutional Reform, which drafted the Weimar Constitution. Motivated by his understanding of the American model, he advocated a strong, popularly elected presidency as a constitutional counterbalance to the power of the professional bureaucracy. More controversially, he also defended the provisions for emergency presidential powers that became Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution. These provisions were later used by Adolf Hitler to subvert the rest of the constitution and institute rule by decree, allowing his regime to suppress opposition and gain dictatorial powers.

Weber would also run, though unsuccessfully, for a parliamentary seat, as a member of the liberal German Democratic Party, which he had co-founded. He opposed both the leftist German Revolution of 1918–1919 and the ratification of the Treaty of Versailles, principled positions that defied the political alignments in Germany at that time, and which may have prevented Friedrich Ebert, the new social-democratic President of Germany, from appointing Weber as minister or ambassador. Weber commanded widespread respect but relatively little influence. Weber's role in German politics remains controversial to this day.

In Weber's critique of the left, he complained of the leaders of the leftist Spartacus League, led by Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, that controlled the city government of Berlin while Weber was campaigning for his party:

• We have this [German] revolution to thank for the fact that we cannot send a single division against the Poles. All we see is dirt, muck, dung, and horse-play – nothing else. Liebknecht belongs in the madhouse and Rosa Luxemburg in the zoological gardens.

Weber was, at the same time, critical of the Versailles Treaty, which he believed unjustly assigned "war guilt" to Germany when it came to the war, as Weber believed that many countries were guilty of starting it, not just Germany. In making this case, Weber argued:

• In the case of this war there is one, and only one power that desired it under all circumstances through its own will and, according to their political goals required: Russia. ... It never crossed [my] mind that a German invasion of Belgium [in 1914] was nothing but an innocent act on the part of the Germans.

Later that same month, in January 1919, after Weber and his party were defeated for election, Weber delivered one of his greatest academic lectures, "Politics as a Vocation", which reflected on the inherent violence and dishonesty he saw among politicians – a profession in which only recently Weber was so personally active. About the nature of politicians, he concluded that, "in nine out of ten cases they are windbags puffed up with hot air about themselves. They are not in touch with reality, and they do not feel the burden they need to shoulder; they just intoxicate themselves with romantic sensations."

Last years

Weber's grave in Heidelberg

Frustrated with politics, Weber resumed teaching during this time, first at the University of Vienna, then, after 1919, at the University of Munich. His lectures from that period were collected into major works, such as the General Economic History, Science as a Vocation, and Politics as a Vocation. In Munich, he headed the first German university institute of sociology, but never held a professorial position in the discipline. Many colleagues and students in Munich attacked his response to the German Revolution, while some right-wing students held protests in front of his home.

On 14 June 1920, Max Weber contracted the Spanish flu and died of pneumonia in Munich. At the time of his death, Weber had not finished writing his magnum opus on sociological theory: Economy and Society. His widow, Marianne, helped prepare it for its publication in 1921–1922.

Methodology

Sociology, for Max Weber, is "a science which attempts the interpretive understanding of social action in order thereby to arrive at a causal explanation of its course and effects".

Made clear in his methodology, Weber distinguished himself from Durkheim, Marx, and other classical figures, in that (a) his primary focus would be on individuals and culture; and (b) unlike theorists such as Comte and Durkheim, he did not (consciously) attempt to create any specific set of rules governing sociology or the social sciences in general. Whereas Durkheim focused on the society, Weber concentrated on the individual and their actions (i.e. structure and action). Compared to Marx, who argued for the primacy of the material world over the world of ideas, Weber valued ideas as motivating actions of individuals, at least in the big picture.

Verstehen

Weber would primarily be concerned with the question of objectivity and subjectivity, going on to distinguish social action from social behavior, noting that social action must be understood through how individuals subjectively relate to one another. Study of social action through interpretive means or verstehen ("to understand") must be based upon understanding the subjective meaning and purpose that individuals attach to their actions. Social actions may have easily identifiable and objective means, but much more subjective ends and the understanding of those ends by a scientist is subject to yet another layer of subjective understanding (that of the scientist). Weber noted that the importance of subjectivity in social sciences makes creation of fool-proof, universal laws much more difficult than in natural sciences and that the amount of objective knowledge that social sciences may achieve is precariously limited.

Overall, Weber supported the goal of objective science as one definitely worth striving for, though he noted that it is ultimately an unreachable goal:

• There is no absolutely "objective" scientific analysis of culture. ... All knowledge of cultural reality ... is always knowledge from particular points of view. ... An "objective" analysis of cultural events, which proceeds according to the thesis that the ideal of science is the reduction of empirical reality to "laws", is meaningless [because] the knowledge of social laws is not knowledge of social reality but is rather one of the various aids used by our minds for attaining this end.|Max Weber|title="'Objectivity' in Social Science"|source=Sociological Writings (1904)

The principle of methodological individualism, which holds that social scientists should seek to understand collectivities (e.g. nations, cultures, governments, churches, corporations, etc.) solely as the result and the context of the actions of individual persons, can be traced to Weber, particularly to the first chapter of Economy and Society, in which he argues that only individuals "can be treated as agents in a course of subjectively understandable action". In other words, Weber contended that social phenomena can be understood scientifically only to the extent that they are captured by models of the behaviour of purposeful individuals – models that Weber called "ideal types" – from which actual historical events necessarily deviate due to accidental and irrational factors. The analytical constructs of an ideal type never exist in reality, but provide objective benchmarks against which real-life constructs can be measured:

We know of no scientifically ascertainable ideals. To be sure, that makes our efforts more arduous than in the past, since we are expected to create our ideals from within our breast in the very age of subjectivist culture.

— Max Weber, Economy and Society (1909), p. xxxiii