Max Weber professeur, Max Weber voyageur

The thousands of letters written by Max Weber between 1895 and 1920, now published in the Max Weber-Gesamtausgabe, throw new light on many sides of his private life and his public activities. One of the less well studied aspects of his life are his numerous long trips to European countries before the outbreak of the First World War. Many of Weber’s letters from Scotland, England, Ireland, France, Spain, Holland, Belgium (but less those from Italy) have as much sociological and anthropological interest as the letters from his trip to America, which have been studied recently by Lawrence A. Scaff. Another aspect of Weber’s personality tackled with in this article are his activities as a teacher and as director of the seminar of economics at the universities of Freiburg im Breisgau and Heidelberg from 1894 to 1903, when he resigns definitively from university after having spent since several years, for medical reasons, more time in Italy and elsewhere than in Heidelberg. Weber’s way back to university at the end of the war, at Vienna in summer 1918 and at Munich in 1919/20, could have opened a new period in the history of German social sciences, but unfortunately he died shortly after having started his lessons on the sociology of the state.