![]() ![]() In 1889 Weber, now twenty-five, completed a doctoral dissertation on the history of trading companies in the Middle Ages, a formidable tome that straddled economic and legal history. He soon abandoned his youthful ways and embarked on a scholar’s path. Her first-born son had been named after his father, an esteemed deputy in the National Liberal Party, and he was expected to conduct himself with restraint. ![]() But for his mother, Max’s transformation was evidently too much. ![]() ![]() In German fraternities until the end of the nineteenth century, fencing remained a venerable tradition, a rite of manhood in which the contestants competed for ribbons that they wore on their ceremonial gowns while they sang patriotic songs and downed buckets of beer. Worst of all, he bore a dueling scar on his cheek. Gone was the lanky eighteen-year-old whose sagging shoulders made him, in the words of his future wife Marianne, a “candidate for consumption.” Thanks to nights of drinking with his fraternity, Max had gained considerable weight, and he had also run up a serious debt, compelling him to trouble his father with frequent entreaties for money. When the young Max Weber returned home in 1883 after his third semester as a law student at the University of Heidelberg, his mother slapped him. ![]()
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