Maximilian Karl Emil Weber (21 April 1864 – 14 June 1920) was a German sociologist, historian, jurist, and political economist. He is being recognized as one of the fathers of sociology, along with Auguste Comte and Émile Durkheim. Weber is best known for his thesis combining economic sociology and the sociology of religion, emphasising the importance of cultural influences embedded in religion as a means for understanding the genesis of capitalism (in contrast to Marx's historical materialism). Weber would elaborate his theory in his seminal work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905), where he attributed ascetic Protestantism as one of the major "elective affinities" involved in the rise of market-driven capitalism and the rational-legal nation-state in the Western world. Less