In 1890, a young German academic agreed to evaluate a survey of landowners in the German provinces east of the Elbe River. Overcoming the limitations of biased and unsophisticated data, he brilliantly analyzed the impact of emerging market forces on the decaying structures of Prussian Junker society.
The scholar was Max Weber. Within a year, this polymath would publish a major legal work on the agrarian history of ancient Rome.
Both works would subtly influence Weber's most famous work, "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism." That masterpiece, together with his monumental "Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft" (Economy and Society), would crown Weber's career as a thinker and underwrite his claim to be the greatest social scientist the world has ever seen.