by Max Weber
104. Though traces of it are to be found everywhere in his work, for instance, in his study of the Protestant sects as a mode of business sociation. While Weber never carried out the research project sketched in the 1905 version of The Protestant Ethic, neither did he delete the sketch from the text of 1920. He did, however, modify its wording; more on this below.
105. The date is given by Wolfgang Schluchter in his reconstruction of the trajectory of Weber’s sociology of religion. See Rationalism, Religion, and Domination, pp. 411–32, at p. 414; also pp. 425, 430.
106. For a critique of Weber’s position, see, inter alia, Jack Goody, The East in the West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), especially pp. 11–81.
107. We have used Solomon’s translation of this passage (in Schluchter, Rationalism, Religion, and Domination, p. 414) in preference to Harry Zohn’s, which, accidentally, substitutes “Eastern rationalism” for “Occidental rationalism,” thus garbling the meaning of this sentence. Compare Marianne Weber, Biography, p. 333, with Lebensbild, p. 381.
108. And even in the 1920 revision for the Collected Essays in the Sociology of Religion, volume 1, Weber was careful in the contents page to indicate the distinct status, and limited purview, of his studies of Protestantism; accordingly, they are not included under the rubric of “The Economic Ethic of the World Religions”—the series of studies of Confucianism, Taoism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and ancient Judaism that Weber had composed from 1913 onward. On this, see Schluchter, Rationalism, Religion, and Domination, pp. 429–30.
As Weber conceptualized matters in 1920, The Protestant Ethic sought to demonstrate “the extent to which the emergence of an ‘economic disposition,’ the ‘ethos’ of an economic form, was determined (bedingt) by certain religious beliefs” (“Prefatory Remarks,” p. 366, below). Here, then, Weber was interested in the impact of a religious faith—or, more specifically, of the practical impulses toward certain kinds of economic action that a particular religious faith psychologically induced—on the modern, bourgeois capitalist mentality (and life conduct). In contrast, the studies of “The Economic Ethic of the World Religions” had a more ambitious goal: to examine both sides of the causal relationship between religious beliefs, on the one hand, and economic disposition and structure, on the other. In these studies, Weber examines the relationships among world religions, the social strata that were their characteristic bearers, and the kind of attitudes toward economic conduct the latter display. Second, he investigates not only the economic ethics of religion but also the economic ethics of the larger societies in which religious faiths are practiced. The economic ethic of a society embraces attitudes to such things as work, wealth, charity, and economic innovation; from this perspective, religion is one determinant of the society’s economic ethic (others include political and geographic factors and, not least, economic ones). On the distinction between the economic ethic of a religion and of a society, see Richard Swedberg’s discussion in Max Weber and the Idea of Economic Sociology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), pp. 132–45.
109. See Wilhelm Hennis, “The Spiritualist Foundation of Max Weber’s ‘Interpretive Sociology’: Ernst Troeltsch, Max Weber and William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience,” History of the Human Sciences 11:2 (1998), pp. 83–106, at p. 106, note 73.
110. For a superb discussion of Weber’s conception of social economics, to which we are indebted, see Swedberg, Max Weber and the Idea of Economic Sociology, especially pp. 173–206.
111. Max Weber, “‘Objectivity’ in Social Science and Social Policy,” in Weber, The Methodology of the Social Sciences (New York: Free Press, 1949), translated and edited by Edward A. Shils and Henry A. Finch, pp. 49–112; “Die ‘Objektivität’ sozialwissenschaftlicher und sozial-politischer Erkenntnis,” Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik 19:1 (1904), pp. 22–87.
112. For Weber, the purview of social economics concerns those phenomena the basic element of which “is constituted by the fact that our physical existence and the satisfaction of our most ideal needs are everywhere confronted with the quantitative limits and the qualitative inadequacy of the necessary external means, so that their satisfaction requires planful provision and work, struggle with nature and the association of human beings,” “‘Objectivity’ in social science,” pp. 63–64. Or, as Weber explained to students attending his course in economics at the University of Heidelberg (1897–98), “The standpoint of man is decisive. Economics is not a science of nature and its properties, but rather of man and his needs,” quoted in Keith Tribe, “His-torical Economics, the Methodenstreit, and the Economics of Max Weber,” in Tribe’s Strategies of Economic Order: German Economic Discourse, 1750–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 66–94, at p. 92.
113. “‘Objectivity’ in social science,” p. 64.
114. In the second of his replies to Fischer, Weber reiterates the point that his concern was with the “economically relevant components of the modern style of life,” see below, p. 234. Note, however, that Weber refers to himself in this essay as a historian and as economist (“we Nationalökonomen”), p. 236. And in the second of the Rachfahl rebuttals, he reemphasizes his interest in “religious psychology.” This serves to remind us that Weber’s scholarly identity was always mercurial and multifaceted.
115. This is also Swedberg’s conclusion in Max Weber and the Idea of Economic Sociology, pp. 119, 192.
When Weber revised The Protestant Ethic in 1919, he substituted a reference to a “social-economic ethic” with the expression “social-political ethic.” Although this seems to lend support to our argument, it probably does not. Weber may have simply thought that “social political” described more accurately the examples he actually provided in both versions (the conventicle and the state). Compare “Die protestantische Ethik und der ‘Geist’ des Kapitalismus,” in the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik 21 (1905), p. 109, with Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie, vol. 1, p. 205.
116. See Swedberg, Max Weber and the Idea of Economic Sociology, p. 200.
117. See here.
118. One of his most famous “new” illustrations—Weber’s enlistment of William Petty to support his argument—was actually first cited in his polemics with Felix Rachfahl; see this volume, here, here.
119. To a large degree, this linguistic refinement was already evident in the replies to Rachfahl, where Weber writes of “rising middle classes” (bürgerlicher aufsteigender Mittelstände) and the “capitalist middle classes” (bürgerlich-kapitalistischen Mittelklassen).
In the first of the Rachfahl Antikritiken (notes 32 and 34), Weber says that confusion about the focus of his essay might have been minimized if he had indicated, particularly in the title of The Protestant Ethic, that he was concerned with the “spirit” of modern capitalism. The reason he failed to adopt that nomenclature, Weber continues, was because he considered “capitalism” to be a concept that was only applicable to modern times. “Modern capitalism” was thus a redundant expression. Later, however, he had changed his mind and now granted that “capitalism” could take many historical forms. That being the case, it was all the more necessary to insist that it was modern capitalism that was his primary concern. See here.
120. We are citing Lichtblau and Weiβ, pp. xv–xvi, almost verbatim.
121. See Max Weber, “The Social Psychology of the World Religions,” (1915) in Gerth and Mills, pp. 267–301, especially the repetition of the word “need” on pp. 270–71, 275. This essay is the “Introduction” (Einleitung) to Weber’s series of studies on the economic ethic of the world religions (Religionssoziologie, vol. 1, pp. 237–75). The English title is a plausible invention of Gerth and Mills.
122. Max Weber, “Max Weber on Church, Sect, and Mysticism,” pp. 148–49.
123. Weber, “Social Psychology,” p. 277.
124. Weber, “Social Psychology,” p. 278.
125. Weber, “Social Psychology,” p. 270; compare p. 28
7. Also, Economy and Society, p. 1197. Or, as Weber put it in the second rejoinder to Rachfahl, “Out of their own religious life, out of their religiously determined family tradition, out of the religiously influenced style of life of their environment, there grew within people [imbued by ascetic Protestantism] a disposition (Habitus) that suited them in a quite specific way to meet the specific demands of early modern capitalism,” p. 312.
126. Parsons translated this term as “sanction.”
127. Religionssoziologie, vol. 1, p. 40 (continuation of footnote 1). In Economy and Society, p. 56 (Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, p. 40) and in “The Protestant Sects and the Spirit of Capitalism,” in Gerth and Mills, pp. 302–22, at p. 321 (Religionssoziologie, vol. 1, pp. 207–36, at pp. 234–35), Weber appears to define faith, sociologically, as an orientation toward Heilsgüter (that is, goods of salvation or religious benefits).
128. Weber’s second rebuttal of Rachfahl, p. 302, below.
129. Weber, “The Protestant Sects,” p. 321.
130. This volume, note 146, see here. Weber expressed a similar indebtedness to Jellinek in a memorial tribute he paid to his deceased friend in 1911: see Marianne Weber, Biography, p. 472, and the remarks of Roth in the “Introduction” to Lehmann and Roth, pp. 20–24.
131. Translated by Max Farrand as The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizens: A Contribution to Modern Constitutional History (New York: Henry Holt, 1901).
132. Jellinek, Declaration, p. 77. (Roger Williams and a small band of compatriots founded Providence, Rhode Island, in 1636. Williams “preached complete separation of Church and State, and demanded absolute religious liberty, not only for all Christians but also for Jews, Turks, and heathen,” Declaration, p. 65). Weber may well have found congenial Jellinek’s contention that although the religious origins of human rights are ancient, their first “practical” application came in the seventeenth century (Declaration, p. 62).
133. All Jellinek will concede is that Rousseau’s essay exercised “a certain influence upon the style of some clauses of the Declaration,” Declaration, p. 12. A critique of Jellinek’s thesis, and a reconstruction of the extraordinarily complex processes that created the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, can be found in Keith Baker’s “The Idea of a Declaration of Rights,” [1994], in Gary Kates (ed.), The French Revolution: Recent Debates and New Controversies (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), pp. 91–140. Baker argues, contra Jellinek, that Rousseau’s political language had a major impact on the Declaration. Compare with Marcel Gauchet, “Rights of Man,” in François Furet and Mona Ozouf (eds.), A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1989), translated by Arthur Goldhammer, pp. 818–28.
134. Jellinek makes a similar point in Declaration, p. 80.
135. Economy and Society (1910–14), pp. 1209–10. Compare Weber, “The Protestant Sects,” p. 321: “The ascetic conventicles and sects formed one of the most important historical foundations of modern ‘individualism.’ Their radical break away from patriarchal and authoritarian bondage, as well as their way of interpreting the statement that one owes more obedience to God than to man, was especially important.”
136. This desideratum is not aided by Marianne Weber’s biography that, however admirable in other respects, is often anachronistic. For our purposes it suffices to note her depiction of The Protestant Ethic (1905) as “Weber’s first study on the sociology of religion,” Biography, p. 335. As Scaff remarks: “Writing in the shadow of the Versailles Treaty, after the bitter disappointments of a fratricidal war, and in the aftermath of the break-up of the international women’s movement, Marianne framed her memory and rewrote history in line with the moment of national collapse and the perceived need for liberal heroes and founders of Weimar. But the gain in national mythmaking was at the expense of an important intellectual record and a social and political experience,” Lawrence A. Scaff, “The ‘cool objectivity of sociation,’” p. 62.
137. David Beetham, “Mosca, Pareto and Weber: A Historical Comparison,” in Mommsen and Osterhammel, pp. 139–58, at p. 146.
138. To employ Gordon Marshall’s terminology, we find a “genealogical” approach to Weber’s work much more plausible than a “teleological” one that ignores chronology and “ruthlessly systematize[s]” Weber’s intellectual development. See Marshall, In Search of the Spirit, pp. 21, 157–64.
SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
The expository and critical literature on The Protestant Ethic is vast, prompting at least one call (in vain!) for a moratorium. The suggestions below mostly embrace texts that deal with the thesis in the round, as opposed to those that focus on one particular aspect of it. With a few exceptions, they are all available in English or English translation. More bibliographical information can be found in the endnotes of the Introduction. At the time this manuscript goes to press, the German critical edition (the Max Weber Gesamtausgabe) of The Protestant Ethic essays, edited by Hartmut Lehmann, is not available. For information on its eagerly awaited publication, readers are advised to consult the regularly updated publisher’s Web site: http://www.mohr.de/mw/mwg.htm.
A) MAX WEBER’S PRINCIPAL WRITINGS ON PROTESTANTISM AND THE SPIRIT OF CAPITALISM AVAILABLE IN ENGLISH
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (London: Unwin University Books, 1930), translated by Talcott Parsons, with a foreword by R. H. Tawney. Parsons translated the 1920 version of the essay. Stephen Kalberg has also translated this version, which is available from Roxbury Press (Los Angeles, 2001).
“The Protestant Sects and the Spirit of Capitalism,” in H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, eds. and transls., From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (London: Routledge, 1970), pp. 302–22.
“Max Weber on Church, Sect, and Mysticism,” Sociological Analysis 34:2 (summer 1973) translated by Jerome L. Gittleman, pp. 140–49.
General Economic History (New York: Collier Books, 1961), translated by Frank H. Knight. This book, composed of students’ notes from a course on “Outlines of Universal Social and Economic History” that Weber delivered at the University of Munich in 1919–20, is invaluable. Weber analyzes Protestantism and the spirit it helped shape in the context of a far-reaching economic, political, and legal examination of the origins of modern capitalism.
Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, edited by Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978; various translators), especially pp. 611–23 (on Judaism and Puritanism), and pp. 1196–1211 (on the Reformation’s impact on economic life, Judaism and capitalism, and church, sect, and democracy).
The Religion of China: Confucianism and Taoism (New York: Free Press, 1951), translated and edited by Hans H. Gerth, with an introduction by C. K. Yang, pp. 226–49 (an influential contrast between Confucianism and Puritanism).
A) GERMAN EDITIONS OF WEBER’S PROTESTANT ETHIC
Klaus Lichtblau and Johannes Weiβ (eds.), Die protestantische Ethik und der ‘Geist’ des Kapitalismus (Bodenheim: Athenäum Hain Hanstein, 1993). This volume republishes the 1905 version of the essay and, together with a helpful Introduction by the editors, also contains a concordance of the changes Weber made to its 1920 counterpart.
Johannes Winckelmann, Die protestantische Ethik I: Eine Aufsatzsammlung. Herausgegeben von Johannes Winckelmann (Gütersloh: Verlagshaus Mohn, 1984). (This contains the 1920 version of the essay, together with some other of Weber’s Protestant ethic related pieces.) Die protestantische Ethik II: Kritiken und Antikritiken. Herausgegeben von Johannes Winckelmann (Gütersloh: Verlagshaus Mohn, 1982). (This volume contains the Fischer and Rachfahl critiques, Weber’s rebuttals, and pertinent essays by Ernst Troeltsch, Ephraim Fischoff, and Reinhard Bendix.)
For more bibliographical information on German editions, see footnotes 1 and 2 of the Introduction.
B) SECONDARY LITERATURE
Marianne Weber, Max Weber: A Biography (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1988), tran
slated by Harry Zohn, with an Introduction by Guenther Roth. Marianne Weber discusses the background to The Protestant Ethic, its main arguments, and the Webers’ American trip on pp. 279–304, 325–42.
Gordon Marshall, In Search of the Spirit of Capitalism: An Essay on Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic Thesis (London: Hutchinson, 1982). A comprehensive analysis of Weber’s thesis and its critics.
Gianfranco Poggi, Calvinism and the Capitalist Spirit: Max Weber’s “Protestant Ethic” (London: Macmillan, 1983). Like Marshall’s book, Poggi’s is lucid, sympathetic but critical.
Two books that helpfully put The Protestant Ethic in the wider context of Weber’s sociology of religion as a whole are:
Wolfgang Schluchter, Rationalism, Religion, and Domination: A Weberian Perspective (Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press, 1989), translated by Neil Solomon.
Reinhard Bendix, Max Weber: An Intellectual Portrait (London: Methuen, 1966).
Sophisticated attempts to refute Weber’s thesis can be found in:
Richard F. Hamilton, The Social Misconstruction of Reality: Validity and Verification in the Scholarly Community (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996), chap. 3; and Luciano Pellicani, The Genesis of Capitalism and the Origins of Modernity (New York: Telos Press, 1994), translated by James G. Colbert, chap. 2. Also noteworthy is the reanalysis by George Becker of the statistical data Weber used to support his argument. See Becker’s “Replication and Reanalysis of Offenbacher’s School Enrollment Study: Implications for the Weber and Merton Thesis,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 36 (4) 1997, pp. 483–96.
Three useful anthologies of writings devoted to the Weber “thesis” are:
