Weber - Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

Max Weber is the one undisputed canonical figure in contemporary sociology.

The Times Higher Education Supplement

Weber's essay is certainly one of the most fruitful examinations of the relations between religion and social theory which has appeared, and I desire to acknowledge my indebtedness to it.

R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism

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Max

The Protestant Ethic and
the Spirit of Capitalism

Translated by Talcott Parsons

With an introduction by Anthony Giddens

First published 1930 by Allen and Unwin
First published by Routledge 1992

First published in Routledge Classics 2001
by Routledge
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1930 Max Weber

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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Weber, Max, 18641920.

[Protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus. English]

The Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism/Max Weber; translated by Talcott Parsons; introduction by Anthony Giddens, p. cm. (Routledge classics)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-415-25559-7 ISBN 0-415-25406-X (pbk.)

1. Capitalism Religious aspects Christianity. 2. Sociology, Christian. 3. Christian ethics. 4. Protestant work ethic. I. Title. II. Series.

BR115.C3 W413 2001

306.6 dc21 2001034800

ISBN10: 0-415-25559-7 (hbk)
ISBN10: 0-415-25406-X (pbk)

ISBN13: 978-0-415-25559-2 (hbk)
ISBN13: 978-0-415-25406-9 (pbk)

BY ANTHONY GIDDENS

The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism undoubtedly ranks as one of the most renowned, and controversial, works of modern social science. First published as a two-part article in 19045, in the Archiv fr Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, of which Weber was one of the editors, it immediately provoked a critical debate, in which Weber participated actively, and which, some seventy years later, has still not gone off the boil. This English translation is in fact taken from the revised version of the work, that first appeared in Weber's Gesammelte Aufstze zur Religionssoziologie (Collected Essays on the Sociology of Religion), published in 19201 just after Weber's death, and thus contains comments on the critical literature to which its initial appearance had given rise.

Weber wrote The Protestant Ethic at a pivotal period of his intellectual career, shortly after his recovery from a depressive illness that had incapacitated him from serious academic work for a period of some four years. Prior to his sickness, most of Weber's works, although definitely presaging the themes developed in the later phase of his life, were technical researches in economic history, economics and jurisprudence. They include studies of mediaeval trading law (his doctoral dissertation), the development of Roman land-tenure, and the contemporary socio-economic conditions of rural workers in the eastern part of Germany. These writings took their inspiration in some substantial part from the so-called historical school of economics which, in conscious divergence from British political economy, stressed the need to examine economic life within the context of the historical development of culture as a whole. Weber always remained indebted to this standpoint. But the series of works he began on his return to health, and which preoccupied him for the remainder of his career, concern a range of problems much broader in compass than those covered in the earlier period. The Protestant Ethic was a first fruit of these new endeavours.

An appreciation of what Weber sought to achieve in the book demands at least an elementary grasp of two aspects of the circumstances in which it was produced: the intellectual climate within which he wrote, and the connections between the work itself and the massive programme of study that he set himself in the second phase of his career.

German philosophy, political theory and economics in the nineteenth century were very different from their counterparts in Britain. The dominant position of utilitarianism and classical political economy in the latter country was not reproduced in Germany, where these were held at arm's length by the influence of Idealism and, in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, by the growing impact of Marxism. In Britain, J. S. Mill's System of Logic (1843) unified the natural and social sciences in a framework that fitted comfortably within existing traditions in that country. Mill was Comte's most distinguished British disciple, if sharply critical of some of his excesses. Comte's positivism never found a ready soil in Germany; and Dilthey's sympathetic but critical reception of Mill's version of the moral sciences gave an added impulse to what came to be known as the Geisteswissenschaften (originally coined precisely as a translation of moral sciences). The tradition of the Geisteswissenschaften, or the hermeneutic tradition, stretches back well before Dilthey, and from the middle of the eighteenth century onwards was intertwined with, but also partly set off from, the broader stream of Idealistic philosophy. Those associated with the hermeneutic viewpoint insisted upon the differentiation of the sciences of nature from the study of man. While we can explain natural occurrences in terms of the application of causal laws, human conduct is intrinsically meaningful, and has to be interpreted or understood in a way which has no counterpart in nature. Such an emphasis linked closely with a stress upon the centrality of history in the study of human conduct, in economic action as in other areas, because the cultural values that lend meanings to human life, it was held, are created by specific processes of social development.

Just as he accepted the thesis that history is of focal importance to the social sciences, Weber adopted the idea that the understanding (Verstehen) of meaning is essential to the explication of human action. But he was critical of the notions of intuition, empathy, etc. that were regarded by many others as necessarily tied to the interpretative understanding of conduct. Most important, he rejected the view that recognition of the meaningful character of human conduct entails that causal explanation cannot be undertaken in the social sciences. On the level of abstract method, Weber was not able to work out a satisfactory reconciliation of the diverse threads that he tried to knit together; but his effort at synthesis produced a distinctive style of historical study, combining a sensitivity to diverse cultural meanings with an insistence upon the fundamental causal role of material factors in influencing the course of history.