Author's best-known and most controversial study relates the rise of a capitalist economy to the Puritan belief that hard work and good deeds were outward signs of faith and salvation.
Max Weber's celebrated thesis, which explores the relationship between Protestant work ethic and the emergence of capitalist enterprise, is presented here inclusive of his lengthy notes. In coining the phrase 'Protestant work ethic', Weber demonstrates a series of parallels between certain Protestant denominations and the modern business. The veneration of hard work, discipline, and carefulness with money birthed a culture that led over generations to the establishment of capitalism; with enough workers sharing in these beliefs, entrepreneurs were able to create large businesses that could consistently deliver a profit. Using examples such as Martin Luther and Calvinist doctrines, Weber demonstrates how ideas of the virtues of diligence were placed parallel with God and morality. By working hard, every man was contributing to a better world and society, in the name of the Lord. However, Weber asserts that over time the religious connotations behind capitalist enterprise largely disappeared; the famous writings of Benjamin Franklin are cited as example, whereby notions of diligence were expressed eloquently but no longer cited God and holy virtue. Though controversial, Weber's work remains much-consulted by sociologists. The notion that Protestantism contributed to or accelerated the development of capitalism is popular in the modern day.
One of the world’s most celebrated theologians argues for a Protestant anti-work ethicIn his classic The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber famously showed how Christian beliefs and practices could shape persons in line with capitalism. In this significant reimagining of Weber’s work, Kathryn Tanner provocatively reverses this thesis, arguing that Christianity can offer a direct challenge to the largely uncontested growth of capitalism.Exploring the cultural forms typical of the current finance-dominated system of capitalism, Tanner shows how they can be countered by Christian beliefs and practices with a comparable person-shaping capacity. Addressing head-on the issues of economic inequality, structural under- and unemployment, and capitalism’s unstable boom/bust cycles, she draws deeply on the theological resources within Christianity to imagine anew a world of human flourishing. This book promises to be one of the most important theological books in recent years.
The Spirit of Capitalism answers a fundamental question of economics, a question neither economists nor economic historians have been able to answer: what are the reasons (rather than just the conditions) for sustained economic growth? Taking her title from Max Weber's famous study on the same subject, Liah Greenfeld focuses on the problem of motivation behind the epochal change in behavior, which from the sixteenth century on has reoriented one economy after another from subsistence to profit, transforming the nature of economic activity. A detailed analysis of the development of economic consciousness in England, the Netherlands, France, Germany, Japan, and the United States allows her to argue that the motivation, or spirit, behind the modern, growth-oriented economy was not the liberation of the rational economic actor, but rather nationalism. Nationalism committed masses of people to an endless race for national prestige and thus brought into being the phenomenon of economic competitiveness. Nowhere has economic activity been further removed from the rational calculation of costs than in the United States, where the economy has come to be perceived as the end-all of political life and the determinant of all social progress. American economic civilization spurs the nation on to ever-greater economic achievement. But it turns Americans into workaholics, unsure of the purpose of their pursuits, and leads American statesmen to exaggerate the weight of economic concerns in foreign policy, often to the detriment of American political influence and the confusion of the rest of the world.
The German sociologist Max Weber is considered to be one of the founding fathers of sociology, and ranks among the most influential writers of the 20th-century. His most famous book, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, is a masterpiece of sociological analysis whose power is based on the construction of a rigorous, and intricately interlinked, piece of argumentation. Weber’s object was to examine the relationship between the development of capitalism and the different religious ideologies of Europe. While many other scholars focused on the material and instrumental causes of capitalism’s emergence, Weber sought to demonstrate that different religious beliefs in fact played a significant role. In order to do this, he employed his analytical skills to understand the relationship between capitalism and religious ideology, carefully considering how far Protestant and secular capitalist ethics overlapped, and to what extent they mirrored each other. One crucial element of Weber’s work was his consideration the degree to which cultural values acted as implicit or hidden reasons reinforcing capitalist ethics and behavior – an investigation that he based on teasing out the ‘arguments’ that underpin capitalism. Incisive and insightful, Weber’s analysis continues to resonate with scholars today.
A diverse set of texts from Foucault, Weber, Derrida and others are examined in this reconceptualization of the way ethnicity functions in capitalist society.
Elizabeth A. Kaye specializes in communications as part of her coaching and consulting practice. She has edited Requirements for Certification since the 2000-01 edition.
For the first time in 70 years, a new translation of Max Weber's classic The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism --one of the seminal works in sociology-- published in September 2001. Translator Stephen Kalberg is an internationally acclaimed Weberian scholar, and in this new translation he offers a precise and nuanced rendering that captures both Weber's style and the unusual subtlety of his descriptions and causal arguments. Weber's original italicization, highlighting major themes, has been restored, and Kalberg has standardized Weber's terminology to better facilitate understanding of the various twists and turns in his complex lines of reasoning. Weber's compelling work remains influential for these reasons: it explores the continuing debate regarding the origins and legacy of modem capitalism in the West; it helps the reader understand today's global economic development; and it plumbs the deep cultural forces that affect contemporary work life and the workplace in the United States and Europe. This new edition/translation also includes a glossary; Weber's 1906 essay, "The Protestant Sects and the Spirit of Capitalism"; and Weber's masterful prefatory remarks to his Collected Essays in the Sociology of Religion, in which he defines the uniqueness of Western societies and asks what "ideas and interests" combined to create modem Western rationalism
Why did modern capitalism not arise in late imperial China? One famous answer comes from Max Weber, whose The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism gave a canonical analysis of religious and cultural factors in early modern European economic development. In The Religions of China, Weber contended that China lacked the crucial religious impetus to capitalist growth that Protestantism gave Europe. The preeminent historian Ying-shih Yü offers a magisterial examination of religious and cultural influences in the development of China’s early modern economy, both complement and counterpoint to Weber’s inquiry. The Religious Ethic and Mercantile Spirit in Early Modern China investigates how evolving forms of Buddhism, Confucianism, and Daoism created and promulgated their own concepts of the work ethic from the late seventh century into the Qing dynasty. The book traces how religious leaders developed the spiritual significance of labor and how merchants adopted this religious work ethic, raising their status in Chinese society. However, Yü argues, China’s early modern mercantile spirit was restricted by the imperial bureaucratic priority on social order. He challenges Marxists who championed China’s “sprouts of capitalism” during the fifteenth through eighteenth centuries as well as other modern scholars who credit Confucianism with producing dramatic economic growth in East Asian countries. Yü rejects the premise that China needed an early capitalist stage of development; moreover, the East Asian capitalism that flourished in the later half of the twentieth century was essentially part of the spread of global capitalism. Now available in English translation, this landmark work has been greatly influential among scholars in East Asia since its publication in Chinese in 1987.