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27 of 27 people found the following review helpful.
Max Weber, Getting to Know Him
By Enrique Lerdau
This classic is more referred to than read by economists in Anglo-Saxon countries where Weber is considered mainly a sociologist. When I went to Graduate School (Wisconsin) it was not even mentioned. A pity, because it is a milestone in the search for explanations of historical events, in this case the extraordinary disseminate of capitalism in Protestant countries. One
may not buy Weber's thesis in share or in toto, but it is so cautiously argued that dissent has to be very nuanced and scholarly to be persuasive. (An example of such originative dissent is Tawney's "Religion and the Rise of Capitalism").
This Edition holds a reasonably good translation; it is main weakness is the arrangement of notes (Editor's and Weber's) at the end of each chapter. Hard to find because tops of pages don't comprise chapter titles. And the notes are an necessary percentage of the whole.
The book also holds various of Weber's rebuttals to a good deal of citicisms that he received. Since these critiques are not reprinted here, the rebuttals are not to the full or entire extent self-explanatory. Moreover, this section is not inspiring for another reason: the tone of academic petulance diminishes the effigy of a great scholar.
17 of 18 humans found the following review helpful.
still a classic
By Christian Wetzel
Weber's "Protestant Ethic" has here been published along with the author's responses to respective reviews; and this is a good idea as it may be helpful in dispelling the incorrect conceptions that arose from the "Weber thesis" and are still rampant. Weber primarily had to deal with interpretations of his work that took him to say that innovative capitalism had it is cause in the complex mental states and working habits of sure minority groups, to wit the "Protestants" or "Puritans" of the early innovative era. So it was Weber's crucial intent in his "counter-reviews" to point out that he had made no such assert at all; in fact, he assumed that modern capitalism had it is origin in respective social, political und scientific developments of the West wholly independent of Protestantism. In particular, he tried to refute two mutual prejudices: that progressed capitalism arose from greed and avarice, or alternatively, from industriousness. The Chinese, as far as we may tell, allround history had been as industrious and hard-working as any people in the West, but failed to invent modern capitalism.
What Weber's thesis was all regarding was a alter of outlook of sure groups of humans at the beginning of the innovative era. He noted, that-largely as a result of religious beliefs and attitudes-some humans rejected the age-old and still prevalent idealisti of the "universal man" of sound erudition and refined taste, the "gentleman" idealisti of the Renaissance, in favor of a altogether dissimilar life goal, that of the "professional man". This reduction of all humane interests to success in one's vocation, has-far from being the "cause" of innovative capitalism-simply proved to be the optimal adaptation to the ecological niche invented by it.
While the upside of this development, in Weber's reckoning of things, was the emergence of the innovative "rationalistic" outlook in all areas of life and thought, the downside was a indepth "disenchantment" of the world. Despite it enormous success in transforming the world and making it genuinely "humane", the humane side of the ledger was not so upbeat. The more successful modern capitalism was, the more it developed a breed of people dissimilar from anything the world has seen before: "experts without wisdom, hedonists without a heart", as Weber contemptuously remarked, was the final outcome of the "Protestant ethic". (It is now upon us to prove him faulty on that charge.)
29 of 36 persons found the following review helpful.
One of sociology's definitive texts.
By Augustus Caesar, Ph.D.
Max Weber (1864-1920) is normally considered (with Emile Durkheim) one of the founding fathers of progressed sociology. Weber's interests in economics, law, bureaucracy, and religion led to a heap of of the most scintillating writing ever produced in the social sciences, and his strenuous originality of thought, dense but lucid prose, and formidable analytical gifts invested his writings with lasting significance. For a good place to get started in exploring the works of this great scholar, "The Protestant Ethic and the 'Spirit' of Capitalism" would do nicely.
This is one of the definitive texts in the history of sociology, and it is power and resonance may be seen in the fact that it remains in print almost a hundred years after it basi appeared. In it, Weber traces the history and philosophical parts of what he calls the "spirit of capitalism," which is the worldview, arising in the first place out of the Calvinist conception of "predestination," of the feeling of satisfaction of a worldly occupation (or "calling") as the suitable task of pious men who were understandably worried with regards to their fate in the afterlife.
Because Calvinism and later forms of protestant religious exercise placed an special importance and significance on overcoming the anxiety induced by predestination, the coordinated distraction of immersion in a worldly occupation evolved into a view of rightful financial toil and accumulation of capital as an ethical end in itself. With the eventual stripping away of the spiritual elements of this idealism, we were left with the tradition of the following of a calling and the moral "goodness" of this worldly profession, the moral goodness, in other words, of economic participation and productivity.
Weber's brilliant and tightly argued thesis I find persuasive, altho it has never ceased to be controversial. We may see reflections of his ideas, however, in the modern tendency of "conservative" Christians to be radically anti-government and anti-regulation when it comes to business. The idea of poverty as a gift from God to motivate the lazy, which numerous of the Christians described by Weber used to warrant their own obsessive accumulation of wealth and refusal to redistribute it, is likewise apparent in the social Darwinist tendencies of contemporary American Christians. The fact that this approach to worldly life is diametrically opposed to Jesus' example and his teachings in, for example, the Sermon on the Mount, does not at all trouble these people, a good deal of of whom are with regards to as likely to genuinely read the Bible as they are to vote Democrat. Like the Calvinists and Puritans in Weber's analysis, their self-satisfaction surpasses any pangs they might receive from their inconvenient consciences.
"The Protestant Ethic and the 'Spirit' of Capitalism" is many times held up as a stinging refutation of the Marxist conception of historical materialism. In short, Weber proposes culture and society as the rudimentary influence on historical and economic change, whereas Marx kept that economics alone was the base which dictated to the superstructure. To me, both ideas are compelling, and a full understanding of the significances they integrate may only come from reading both and resolving for yourself.
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