THE PROTESTANT ETHIC AND THE SPIRIT OF CAPITALISM

ABOUT AUTHOR

       MAX WEBER

The sociology of Karl Emile Maximilian (Max) Weber (April 21, 1864 June 14, 1920) may be regarded as an antithesis to Auguste Comte’s positivism and Emile Durkheim’s empiricism, as he sought to develop sociology into a discipline that studies social actions through the meanings and purposes which individuals attach to their own actions. To Max Weber, sociology is ‘a science which attempts the interpretive understanding of social action in order thereby to arrive at a causal explanation of its course and effects.’ This was quite akin to the neo-Kantian call to put an end to objectivity in science, a call which Weber imbibed from Heinrich Rickert, his colleague at the University of Freiburg.

Weber’s sociology is often described as a ‘dialogue with the ghost of Karl Marx,’ and the present work may be treated as an example. Here, what Weber has done is to put on its head, so to say, the relationship which Marx saw between capitalism and Protestantism in the first volume of Capital, his magnum opus. Weber’s insurmountable distance from Marx is also evident from his treatment of class, status and power as disjointed phenomena, Durkheim and Marx. which was at total variance with the holistic approaches of Comte,

Protestant Ethic is in effect an early part of Weber’s project to study the sociology of religion where he is concerned with the role of cultural influences (by and large reduced to religious influences) in the development of the concerned societies like China, India and Japan.