Summary

Fischer maintains that Weber's ‘temperamental’ response has missed the crux of the issue. He denies assuming either that Weber sought to explain presently existing connections between religious confession and socio-economic position or that what Weber sought to ‘derive’ from religious motives were the material– economic forms and structures of capitalist enterprise. Weber, he complains, has ascribed to him the most unfavourable position: he fully understood that what Weber sought to ‘derive’ from Protestant asceticism was the ‘spirit of methodical conduct of life’ and that Weber only wished to consider those cases where religious influences on material culture were truly indisputable.

However, Fischer still declares himself unhappy with Weber's method, insisting that however much Weber may deny substituting a ‘one-sidedly intellectualist’ interpretation of historical causation for a ‘one-sidedly materialist’ one, he does not actually live up to this claim. Fischer's central contention is that we can speak of ‘the’, or at least ‘a’, spirit of methodical conduct of life long before the rise of Puritanism. The question at issue for him is not whether Puritan attitudes influenced and reinforced the spirit of methodical conduct of life once it had arisen, but what caused it to arise in the first place:

He then reiterates that Lutheranism's emphasis on duty in a calling as the highest moral activity and Calvinism's perception of successful labour as a sign of election can only have resulted from adaptation to prevalent economic circumstances. Weber's discussion of theological devotional literature, on the other hand, shows at most that the authors of these texts allowed economic beliefs to become woven into their dogmatic systems. In Fischer's view, Weber shows that both factors, the religious and economic, were present simultaneously and closely bound up with each other, but nothing more than this.