Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- Acknowledgements
- Note on citations
- Introduction
- 1 From the inaugural lecture to the Protestant Ethic: political education and German futures
- 2 From the Protestant Ethic to the vocation lectures: Beruf, rationality and emotion
- 3 Passions and profits: the emotional origins of capitalism in seventeenth-century England
- 4 Protestant virtues and deferred gratification: Max Weber and Adam Smith on the spirit of capitalism
- 5 Ideal-type, institutional and evolutionary analyses of the origins of capitalism: Max Weber and Thorstein Veblen
- 6 The Jewish question: religious doctrine and sociological method
- Conclusion
- References
- Index
Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- Acknowledgements
- Note on citations
- Introduction
- 1 From the inaugural lecture to the Protestant Ethic: political education and German futures
- 2 From the Protestant Ethic to the vocation lectures: Beruf, rationality and emotion
- 3 Passions and profits: the emotional origins of capitalism in seventeenth-century England
- 4 Protestant virtues and deferred gratification: Max Weber and Adam Smith on the spirit of capitalism
- 5 Ideal-type, institutional and evolutionary analyses of the origins of capitalism: Max Weber and Thorstein Veblen
- 6 The Jewish question: religious doctrine and sociological method
- Conclusion
- References
- Index
Summary
Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism is a remarkable essay that has had an even more remarkable history. It was first published in 1905 as two articles in the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, a journal in which Weber had an editorial interest. This structure, consisting of two parts, was preserved in a later and amended, or revised, version that Weber prepared in 1919 and which was published in a posthumous collection of his papers on the sociology of religion, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie, in 1920. The first part of the Protestant Ethic consists of three chapters which respectively indicate a contemporary correlation between Protestant religious affiliation and capitalistic involvement, that describes the capitalist spirit as the motive of money-making for its own sake through rational means, and which shows that this spirit was an unintended consequence of the Protestant Reformation and especially the Calvinist form of the notion of calling. The second part has two chapters; one of which focuses on the psychological sanctions of religious belief that influences and directs practical conduct, while the other documents the impact of religious teaching in the seventeenth century on social and economic affairs. Weber is clear that these chapters do not add up to an account of the origins of modern capitalism.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Weber, Passion and Profits'The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism' in Context, pp. 1 - 14Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2008