Customer Reviews

Max Weber: Selections in Translation

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I keep looking for ideas that could be applied in politics. Max Weber had an emphasis on religion in The Soteriology of the Underprivileged, first published in 1922 and included in these selections just before the chapter on The Religions of Asia. An Indian Vishnuite sect that is primarily poor people who worship a hereditary guru, is stuck up enough to exclude outsiders, probably because the limited amount of salvation can't be bought up by somebody no one knows, like all our old hangouts in America. The American dream has brought millions of people to America with high hopes for something like Max Weber considering that sect, which "took very seriously the dissolution of the caste taboo (which in theory is part of many salvation religions) and established at any rate limited commensality among its members, extending to private life as well as cultic contexts, as a consequence of which it has become primarily a sect of poor people. In this sect, the anthropolatrous veneration of the hereditary guru is promoted to the fullest extent, even to the point of excluding outsiders from the cult." (p. 179).