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25 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Max Weber, Getting to Know Him, July 19, 2005
This review is from: The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism: and Other Writings (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics) (Paperback)
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 spread of capitalism in Protestant countries. One
may not buy Weber's thesis in part or in toto, but it is so carefully argued that dissent has to be very nuanced and scholarly to be persuasive. (An example of such creative dissent is Tawney's "Religion and the Rise of Capitalism").
This Edition contains a fairly good translation; its 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 contain chapter titles. And the notes are an important part of the whole.
The book also contains several of Weber's rebuttals to some citicisms that he received. Since these critiques are not reprinted here, the rebuttals are not fully self-explanatory. Moreover, this section is not inspiring for another reason: the tone of academic petulance diminishes the image of a great scholar.
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15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
still a classic, March 13, 2005
This review is from: The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism: and Other Writings (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics) (Paperback)
Weber's "Protestant Ethic" has here been published along with the author's responses to various reviews; and this is a good idea as it may be helpful in dispelling the misconceptions 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 modern capitalism had its cause in the attitudes and working habits of certain minority groups, to wit the "Protestants" or "Puritans" of the early modern era. So it was Weber's primary aim in his "counter-reviews" to point out that he had made no such claim at all; in fact, he assumed that modern capitalism had its origin in various social, political und scientific developments of the West completely independent of Protestantism. In particular, he tried to refute two common prejudices: that modern capitalism arose from greed and avarice, or alternatively, from industriousness. The Chinese, as far as we can tell, throughout history had been as industrious and hard-working as any people in the West, but failed to develop modern capitalism.
What Weber's thesis was all about was a change of outlook of certain groups of people at the beginning of the modern era. He noted, that-largely as a result of religious beliefs and attitudes-some people rejected the age-old and still prevalent ideal of the "universal man" of sound erudition and refined taste, the "gentleman" ideal of the Renaissance, in favor of a completely different life goal, that of the "professional man". This reduction of all human interests to success in one's vocation, has-far from being the "cause" of modern capitalism-simply proved to be the optimal adaptation to the ecological niche created by it.
While the upside of this development, in Weber's reckoning of things, was the emergence of the modern "rationalistic" outlook in all areas of life and thought, the downside was a thorough "disenchantment" of the world. Despite it enormous success in transforming the world and making it truly "humane", the human side of the ledger was not so upbeat. The more successful modern capitalism was, the more it produced a breed of individuals different 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 wrong on that charge.)
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28 of 35 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
One of sociology's definitive texts., January 7, 2004
This review is from: The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism: and Other Writings (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics) (Paperback)
Max Weber (1864-1920) is usually considered (with Emile Durkheim) one of the founding fathers of modern sociology. Weber's interests in economics, law, bureaucracy, and religion led to some 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 start 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 its power and resonance can be seen in the fact that it remains in print nearly a hundred years after it first appeared. In it, Weber traces the history and philosophical components of what he calls the "spirit of capitalism," which is the worldview, arising originally out of the Calvinist concept of "predestination," of the fulfillment of a worldly occupation (or "calling") as the appropriate task of pious men who were understandably worried about their fate in the afterlife. Because Calvinism and later forms of protestant religious practice placed an emphasis on overcoming the anxiety induced by predestination, the methodical distraction of immersion in a worldly occupation evolved into a view of lawful financial toil and accumulation of capital as an ethical end in itself. With the eventual stripping away of the spiritual components 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, though it has never ceased to be controversial. We can 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 many of the Christians described by Weber used to justify their own obsessive accumulation of wealth and refusal to redistribute it, is also evident 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, many of whom are about as likely to actually read the Bible as they are to vote Democrat. Like the Calvinists and Puritans in Weber's analysis, their self-satisfaction exceeds any pangs they might receive from their inconvenient consciences. "The Protestant Ethic and the 'Spirit' of Capitalism" is often held up as a stinging refutation of the Marxist concept of historical materialism. In short, Weber proposes culture and society as the fundamental influence on historical and economic change, whereas Marx held that economics alone was the base which dictated to the superstructure. To me, both ideas are compelling, and a full understanding of the implications they contain can only come from reading both and deciding for yourself.
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