The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism undoubtedly ranks as one of the most renowned, and controversial, works of modern social science. First published as a two-part article in 1904–5, in
the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, of which Weber was one of the editors, it immediately provoked a critical debate, in which Weber participated actively, and which, some seventy years later, has still not gone off the boil. This English translation is in fact taken from the revised version of the work, that first appeared in Weber’s Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie (Collected Essays on the Sociology of Religion), published in 1920–1 just after Weber’s death, and thus contains comments on the critical literature to which its initial appearance had given rise.
Weber wrote The Protestant Ethic at a pivotal period of his intellectual career, shortly after his recovery from a depressive illness that had incapacitated him from serious academic work for a period of some four years. Prior to his sickness, most of Weber’s works, although definitely presaging the themes developed in the later phase of his life, were technical researches in economic history, economics and jurisprudence. They include studies of mediaeval trading law (his doctoral dissertation), the development of Roman land-tenure, and the contemporary socioeconomic conditions of rural workers in the eastern part of Germany.
These writings took their inspiration in some substantial part from the so-called ‘historical school’ of economics which, in conscious divergence from British political economy, stressed the need to examine economic life within the context of the historical development of culture as a whole. Weber always remained indebted to this standpoint. But the series of works he began on his return to health, and which preoccupied him for the remainder of his career, concern a range of problems much broader in compass than those covered in the earlier period.
The Protestant Ethic was a first fruit of these new endeavours. An appreciation of what Weber sought to achieve in the book demands at least an elementary grasp of two aspects of the circumstances in which it was produced: the intellectual climate within which he wrote, and the connections between the work itself and the massive programme of study that he set himself in the second phase of his career.
