The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism Max Weber

“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.”

Anthony Giddens

Testimonials

“Full of brilliant analysis, and profound reflection on the interplay of religion’s social and economic influences.”

Expository Times

“Students of the relation between the Protestant Reformation and the rise of capitalism are all forced back upon Max Weber as a major source of information and scholarly analysis.”

Federal Committee Bulletin

“One of the monuments of economic literature.”

Yorkshire Post

"In the title of this study is used the somewhat pretentious phrase, the spirit of capitalism. What is to be understood by it? The attempt to give anything like a definition of it brings out certain difficulties which are in the very nature of this type of investigation. If any object can be found to which this term can be applied with any understandable meaning, it can only be an historical individual, i.e. a complex of elements associated in historical reality which we unite into a conceptual whole from the standpoint of their cultural significance."

Max Weber (1864–1920) was a German sociologist, philosopher, and political economist, widely regarded as one of the founding figures of modern sociology. His work spans a wide array of topics, including social theory, the development of capitalism, the role of religion in society, and the study of bureaucracy.