The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, by Max Weber

This study by one of the founding fathers of scoiology, Max Weber, is clearly written in opposition to Karl Marx (even thought Weber does not do Marx the honor of refering to him) and the Marxist concept of dialectical materialism, with its insistence that social change takes place through the conflict of opposites. Instead, Weber relates the rise of a capitalist economy to the Puritan determination to work out anxiety over salvation or damnation by performing good deeds — an effort that ultimately encouraged capitalism.

Weber discovered that in Germany, Protestants tended to be wealthier and better educated than Catholics because Protestants showed a special tendency to develop “economic rationalism”; that is, a particular approach to creating wealth that was less focused on the gain of comfort than on the pursuit of profit itself. The general outlook on life and work that the early protestants sects drew from their belief made them singularly well adapted to modern capitalism, according to Weber.

Links to books by Max Weber at Amazon US, Amazon UK, and Amazon CAN.

Tagged as: book review, Max Weber, religion and social change, sociology of religion, Weber on the origins of Capitalism