The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism: Second Roxbury Edition
Author: Max Weber, Randall Collins, Talcott Parsons
List Price: $24.95
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ISBN: 093573290X
Publisher: Roxbury Pub Co (January, 1998)
Sales Rank: 203,927
Average Customer Rating: 4.39 out of 5
Customer Reviews
Rating: 5 out of 5
A must read for students of Social Science
This book turns Marx on his head in that Marx regarded religion an ideology reflecting classes, Weber seems to be showing that capitalism itself was produced not by economic forces but by the influences of religious ideas. The drive of puritans to work out anxiety over their salvation or damnation, which was left in doubt by the theological doctrine of predestination. The predestined beliefs of the Protestants encouraged capitalism. Weber uses this to describe why capitalism emerged in the western world. Students of the conflict tradition should not miss this work.
Rating: 4 out of 5
The book that launched 1,000 Weberians
This is a brialliant yet problematic work. It is primarily concerned with showing how the ideals of early capitalism were mirroed and shaped by the ideals of Calvinism. It is NOT an attempt to show Protestantism as the casue of capitalism. Weber regarded this as foolish, but too many who pick up this book for the first time read it this way. Weber's theory of the Iron Cage is important and stunnningly extended by Daniel Bell in the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism.This book was translated 17 years before the next important work of Weber's, which caused much scholarship of him to reduce him to the content of this text. Don't fall into that trap. Weber is one of the hardest thinkers to reliably abstract in history. Most Weberians and Neo-Weberians are still radically at odds with each other over what his opus meant. Heck, Thomas Burger almost gets violent in his criticism of other Weberian interpretations.The primarary error of setting this as Weber's monolithic work is to set Weber as Marx's counterbalance. He "turned Marx on his head" mainly to Weber's contemporaries in Germany, many of whom had accepted religion as an opiate of the masses unworthy of scholarship. It is far easier to understand Weber is you compare him with Richter. Better yet, read Weber's on work on methodology of the social sciences and his alter works that explored hte religious, political and social worlds.
Rating: 4 out of 5
The Essence Of National Liberalism...
Courtesy Of Someone Who Might Help Break It Down A Little Bit.The theoretical legacy of Max Weber -- namely, sociology as an independent science only dubiously dependent upon either economics or philosophy -- is a task which one is not highly encouraged to pick up in the present day, but the use of Weber recommended by Pierre Bourdieu (as a form of cold comfort surpassing Marx in his cultural materialism) may have involved too obscure a camera for the import of this book relative to extant social theory to be properly appreciated. Perhaps there is even a tonic more readily administered than recent disputations of Weber's famed religio-economic history: which has it that the cultural norms of Protestantism (denial of self-gratification in pursuit of a spiritual ideal) are responsible for the rise of the modern entrepreneural economy, perhaps all too securely. In fact, perhaps the architect of Weimar's Caesarist exceutive branch ought to be trusted with relatively little in this respect: that is to say, there should be some fact by virtue of which his work is available to us as an unstable amalgam permitting of virtuous appropriation.
Might this be the new "availability" of the former standard translation by Talcott Parsons? Indeed it might: Parsons was not only the dean of American sociologists (and how), he was actually a fantastically acute observer of "Lakatosian" dynamics in the history of ideas, and the problematic character of the Weberian conceptual scheme was unlikely to have passed him by. If we compare this version to George Schwab's translation of *The Concept of Politics* by Carl Schmitt (once explicitly claimed to be the "legitimate heir" of Weber by Habermas) the relative lack of excitement is palpable, and perhaps tangible too: Parsons was actually rather fond of "cages of rationality", and in all seriousness there may be no very good reason to consider "cylindricized" elements of meaning employed in goal-directed behavior all that ironclad. Kudos to Routledge for providing a durable reprint of the Simon & Schuster version, even with the screams of Anthony Giddens.
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