by Max Weber
In view of the present status of ethnography, some explanation is required as to why it is that in pursuit of the present aims we have not drawn on ethnographic research to anything like the extent that would have been essential for any really searching analysis, particularly of Asian religiosity. The reason for this is not simply that the human capacity for work has its limitations. The reason why such an omission seemed permissible was primarily that we were here concerned precisely with the context of the religiously determined ethic of those strata that were the “bearers of culture” [Kulturträger] in the relevant area. We are concerned with the influences that the conduct of life of these people has exercised. It is perfectly true that the particular character of even these influences can only be fully grasped when it is seen against the ethnographic background. It must be freely admitted and stressed that there is a gap here that the ethnographer has every right to complain about. I hope to be able to do something about filling it by undertaking a systematic treatment of the sociology of religion. Such an enterprise would, however, have exceeded the bounds of the present essays, with their limited aims. These essays have had to content themselves with revealing as far as possible the points of comparison with the religions of our Western civilization.
Finally, we should give some thought to the anthropological10 aspect of the problem. If we find again and again—even in (apparently) unconnected areas of the conduct of life—in the West, and only there, certain kinds of rationalization developing, it seems a reasonable assumption that hereditary qualities have been key factors here. The author confesses that he personally and subjectively is inclined to rate the significance of biological heredity very highly. However, despite the significant achievements of anthropologists, I can at the moment see no way to even hazard a guess at what part it plays in the development under investigation here, let alone comprehend it adequately. It will have to be one of the tasks of sociological and historical work to first do what it can to expose all those influences and causal chains that can be satisfactorily explained by reference to reactions to fate and one’s environment. Only then, and when moreover the study of the comparative neurology and psychology of race have progressed beyond their present (and in some cases highly promising) early stages, shall we perhaps be able to hope for satisfactory results relevant to our problem. [5] At present, these conditions do not yet seem to be fulfilled, and reference to “heredity” would represent a premature abandonment from the level of knowledge that may be possible today, and a shifting of the problem to factors that are as yet unknown.
WEBER’S NOTES
1) Here, as in certain other points, I differ from the view of our revered master Lujo Brentano (as expressed in the work from which we shall later quote). The difference is, in the first instance, terminological. It does, however, also extend to matters of substance. It does not seem to me helpful to include in the same category such heterogeneous things as the acquisition of booty and acquisition of a factory by the management. Still less should we designate as the “spirit” of capitalism—in contradistinction to other forms of acquisition—every kind of striving for the acquisition of money. My reason is that in the first case we lose the opportunity, in particular, of focusing on what is specific about Western capitalism as compared with other forms, and in the second we lose all conceptual precision. In The Philosophy of Money by G. Simmel, “money economy” and “capitalism” are far too closely identified, to the detriment of the substance of the argument. In the writings of W. Sombart, especially in the most recent edition of his principal work, Der moderne Kapitalismus, an excellent book, what is specific about the West, namely, the rational organization of labor, is very much downplayed in favor of developmental factors that were present throughout the world. That at least is how I see it from the perspective of my problem.
2) Of course, the antithesis should not be taken as absolute. In Mediterranean and Oriental antiquity, and probably in China and India too, rational permanent businesses have grown out of politically oriented capitalism (especially that which derived its income from taxation). The accountancy of these businesses—and records have only been preserved in meager fragments—could well have been “rational” in character. Furthermore, in the history of the origin of the modern banks (including the Bank of England), most of which evolved from political businesses motivated by the needs of war, politically oriented “adventure” capitalism and rational business capi-talism are extremely closely linked. An illustration of this is the antithesis between the individuality of, for example, Paterson11—a typical “promoter”12—and those members of the board who were responsible for the stance of that institution and were very soon char-acterized as “The Puritan usurers of Grocers’ Hall.”13 Another is the blunder committed by this most “solid” bank at the time of the founding of the South Sea Company. Thus the antithesis is, of course, quite fluid. But it is there. Neither the great promoters and financiers nor—speaking generally and allowing for individual exceptions—the typical bearers of financial and political capitalism, the Jews, created methods of rational labor organization. That was done by a quite different type (!) of people.
3) The remnants of my knowledge of Hebrew are completely inadequate too.
4) I scarcely need to say that I do not include essays such as those by K. Jaspers (in his book Psychologie der Weltanschauungen, 1919), or, on the other hand, studies like those of Klage (in Charakterologie), which differ from what I am attempting in the nature of their starting point. It would not be appropriate to discuss these matters at this point.
5) A most distinguished psychiatrist expressed this view to me a number of years ago.
EDITORS’ NOTES
1. “Vorbemerkung” in Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religions-soziologie (Col-lected Essays in the Sociology of Religion), vol. 1 (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1920), pp. 1–16. Weber’s Collected Essays in the Sociology of Religion (3 vols.) was largely devoted to a cross-cultural analysis of the economic ethic of the world religions. For more information on this project, see Introduction, footnotes 101 and 108.
2. To avoid any misunderstanding, it should be emphasized that here, and throughout the essay, Weber is concerned with identifying institutions and practices—among them science, law, bureaucracy, bourgeois business capitalism, and their distinctive modes of rationality—that arose originally in the West. He was not saying that such institutions and practices could never have emerged in Asia. Nor was he saying that other civilizations could never have adopted them. On the contrary, it was obvious to Weber that the reverse was the case: that Occidental phenomena were becoming increasingly “universal,” that is, disseminated throughout, and incorporated adaptively within, all of the world’s major civilizations.
3. Gebanntheit is literally the condition of being spellbound or transfixed.
4. For a lucid description of the Ständestaat, see Gianfranco Poggi, The Development of the Modern State: A Sociological Introduction (London: Hutchinson, 1978), pp. 36–59.
5. Weber uses the English phrase.
6. Commenda was a form of trust in use in the Middle Ages in which goods were delivered to another agent for a particular enterprise (as for marketing abroad).
7. In this case the German word is Bourgeoisie (not Bürgertum). See The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism, Editors’ note 4, here of this volume, for a comment on these terms.
8. The word Weber uses is Lebensordnungen (life orders or life spheres). According to Weber’s theory of modern social development, the various “life orders” (sexuality, family, economy, politics) become increasingly detached from one another and subject to their own immanent logic.
9. Weber is referring to “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism” and “The Protestant Sects and the Spirit of Capitalism.” Strictly speaking, these are both revisions of “older essays”: respectively, “The Protestant Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism” (1905) and “‘Churches’ and ‘Sects’ in North Americ
a” (1906), both of which appear in this Penguin Classic on pp. 1–202 and pp. 203–20, respectively.
10. Anthropology is today usually regarded as a discipline that examines cultural diversity. In contrast, Weber used the term in its original sense, defined by the Oxford English Dictionary (2nd ed., 1989) as “the science of man, embracing human physiology and psychology and their mutual bearing.”
11. William Paterson was one of the founders of the Bank of England.
12. This word is in English in the original.
13. This phrase is in English in the original.
NAME INDEX
The page numbers in this index refer to the printed version of this book. To find the corresponding locations in the text of this digital version, please use the “search” function on your e-reader. Note that not all terms may be searchable.
Page numbers followed by the letter n refer to editors’ notes.
Weber’s notes are indexed as text.
Adams, Thomas, 175, 184, 185, 187, 188, 191, 200
Addams, Jane, xv
Aegidius, Saint, 100
Alberti, Leon Battista, xxii, 345 – 50, 353, 354
Antoninus, Saint, 25, 30, 351, 353, 354
Arendt, Hannah, xxx
Aristotle, 357
Arminius, Jacob, 123n
Augustine, Saint, 72, 143
Baehr, Peter, i–ii, lxix, lxxi
Bailey, Lewis, 74, 88, 90, 134, 143, 145, 149, 177, 188
Baltimore, Lord, 156
Barclay, Robert, 101, 102, 106, 116, 173 – 75, 177, 196
Barebone, Praisegod, 156
Baudelaire, Charles-Pierre, 271
Baumgarten, Eduard, 39n
Baumgarten, Otto, xii
Baxter, Richard, 74, 105 – 9, 111, 112, 117, 121, 136, 139, 140, 142, 145, 147, 150, 166, 174, 176, 177 – 79, 180, 182 – 83, 185, 189, 190, 195, 196, 197, 199, 200, 244, 311
Becker, George, xlvn, 66n
Beethan, David, xli
Bell, Daniel, xxxi
Bellah, Robert, xxviii
Below, Georg von, 279n
Bendix, Reinhard, xxx
Benedict, Saint, 81
Bernardine, Saint, 147, 150, 154, 167, 351, 353, 354
Bernstein, Eduard, 198
Berthold of Regensburg, 302
Beza, Theodore (Théodore de Bèze), 76, 142
Bismarck, Otto von, i, xi, 322
Bloom, Allan, xxxi
Bonaventura, Saint, 147, 154, 308
Brecht, Arnold, xxx
Brentano, Lujo, xxii, xxiii, xxxiii, xxxvii, 45, 50, 341, 342 – 43, 345, 350 – 54, 369
Bryce, James, 187
Bunyan, John, 74 – 75, 84, 118, 139, 142, 146, 190 – 91, 310
Burckhardt, Jakob, 133
Busken-Huët, Conrad, 273, 326
Butler, Samuel, 114
Calvin, John, x, xviii, xlviiin, 7, 35, 38n, 46, 72, 74, 76, 77, 78, 85, 88, 106, 111, 119, 124n, 131, 140, 143, 149, 155, 173, 191, 193, 224, 250, 305, 330, 351
Carlyle, Thomas, 3
Carnegie, Andrew, 227
Cato, Marcus Porcius, 346, 347 – 48, 349, 352
Chalcraft, David, lxxi
Charles I, 113
Charles II, 194, 198
Charles V, 37n, 40n
Chillingworth, William, 86
Christoph, Duke of Württemberg, 186
Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 53
Cobden, Richard, 272, 319
Colbert, Jean-Baptiste, 7, 290
Collins, Randall, xxviii
Columella, Lucius, 347, 349
Court, Pieter de la, 17, 119
Cromwell, Oliver, 30, 105, 106, 138, 147, 149, 156, 157, 169, 192, 194, 215, 272, 322
Defoe, Daniel, 199
Delbrück, Hans, 241, 319
Descartes, René, 39n, 80
Dowden, Edward, 118, 133
Doyle, John Andrew, 117
DuBois, W.E.B., xv
Durkheim, Emile, xxvii, xxviii
Edward VI, 39n
Eleazar, Rabbi, 197
Engels, Friedrich, 342
Erasmus, Desiderius, 40n, 41n, 326
Esau (biblical figure), 188
Faraday, Michael, 317
Fischer, H. Karl, xvi, xviii, xxii, xxiii, xxxiii, xxxvii, xl, lxn, lxix, 221 – 43, 230n, 341
Fox, George, x, 35, 41n, 100, 101, 169
Francis, Saint, 6, 82, 100, 170
Francke, August Hermann, 90, 91, 94, 160, 166, 168
Franck, Sebastian, 132, 249, 309 – 10
Franklin, Benjamin, xvii, xxii, 9 – 13, 14, 15, 19 – 20, 24, 25 – 26, 30, 39n, 84, 103, 107, 120, 139, 181, 182, 221, 222, 229, 259, 261, 264, 265, 270, 344 – 50
Frederick III (the Wise), 37n
Frederick William I, 7, 166
Frederick William IV, 217
Fromm, Erich, xxx
Fugger, Jakob (Jakob II the Rich), 11, 40n, 222, 226, 229, 244, 256, 268, 270, 272, 344 – 45
Fugger family, 30, 40n, 289
Gamble, Ian, xxiv
Gerhard, Johannes, 140
Gerhard, Paul, 34
Gerth, Hans H., xxx, 203
Gladstone, William Ewart, 157, 342
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, xxxiii, 103, 120, 143, 178, 215, 242n
Göhre, Paul, xlvn
Gothein, Eberhard, 7, 301, 314, 320, 321
Greeley, Andrew, xxviii
Groen van Prinsterer, Guillaume, 255, 326
Halbwachs, Maurice, xxv
Hals, Frans, 193
Hammer, Mary, 195
Harnack, Adolf von, x, 180, 302
Haupt, Hans, 219n
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 223
Heinrich, Friedrich, 192
Hennis, Wilhelm, lin
Henry, Matthew, 150, 176, 178
Hensel, Paul, xiii
Hinkle, Gisela, xxvi
Hooker, Richard, 86
Hoornbeek, Johannes, 133, 134, 144, 145 – 46, 187
Howe, John, 149
Hughes, H. Stuart, xxxi–xxxii
Hundeshagen, 138
Huntingdon, Lady, 85
Ignatius, Saint, 81
Irving, Washington, 178, 194
Jacob (biblical figure), 188
Jaffé, Edgar, xv, 230n
James (brother of Jesus), 125n
James, William, xv, 144
James I, 70, 113
Jaspers, Karl, xxvi
Jellinek, Georg, xl–xli, lxiin, 157, 323
Jesus Christ, 31, 99, 125, 137, 141, 150, 153, 172
Jesus Son of Sirach, 28, 52, 53, 56, 57 – 58, 111
Kant, Immanuel, 189 – 90
Kaufmann, Walter, lviin
Keats, John, 337
Keats, Thomas, 337
Keller, Gottfried, 75
Kidd, Benjamin, xxvii
Knapp, G. F., 238, 267
Knight, Frank H., xxvi
Knolly, Hanserd, 85, 143
Knox, John, 7, 38n
Kürnberger, Ferdinand, 11
Kuyper, Abraham, 272, 304
Lafayette, Marquis de, xl
Lamprecht, Karl Gottfried, 158, 163
Law, William, 200
Lederer, Emil, xxx
Lehmann, Hartmut, xxxiv
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, xiii, 294
Lichtblau, Klaus, xxxvii
Liguori, Alfons von, 75
Louis XIV, 4, 37n, 191
Löwe, Adolph, xxx
Luther, Martin, x, 7, 28 – 33, 37n, 38n, 40n, 41n, 49, 60, 72, 75, 77, 82, 84, 86, 90, 100, 102, 108 – 9, 111, 125n, 131, 139, 141, 150, 151, 158, 161, 162, 164, 168, 190, 221, 222 – 23, 261 – 62, 299, 302, 309, 353
Machiavelli, Niccolò, 75, 356
Mannheim, Karl, xxvi
Mantegna, Andrea, 194
Marshall, Alfred, xxvii
Marshall, Gordon, lxiiin
Marx, Karl, xxviii, xxix, xli, 341, 342
Mary (mother of Jesus), 172
Mary Tudor (Mary I), 39n
Matthew, Saint, 126n
&nbs
p; Maurice, Prince, 123n
Maxwell, James Clerk, 317
Melanchthon, Philipp, 72, 138, 151, 152, 153, 161
Menno Simons, 35, 99, 102
Merton, Robert K., xxviii
Mill, John Stuart, 221, 227, 236
Mills, C. Wright, xxx, 203
Milton, John, 33 – 34, 71, 132, 139, 185
Molière, 227
Montesquieu, Baron de La Brède et de, 7 – 8
Morgenthau, Hans, xxx
Moses, 149
Müller, Karl, 169
Münsterberg, Hugo, xiii
Naumann, Friedrich, xii
Neumann, Franz, xxxi
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, xxxi
Offenbacher, Martin, xlivn, 43, 44, 45, 66n
Oldenbarnevelt, Johan van, 70, 272
Owen, John, 149
Pareto, Vilfredo, xxvii, xxviii
Parsons, Talcott, xxiv, xxvi–xxviii, xxx, xxxiii, lxix, lxx, 127n
Paterson, William, 370
Pauck, Wilhelm, 219n
Paul, Saint, 31, 126n
Penn, William, 272
Petty, William, lxn, 245, 253, 254 – 55, 290, 329
Pirenne, Henri, xxv
Plutarch, 147
Poggi, Gianfranco, xix
Rachfahl, Felix, xvi, xviii, xxii, xxiii, xxxiii, xxxvii, xxxix, xl, xli, xliin, xliiin, xlviin, xlviiin, lxn, lxin, lxix, 203, 231n, 243n, 244 – 81, 279n, 282 – 339, 343
Rade, Martin, xvi
Raphael, 194
Rathenau, Walther, 275
Rembrandt, 115, 192, 271
Renata, Duchess of Este, 149
Rhodes, Cecil, 6
Ritschl, Albrecht, xlivn, 92, 95, 130 – 31, 140 – 41, 153 – 54, 158 – 60, 161, 162, 166, 169, 249
Robertson, H. M., xxv
Rockefeller, John D., 276
Rodbertus, Johann Karl, 363
Rollmann, Hans, xiv
Roth, Guenther, xxi, xliiin
Roth, Michael, xxiv
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, xl, xli
Rubens, Peter Paul, 271
Salmasius, 351
Salomon, Albert, xxx