Reply to Guy Oakes

Oakes' criticism of my “Weber and the Myth of Calvinism” is both surprising and predictable. “Surprising,” because Oakes still has no doubts concerning the validity of Weber's thesis. “Predictable,” because Weberians have always followed Oakes' approach in responding to criticism. First used by Ernst Troeltsch against Felix Rachfahl, and by Talcott Parsons and Julien Freund against H. M. Robertson and Herbert Luthy, it consists in claiming that critics have failed to grasp the real meaning of the thesis — either because of ignorance of some of Weber's work, or because of lack of familiarity with his mediodology. Oakes claims that I did not take into account Weber's essay on the American Protestant seas, written after his visit to the US and his response to Fischer and Rachfahl

Art · Calvinism · Criticism · Epistemology · Ignorance · Literature · Meaning (existential · Mythology · Protestantism · Theology · Philosophical Ethics and Theory · Philosophy · Religious studies · Seventeenth-Century Political and Philosophical Thought · Weber, Simmel, Sociological Theory · Religious Studies

• Weber's Protestant-Ethic Thesis, the Critics, and Adam Smith

  Christian Etzrodt•Max Weber Studies•2008

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