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The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904–5/1920)

Bibliographic Data

ID20076718
AuthorsPeter Ghosh (corresponding author)
Year2022
Pages145-157
Publication date2022-07-15
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeCHAPTER
VenueRoutledge International Handbook on Max Weber (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherRoutledge (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.4324/9781003089537-14
OpenAlexW4285493394
ISBN9781003089537
LanguageEN
Citations received31

The Protestant Ethic (PE) is the most misunderstood text in the canon of modern political and social theory and for a good reason: it compresses most of the thought of an inter-disciplinary polymath into the shortest possible space. Weber was not a systematic thinker and there is no single PE ‘thesis’. Instead the text is a set of inter-linked ideas with multiple foci, and this explains the lay-out of the exposition here. There are four sections: (1) examination of the text’s ‘Reception’ and some influential misreadings by social scientists and historians. (2) ‘Rationality and Capitalism’, where capitalism is the outstanding individual reality of modernity and rationality the set of pervasive, formal procedures that run through it. The central subject of the whole PE, ascetic Protestantism, is a rationalizing Protestantism. (3) ‘Ethics and Religion’, on the supersession of traditional Christian and Biblical ethics by a wholly modern code of conduct. (4) ‘Politics’, on Weber’s little-known arguments for the historic role of religion in setting limits to the exercise of political power. The method throughout is that of the history of ideas: to look for ‘what Weber really thought’, and only then turn to its present-day theoretical implications

Art · Asceticism · Capitalism · Epistemology · Exposition (narrative) · Literature · Modernity · Political science · Politics · Protestant work ethic · Protestantism · Rationality · Social science · Sociology · Subject (documents) · Theology · Law · Philosophy · Political Theology and Sovereignty · Religion and Society Interactions · Religious studies · Weber, Simmel, Sociological Theory

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Unique citing works31
Citations per year0,66
Citation span1979 - 2024 (46)
Citation velocityrecent
Highly citedNo
Citation typesNeutral: 31
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