Max Weber and the Protestant Ethic

In this stunning work of intellectual archaeology, Peter Ghosh presents a new reading of Weber’s thought through the vanishing-point of the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905) (PE). Some might say that Economy and Society, which Marianne Weber posthumously assembled in 1920, as well as his late essays in global intellectual history, superseded the PE in terms of intellectual significance. But Ghosh insists that Weber never lost sight of his central preoccupation with capitalism and the history of the West, even when dealing with subjects such as Hinduism and Confucianism. The text of the PE itself is flanked by two large silences: a nervous collapse, which hit him in 1898; and the First World War, during which Weber was engaged in some war work, journalism and the writing of essays. Observing that ‘[t]he most important guide to the tendency of Weber’s thought’ can sometimes be ‘not a statement but a silence’ (p. 141), Ghosh brazenly cuts into it as if silence itself could be broken down into discrete speech acts if Ockham demanded so. If Max Weber is the ‘most prestigious’ of modern Western European thinkers, Ghosh reminds us, his celebrity often makes us unable to distinguish the gems of his thought (such as his studies of sectarianism) from vulgar bijouterie (such as his definition of the state in Politics as a Vocation [p. 338]). An ingrained tendency to ‘add ever fresh layers to an original composition’ makes his task to ‘lay bare the intellectual life of Max Weber’ an arduous, if ultimately gratifying undertaking (p. 147). The result is an awe-inspiring exercise in intellectual history, which masterfully avoids what Quentin Skinner has called the ‘fallacy of coherence’

Aesthetics · Art · Capitalism · Literature · Politics · Protestant work ethic · Protestantism · Reading (process · Silence · Sociology · State (computer science · Law · Philosophy · Religious studies · Weber, Simmel, Sociological Theory