Work · Sociology & Social Theory
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
How religious asceticism fostered modern capitalism.
Introduction
Weber published the study in two parts in 1904 and 1905 in the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, which he co-edited, and revised it in 1920 with long notes answering his critics. He starts from statistics suggesting that Protestants in Germany were more prominent in business and technical education, and from Benjamin Franklin’s maxims, such as “time is money”, as an example of a capitalist ethos. His explanation lies in the Calvinist doctrine of predestination: believers who could not know whether they were saved looked for signs of grace in methodical work in a “calling”, and saved instead of spending. Historians and sociologists have disputed the thesis ever since.
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Connections
Criticizes
- Capital1867 · Karl Marx
Taken up in
- Economy and Society1922 · Max Weber
- History and Class Consciousness1923 · Georg Lukács
- The Structure of Social Action1937 · Talcott Parsons
- The Theory of Communicative Action1981 · Jürgen Habermas
- A Secular Age2007 · Charles Taylor
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