Weber places at the center of his analysis the influence that the expansion of protestant religious denominations and the moral values they preached had on the emergence and growth of the mindset and human behavior necessary to maintain capitalism: what he calls the ‘spirit’ of capitalism. Even though all his work can be understood as part of a constant discussion with Marxism, in The Protestant Ethic he puts forward a theory of the origins of capitalism that draws a sharp contrast with historical materialism.
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism is considered the most important work written by Max Weber.
Moreover, a reverse causality hypothesis has been proposed with convincing although not definitive argumentation.įinally, two aspects of The Protestant Ethic gravely undermine its explanatory power and compromise its historical accuracy: the complete lack of reference to material conditions, including the process of primitive accumulation, as a driving thrust for capitalism to develop and the poor quality of the evidence provided. More recent studies relying on heavily quantitative (and questionable) methods have tested versions of Weber’s thesis, obtaining negative results.
In The Protestant Ethic we can identify what is arguably the central debate between Weberian and Marxist schools of thought: the predominance of ideas versus the centrality of material conditions and class struggle in the making of history. Although he lays out a nuanced analysis-widely overstretched by many scholars following his line of thought-he explicitly criticizes historical materialism as a framework that is inadequate in explaining the rise of capitalism. Protestant asceticism is considered by Weber a central ideological underpinning for the emergence of modern capitalism. I make an attempt to contrast his worldview with that of Marx and other authors in the historical materialist tradition. In this article, I critically analyze what is considered Max Weber’s most relevant sociological contribution, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.
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