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This chapter examines the significance of Max Weber's time in Pennsylvania, and particularly his experience of the Fifth Day Quaker service, to his thesis about the Protestant ethic. It first describes Max and Marianne Weber's itinerary in the District of Columbia before discussing Max Weber's two engagements: a meeting with the president of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), Samuel Gompers; and an opportunity to observe the religious service of the Nineteenth Street Baptist Church. It then considers some of the main arguments put forward by Weber in The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism, and how the Quakers' Fifth Day service influenced his written work. It also analyzes Weber's meeting with scholar William James in Cambridge, Massachusetts, along with their thoughts on two fundamental issues: the problem of the relationship between ideas and action, and the question of the “rationality” of experience.

This chapter examines the social formations Weber associated with religion—the sect and the bourgeois community of the city. It argues that the sectarian idea is a fundamental component of the ‘Protestant Ethic’ as well as the ‘Protestant Sects’—the intellectual unity between these two is of a far higher order than is commonly supposed—which immediately suggests that there is a more significant hinterland present here. The exploration of this idea after 1907–8 will prove to be a highway through Weber's “later” thought, which leads into a quite new area: his thinking about bourgeois group association, hence bourgeois identity in general.

This chapter begins in 1905 when Weber started writing the PE, noting his detachment towards the text. Weber had no especial liking for the seventeenth-century subject matter of the PE, which relied ‘so heavily on alien (theological and historical) works’. The discussion then turns to the years 1907–1908 when the PE was set aside and no more would be heard about it as a publishing project until 1915. While there is no documentary answer as to why the project was set aside, there were sufficient intellectual deterrents at work, besides the improvement in the Webers' financial circumstances.

This chapter focuses on the relationship between work and exhaustion, and analyzes Max Weber's influential book 'The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism', as well as Ivan Goncharov's novel 'Oblomov', Thomas Mann's 'Buddenbrooks', and recent economic theories of happiness and inequality.

This chapter examines the connections between the PE and ‘Economy and Society’. It considers how Ernst Troeltsch's publication of his great work on the Social Teachings of the Christian Churches in 1912 prompted Weber to return to the PE. Troeltsch's support and alternative exposition of socioreligious history meant that the original PE text required only modest revision in detail—a confirmation of the position Weber had adopted in 1907.

This chapter explores the theme of religion that descends from the PE. It demonstrates an essential continuity between the ideas presented in the PE in 1904–5, and those advanced in his second wave of religious writing from 1912 onwards (the Sociology of Religion and the ‘Economic Ethics of the World Religions’). It discusses the physical continuity and discontinuity between the PE and the ‘Economic Ethics’, and the qualitative differences between the PE and the later religious writings.

This chapter discusses how Weber traversed the period from 1898–1905, which marked a great hiatus in his life. It describes his travels, including his time in Italy in the summer of 1900 and his three months in America from September to November 1905. It suggests that the prospect of America rather than the actual experience of it that was most significant for the composition of the PE.

This chapter examines the case of religion, where the discontinuity between the PE and Weber's work in the 1890s is more apparent. It concludes that Weber's speeches and writings in the 1890s show that the origin of Weberian bourgeois democracy was religious; and that this coexisted with a ‘purely historical’ conception of Christianity as a central component in the evolution of the Occident across millennia. In his own particular sense of the word, the centrality of religion within Weber's thought-world was clearly established not merely by this date but fully twenty years before the first appearance of the PE in 1904.

This chapter addresses the central issue: what was the substance and significance of Weber's religious thought taken as a whole? In more formal language: what was the Weberian sociology of religion and how should we assess it? It discusses the centrality of the ascetic/mystic typology of religious behaviour to Weber's thought; Weber's elevation of Entzauberung, the removal of magic, to a prominent place in his religious typology; ethical and salvation religion; and the problem of meaning.

This chapter addresses another problem in Weber's intellectual biography: where exactly does capitalism fit into his later thinking? It identifies two underlying causes behind his stand-off with capitalism. First, he had been brought up within the traditions of classical German and Continental liberalism: of bureaucracy, law and the Rechtsstaat on his father's side, of rationalizing religion on his mother's. The movement away from capitalism can also be explained as arising from problems caused by Weber's historicism: specifically, the tension between his commitment to historical-genetic enquiry and his resolutely modern and contemporary focus.

Liah Greenfeld argues that capitalism is neither the problem nor the solution to the financial crisis, but a victim of the crisis. Tracing the emergence of capitalism through a reworking of Max Weber's thesis from the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Greenfield argues that capitalism has its roots in nationalism, not religion as Weber suggests. When a nation decides to compete in the field of economic activity, the result is its reorientation toward the accumulation of ever-increasing wealth and, given that the competitors are capable by definition, economies of sustained growth or capitalism. In other words, competitive national exertion is what explains the persistence of capitalist activity. Along the way, Greenfeld dispels misconceptions surrounding capitalism—including the perception that capitalism is tied to globalization.

This chapter measures the gap between where Weber stood before the great hiatus in his life and where he was when he issued the PE in 1904–5. It suggests that in some ways it is clear that the PE of 1904–5 is the product of the same mind that was at work in the 1890s; and Weber was fully justified when he claimed that the ideas of the PE went back to that date. However, there are also major discrepancies. There is nothing here about rationality or rationalism; and there is practically nothing of the empirical, religious, and historical argument of the PE: a dash of Calvin but no Calvinism, no Protestant sects, and no asceticism.

This chapter presents an analysis of the PE as a whole. The text contains a historical argument regarding the movement from proto-rationalist asceticism to modern formal rationality, but to suppose that the PE is simply the statement of a narrow and finite ‘thesis’ is to mistake its character entirely, and it was predictable that no agreement on the alleged ‘thesis’ should ever have been reached. Weber's argument regarding the evolution of rationality may be precisely focused, but an argument on such a theme is by definition comprehensive, since it is an argument about the nature of ‘modern Kultur’ in its entirety.

This chapter describes how the revival of the PE was completed by the accident of world war. It discusses why Weber could revise the text so speedily in 1919; why he could insist so vehemently that the reissued text of the PE was essentially unaltered from the original; and why even in 1919 the PE would be described as one of a pair of ‘older essays’ alongside the ‘Protestant Sects’.

This chapter examines the history of the ideas that run through the PE, focusing on the theme of capitalism. It concludes that Weberian capitalism was conceptually thin and problematic in a fundamental sense, even though it displayed a wealth of innovative, post-Marxist thinking. This unresolved question is revisited later on in this book.

This chapter examines the importance of rationality to the PE. It argues that the historical thesis of Part II of the text is an assertion of the link between asceticism and rational conduct, where Weber understands ‘asceticism’ as signifying protorational conduct. The major legal theme of natural law in the text is also considered. It suggests that once natural law has been included, the parallels between Weber's scheme of legal evolution and the religious history of the PE outweigh the differences.

This chapter examines the themes of politics and nationality in the PE. It argues that politics are formally omitted from the PE for intellectual, not political, reasons. Nationality, unlike politics, is not formally excluded; one of the more obvious, if often overlooked, building-blocks of the PE supplied by Weber's work in the 1890s is his belief in the excellence of English Kultur. The peculiar nature of Weber's “Anglophilia” is also discussed.

This chapter aims to provide an answer to the question: who was Max Weber? Weber was a German thinker who reflected on a modernity that was the outcome of history. He viewed religion and history as the only resources that could supply comprehensive answers to the fragmented modern predicament. His bipolar, conceptual-empirical approach to reality in general (“the world”) is mimicked by a bipolar solution to the problem of specialization: proper understanding of the absolute necessity of specialization throughout society—the world of Berufe promoted and legitimated by the Protestant ethic—must include recognition of the fundamental inadequacy of the purely specialized perspective.