Max Weber (1864–1920) was a German sociologist, economist and historian, born in Erfurt and raised in Berlin, the son of a National Liberal politician and a devout Protestant mother. He trained in law and economic history and held chairs in economics at Freiburg and Heidelberg until a severe nervous illness from 1898 forced him to give up teaching for several years. He then wrote a series of comparative studies of religion and economic life, of which The Protestant Ethic was the first, and worked on the vast Economy and Society, published after his death. He gave the lectures Science as a Vocation and Politics as a Vocation in Munich in 1917–19 and died there of pneumonia in June 1920.
Frequently Cited
“The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so.”
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism is a long essay in two parts asking why modern rational capitalism, with its disciplined, systematic pursuit of profit as a duty, arose first and most strongly in the Protestant lands of the West. Weber does not argue that Protestantism caused capitalism, and he says so explicitly; he argues that certain forms of Protestant belief helped produce an ethos, a moral attitude toward work and wealth, that fitted the needs of a new economic order.
