It would be foolhardy to suggest that serious attention has yet to be paid to Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. On the contrary, this text is arguably the most famous and widely read in the classical canon of sociological writing and has been extensively debated within the discipline ever since its first appearance as a series of two articles in 1904–05. Karl Fischer, one of Weber's first critics, spoke of the ‘lamentable chain of misunderstanding’ as early as 1908 (Fischer 1908:38), and even though the work has been extensively studied, there is the sense that ‘what Weber really meant’ has only rarely been grasped. The ‘academic “Thirty Years War”’ which was how Lynn White characterized the Protestant Ethic (PE) debate (cited in Marshall 1982:11) has now almost become worthy of the epithet of the ‘academic “Hundred Years War”’. In recent times, scholars have extended the PE debate backwards in time before 1905 and looked at the ‘Weber thesis before Weber’, at the cultural wars of the 1870s (Anderson 1986; Blackbourn 1988) and beyond into the wider culture where general stereotypes of ‘northern Protestant energy’ and ‘southern Catholic indolence’ were common (Münch 1993). We clearly are dealing with a thesis that confronts questions of overwhelming significance for the understanding of modernity and its rise over more than four hundred years. Less charitably, it has been argued that the reasons for the thesis’ continuing fascination are ‘largely a function of extraneous factors rooted deeply in the history of this century’ (Piccone, 1988:97) to do with western imperialism and rationality and the West's ethnocentric justification for growing social inequality (Piccone 1988:107ff.). Not many commentators, to be sure, would want to be as extreme as this, but we must not forget a long tradition of Marxist encounters with the thesis (Marshall 1982:140–57; Turner 1985).

When the literature produced by historians (e.g. Bouchard 1991; Gorski 1993; Valeri 1997; Gellner 1988; Hughes 1986, Silber 1993; Schroeder 1995, Forster 1997), theologians (Volf 1991; Badcock 1998), psychologists (Furnham 1990), and more recently by literary critics (e.g. Stachnieweski 1991; Goldman 1988, Jameson 1974; Hernes 1989; Malcolmson 1999) is added to the sociological discussions, the extent of labour expended on the essay is indeed immense.