Max Weber's early studies of agrarian social structure, including his inaugural lecture of 1895, have been largely ignored by sociologists. It will be shown in the discussion to follow that the 1895 lecture is, however, an absolutely necessary key to the proper appreciation of Weber's subsequent work, including – it might be said especially – The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Indeed, a reading of Weber's subsequent writings through the prism of the inaugural lecture provides an incisive route to an understanding of Weber's enduring argument concerning social and cultural forms and the meaning and purpose of his methodological constructions. Any discussion of the Protestant Ethic and the contemporaneous and subsequent methodological essays will find that a consideration of the 1895 lecture is nothing less than essential. Indeed, it will be shown in this chapter that an appreciation of Weber's argument in the inaugural lecture transforms the current and conventional understandings of the Protestant Ethic as well as the supporting methodological essays.

The long-standing sociological disregard of Max Weber's writings before the Protestant Ethic is extremely curious. Conventional wisdom has it that Weber began writing sociology after he came out of a depressive illness around 1903, which is when he began drafting the Protestant Ethic (Marianne Weber 1926: 325–6).