Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- Acknowledgements
- Note on citations
- Introduction
- 1 From the inaugural lecture to the Protestant Ethic: political education and German futures
- 2 From the Protestant Ethic to the vocation lectures: Beruf, rationality and emotion
- 3 Passions and profits: the emotional origins of capitalism in seventeenth-century England
- 4 Protestant virtues and deferred gratification: Max Weber and Adam Smith on the spirit of capitalism
- 5 Ideal-type, institutional and evolutionary analyses of the origins of capitalism: Max Weber and Thorstein Veblen
- 6 The Jewish question: religious doctrine and sociological method
- Conclusion
- References
- Index
Conclusion
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- Acknowledgements
- Note on citations
- Introduction
- 1 From the inaugural lecture to the Protestant Ethic: political education and German futures
- 2 From the Protestant Ethic to the vocation lectures: Beruf, rationality and emotion
- 3 Passions and profits: the emotional origins of capitalism in seventeenth-century England
- 4 Protestant virtues and deferred gratification: Max Weber and Adam Smith on the spirit of capitalism
- 5 Ideal-type, institutional and evolutionary analyses of the origins of capitalism: Max Weber and Thorstein Veblen
- 6 The Jewish question: religious doctrine and sociological method
- Conclusion
- References
- Index
Summary
While a number of problems regarding The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism have been discussed in the preceding chapters, some of them can be identified by considering Weber's own later assessment of the ideas set out in that brief and enduring book. Placing the Protestant Ethic in the context of Weber's treatment of its themes in his later writing, therefore, provides a useful framework through which aspects of the argument concerning the religiously founded ethical basis of a capitalistic vocation can be understood. In particular, it was shown in chapter 2, for example, that although the Protestant Ethic articulates only a suppressive approach to emotions, in subsequent writing Weber incrementally revises his account of the relations between vocation and emotions so that by the time he comes to deliver the vocation lectures he accepts a role for emotions in rational actions that is the reverse of the position he set out in the Protestant Ethic. Similarly, it was shown in chapter 3 that while in the Protestant Ethic there is a failure to distinguish the cultural apparatus necessary for pursuance of money-making as an end in itself on the one hand, and the motivational force that directs a person to such capitalistic drives for profit and keeps them at it, on the other, there is some resolution of such a conflation of factors in, for instance, Economy and Society and also General Economic History.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Weber, Passion and Profits'The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism' in Context, pp. 214 - 225Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2008