M A X WE B E R A N D T H E P R O T E S T A N T E T H I C:

TWIN HISTORIES
 Max Weber and
The Protestant Ethic:
Twin Histories
PETER GHOSH

1
 3
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 This book is for
Helen
Olivia
William
and all those who, in spirit at least, have been with Max Weber at Portree
 Preface

Max Weber is without doubt the most prestigious thinker in the social sciences
today in Western Europe, North America and East Asia. His works are used by
innumerable people in many disciplines, with the result that everyone knows “Max
Weber” in their own particular way. Yet there is no Max Weber, an identifiable
person with a clear intellectual identity, nor a sense of the inner unity and inter-
connection of his ideas. There are two principal reasons for this. First, Weber was
an undoubted polymath (or, as he sometimes put it, dilettante), who committed
himself explicitly to working on an inter- and multidisciplinary basis. At the same
time, he had a ferocious aversion to discussing or reflecting on himself and his
work. Clues to the underlying meaning of what he thought he was doing are
extremely scarce and there is nothing like the sort of guidance one gets in a work
such as J. S. Mill’s Autobiography. We are thus confronted by an immense, plural
œuvre that few persons can survey, while the personal presence behind it remains
the same spectral “Myth of Heidelberg” that it was in Weber’s own lifetime. Yet the
integrity of his personality, of his mind and thought, was self-evident to contem-
poraries. Here then is a great challenge: to put Humpty Dumpty back together
again.
Meanwhile the resources for such a project have been transformed out of all
recognition by the publication of the Max Weber Gesamtausgabe (the collected
edition of his works)—especially in the new millennium, when publication, at first
slow, has become rapid. In 2014 the edition will be three-quarters complete (and
full completion is projected for two to three years after that). The full range of
Weber’s printed œuvre is now clear; the letters for the second half of his life
(1906–20) have been published, as have his most important lecture manuscripts.
Taken as a whole, this is like a vast virgin terrain, which presents a unique
opportunity that will never recur. In particular it is an opportunity for the historian
of ideas, when the vast majority of those who read and use Weber are social
scientists and disciplinary specialists, not historians with their omnivorous com-
mitment to “the past” in its totality. For the way in which the materials are read is at
least as important as the fact of their availability. This is not to say (of course) that
the historian of ideas is a better reader than the economist, social scientist,
theologian or whoever. Nonetheless, the historian of ideas is the only one whose
sole commitment is to understanding Max Weber “as he really was” and in his
totality; s/he is not simultaneously seeking some Weberian input for the benefit of
current thinking in a particular field of study. One cannot complain at the
alternative viewpoint—Weber himself was eminently present-minded; but it
proves time and again to introduce a distorting element, if what concerns us is to
understand the man in his historical actuality.
In this book I propose to meet the challenge Weber poses and to exploit the
opportunity offered by the Gesamtausgabe, by presenting an intellectual biography
viii Preface

framed along strictly historical lines—something that, despite occasional sugges-

tions to the contrary, has not been done before. However, this will not be done on a
conventional narrative principle, taking the reader through Weber’s life and works
more or less in sequence. Instead I wish to use his most famous text, ‘The Protestant
Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism’ (1904–5), as a focal point. In preparing an
edition of this text, it became clear to me that it is not just the familiar work with a
hackneyed “thesis”, that is taught in schools and universities. On the contrary, it is a
kind of compact summa, which exploits the full resources of Weber’s interdiscip-
linary commitments (in law, economics, theology, politics and sociology), and
contains his views on practically all subjects, albeit they are sometimes hermetically
compressed or squirrelled away in footnote-essays. Not for nothing did he describe
it as his Hauptwerk or chef d’œuvre in 1905. So to explain where the ‘Protestant
Ethic’ came from requires a survey of the principal themes in Weber’s career prior
to 1904, as well as an estimate of the great hiatus and additional puzzle presented by
the nervous collapse that preceded its composition. This is Part I of the book.
The ‘Protestant Ethic’ also has a second history, that of charting its legacy for the
rest of Weber’s life (from 1905 to 1920)—and this is Part II. Its one rival as a
summation of his views is ‘Economy and Society’ (1910–20), which might be
described as a macrocosm in contrast to the microcosm of the ‘Protestant Ethic’.
But however different their organizing principles may be, they share a comprehen-
sive ambition. Thus there are deep and strong lines connecting the ‘Protestant
Ethic’ to all the major sociologies within ‘Economy and Society’ on law, religion,
and Herrschaft (rule). Here is a classic terrain for the intellectual historian, and yet it
is a history that has not been told before. Surprising though it may sound, the idea
that there might be connections—or even a need to chart the interrelation—
between Weber’s two most famous works has not been broached. The second
most important project of Weber’s later years, the ‘Economic Ethics of the World
Religions’ (1912–20), was much more obviously an extension of the ‘Protestant
Ethic’ (although even this has been brought into question), and such forward
connections can be multiplied many times over. In short, the intellectual legacy
of the ‘Protestant Ethic’ takes in the principal works of Weber’s later life, and the
text operates as a kind of axial point about which his career revolves. So while the
portrait that follows does not observe systematic completeness, it seeks to compen-
sate for this by enhanced coherence, so as to yield a clearer picture of the thinker as
an individual—someone who is more than just a set of fragments parcelled out
across a range of disciplines. Even so, the intellectual biography of Max Weber and
the history of the ‘Protestant Ethic’ are to a remarkable degree twin histories, and
there is a symbolic aptness in the fact that republication of a revised edition of the
‘Protestant Ethic’ in 1920 was also the moment of Weber’s death.
 Acknowledgements

After the dedicatees and their sparkling offerings of bracing scepticism, time-
management counsel, and Pauline caritas, my first thanks go to Hubert Treiber
and Guenther Roth. Besides reading the text, they have been my constant partners
in scholarly dialogue, offering advice and assistance of every kind. Second is my
indebtedness to MWG: to Wolfgang Schluchter who most generously sent me the
draft of his forthcoming introduction to MWG I/9 (the edition of the 1904–5
‘Protestant Ethic’); and to Edith Hanke, Ursula Bube, and Prof. Rainer Lepsius,
who have been equally and unfailingly generous in giving me documentary assist-
ance. My thanks too to Friedrich Wilhelm Graf and Hans Henrik Bruun for their
documentary assistance. Nearer home, I thank Ross McKibbin, the first reader of
much of the text and for many years a kind of scholarly conscience. Forgive me if
I mention by name only those who have been directly connected with this book,
and not all those who have helped me with Max Weber over the years. They know
who they are and will I trust accept a comprehensive expression of thanks here.
Finally, a general reflection: the community of Weber scholars is genuinely inter-
national, multidisciplinary and collegial, a successor in microcosm to the Republic
of Letters of early modern Europe. It is a privilege to be a member of it.

Plurimi pertransibunt et multiplex erit scientia.

 Contents

Preface vii
Acknowledgements ix
Textual Symbols and Conventions xiii
Four German Words xiv
Abbreviations xv

P A R T I . T H E GE N E S I S O F T H E P R O TES T A N T
ETHIC—AND THE HISTO RY OF M AX WEBER,
C .1884–1 9 05

1. A Problem 3
2. A Situation Report c.1897 12
3. A Narrative 1898–1905 31
4. Capitalism 57
5. Politics and Nationality 76
6. Religion 85
7. Rationality and Law 102
8. A Whole Text? 129

PART II. THE S ECOND HISTORY OF T H E

PRO T ESTA NT ET HIC —A N D O F MA X
WEBER, 1905 –1 9 20
Proem 145

1. 1905–1908: Going into Hibernation 148

I. A narrative 149
II. Capitalism and religion, 1907–1908 162

2. The “Anti-Critical” Essays 175

3. Recalled to Life: From the ‘Protestant Ethic’ to ‘Economy

and Society’ and the World Religions 182

4. War and Peace: 1914–1920 205

5. Religiosity and Modernity (I) 218

I. Religion, politics, Wissenschaft 218
II. The question of continuity 223
III. An argument from quantity 228
xii Contents
IV. Two “sides” 234
V. An expansion of horizons? 241
6. Religiosity and Modernity (II) 247
I. General observations; Asceticism and mysticism 247
II. Anti-magic 257
III. Ethical and salvation religions—and beyond 265
IV. The problem of meaning 277

7. Capitalism and Herrschaft 294

I. More problems with capitalism 297
II. Charisma 305
III. Capitalism, law and bureaucracy, c.1910–1914 317
IV. The impact of war 326
V. A conclusion 335

8. From the Sects to ‘The City’: Max Weber ‘the fairly pure bourgeois’ 339
I. The legacy of 1648 340
II. The sectarian idea, 1884–1905 347
III. ‘The Protestant Sects’, 1907 354
IV. Sects and virtuosi 361
V. The bourgeois idea and the city 372

Envoi: Who was Max Weber? 387

Index 393
 Textual Symbols and Conventions
[XX.1], [XXI.1] ‘Die protestantische Ethik und der „Geist“ des Kapitalismus’ (‘The
Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism’) [PE], Archiv für Sozial-
wissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, XX.1–54 (1904), XXI.1–110.
[i.100]+ Text added to the PE in Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie
[GARS] (Tübingen, 1920), i. 17–206.
[i.1] References to ‘Vorbemerkung’, ‘Die protestantischen Sekten und der
Geist des Kapitalismus . . . ’ in GARS i. 1–16; i. 207–36.
[CS 558] ‘„Kirchen“ und „Sekten“ in Nordamerika’, Die Christliche Welt, 20
(1906), 558–62, 577–83
(I.1) Cross-references to other chapters in this book
[c] Points where further material is expounded in the commentary to my
edition of the PE (forthcoming, OUP)
Arial font Foreign words (usually English) in Weber’s “German”, which are here
untranslated
Ideas/ideas ‘Ideas’ translates the German word Ideen, meaning great, leading, or
world-historical Ideas, in contrast to more humdrum, everyday ‘ideas’
or ‘thoughts’ (Gedanken)
All translation from German is my own, unless otherwise indicated.
Dates attached to Weberian texts are dates of composition, and not
necessarily of publication.
 Four German Words

These few words are central to any discussion of Weberian themes but are
untranslatable by any simple equivalent.
Herrschaft: ‘rule’ is an approximate equivalent. This must always be understood
as ‘legitimate rule’ (not ‘domination’), but even so this is an inadequate transla-
tion because Herrschaft is not merely the act of political governance, but a continu-
ing process of creating mass legitimacy for forms of rule within a social context.
Kultur: a truly untranslatable word, hence its presence in OED. It is not mere
artistic or literary ‘culture’ (Bildung), but the realm of fundamental values, the
entire ethical and ideal make-up of a person or society. As such it offers a kind of
alternative to religion, and its extreme elevation in late-nineteenth-century
German language discourse is the obvious product of a secularizing era. Adjec-
tive: kulturell.
Täufer: radical sectarians in religion who, in the eyes of Weber and others, made
up a continuous tradition running from the Anabaptists of the early German
Reformation through to the English Independents and Quakers of the seven-
teenth century. ‘Baptists’ might seem an obvious translation, but the broadly
conceived movement of the Täufer is not to be confused with the specific sect of
English Baptists (Baptisten), while Quakers did not believe in any sacrament of
baptism.
Wissenschaft: literally ‘science’ as in the Latin scientia, meaning the totality of
‘organized knowledge’, the corporate undertaking of disciplined ‘learning’ within
a university context. This is in contrast to the vague English word ‘science’,
which if it has a precise meaning suggests only ‘natural science’ and empirical
certainty. Wissenschaft remains a significant part of German identity to this day.
 Abbreviations
Abriß Abriß der universal Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte
[1919–20]
ADB Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie, ed. R. von Liliencron
et al., 56 vols (Leipzig, 1875–1912)
AfGS Archiv für soziale Gesetzgebung und Statistik
AfSS Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik
‘Agrarverhältnisse’1–3 ‘Agrarverhältnisse im Altertum’, 18971, 18982, 19093
‘Antikritisches’ ‘Antikritisches zum „Geist“ des Kapitalismus’, AfSS 30
(1910), 176–202
Asketischer Protestantismus Asketischer Protestantismus und der ,Geist‘ des modernen
Kapitalismus, ed. Wolfgang Schluchter and Friedrich
Wilhelm Graf (Tübingen, 2005)

‘Bemerkungen’ ‘Bemerkungen zu den vorstehenden „Replik” ’, AfSS 26

(1908), 275–83
Briefe Max Weber Gesamtausgabe, Abteilung II Briefe

CS ‘ “Churches” and “Sects” in North America’ (‘„Kirchen“

und „Sekten“ in Nordamerika’, Die Christliche Welt, 20
(1906), 558–62, 577–83)

Dreijmanis, Vollständige Schriften John Dreijmanis (ed.), Max Webers vollständige Schrif-
ten zu Akademischen und politischen Berufen (Bremen,
2010)

‘Einteilung des Gesamtwerkes’ Grundriss der Sozialökonomik Abt. I (Tübingen, 1914),

X–XIII. Frequently reproduced in facsimile e.g. MWG
II/820–3. In adjusted format: MWG I/24.168–73)

Freiburg Inaugural Der Nationalstaat und die Volkswirtschaftspolitik. Aka-

demische Antrittsrede (Freiburg, 1895)

GARS Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie (Tübingen,

1920–1)
GASS Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Soziologie und Sozialpolitik, ed.
Marianne Weber (Tübingen, 1924)
Grundriss Grundriss zu den Vorlesungen über Allgemeine („theore-
tische“) National-ökonomie [1898]
GdSÖ Grundriss der Sozialökonomik (Tübingen, 1914–)
GSG Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt a.M., 1989–)

Historian Peter Ghosh, A Historian Reads Max Weber (Wies-

baden, 2008)
HZ Historische Zeitschrift
xvi Abbreviations
Jugendbriefe Jugendbriefe, ed. Marianne Weber (Tübingen [1936])

KGA Ernst Troeltsch Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. Friedrich

Wilhelm Graf et al. (Berlin and New York, 1998–)
Kritiken und Antikritiken Die protestantische Ethik II. Kritiken und Antikritiken,
ed. J. Winckelmann (Gütersloh, 1978)
‘Kritische Bemerkungen’ ‘Kritische Bemerkungen zu den vorstehenden „Kri-
tische Beiträgen” ’, AfSS 25 (1907), 243–9
‘Kritische Studien’ ‘Kritische Studien auf dem Gebiet der kulturwis-
senschaftlichen Logik’ (1906)
KZSS Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie

Lebensbild Marianne Weber, Max Weber. Ein Lebensbild [1926]

(Munich, 1989)
Lenger, Sombart Friedrich Lenger, Werner Sombart 1863–1941. Eine
Biographie (Munich, 1994)

Max Weber zum Gedächtnis Max Weber zum Gedächtnis, ed. J. Winckelmann and
R. König, Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsy-
chologie, Sonderheft 7 (1963)
MK Werner Sombart, Der moderne Kapitalismus (Leipzig,
1902)
MWG Max Weber Gesamtausgabe, ed. Horst Baier et al. (Mohr
[Siebeck] Tübingen, 1984–)
MWS Max Weber Studies

Nachlaß Max Weber Unpublished letters from the Geheimes Staatsarchiv,

Berlin- Dahlem, GStA PK, VI. HA Nachlaß Max
Weber
NDB Neue deutsche Biographie (Berlin, 1953–) hrsg. von der
Historischen Kommission bei der Bayerischen Akade-
mie der Wissenschaften

»Objektivität« ‘Die „Objektivität“ sozialwissenschaftlicher und sozial-

politischer Erkenntnis’ (1904)

Parlament und Regierung Parlament und Regierung im neugeordneten Deutschland

PE ‘The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism’
(‘Die protestantische Ethik und der „Geist“ des Kapi-
talismus‘)
PJb Preußische Jahrbücher
PRE Realencyklopädie für protestantische Theologie und Kirche,
ed. A. Hauck (Leipzig, 1896–19133)
‘Protestantisches Christentum’ Ernst Troeltsch, ‘Protestantisches Christentum und
Kirche in der Neuzeit’, in P. Hinneberg (ed.), Die
Kultur der Gegenwart, Teil I, Abt. IV, Die christliche
Religion (Berlin and Leipzig, 1906), 253–458
 Abbreviations xvii
PS ‘The Protestant Sects and the Spirit of Capitalism’ (‘Die
protestantischen Sekten und der Geist des Kapitalis-
mus’, GARS i. 207–36)

Radkau, Max Weber Joachim Radkau, Max Weber: Die Leidenschaft des Den-
kens (Munich and Vienna, 2005)
RGG Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart, ed.
F. M. Schiele et al. (Tübingen, 1908–13)
Roth, Familiengeschichte Guenther Roth, Max Webers deutsch-englische Familien-
geschichte 1800–1950 (Tübingen, 2001)
‘The Rural Community’ ‘Max Weber on “The Rural Community” A Critical
Edition of the English Text’, ed. P. Ghosh, History of
European Ideas, 31 (2005), 327–66

‘Schlusswort’ ‘Anti-kritisches Schlusswort zum „Geist des Kapitalis-

mus” ’, AfSS 31 (1910), 554–99
Schmollers Jb Jahrbuch für Gesetzgebung, Verwaltung und Volks-
wirtschaft
‘Stoffverteilungsplan’ ‘Stoffverteilungsplan’ for the Handbuch der politischen
Ökonomie, May 1910. Fascimile with marginalia in
Johannes Winckelmann, Max Webers hinterlassenes
Hauptwerk (Tübingen, 1986), 150–5. The facsimile
text alone is frequently reprinted (e.g. MWG II/
6.766–74), and is to be preferred to that in MWG
I/24.164–73.
‘Soziallehren’ Ernst Troeltsch, ‘Die Soziallehren der christlichen
Kirchen’, AfSS 26–30 (1908–10)
Soziallehren Ernst Troeltsch, Die Soziallehren der christlichen Kirchen
und Gruppen (Tübingen, 1912)
Sociology of Herrschaft* Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Herrschaft MWG I/22–4,
ed. E. Hanke (Tübingen, 2005)
Sociology of Law* ‘Die Entwicklungsbedingung des Rechts’, in Wirtschaft
und Gesellschaft. Recht MWG I/22–3, eds W. Gephart
and S. Hermes (Tübingen, 2010)
Sociology of Religion* Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Religiöse Gemeinschaften
MWG I/22-2, ed. Hans G. Kippenberg (Tübingen,
2001)

* Note. I retain the conventional titles for these texts that make up the bulk of the pre-war drafts of
‘Economy and Society’, since they are transparent and readily understood. They are not purely
historical, but nor are they entirely artificial, since from 1913–14 on Weber was employing titles of
precisely this kind. I have therefore ignored the different titles coined by MWG (Religiöse
Gemeinschaften, Die Entwicklungsbedingungen des Rechts), which arise primarily from the structure
and needs of that edition. These are at least as artificial as the established alternatives; where they are
different, they are less transparent; and in one case, Religiöse Gemeinschaften, the new title is
demonstrably misleading, since the surviving text of the Sociology of Religion contains no
discussion of religious sects, the form of ‘religious community’ of most interest and importance to
Weber.
xviii Abbreviations
‘Vorbemerkung’ ‘Vorbemerkung’ (1919–20), GARS i. 1–16; literally
‘Preliminary Remarks’; translated by Talcott Parsons
as ‘Author’s Introduction’

WL Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre, ed.

J. Winckelmann (Tübingen, 19683); WL 1–359 is
identical with the 1st edn (1922), and 1–474 with the
2nd edn (1951)
WuG ‘Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft’ [1919–20] in Grundriss
der Sozialökonomik, III. Abteilung, 1. Lieferung [pp. x,
180] (Tübingen, 1921)
 PART I

THE G ENESIS OF THE

PROTESTANT ETHIC—AND
T H E H I S T O R Y O F M A X WE B E R ,
c . 1 8 8 4– 1 9 0 5
 1
A Problem

The central problem of Max Weber’s intellectual biography is practically the same
as that of the genesis of ‘The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism’ (PE )
and its emergence as if from nowhere. The five years from March 1898 to April
1903, when he was aged between 34 and 39, mark out an immense hiatus in his
life, framed at one end by the onset of nervous collapse and at the other by the
abandonment of the salary and duties of his university chair (though not his
professorial title). For the first four of these years there was no intellectual
production at all; between April 1902 and July 1903 Weber wrote just two
book reviews and what proved to be the first part of an essay pairing (‘Roscher
and Knies’).1 But after this painfully slow resumption he became, if not prolific,
fecund, and from late 1903 onwards works that we now value as great master-
pieces began to issue from his pen, even if the sense of nervous strain never went
away. Within the essayistic œuvre of the years 1903–9 the PE was the undoubted
centrepiece: in Weber’s own words, it was his ‘Hauptarbeit’ or principal work at
this time.2 Here was what Marianne Weber called ‘the new phase of production’,
one that she supposed was of a ‘completely different character’ from his previous
work.3 In fact Weber had begun two new streams of work. Besides the PE, a
substantive historical statement about the nature of modernity, there was a series
of essays on questions of method in history and social science. The essay on ‘The
“Objectivity” of Knowledge in Social Science’, also from 1904, is a parallel
moment of blazing intellectual ambition and assertion, as Weber settles his
theoretical account with the immense burden imposed by encyclopaedic know-
ledge of the past. This was followed by the second and major half of ‘Roscher and
Knies’ (1905–6), which laid down the foundations of what we now know as the
sociology of Verstehen (social science based on the attempt to understand the
conduct of individuals as in some degree meaningful), even if in a literary sense
this was much less successful. But if one were to ask where these unprecedented
works and ideas had come from, then from that day to this there has been no
direct answer to this question, and the only rational prediction is that there never
will be. This is not to say that future archival work will make no difference to our
understanding. A good deal of our knowledge of what Weber was up to depends
upon stray trifles of information; there is still some combing of sources to be done

1 WL 1–42. 2 Weber to Rickert, 14.6.04, Nachlaß Max Weber 30/4 Bl. 94.
3 Lebensbild, 272.
4 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

and who knows what may turn up.4 But what we shall not find is a direct
statement by Weber outlining his intellectual trajectory or major purposes in
life, because autobiographical reflection of this kind was something he refused to
indulge. There is, for example, no equivalent in his work to Marx’s 1859 Preface
to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, with its brief sketch of the
evolution of his thought—yet no one would describe Marx as self-indulgent in
this respect.
Weber’s detestation of the confessional mode was absolute. Like the Puritans, he
shunned “idle talk”, and their ‘command to keep silent’ was one he passed on to his
students as a maxim of conduct [XXI.77 & n. 7].5 On the rare occasions when he
might have wished to be more forthcoming, he found he could not. When his
youngest sister suffered a double bereavement during the Great War, he wanted to
help her, but was driven to this admission: ‘It must be said that I will probably
always remain a more closed and perhaps lonely person than it may seem [out-
wardly], and not easily accessible: this was something nature did not grant me.’6
The very category of the ‘personal ’ [XX.30] was for him a suspect one. In the
modern world what was ‘personal’ should remain private, a realm standing outside
the cool sobriety of rational social interaction; in the public arena, it took on a
‘vegetative meaning’, laden with ‘irrationalities’ of a degradingly emotional and
sentimental variety [cf. XXI.14 n. 21].7 In the academic sphere such thinking led to
a doctrine of near complete self-effacement. Indeed effacement was the best, and
only proper, outlet for the ‘personality’, a concept that in Weber’s view was, or
ought to be, the very antithesis of the merely “personal” and ostentatious.8 As he
told the all too showy Werner Sombart: ‘You want to write “personal” books. I am
convinced that personal character (of which you certainly have a good deal) always
comes to the surface when it is unintended, but only then, when it hides behind the
book and its objective character, and this is what all the great masters have done
from behind their works.’9 So when in his mid-fifties Weber launched an attack on

4 We must await publication of the relevant correspondence volumes in MWG for a tolerably

comprehensive record of Weber’s life prior to 1906. However, publication of the principal lecture
manuscripts from the 1890s has removed one of the most important areas of documentary uncertainty
for this period. Another possible source may lie in the notes of any reading he did in the years 1901–3,
and MWG I/9 will cast light on this.
5 Karl Loewenstein, ‘Persönliche Erinnerungen an Max Weber’, in Gedächtnisschrift der Ludwigs-

Maximilians-Universität München zur 100: Wierderkehr seines Geburtstags (Berlin, 1964), 27–38, here
35. Loewenstein thought that Weber failed to keep his own command, citing as evidence his combative
wartime political engagement. Yet the wartime writings contain frequent exhortations to silence
(MWG I/15.165–6, 244, 374, 433, 593), and Weber’s actual silence amidst the jingoism of
1914–15 is one of the most important acts of his life: below II.4. In fact Loewenstein mistakes
Weber’s command for silence on matters personal as a command for silence on contentious subjects.
6 To Lili Schäfer, 27.9.15, Briefe. First Lili’s husband died, then her brother Karl, and she later

committed suicide. Compare identical statements from thirty years before: to Fritz Baumgarten,
19.1.79, to Helene Weber, 3/7.5.84, Jugendbriefe, 21, 114.
7 ‘Kritische Studien I’ [1906], WL 227. There are obvious echoes of Hegel here, and an equally

obvious contrast to the J. S. Mill of On Liberty.

8 ‘Knies und das Irrationalitätsproblem’ [1905–6], WL 46 n. 1, 132; cf. Friedrich Meinecke,

‘Erwiderung’, HZ 77 (1896), 263–4.

9 To Sombart, 16.7.08, Briefe.
 A Problem 5

the false cult of academic “personality”, he meant every word he said. Not only was
an academic author’s work necessarily superseded by the work of those who came
after, but the true servant of a necessarily impersonal academic science or Wissen-
schaft ‘wanted to be superseded and to become obsolete’.10 Anyone who did not
share this assumption simply did not understand the academic vocation. In the
words of Marianne Weber (who admired but could not altogether share his
viewpoint), a ‘sovereign composure full of self-denial regarding his own personal
fate was part of his being’11—an assessment that recalls the ‘ideal of “reserve”’ and
‘self-mastery’ that Weber admired in the Puritans [XXI.29 & n. 82]. So it is that a
deep and deliberate silence lies at the heart of our researches—whether into the
intellectual biography of the man or the genesis of a major text such as the PE.
In this enquiry there has been no pathfinder. The only intellectual estimate of
Weber by a contemporary that went any further than obituary tribute lay in the
successive profiles by Karl Jaspers. However, these are snapshots only, and despite
their undoubted value Jaspers was no impartial expositor but was explicitly advan-
cing his own intellectual concerns: ‘One honours a great man by making his works
one’s own’.12 At first sight this absence of reflection seems odd, for there was no
want of contemporary appreciation of Weber’s gifts. However, even if we set aside
the handicap imposed by his self-concealment, there were obvious reasons for this
deficiency, which were frequently noted. One was the simple physical dispersion of
his work. Apart from two early dissertations required for academic promotion, he
wrote no books, and so his œuvre was ‘all fragments . . . hiding in journals, archives,
newspapers’. This was a reflection of something more fundamental and, so far as
intellectual appreciation was concerned, quite as forbidding. Weber understood
that academic specialization was both indispensable and the greatest single threat to
the collective enterprise of Wissenschaft, the pursuit of a unified body of knowledge,
and he fought a lifelong battle against it. Hence (as Jaspers observed) it was ‘not
appropriate for this great man to be claimed for a . . . single discipline’. On the
contrary: ‘One could, depending on the occasion, think that everything was his true
profession or vocation [Beruf ].’13 However, none of Weber’s contemporaries could
accept his commitment to inter- and multidisciplinary enquiry unless it was

10 ‘Science as a Vocation’ [1917/19], MWG I/17.85. Even Goethe was reprimanded for diverting

attention away from intellectual and cultural production into fashioning his life as an artwork (84).
11 ‘Vorwort’ (October 1920), GARS iii. vii; for an earlier expression of this view, cf. Marianne to

Helene Weber, 10.12.01, Bestand Max Weber-Schäfer, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Ana 446.
12 Karl Jaspers, Max Weber: Rede bei der . . . Trauerfeier [1920] (Tübingen, 1926), 3; cf. Max Weber:

Deutsches Wesen im politischen Denken, im Forschen und Philosophieren (Oldenburg: Gerhard Stalling,
1932). Besides being very short (seventy pages), the latter was a most untimely production in 1932.
Hence it was published obscurely and was little read before 1945.—Among modern work, Joachim
Radkau, Max Weber (Munich and Vienna, 2005), is a riotous gallimaufry, delightful in its way, but not
an intellectual biography: see my review ‘Life and Work’, TLS, 19 June 2009, 9. Fritz Ringer published
a book under the title Max Weber: An Intellectual Biography (Chicago, 2004), but the subtitle is a
pretence. The recent biographies by Jürgen Kaube, Max Weber: Ein Leben zwischen den Epochen
(Berlin, 2014), and Dirk Kaesler, Max Weber: Preuße–Denker–Muttersohn (Munich, 2014), are very
much “complete” in their focus, taking in both Weber’s life and works, and the difference between my
aims and theirs will be clear.
13 Jaspers, Max Weber: Rede, 4, 3, 21 resp.; cf. ‘Science as a Vocation’ [1917/19], MWG I/17.80–4.
6 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

surmounted by a single master discipline—and here the philosopher Jaspers was no

exception. So in their eyes Weber’s work remained that of a ‘fragmentarian’, even
though such a judgement epitomized the very state of specialized disintegration
that he opposed.14 While there was no want of detailed engagement with the
seminal fragments of that work after 1920, the identity of the mind behind them
disappeared, leaving only ‘a huge field strewn with blocks of lava, after a terrific
volcanic eruption’—and this has been the overriding history of Weberian tradition
and reception ever since.15
But what, then, of Marianne Weber, whose services to the perpetuation of her
husband’s name and work are indisputable? After Weber himself, Marianne was the
person with the best chance of knowing what he was up to, at least in the literal
sense of usually being physically present alongside him until 1918, while our debt
to her in assembling his fragmentary, essayistic œuvre in book form is inestimable.
Yet we cannot rely on her as an interpreter of Weber’s ideas, none of which she
dared to engage with during his lifetime, and hardly thereafter. Her Life Portrait
(Lebensbild, 1926) of Weber was precisely that: a portrait of his life, not his mind.
In her own words, it was ‘außerwissenschaftlich’: it stood ‘outside the academic
sphere’, and should rather be read as a ‘popular book’.16 However, regardless of this
winning modesty, she had tenacious prejudices of her own, and her apparently
authoritative and unforced assumptions would give rise to a number of fundamen-
tal misconceptions about the contours of Max’s life and work as a whole. So the
implicit reliance that almost all commentators have placed on Marianne hitherto,
must be abandoned. The Life Portrait will always be the first of posthumous
biographical sources on Max Weber; but the idea that it is ‘reliable as a rule’ in
what it says about his thought is untenable.17
The Webers’ marriage was one of shared assumptions about intellectual devel-
opment, personal autonomy and gender equality. Max Weber was explicit that the
ideal marriage for a man was to ‘a woman equal in worth or status’,18 but equality

14 Jaspers, Max Weber: Rede, 15. Although Jaspers claimed to find unity in the fact of Weber’s life,

his Existenz, he still broke it down into three components: the politician, the scholar or researcher, and
the philosophic embodiment of Existenz, as in the title of his 1932 book. Below II.6.iv.
15 Moritz Bonn, Wandering Scholar (London, 1949), 66.—For an avowedly plural, even

pointilliste, portrait of aspects of Weberian reception, Joshua Derman, Max Weber in Politics and
Social Thought (Cambridge, 2012).
16 Marianne Weber to Oskar Siebeck, 22.10.25, cit. Edith Hanke, ‘ “Max Webers Schreibtisch ist

nun mein Altar”. Marianne Weber und das geistige Erbe ihres Mannes’, in Karl-Ludwig Ay and Knut
Borchardt (eds), Das Faszinosum Max Weber (Konstanz, 2006), 29–51, here 45. The only sections in
the Lebensbild devoted to exposition of Weber’s intellectual work (chs 10, 20 }II) were added at a late
stage—the subject could hardly be omitted entirely—but even so their modest aims are explicit, since
both are addressed to the academic ‘layman’ (Lebensbild, 318, 687). They are undoubtedly the dullest
parts of an otherwise fascinating book. The only piece Marianne ever wrote about Weber in a formally
academic context was a brief introductory survey in a lecture series on Gründer der Soziologie (Jena,
1932), 141–58. This, however, adds nothing to the Lebensbild and has deservedly languished in
obscurity.
17 Wolfgang Schluchter, Religion und Lebensführung (Frankfurt, 1988), ii. 561.—Surprisingly

Bärbel Meurer has nothing to say on this subject: cf. Marianne Weber: Leben und Werk (Tübingen,
2010), 478–500.
18 To Walter Jellinek, 30.12.13, Briefe.
 A Problem 7

did not imply or require identity of view. On the contrary: it signified autonomy
and allowed for difference. At their silver wedding celebration in September 1918,
Marianne thanked Max, quite precisely, for ‘having placed her beside him in full
freedom, and allowing her to develop according to her own law.’19 The most salient
difference between them was that, whereas Weber was religiously “unmusical”,
Marianne was at heart ‘a pious being’ (ein frommer Mensch) like her mother-in-law
and surrogate mother, Helene Weber.20 Furthermore, although there was a pre-
sumption of equality in principle, there was evident inequality in fact. Marianne
was both a ‘high-minded comrade’ and a ‘child’,21 who married Max, above all, to
gain access to the precious goods of intellect that were the basis of personal
autonomy. Yet these were goods that he already had in immense, even fabulous,
quantities and she did not. Her only higher education had been two and half years
at a boarding school in Hannover. This placed its chief emphasis on the traditional
female accomplishments of music, dancing, and foreign languages, and these,
because they were traditional, she seems to have discounted.22 So while he was
unstintingly generous in promoting her higher education (down to 1907), this
could only be a one-way transfer.
This was bound to have consequences for the way in which she approached his
work, both before and after his death in 1920. Weber’s creative work represented
the very apex of the inequality between husband and wife. In the early years of
their marriage, besides his supervision of her two major pieces of academic work,
which served as informal equivalents to the theses submitted for doctoral pro-
motion and post-doctoral habilitation, it gave her access to his work in the
capacity of ‘copying secretary or calculating machine’ (for agrarian statistics).23
He was still using her as a copyist when drafting the first part of the essay on
‘Roscher and Knies’ in late 1902—a carryover from the first years of marriage and
from the close community enforced upon them when on their travels in Italy in
the two previous years—but ‘Roscher’ was the end of the road: ‘he [did] not like

19 Lebensbild, 628; cf. 241 for the working of this idea in the 1890s.
20 Resp. Weber to Ferdinand Tönnies, 19.2.09, Briefe; Else Jaffé, ‘Marianne Weber: Zu ihrem 80.
Geburtstag’ [1950], in Bärbel Meurer (ed.), Marianne Weber: Beiträge zu Werk und Person (Tübingen,
2004), 266. Marianne’s religiosity is a fundamental point but one that, apart from brief reportage of
incidents from later life, her biographer evades so far as possible: Meurer, Marianne Weber, 510,
551–3, 555. Lebensbild, 20–1, 105, gives quite a good idea of her views as of 1926, where piety is far
more important than specific tenets of belief.
21 Max to Marianne Weber, n.d. [? end 1892], pr. Lebensbild, 190.
22 Marianne Weber, Lebenserinnerungen (Bremen, 1948), 43–8. One should not underestimate the

“accomplishments”, but even the valuable things Marianne was taught seem to have left little mark on
her. For example, much time was devoted to teaching music, which took in Wagner and visits to the
opera: Meurer, Marianne Weber, 34. On the face of it, this might have been of some relevance to
the future wife of Max Weber, yet it was not she but Mina Tobler who was Max Weber’s principal
female companion in his musical explorations after 1910.
23 Max to Marianne Weber, 13.8.98, cit. MWG III/5.35 n. 81; cf. ‘Die deutschen Landarbeiter’

[1894], MWG I/4.313, 317. Marianne’s equivalent to a doctoral promotion thesis was Fichte’s
Sozialismus (Tübingen, 1900); her “habilitation” was Mutter und Ehefrau in der Rechtsentwicklung
(Tübingen, 1907). 1907 was thus the crucial point at which her education-within-marriage ended and
she attained full autonomy. Thereafter she was able to live more and more independently of Max,
intellectually and physically.
8 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

to say’ what he was doing; she made mistakes when trying to decipher his
‘cuneiform script’; and in any case it was a chore that got in the way of her
work.24 Thereafter what she knew about his work, and the occasional copying
she was still asked to do, were absolutely at his discretion, and, in the case of
projects that were not yet completed, it normally suited him to say nothing. His
‘work desk . . . was taboo’.25
For example, it was not until after Weber’s death that she first confronted the
manuscripts of ‘Economy and Society’—previously all she knew was what she had
gathered from listening to selected portions in the lecture hall, like any other
student. Yet given the intellectual centrality they enjoyed in his mind in the decade
after 1910, this is an immense lacuna. Without underestimating the scale of
Marianne’s intellectual achievements, she always lacked self-confidence in an
academic context. After her education under Max’s tutelage was completed, she
did not pursue an academic path but that of the public policy activist, and it was
predictable she should decide that she could not cope with this extraordinary
manuscript bequest on her own. Within a fortnight of Weber’s death she had
called in ‘a young scholar’, Dr Melchior Palyi, as a co-worker in her editorial
labours, simply because he had been attending Weber’s last, post-doctoral “Doz-
entenseminar” and possessed the formal academic qualifications that she lacked. Yet
his personal knowledge of Weber was as nothing compared to hers.26 Equally
surprising is the fact that she seems to have been entirely unaware of the short series
of perhaps four or five talks on the ‘Economic Ethics of the World Religions’ that
Weber gave to friends in 1913—talks that supplied the new comparative setting
whereby the PE was recalled to life after being set aside in 1907–8. Yet were they
not given at home, and should she not have known about them? No doubt there is
a simple explanation of this oddity. Perhaps she was away at the time? Perhaps (and
this seems the most likely case) the arrangements for their delivery were so informal
that she overlooked their significance? But in any event the facts of his silence and
her ignorance are confirmed.27 In the case of the PE, the most she could say about

24 Resp. Marianne to Helene Weber, 20.10.02, Lebensbild, 272 (cf. Radkau, Max Weber, 284);

same to same, 29.12.02, pr. Radkau, Max Weber, 182.

25 Marianne Weber memo. [post-June 1920], pr. Radkau, Max Weber, 181. Marianne’s desire to

tidy up Max’s horrible chaos of papers was a bone of marital contention; but though she occasionally
braved his wrath and did so (e.g. Max Weber to Siebeck, 3.7.14, Briefe), this did not mean she actually
read or inspected the papers being tidied. Again, she certainly handled some of the manuscripts of
‘Economy and Society’ within their physical containers (folders, holders), as well as attending lectures
culled from it (e.g. Lebensbild, 617–18); but she had no intellectual conception of the project’s shape or
composition. When, after Weber’s death, Marianne consciously made the writing desk and indeed the
workroom or ‘cell’ (Arbeitsklause (Lebensbild, 681)) into a shrine or ‘altar’, this was an echo of their
formerly unapproachable quality: Lebenserinnerungen (Bremen, 1948), 115; cf. 116, 133–4.
26 Marianne Weber to Siebeck Verlag, 30.6.20, pr. W. Schluchter, ‘Max Webers Beitrag zum

“Grundriss der Sozialökonomik” ’, KZSS 50 (1998), 329 n. 5; cf. G. Hübinger, ‘Editorischer Bericht’,
MWG III/7.50. Marianne received a well-deserved honorary doctorate at Heidelberg in 1926 on the
strength of the Lebensbild.
27 We only know of these lectures through Weber—‘Einleitung’, WEWR, AfSS 41 (1915), 1 n. 1—and

Georg Lukács: to Weber [mid-December 1915], Briefwechsel 1902–1917, ed. Éva Karádi and Éva
Fekete (Stuttgart, 1982). Cf. Lebensbild, 561, where Marianne simply borrows from Weber’s note.
Otherwise her vagueness on this subject is of a very high order: the studies of comparative religion were
 A Problem 9

it in 1926, after the diligent assembly of an extensive body of Weber’s correspond-

ence, was this: ‘It was in 1903, presumably in the second half of the year . . . that he
began what was until then his most famous piece of writing.’28 At the time
Marianne had been quite unable to see the point of Weber writing essays at the
helm of a learned journal, the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft, because of a deter-
minedly conventional idea of the way academics should operate. In her eyes journal
work, with the PE at its centre, was ‘after all only a surrogate’.29 What she wanted
for Max was an orthodox professorial career and the big books that, according to
her conventional view, would bring him fame. He, it appears, called her a ‘silly
goose’,30 for though the writing of books would indeed bring her a degree of fame,
the ‘big book’ was a genre that Weber himself despised, and one that the article
format of the PE explicitly contradicted [XXI.110 n. 86].
Now the problems that the PE poses are not unique. Between 1909 and 1914
Weber’s academic publications, aside from the stenographic records of conference
speeches, fall almost to zero once more.31 In this period by far his most important
and sustained work was on the drafts of ‘Economy and Society’. But though all his
extant correspondence for the period is now in print, a systematic intellectual
reconstruction of the genesis of ‘Economy and Society’ prior to 1914 has not
been attempted hitherto (an astounding index of the primitive state of historical
enquiry into Max Weber); and even when it is—as we shall see below (II.3)—it
necessarily remains somewhat speculative owing to the absence of precise informa-
tion.32 So there was always secrecy and silence on Weber’s part—and yet the PE is

begun ‘around 1911’ and finished ‘around 1913’: ibid. 346, 350. A plausible scenario is that Lukács
felt he could drop into the Weber house at any time; that Weber perpetually carried on a great deal of
apparently informal academic conversation, of which Marianne was only obliquely aware; and that,
since the original texts of the ‘Economic Ethics’ were very short, Weber’s ‘lectures’ appeared analogous
to the long monologues that he produced spontaneously on other occasions, as, for example, the
Sunday jours. For an indication of how this might have worked: Weber to Lukács, 29.1.13, Briefe.
28 Lebensbild, 340, emphasis added. Meurer, Marianne Weber, adds nothing. Marianne was allowed

to fair copy Weber’s self-analysis of his nervous illness because this was a subject to which she had been
privy all along, and it was a document no copyist could be shown: ‘Bericht über pathologische
Veranlagung, Entstehen, Verlauf und Art der Krankheit’ (1907); cf. Briefe, II/5.393; Radkau, Max
Weber, 297.
29 Marianne to Helene Weber, 26.8.03, pr. Meurer, Marianne Weber, 169.
30 Marianne to Helene Weber, 6.12.01, pr. Radkau, Max Weber, 255; cf. same to same, 10.12.05,

pr. ibid. 183.—Emile Durkheim reviewed Marianne’s book Ehefrau und Mutter in der
Rechtsentwicklung (Tübingen, 1907), but knew nothing of the PE owing to its article format: Marcel
Fournier, Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) (Paris, 2007), 741.
31 Between completing ‘Zur Psychophysik der industriellen Arbeit’ in June 1909 (to Siebeck,

23.5.09, Briefe) and the outbreak of war in August 1914, Weber’s only important written publication
was the essay ‘Ueber einige Kategorien verstehenden Soziologie’ in 1913 (WL 427–74), designed as a
trailer for ‘Economy and Society’. His contribution to the ‘Äußerungen zur Werturteilsdiskussion im
Ausschuß des Vereins für Sozialpolitik’ (1913) was a semi-public but still unpublished statement: Der
Werturteilsstreit, ed. H. H. Nau (Marburg, 1996), 147–86.
32 Wolfgang Schluchter’s history of ‘Economy and Society’ down to 1914 in MWG I/24.1–131 is a

valuable restatement of his long-established (though now contested) views, but still this is
Werkgeschichte only: the history of a text, not an examination of the text within Max Weber’s
intellectual history.
10 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

an aggravated case. Though Weber would remain a lifelong ‘neurasthenic’,33 there

was no later repetition of the complete nervous collapse of the years after 1898, and
so no comparable extraneous hiatus. Again, whatever the deficiencies of our
knowledge regarding ‘Economy and Society’, intellectual precedents for its central
concepts do exist in one form or another, and this is a trail that goes back to the PE
above all (as we shall see). By contrast there is so much in the PE for which there
appears to be no precedent. Hence the central problem of Max Weber’s intellectual
biography: how to connect the first thirty-four years of his life to 1898 with the last
seventeen from 1903? And in the first instance, this problem is almost identical
with the difficulties confronting any attempt to understand the genesis of the PE.
Adequate historical explanation of the text is the kernel of an adequate history of
the man.
When confronted by such questions we should not try to dispel mystery where
we cannot. To omit, or to try to overcome, what Paul Celan called ‘the resistance of
the incommunicable’ is a betrayal of reality which, in Weber’s view, was symp-
tomatic only of a debased ‘intellectualism’.34 Keeping silent is the true record of his
intentions, and in any case the greatest element of mystery—or in another per-
spective, the “free” element at work—lies in the extraordinary nature of his
intellectual creativity when composing the PE. The idea that historical method
consists only in the assembly of sufficient number of bibliographical precedents, so
that ‘there is scarcely a position of Max Weber’s which has not already been
formulated in the . . . thought of his day’, is wholly misconceived.35 This is not
simply because there was some irrational quantum of “originality” present in his
work, though Weber did not deny that “scientific” or academic (wissenschaftlich)
work was ultimately indebted to such an unanalysable residuum.36 The central
point is that, in his academic as in his social relations, he was like the Calvinist he
portrays in the PE: a man dominated by his ‘sense of the unprecedented inner
isolation of the single individual’ [XXI.11]. In this isolation he, analogous to the
Calvinist, construed political and intellectual tradition as carrying ‘a peculiarly
objective and impersonal character’ [XXI.17]. The obverse of this was a vehement
refusal to acknowledge any form of individual or personal dependency. As Jaspers
understood, ‘he never felt, either in his youth or later, that a single person, whether
dead or living, was his leader or hero’.37 So there is no equivalent in his case to the
relationship between Marx and Hegel, let alone that of the younger Mill to
Bentham, and any attempt to posit a seminal authorial influence of this kind is
necessarily false.38 What stands in place of persons is the liberal and public heritage

33 Such was the language of the day. In May 1900 Weber was certified by a Heidelberg doctor as

suffering from ‘severe and persistent neurasthenia’: cit. Radkau, Max Weber, 258.
34 Cf. ‘Zwischenbetrachtung’, AfSS 41 (1915), 414–15.
35 Andreas Anter, Max Webers Theorie des modernen Staates (Berlin, 19962), 233. Curiously Anter

accepts that Weber refused to align himself with intellectual forebears or ‘specific lines of tradition’
(16), but is determined to locate him in this way all the same.
36 e.g. ‘Science as a Vocation’ [1917/19], MWG I/17.81–3.
37 Karl Jaspers, Max Weber: Rede bei der . . . Trauerfeier [1920] (Tübingen, 1926), 25–6.
38 The only study Weber ever wrote that was in any way directed at academic predecessors,

‘Roscher and Knies’ (1903–6), has no element of personality in it. Insofar as there is any attention
 A Problem 11

of rationalism, Wissenschaft, and law: a set of impersonal structures of immense

power, the defining yet constraining ‘steel housing’ [XXI.108] of modern ration-
ality, which Weber would always carry with him, like a modern Atlas. But since
they were impersonal, just how they were communicated by human agents was
relatively inconsequential in his eyes. This, together with an accompanying desire
for complete secrecy until he had worked out his views (though its correlative was a
generous and expansive sharing of his ideas once they were established), is the root
of our documentary and evidential problem. It is a comment on the historical
subject, and not simply an accident produced by the destruction of data.39
In tackling this problem our strategy will be (first) to delimit the realm of the
“free” and unknown as accurately as possible, by examining Weber’s thinking
immediately prior to his flight from university teaching and psychological collapse
c.1898 (I.2). Next, to trace the documentary or “external” history of the PE forward
from this notional point of origin to its publication in 1904–5 (I.3). Then we must
consider its “inner” genesis: that is, the ways in which, despite all evidential lacunae,
Weber developed his ideas according to the ordinary laws of historical causation
and ‘vulgar psychology’40—just as they would operate (and just as he supposed
them to operate) in all human conduct (I.4–8). Here we shall strive to understand
the mind of Max Weber, without, however, confining ourselves to the Weberian
categories of understanding (Verstehen). Instead as historians we shall be ruthless in
using every form of evidence available to us—not just intellectual and theoretical
statements—so as to achieve the utmost inwardness and sympathy with the mind
of Max Weber as it gave expression to intellectual and theoretical statements. At the
same time we shall not forget that inwardness and sympathy are qualities he would
have mistrusted; and that he would have regarded the tracing of his intellectual
biography as an absurd elevation of personality and distraction from the collective,
impersonal pursuit or service of Wissenschaft (academic ‘science’ and ‘knowledge’).
But then the present enquiry is not a work of piety. It proceeds instead from the
quite distinct assumptions that govern the study of intellectual history,41 and from
that component in the Kultur of the twenty-first century Occident that places a
value on the study of canonical authors. Our aim is only personal in that qualified
sense, and the external data of Weber’s life are only important insofar as they serve
the better understanding of Weberian ideas.42 If such an approach is conceived as
standing in a relation of avowed difference to its subject, it is one that Weber could
have acknowledged and understood, even if he could not have agreed with it.
Mere piety he would have rejected with contempt.

to persons it focusses on ‘their weaknesses’ (WL 1–145, here 1), but the essays should really be
understood through their starkly conceptual subtitle ‘The Logical Problems of Historical Economics’.
39 All the same data have been lost, and this is deeply regrettable: Hanke, ‘ “Max Webers

Schreibtisch ist nun mein Altar” ’, in Das Faszinosum Max Weber, 46–8.
40 See, e.g., ‘Marginal Utility Theory and “the Fundamental Law of Psychophysics” ’ [1908], WL

391; cf. 388–96.

41 For shorthand on this subject: Historian, ch. 1; below I.7, n. 35.
42 However, this is a proposition that needs to be justified, most obviously in regard to Weber’s

political activities.
 2
A Situation Report c.1897

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. The full extent of his
personal reflections on the composition of the PE runs to just two sentences,
neither of which appears in the final text published in 1920. The second is
marginally more informative than the first: ‘My work on these matters, which
I presented in part in lecture form fully 12 years ago, was not first caused by Sombart’s
“[Modern] Capitalism”’, published in 1902.1 These words were written in De-
cember 1909, so ‘12 years ago’ takes us back to 1897,2 and (most obviously) to the
historical sections of the university lecture course that Weber gave in the years
1894–8 on ‘General (“Theoretical”) Economics’—which, as its ‘general’ title
suggests, is the nearest thing we have to a comprehensive statement of his views
during his brief period as a professor of economics. Here is a point of documentary
surety, since both a published outline (Grundriss) and Weber’s manuscript notes for
these lectures survive. We cannot date the notes within the years 1894–8,3 but it
may be that, in directing our attention to 1897, Weber had in mind the point at
which he arrived in Heidelberg, where he began to lecture in the summer semester
of 1897. The time allotted to the lectures on ‘General Economics’ was expanded to
its maximum of six hours weekly, and it is then that the course took on its final and
most complete form.
‘General Economics’ was the undoubted centrepiece of Weber’s frustrated and
strangulated output from these years, but there are other, lesser sources that cast
light on his views. Materials for the “early history of the PE” can be found in the
short lecture course Weber gave on the ‘History of Economics’ as a discipline, when
he was still at Freiburg, and the occasional course in ‘Practical Economics’. Besides
university lectures, there are press reports for a number of public lectures, and of
these one in particular stands out: the course of four lectures Weber gave to a lay,
commercial audience at Mannheim in November–December 1897, under the
typically Weberian title ‘The Course of Economic Development’. How after all
could one convey economics in a popular form except by considering the whole
gamut of a very broadly defined “economic” history from beginning to end? As

1 ‘Antikritisches’, 177; emphasis added. Cf. [XX.19 n. 1]: ‘the perspectives in the following studies

[the PE] go back to much earlier works’ than Sombart’s.

2 Cf. Weber to Rickert, 11.12.09, Briefe.
3 W. J. Mommsen, ‘Einleitung’, ‘Editorischer Bericht’, ‘Allgemeine (“theoretische”) Nationalökonomie’,

MWG III/1.49, 166.

 A Situation Report c.1897 13

such they offer a fair copy and synopsis of the historical scheme in the university
lectures.4 Overall, the virtue of these various lecture series is that they supply us
with quite a sharply focused idea of the size of the intellectual leap performed by
Weber in the PE. To be sure, this clarity is in some sense artificial. The lectures will
not tell us all that was in his mind before intellectual silence descended in the years
1898–1902. And, as he says with some bitterness, ‘only the econ[omic] perspective
concerns us’, a perspective that (somewhat unusually for a professor of economics)
he held was overrated;5 but still they mark out with some precision the positions to
which he was prepared to commit himself publicly prior to the divide marked out
by his illness. So we begin with a snapshot of where he stood c.1897.
It is clear, first of all, that almost all the components of the conception of
‘modern capitalism’ presented to us in the PE were in place by 1897–8. ‘The
historical position of modern capitalism’ was the title of the fourth of his Mann-
heim lectures—preceding Werner Sombart’s Modern Capitalism by five years.6
Consider, for example, a set of elementary characteristics that appear in the lectures
and then again in the PE. The importance of ‘markets’ and exchange transactions,
the very kernel of all capitalist behaviour (e.g. 461)7 [cf. XX.18]; the wisdom of
paying high wages to the modern capitalist labour force (529, 589) [cf. XX.22]; the
need for that labour force to be ‘skilled ’, educated, and ‘qualified’ (524, 527) [cf.
XX.1–5]; the need to conserve fossil fuels (225, 532) [cf. XXI.108]; the identity of
central socio-economic phenomena as necessarily ‘mass phenomena’, because it was
only by such mass replication that ‘individual phenomena’ could take on social
significance (e.g. 494) [cf. XX.20]; ‘the division between [the] household & acquisi-
tive economy’ (489) [XXI.98 n. 64], i.e. the separation between personal and
impersonal spheres that for Weber was a necessary condition of the “impersonal”
behaviour that lay at the root of the modern economy [cf. XXI.17]; the identifi-
cation of putting-out and domestic industry as the first stage in the rise of modern
industrial organization, ‘e.g. in the textile trade’ (505) [cf. XX.26–9]; a consistent
emphasis on the ‘intensive division of labour’ and the concomitant ‘progress of the
formation of industrial occupations [Berufe]’, ‘specialization of free occupations’,
‘strength of the arrangement of occupations, division according to occupations’
(461, 472, 473; cf. 300–1), thereby identifying the divided and specialized struc-
ture of economy and society as essentially one and the same—all these ideas are
clearly in evidence in the lectures.
The long hours available for university lectures mean that they are fuller in detail
than the public ones. Nonetheless, within the university context Weber felt obliged to
‘give “responsible” formulations’ of problems—an accompaniment to his well-known

4 ‘Der Gang der wirthschaftlichen Entwicklung’, MWG I/4.846–52. Hereafter ‘Mannheim

Lectures’.
5 ‘Allgemeine . . . Nationalökonomie’, MWG III/1.277; cf. 364; Freiburg Inaugural [1895], MWG

I/4.565.
6 MWG I/4.850; cf. Werner Sombart, Der moderne Kapitalismus (Leipzig, 1902).
7 References in this form are to MWG III/1, principally ‘Allgemeine (“theoretische”)

Nationalökonomie’.
14 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

principle that there should be no politics in the lecture hall8—and here is the probable
explanation why the modish vocabulary of ‘capitalism’ is not used as a heading, though
it is plainly in evidence (474, 506, 515, 525). In the public lectures, by contrast, the
conventional academic designation of the ‘national economy’ (a unit defined by its size
and political status) has been superseded by ‘modern capitalism’ (a qualitative defin-
ition), although this is a question of titles only, and Weber makes it clear to his
university students that the area embraced by theoretical “national economics” is
‘international’ (195). Still, at Mannheim the all-embracing nature of Weber’s con-
ception of capitalism is vividly captured. He is not interested in Marx’s materially
defined ‘capitalist mode of production’ alone, but in the creation of ‘modern,
Occidental man’ as a whole,9 just as in the PE capitalism is a holistic construct that
embraces the entirety of ‘modern Kultur’ [e.g. XXI.107]. (It should be stressed that
neither the term ‘capitalism’ nor, more obviously, Weber’s totalizing conception
thereof, is Marxist.)10 But such radical and general conceptions can also be found
within the “text” of the university lectures if not in the headings, as, for example, when
Weber speaks of the ‘Götterdämmerung of capitalism’, referring to the decline of a
“free” Cobdenite, international capitalism in favour of rigid national and imperialistic
blocs, a process that he takes to be currently under way (525; cf. 405, 545).
The inner kernel of this holistic ‘capitalism’ is the psychological make-up of the
individual: what in 1904 would be called the “spirit” of capitalism was in the 1890s
lectures ‘the capitalist character’ (506). So we cannot separate psychological from
external phenomena in the features just listed. For example, when Weber repeat-
edly emphasizes ‘markets’, this is not just an economic commonplace, but suggests
the characteristically Weberian idea of the market as an area of human conduct and
ratiocination, of disciplined capitalist calculation subject to fierce penalties [XX.18,
29]. Again, persistent emphases on the Beruf—a term that in its meaning runs all
the way from the dry listing of one’s census ‘occupation’ to a religious ‘vocation’ or
‘calling’—do not simply represent an external, Smithian description of the division
of labour, though that is an undoubted point of origin (300) [XX.42–3]. They also
imply that Weber has the ‘vocational Idea’ of the PE in view [XXI.1], where the
narrowing of horizons implied by specialization and a total psychological or ethical
commitment to one’s ‘job’ within that division run in parallel. Note too the
identification of a positive component within the medieval city economy, where
‘Progress’ is reflected in a ‘different valuation of labour—[as an] ethically normal task
of life’. What was the ‘cause’ of this change (the lecture notes ask)? The answer is
the cessation of a ‘purely pol. perspective’ on life (685). Here is another foundation
of the idea of the Beruf: the ascription of an ethical quality to labour that in its
totality constitutes a life-sphere standing outside politics. Hence its purposive and
ethical description as a ‘task’ (Aufgabe), which directly anticipates the PE [XX.36],
even if in his lectures Weber is tracing its historical origins to an earlier period than
that of the PE (the late medieval city economy) and without any overtly religious

8 To Mina Tobler, [26.7.19], Briefe; cf. ‘Science as a Vocation’ [1917/19], MWG I/17.95.
9 MWG I/4.851. 10 Historian, 89.
 A Situation Report c.1897 15

source. Certainly the underlying theme noted here, the emergence of modern
economic activity as ‘ethically normal’, propelled by a separate logic standing
outside political imperatives and instruments—what Weber would later describe
as the rationally grounded capitalism specific to the Occident as distinct from a
ubiquitous ‘political’ or ‘adventure’ capitalism—is a direct precursor of much later
thinking [i.4–8], [i.42–3,53–4]+.
The lectures also cover more pervasive psychological themes such as the import-
ance of fixity and reliability to modern economic behaviour, which would later be
highlighted as necessary foundations of rational conduct. Hence ‘fixed rules f[or]
labour in domestic industry’ (490), and ‘a certain volume of the exchange of goods
as the ‘indispens[able] constant factor’ underlying the ‘econ[omic] existence’ of the
national economy (503; cf. 404). One component of fixity was ‘the need for steady
[stetige] prices’ (531), an anticipation of the ‘fixed [festen] prices’ that Weber would
later single out as of peculiar importance to rational economic behaviour in the
case of the Quakers [PS i.219]. Another central theme is the distinction between
‘system[atic] exchange with the aim of making a profit’ and the far more limited pre-
capitalist goal of ‘coverage of one’s own needs’ (484; cf. 485, 525). The transition
between these two states and the concomitant rise of income from capital is only ‘to
be established historically’ (307), and this same distinction (and same emphasis on
historical method) is taken as an elementary starting point for discussion in the PE
[XX.25, 53]. Similarly reference to the entrepreneur who is ‘working without
tradition’ (504) is an anticipation of the psychological contrast between ‘tradition-
alist’ behaviour and its capitalist opposite [XX.20–29], and anticipation becomes
literal equivalence when the lectures uphold the view that, for workers to maximize
their wages when working on a piece-rate basis, ‘the breaking down of traditional-
ism [is] necessary’ (589) [cf. XX.20–24]. Consider more simply the dictum:
‘Tradition upset by money economy’ (498), which is practically a synopsis of the
PE at this point. Finally there is this elementary yet emphatic statement: ‘man
begins to calculate’ (489). At first sight this may seem bland and unoriginal,
especially if calculation is measured in purely external terms, such as the introduc-
tion of double-entry book-keeping [i.5]. Yet seen as a central statement about
capitalist psychology, as a trait immediately adjacent to Weberian conceptions
of rationality, emphasis on the ‘propensity to calculate’ (Rechenhaftigkeit) [XXI.77
n. 7],11 or ‘calculating calculation’ (rechnerisches Kalkül ) [XX.34], takes us to the
heart of the capitalist “spirit” in the PE.
What then do the lectures have to say about ‘rational’ behaviour and rationality?
In the great mass of notes for the lectures on ‘General Economics’, there are just
two uses of the German word rational. The first carries the meaning that Weber
would later call ‘materially rational’ (‘the purely rational distribution’ of goods),

11 At [XX.34] Weber signals a debt to Sombart as regards Rechenhaftigkeit, but, as usual, the debt is

more verbal than substantive. Thus, for Sombart, Rechenhaftigkeit is not merely ‘calculating’ but
‘speculative’ (MK i. 198; cf. 207, 395), which points up a fundamental gap between Weber and
Sombart regarding the capitalist “spirit”, since for Weber any speculative, i.e. random, gambling
element is anathema.
16 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

whereas formal rationality is the focus of his later innovation (608). The second
refers to ‘rational’ economic theory in the era of mercantilism (692), which as it
stands looks like a borrowing from the established terminology of ‘rationalism’ as
applied to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and on the previous page has
also been described as ‘rationelle theory’, which—unlike rational—is another
established and traditional usage. So there is nothing here that immediately suggests
rationality or rationalism in the revolutionary new form expounded in the PE: as
formal and value-free.12 Besides the rarity of such usages and their indecisive
nature, note here the complete silence regarding ‘rationalism’. This is linguistically
important because, on the one hand, it was a long-established and available word
(connoting eighteenth-century thought, usually in a somewhat pejorative or mech-
anical sense), yet Weber was not afraid to take it over wholesale in the PE, since in
his eyes formally and technically rational twentieth-century behaviour did indeed
have some affinity with the mechanical stereotype, with the difference that he
perceived it as formidable and not to be dismissed as outdated or contemptible
[XX.34–5]. So outwardly at least Weber’s focus in the 1890s lies with capitalism
and not with rationality, and there are obvious reasons for this. ‘Capitalism’, even in
its expansive Weberian definition, carries a specific identity, which at least starts
with the economy—it is ‘the economic way of viewing things’13—and works
outward from there; by contrast rationality represents a set of formal procedures
that can in principle apply to all areas of human conduct [XX.35]. Again, while
thinking about capitalism can at most trace itself back to Marx, rationality, and
more obviously rationalism, however radically Weber may rework it, has a quite
different and far deeper historical lineage, deriving from the immensely powerful
European tradition of ideas concerning secular reason going back to the seven-
teenth century and symbolized in the PE by Descartes and Bacon [XXI.28, 53 n.
108]. In short, the epoch-making consideration of rationality that appears in the PE
is a textual novelty, and one that by 1907–8 will supersede capitalism as a leading
conceptual focus.
Yet Weber’s 1890s conception of ‘capitalism’ as an idea almost as comprehensive
as his future conception of ‘rational’ behaviour may well be the beginning of that
later history. As the example of capitalist calculation makes clear, he always saw a
powerful rational component in capitalist behaviour. Given his personal secrecy
coupled with the disciplinary constraint under which he was operating—being
limited to ‘the economic perspective’—we cannot be certain as to the cause of his
silence about what is rational. Were these ideas unavailable to him at this date, or
was this a deliberate withholding of ideas he possessed? One small sign in the 1890s
lectures that Weber was looking to attach a more universal label to economic
activity may come when he invokes ‘Reflection [Reflexion] instead of accommoda-
tion with the traditional conditions of life. Reflection [is] nothing natural’ (525; cf.
528). Elsewhere it appears as the crucial commencement of the ‘separation of the
individual from the group’, leading in the long term to modern individualism (679)

12 Other lectures from the 1890s tell a similar story: MWG III/4–5.
13 Freiburg Inaugural [1895], MWG I/4.561.
 A Situation Report c.1897 17

[cf. XXI.12]. Another pointer is his use of the term rationell, which, although an old
word and one he discards in 1904–5 in favour of rational,14 is attached to some
recognizably post-1900 Weberian ideas in the lectures: thus the operation of
abstract economic theory is described as ‘wholly rationell ’ (245), and so is the
capitalist enterprise (580, 652).15 Rationell here signifies rational. Furthermore,
besides Weber’s interest in man as a calculator, another of the intellectual founda-
tions of Weberian rationality is firmly in view in the lectures, when the ‘freedom’ of
economic agents is described as ‘formal’. The property owner’s disposition over his
goods is ‘formally free’ unless there is political intervention; economic exchange is
‘formally voluntary’; while modern socialist man is also ‘formally free’, even if he
remains governed and constrained by impersonal and historical forces such as
technical evolution (533, 302, 701). These references are legal in the first instance,
because law is the source of Weber’s thinking here. It is clear that his conception of
modern Occidental law as distinguished by formal perfection rather than any
particular substantive content is already in place, and thinking along these lines
points forward to the insistent reference to the ‘formal legality’ and ‘formal
correctness’ of the Puritans in the PE [XXI.71,105; cf. 90, 102]. Now if ‘formal
freedom’ is taken simply as a legal statement, there can be no surprise here, since
Weber’s legal education and formation were complete by 1894. However, formal-
ism is not just a legal idea for Weber. It lies at the root of his conception of a “value-
free” rationality or disenchanted rationalism, which, in sharp contrast to the ideal
reason (Vernunft) of classical German liberalism, is not normative. Instead, like law,
it is defined by its formal, i.e. technical and logical, quality, with the result that one
could ‘“rationalize” life according to the most varied ultimate perspectives and in
very different directions’ [XX.35]—a statement of enormous importance for Max
Weber and Western thought generally. So the ‘formal’ discourse of the lectures,
along with other indications, strongly suggests that rationality was an idea “in
waiting” in the 1890s, even if Weber was almost certainly impeded intellectually by
his inability to work out his ideas publicly at that time.
To return to capitalism, note finally that perhaps the most elementary similarity
between the perspective of the lecture courses of the 1890s and the later Weber is
the assumption that capitalism, though capable of being construed in terms of
‘abstract theory’ in accordance with the contemporary presuppositions of margin-
alist economics, must also be viewed within the context of a long-term historical
evolution (122).16 Yet here we shall find that, whatever their deficiencies relative to
his later work, the perspective of the early lectures is in some respects broader than
that of the PE because, as was conventional for all the historicist German academics
of this generation—in any faculty—reference to ‘history’ assumed reference to the
whole of recorded Occidental history, from biblical and classical antiquity onwards.
This made for a sharp contrast with the essayistic PE and its primary focus on the

14 Except where it is used in a consciously traditional sense: for example, in relation to agricultural

production or as signifying self-interest and nothing more [XXI.103].

15 On the latter, see II.7, p. 303. 16 Cf. Historian, ch. 9.
18 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

‘fateful epoch of the seventeenth century’, notwithstanding gross and obvious

breaches of this limit [XXI.36].
A salient example of the lectures’ broad perspective lies in the explicit assumption
that ‘the era of capital and interest on capital had arrived’ as early as the thirteenth
to fifteenth centuries, with the flowering of the medieval city economy.17 Promo-
tion of the “city economy” as a conceptual category may be traced to Karl Bücher’s
famous lecture ‘The Rise of the National Economy’ (1893); but, though Weber
entertained a high regard for Bücher for this reason—on the strength of it he
commissioned him in 1909–10 to write the opening article of the future Grundriss
der Sozialökonomik on ‘Periods and Stages of the Economy’18—their specific
conceptions of the city economy were different. For Bücher the trading operations
of the city economy were in principle based on direct exchange; thus it remained
‘opposed to capital’, and a ‘capitalist economy’ arose only within the later, more
extended, national economy.19 For Weber by contrast, capitalism originated in the
city, leading to an eminently modern polarity between ‘entrepreneur and capital’
(on the one side) and the ‘journeyman stratum’ (on the other), where the latter was
‘the precursor of today’s labouring class’.20 However, this division was to be viewed
as a ‘conflict of interests’ rather than of fundamental values or Kultur, since the
conflict between capital and labour was secondary to the primary reality of the city:
the common identity of the ‘bourg[eois] classes’ (498–9) [cf. XX.32]. Here were
the historical origins of the bourgeois ‘economic power’ that Weber profiled at
Freiburg in 1895.21 Now it is much the greatest omission, even retrogression, in
the PE that, in the desire to highlight a religious argument from the seventeenth
century, Weber should seem to relegate the pre-Reformation origins of capitalism
to a matter of certain legal ‘forms’ [XX.54], where these forms are not even
specified.22 There is a substantial (if somewhat inscrutable) apology on this account
at the end of the text when Weber admits that the PE has been too ‘one-sided’; that
he has neglected ‘the totality of the conditions determining Kultur in society,
especially the economic ones’ that preceded ascetic Protestantism [XXI.110]. This
means the city economy, and, when Weber began to retreat (as he did) from the
titular capitalist focus of the PE in 1907–8, one of the ways in which he did so was
to return to an enhanced emphasis on ‘the specifically Occidental bourgeois “spirit”’
[PS i.214]. This caused him to reopen the history of the medieval city in 1907–8,
which would lead to the extended study of ‘The City’ (c.1908), and the proposal to
include ‘a sketch of the historical evolution of the European bourgeoisie in
antiquity and the middle ages’ alongside his studies of the PE and the world
religions in 1919.23 So, while the PE said much that was not in the lectures of
the 1890s, the balance of gain and loss was not all one way. As the dust settled after
the revolutionary innovations of 1904–5, Weber realized the need to reconcile the

17 Mannheim lectures, MWG I/4.848. 18 ‘Stoffverteilungsplan’ (1910), Bk I.i.

19 Die Entstehung der Volkswirtschaft (Tübingen, 18982), 118; cf. 86–107.
20 This quotation only: MWG I/4.847. 21 MWG I/4.566.
22 Cf. ‘Agriculture in Antiquity’ [1907–8], MWG I/6.711.
23 [Advertisement, 1919], MWG I/19.29. Below II.8.
 A Situation Report c.1897 19

new matrix of ideas with elements from his earlier thinking—above all the com-
prehensive perspective on the past with which he had grown up. The modern
orthodoxy that this expansion of view was a novelty after 1910 is quite mistaken.24
The creation of a great bourgeois and capitalist economic power such as the city
then raised the question of its relations with the other ‘great world powers’ of the
medieval world: that is, ‘the Emperor’, hence political rulers in general, and the
‘Church’ (498). From this it is clear that the Weberian history of capitalism needs to
be understood in relation to two extraneous ‘powers’, politics and religion, and not
just one. The mere mention of religion at this strategic juncture shows that a central
strand in the problematic of the PE—the need to analyse the relationship between
religion and capitalism—is clearly present in Weber’s mind. On the other hand, the
ample coverage of politics in the lectures draws our attention to their exclusion
from the PE. The focus of the latter on religion and capitalism sidelines not only the
political impact of radical religiosity, where, however, a wealth of notes and
fragments tells us much of what Weber thinks,25 but also the more conventional
history of the relationship between the secular state and nascent capitalism. Of
course, the omission of the political history of capitalism in 1904–5 was a formal
exclusion only. It did not mean that Weber wished to discard or discount it. It
would feature prominently (for example) within the pre-war Sociology of Herrschaft
in ‘Economy and Society’,26 while its most recent history would have been covered
in Book II of the Grundriss der Sozialökonomik, where Weber elected in 1910 to
cover the subject of ‘The modern state and capitalism’ (although the entry was
never written).27 So he was simply being candid when he stated in the PE that he
had sought ‘only’ to establish the causal contribution of religion to the shaping of
‘our modern material Kultur’, and that this omitted an immense amount, ‘espe-
cially purely political processes’ [XX.53–4]. Still the political history previously
outlined at Mannheim and in the ‘General Economics’ lectures is an important
supplement to the PE: the mercantilist alliance between capitalism and the state;
the dissolution of that alliance in the nineteenth-century era of the ‘world econ-
omy’; and the incipient reassertion of political power over a free market capitalism
liberated from the state that Weber anticipated in the near future (528–35).28 In
the history of Kultur, religion, including the relation of religion to politics, was
always of more interest and importance to Weber than politics per se; but, even so,
complete understanding of the PE requires attention to both these contexts.
For example, it seems that secular political history provided one of the founda-
tions for the detailed design of the PE, whereby Weber used components of the

24 Below II.5.
25 [XXI.14 n.21, 37 n. 74, 42 n. 78, 46 n. 83, 65 n. 130, 70–2, 77 n. 7, 83 n. 27, 93, 95 n. 54b].
26 See esp. MWG I/22–4.418–53. In the post-1918 scheme it looks as if it would have been

transferred to the ‘Staatssoziologie’: MWG III/7.66, }}5, 6, 13, 14.

27 ‘Stoffverteilungsplan’ (May 1910), Bk II, II.2; cf. ‘Einteilung des Gesamtwerkes’ ( June 1914),

Bk II, III. See also Weber to Heinrich Sieveking, 29.6.13, Briefe.

28 Mannheim lectures, MWG I/4.848–51.
20 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

known political history of capitalism to create a previously unknown religious

history in its image. The lectures (503, 515–18)29 insist that the support of the
mercantilist state had been crucial to the genesis of early capitalism. This then gave
rise to a form of reasoning outlined in the PE: ‘Just as [capitalism] once burst the
old forms of medieval economic regulation only in alliance with the developing
power of the modern state, the same might—as we may say provisionally—also
have been the case in regard to its connections with religious powers’ [XX.32].30
Once this suggestion is noticed, some common features between Weber’s secular
political and his newly created religious history emerge: the formative impact of
ascetic Protestantism on capitalism described in the PE occurs in the ‘fateful epoch
of the seventeenth century’ [XXI.36], which is simultaneously the first century of
classical mercantilism and the epoch of the formative politico-religious encounters
that were of such importance to Weber: the Synod of Dort in the Netherlands; the
English Civil Wars, Commonwealth and Protectorate; and (on the negative side)
the Thirty Years War in Germany. Indeed it is not too much to say that Oliver
Cromwell is a living presence throughout the seventeenth-century portions of the
text, whether in propria persona or through that of Richard Baxter, for, if we ask
how and why Weber selected Baxter as his single most prominent religious source,
then his historical location amidst the Puritan Revolution of mid-seventeenth-
century England is an obvious, if inevitably speculative, answer.31 Again, the
subsequent political movement from mercantilism to free trade, whereby nascent
capitalism was freed from close ties to the state, is paralleled in the religious sphere
by the capitalist ethic’s ‘switch’ [Umschlag] away from its original root in ascetic
Protestantism into the secular and autonomous utilitarianism of the eighteenth
century, devoid of a ‘religious root’ [XXI.75 n. 3, 104, 106]. However, the
parallelism is only of the elementary kind that Weber suggests; and it would
be futile to try to develop it more systematically. Large differences between the
histories of religion and politics remain, and Weber never supposed that there was
any principle in affinity between these spheres—quite the reverse. The political
state, unlike the ‘religious root’ supplied by Christian theology, does not die out.
On the contrary, as noted, Weber envisages an increase in state power in future, as
an essentially international capitalism reverts to much closer political control within
a renewed neo-mercantilism.
What then does the “early” Weber have to say about the other ‘world power’:
religion and the ‘Church’? Alongside rationality, the second great absentee from the
lectures is Protestantism; a fortiori ascetic Protestantism. Yet reference to religion,
and the links between religion and capitalism, is not entirely wanting. We have a
sense of Weber marking out a vacancy that he would like to fill, if only he were
freed from the narrow departmental and specialized constraints imposed by having

29 Ibid. 849–50.
30 Cf. [XX.24], which refers to religion as ‘a mighty helper, who . . . stood by its [capitalism’s] side at
the time of its emergence’.
31 This is not to overlook the religious and casuistical attractions of Baxter: Historian, 39–44.
 A Situation Report c.1897 21

to lecture on economics, the “spirit” of which condemned him to try to get at

‘people’ only by way of a ‘laboriously material detour’.32
What Weber does discuss on a fairly regular basis is the pre-Reformation
church.33 The ‘General Economics’ lectures summarize its position with schematic
clarity (498–9; cf. 684):34
Church: . . . divided interests
politically—ag[ain]st the Emperor—
so for the city
ethically: anti-capitalist
tradition shaken by the money econ[omy]
authority [shaken] by the rule [Herrschaft] of capital
So: ag[ain]st interest & capital
The divided nature of the Church’s interests (supportive of the capitalist city, but
ethically anti-capitalist) explains why its position on usury and capital as described
in the PE is the Laodicean one of ‘accommodation’ [XX.33]—neither decisively for
or against—and the general position set out here is one to which Weber would
always adhere. The fullest later exposition of his views on the pre-Reformation
Church, the treatment of hierocracy in the Sociology of Herrschaft (c.1911–14),
also picks up on the divided forces at work within the pre-Reformation Church.
This differs in specifics, focusing on the tension between the official charisma of the
papacy and its rational bureaucracy relative to the quite different ascetic rationalism of
the monastic orders, but the conclusion is much the same: that the Catholic Church
was far less of a “unified Kultur” than any of its comparators amongst the world
religions, which in both cases suggests a significant new departure is in the offing.35
Yet ordinarily the early lecture presentations posit the breakdown of the relationship
between the Catholic Church and nascent capitalism at the end of the medieval
period, but go no further. The history does not continue forward into the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries to see what resolution, if any, is achieved; instead attention
is transposed onto the more conventional political context for capitalism. Now, to a
contemporary Lutheran audience, the idea that the Reformation marked a funda-
mental caesura in this way would surely have seemed unremarkable. However, we
can see that a space has been marked out for the post-Reformation history of the
relationship between religion and capitalism, even if, as yet, Weber refuses to enter
upon it.

32 To Carl Neumann, 14.3.98, Nachlaß Max Weber 30/4 Bl. 72.

33 Treatment of this subject is essentially the same at Mannheim and in the university, and we must
not suppose that failure to fulfil an apparent promise to devote an entire lecture to this theme at
Mannheim has deprived us of anything essential: MWG I/4.848.
34 Cf. Mannheim lectures, MWG I/4.848, 851–2.
35 MWG I/22–4.649. This is a striking example of how radically Weber’s view of religious history

differed from the Christian–idealist conception of Ernst Troeltsch, regardless of the mutual intellectual
respect and collaboration they sustained in the years 1905–12. For Troeltsch the distinguishing feature
of the medieval church was that it was a unity, the integrated precursor to a distintegrated secular
Kultur: e.g.‘Protestantisches Christentum’ [1905–6], 256.
22 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

When he does go forward in time, the presentation is occasional, even fleeting,

and the intellectual basis narrower. Because of his training in the history of
commercial law and his connection with Levin Goldschmidt, in whose place he
lectured in Berlin between 1892 and 1894,36 Weber was well schooled in the
history of those subjects where the Protestant (as well as Catholic) churches
pronounced on economic matters: this meant the history of canon law pronounce-
ments on usury above all, a longstanding and conventional subject. So in the short
lecture course on the ‘History of Economics’ as a science, given just once in 1896,
he discusses the “pre-history” of the discipline, prior to its emergence as ‘mercan-
tilism’ in the seventeenth century, and offers a brief, discussion of the ‘Reformat[ion]
Period ’. Here the contribution made by Lutheran thought to any “progressive”
economic development appears to be either null or negative (685):
Reformers also [rest] on the standpoint of the [medieval] canon lawyers.
Luther—great step backwards.
Ag[ain]st all calculation—Providence
Sermon agst Usury—Fugger
Now the reader of the PE will have no difficulty in construing these remarks. There
too Weber starts from Luther’s affinity with the medieval Catholic tradition of
canon law represented by Thomas Aquinas [XX.41–2]; there too he notes the ‘ever
more thorough-going belief in Providence’ of the later Luther [XX.47], just as he
dismisses Luther’s attack on the Fugger in the Sermon on Usury as ‘peasant distrust
of capital’, and the reverse of forward looking [XX.44 & n. 1].37 When in the
lectures he highlights Luther’s hostility to economic calculation (686), the thinking,
if not the terminology, is the same as the comment in the PE that ‘it is hardly
necessary to point out that Luther cannot be described as having any inner affinity
with the “capitalist spirit”’, since calculation is essential to that spirit [XX.44].
There is, however, nothing in 1896 about the latent positive contribution Luther
makes to the development of the Protestant ethic via the secular conception of the
Beruf or calling—Weber’s only recorded comments from the 1890s focus on the
negative, constraining aspects of the Lutheran Beruf.38 Still this view is also fully
represented in the PE [XX.45–50], and the overall message is the same on each
occasion: that one will not look to Lutheranism for a great modernizing impulse;
even if the more refined distinction the PE makes between Luther (‘the religious
genius’) and a dowdy Lutheranism is predictably missing [XXI.38].
But, while there are pointers to the future here, we should be aware of the
limitation of what Weber was doing in 1896. Weber always insisted that the
conventional insistence on the historical importance of doctrines of usury was
quite mistaken: this was mere ‘doctrine’ or ‘church doctrine’ [XX.48; XXI.65]
without (as in the case of predestination) that broader ethical impact that was so

36 ‘Lehrveranstaltungen . . . 1892–4’, MWG III/1.52–4.

37 This is regardless of Weber’s doubts about the status of the Fugger as representatives of a modern
rationally grounded capitalism) [XX.14–15].
38 e.g. ‘Zur Rechtfertigung Göhres’ [1892], MWG I/4.117.
 A Situation Report c.1897 23

important to him [XXI.2–3]. Thus in 1920 Weber could describe the original PE
as ‘a treatise which nowhere mentions the canonical prohibition on taking interest
(apart from one incidental observation without any connection to the overall
argument)’ [i.56 n. 1]+. This was substantially if not quite literally true, since his
general view was that what was required to establish modern capitalism was a
psychological resource, ‘the capitalist “spirit” as a mass phenomenon’, and ‘not . . .
the supplies of money’ [XX.20, 29] that might have been impeded by usury law.39
Thus his one significant reference to the subject in 1904 was an acceptance of the
self-evident fact ‘that the conception of monetary acquisition as an obligatory end
in itself, as a “calling”, ran contrary to the ethical feeling of entire epochs’ regardless
of the more economically realistic treatment of the subject by fifteenth-century
Catholic theorists [XX.32]. In a word, usury theory told one nothing about the
ethic of an epoch: it was not the case, as was conventionally assumed, that usury law
was holding back capitalism, but that public opinion was much more hostile to
usurious capitalist practices than the relaxed canon lawyers. So, while we can plainly
see the hand of the author of the PE at work in 1896, he is not here offering a
history of the relationship between religion and capitalism; he is only offering a
set of remarks about the doctrinal history of usury, albeit from a novel, critical
standpoint.
A similar limitation attaches to a brief discussion of the ‘reworking of canonist
doctrines’ by Calvin in the lectures on ‘Practical National Economy’. It was a
course he gave about two and a half times (1895, 1897–8, 1898–9, the third time
much interrupted by bad health) and one that in principle he held in low esteem,
because the requirement for practicality implied political engagement and the
compromise of neutral Wissenschaft.40 Drawing on the well-documented position
that Calvin was more relaxed about the regulation of usury than Luther,41 Weber
suggested that this was significant not because it promoted the supply of capital,
but because it was symptomatic of a more positive attitude to economic activity: it
favoured an ‘ethical theory of ec[onomic] meanness’, which ‘corresponded to the
conception of life of the most competent elements of rising capitalism, under which
gaining wealth [was] an ethical vocation’. In summary, there was an ‘unleashing &
ethical sanctioning of the acquisitive drive, of econ[omic] self-interest; on the other
hand, limitation of the pleasure drive’. Now this undoubtedly suggests that there

39 Scholars who write about Weber and usury are usually too committed to their subject to be fully

amenable to this argument: Benjamin Nelson, The Idea of Usury (Chicago, 19692) is a well-known
example; Lutz Kaelber, ‘Max Weber in Usury and Medieval Capitalism’, MWS 4 (2004), 51–75, is
more judicious and scholarly, but still not exempt.
40 I am indebted to Wolfgang Schluchter for drawing this source to my attention, and to Edith

Hanke and Rainer Lepsius of MWG for making Weber’s text available to me: ‘Praktische
Nationalökonomie’, }3 ‘Merkantilismus und Protektionismus’ fo. 46r–v. All lecture quotations in
this and the next paragraph are from this brief text.—For Weber’s view of ‘Practical Economics’ as a
‘nonsense’: to Johann Plenge, 28.12.19, Briefe. This can only have derived from his experience in the
1890s.
41 W. Endemann, Studien in der romanisch-kanonischen Wirtschafts- und Rechtslehre (Berlin,

1874–83), i. 41, who relies on H. Wiskemann, Darstellung der in Deutschland zur Zeit der Reformation
herrschenden nationalökonomischen Ansichten (Leipzig, 1861), 79–86. Both texts were well known to
Weber.
24 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

was a new, religiously based ethical conception, whereby Calvin and urban Prot-
estants had come to terms with rising capitalism in a way that Catholicism and
Lutheranism had been unable to do; but it does not amount to much more than
saying that a vacuum had been created and that it was somehow filled. The premiss,
that there is some alignment between religion and acquisitive economic activity
under Protestantism (and indeed an alternative Catholic one represented by the
unscrupulous but still ascetic and systematic casuistry of the Jesuits) [cf. XXI.86 n.
35], is important; but the way this conceptual hole has been filled in is extremely
sketchy and to a large extent “wrong” when judged by what emerged in 1904–5.
Most obviously the crucial distinction the PE makes between ‘the personal views
of Calvin’ in the sixteenth century—which it relegates—and ‘doctrine of Calvinism’
in the fateful epoch of the seventeenth century is absent [XXI.6 n.5]. The lecture
focus on Calvin minus Calvinism would appear to be corroborated by Weber’s
acceptance of a graduate student in 1898, Maximilian Kamm, who began a
doctoral dissertation on ‘Johannes Calvin as a maker of economic policy’, although
the thesis was not completed, and we know nothing more about Kamm.42 Again,
the territorial focus of the PE is missing in the lectures. Circa 1897 Weber links
Calvin to the ‘Hanseatic towns’, a connection he subsequently repudiated in regard
to Hanseatic Hamburg.43 By 1905 (on the other hand) Calvinism means England
and Holland in the first instance, while ‘Germany remains wholly to one side’ [XXI.6
n. 5]. We can perhaps see vestiges of the 1890s conception at the very opening of
the PE when it points to the affinity between sixteenth-century Protestantism and
‘the majority of rich cities’ in the German Reich [XX.2]. The bibliography for the
PE also suggests that at an early stage of his research Weber was interested in
comparing sixteenth-century French Calvinism to the seventeenth-century Dutch,
English, and North German varieties that monopolize the account given in 1905—
which looks like a half-way house between Jean Calvin, the man, and seventeenth-
century Calvinism.44 But, while these data are of interest in regard to Weber’s
working methods—as showing how the fact that he started from a conceptual
blank did not dictate the final empirical and historical solution—it remains the
case that the position adopted in the 1890s lectures is a discarded preliminary,
overridden by strategic decisions that will follow later. On a point of detail,
consider Weber’s interest in the contemporary ‘th[eory] of the productivity of
low wages’ espoused by the Dutch writer and textile manufacturer Pieter de la
Court (1618–85), which supplies a textual link between the ‘Practical Economics’

42 Hartmut Lehmann, ‘Max Webers Weg vom Kulturprotestantismus zum asketischen

Protestantismus’, in Asketischer Protestantismus, 33 n. 1.

43 ‘Antikritisches’, 184; cf. [i.28 n. 2]+.
44 Note citations of the Bulletin de la Société de l’Histoire du Protestantisme Français, Jean Aymon,

Tous les synodes nationaux des Églises réformées de France (La Haye, 1710) [XX.9 n. 1]; H. M. Baird,
History of the Rise of the Huguenots (1880), Erich Marcks, Coligny (1892), K. G. F. von Polenz,
Geschichte von französischen Calvinismus (1857–69) [XXI.5 n. 4].—Weber was not above publicly
invoking his French (Souchay and Huguenot) bloodline, but this was only a rhetorical and anti-racist
gesture: ‘Zum Vortrag von A. Ploetz’ [1910], GASS 458. Although the Souchays could be traced back
to Huguenot France, their visible presence in Weber’s family history is pre-eminently German or else
English: Roth, Familiengeschichte, chs ii–v, viii.i, etc.
 A Situation Report c.1897 25

course and the PE [cf. XXI.106]. However, whereas in the first case the theory is an
undifferentiated component within the portrait of ‘Calvin’, by 1904 it appears as a
mistaken idea belonging to ‘early Calvinism’ [XX.22], incompatible with a capit-
alist “spirit” that found its constituency in skilled labour that might seek rationally
to maximize its wages as much as in the entrepreneurial stratum. At a fundamental
level, there is a hint in the lectures that the new thinking represents a ‘conception of
life’ (Lebensauffassung), while the idea that making money is an ‘ethical vocation’
certainly looks forward to 1904 [XX.15, 19]. Nonetheless the systematic structure
that Weber would overlay onto the specific foundation of money-making is
missing. The central nexus of ideas in the PE, of the conduct of life (not merely
its conception) systematized towards a rational end, deriving from a proto-rational
asceticism, worked out within a vocational Idea that runs through the whole society
(and not just employers)—all this is missing. Nor of course can there be any
sectarian idea here, even if its bourgeois precursor in the medieval city is in rude
health. What we have instead is a tight, economistic construction, where ethical
restraint appears in the form of material ‘meanness’—something we can still
recognize in 1905 as the ‘compulsion to save’ but which has now acquired an ‘ascetic’
predicate [XXI.101]. Again, the ethical component c.1897–8 is not asceticism but
utilitarian ‘self-interest’ and ‘limitation of . . . pleasure’: that is, the ethical phase that
in 1905 is the ‘heir’ to asceticism after the latter has decayed, but is distinct from it
[XXI.104].
So, while Weber’s brief remarks on Calvin are more than simply occasional, they
are not much more than that. However, a central conceptual component of the new
history of the relationship between religion and capitalism set out in the PE is
abundantly present elsewhere, not least in the ‘General Economics’ course. Weber
identified the underlying cause of the fractured relationship between the Catholic
Church and capital as the ‘impersonality of capitalist rights to rule [over people],
their purely economic character’ (514). Rule (Herrschaft) was no longer exercised by
patriarchal individuals, nor even (in any substantial sense) by factory owners (509);
but rather by the homage that all owed to impersonal capital in an economy that
was highly specialized, with the result that “Everyone takes a return from every-
one”, including the humblest investor in a savings bank (514, 521). Now the
empirical fact of a multiplicity of small capital holders was known and under-
stood;45 what was novel in Weber’s handling was the inference that the pervasive-
ness of capital ownership made it into an impersonal force. Such impersonality was
not merely quantitative and external, like Marx’s ‘big industry’, but a qualitative
phenomenon that was internalized within human relations. This was alien to a
Catholic Church that exercised ‘Personal authority’ through ‘human connections’,
most obviously the power of the priest through the confessional; and the ‘imper-
sonal character of the relationships of rule’ exercised by capital ‘could not be grasped
ethically’ (499; cf. 684)—or at least not according to any traditional Christian (or
Kantian) conception of ethics. As a result Church ‘authority’ was shaken ‘by the rule

45 e.g. E. Bernstein, Die Voraussetzungen des Sozialismus (Stuttgart, 1899), ch. 3 (b).
26 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

of capital ’ (498). This was not just a problem on the eve of the Reformation but
one that affected all personally based religions. Thus excessive reliance on a purely
personal conception of human relations afflicted modern Lutheranism just as much
as pre-Reformation Catholicism, as is clear from Weber’s 1894 critique of Friedrich
Naumann’s attempt to found a new Christian–Social political party that would
confront the challenges of socialism and democracy. Weber sympathized with
Naumann in that he too wanted to establish a modern bourgeois democracy in
preference to a socialist one; but still he was clear that Naumann’s appeal to a
sentimental Lutheran “brotherliness” based on faith in personal connection, like his
desire ‘to grasp the relationship of ruler and ruled in ethical and religious terms’,
was inadequate. Hence this summary conclusion: ‘you still lack the forms . . . with
which to penetrate class conflict by ethical means’ in the impersonal context
produced by the ‘rule of capital’.46
However, this modern, impersonal context did not put an end to the need for an
individual ethic—if by ‘ethic’ we mean a functional prescription for conduct rather
than a code of timeless and universal moral values. On the contrary, as Weber
argued to his audience in Mannheim: ‘Replacement of the natural by the money
economy has created the personal responsibility of the single individual.’47 Because
individuals were no longer located within personally defined relationships of rule,
rank (Stand ), or associated economic organization, they had to rely on themselves,
and themselves alone; and this state of individual self-reliance and self-responsibility
was a universal state of affairs for all living within a capitalist economy. This was the
individualizing correlative to the rise of impersonal capital. So one of the ‘Gen[eral]
ec[onomic] consequences of commercial freedom’ (523) brought about by the transi-
tion to capitalism was the
Nurturing of individualism
Individualism of need provision with the development of the money economy &
breaking away from typical need provision
. . . Premium on maximum of individual capacity to adapt.
Individual struggle for existence
‘each the forger of h[is] own happiness’ (525)
In this situation there was a great vacant space for a new modern ‘ethic’, and the
‘Protestant Ethic’ would be Weber’s answer as to how it had emerged in fact. There
is, for example, a clear analogy between the impersonal rule of invisible capital and
that of Calvin’s ‘deus absconditus’ or hidden god, ‘the despot who disposes arbitrar-
ily’ over the fortunes of men, in accordance with the inscrutable and unchallenge-
able doctrine of predestination [XXI.9 n. 9]. But we need not rely on analogies,
however transparent, since Weber transposes key terms and ideas from the 1890s
lectures directly onto ascetic Protestantism—impersonality above all. One of the
central ascetic denials enacted by seventeenth-century Protestants lay in their

46 Resp. review Was heißt Christlich-Sozial? MWG I/4.352, 357; ‘Die deutschen Landarbeiter’,

MWG I/4.329, 327.

47 MWG I/4.851.
 A Situation Report c.1897 27

emphasis on impersonality: on doing everything for the glory of a transcendent,

inhumane, and in this sense impersonal God, and nothing out of personal consid-
erations, or emotionally driven ‘love of one’s neighbour’ (Nächstenliebe)—to use
the more biblical term from which Naumann’s “brotherliness” (Brüderlichkeit)
derived [XXI.79 n. 16].48 In this way ascetic Protestantism confronted and resolved
the problem sketched out (variously) for the Christian–Socials or the pre-Refor-
mation Church, even if Weber’s ‘Protestant ethic’ is far removed from any ordinary
or contemporary conception of what was ethical, whether it be Naumann’s mod-
ernized Lutheranism, the secularized moralism of the Society for Ethical Kultur
[XX.53], or the “ethical” economics that lay at the heart of the foundation of the
Verein für Sozialpolitik under Schmoller and Brentano in 1872 (568).49 A central
exposition of the new, impersonal ethic of modernity, where the impersonal is also
rational, appears in the PE (as we might expect) at the point where Weber evokes
‘the social character of Reformed Christianity’:
It is just here that the g e n e r a l i s e d [allgemein] idea that the Christian should personally
prove his state of grace through action “for the greater glory of God”, was decisive . . . the
sharp condemnation of the idolatry of created man and of any clinging to p e r s o n a l ties with
men was bound to direct this energy imperceptibly into the path of c o n c r e t e (impersonal)
action. The Christian who took to heart the proving of his state of grace, was working for the aims
of G o d , and these could only be impersonal. In the Puritan, just as in any ascetic ethic, every
p e r s o n a l connection between men which was purely e m o t i o n a l l y based, and so not
r a t i o n a l l y conditioned, fell all too easily under the suspicion of being idolatry of created
man. [XXI.14 n. 21] [i.98 n. 1]+
Here I have presented the PE so as to illustrate both its earlier and later state, and it
can be seen that the later, italicized additions to the text, which could as easily
derive from 1907 or 1919, strenuously reinforce the original thinking of 1905. To
borrow a Weberian phrase, they do not depart from it by a hair’s breadth. Indeed,
the only surprise is that Weber nowhere invokes the idea of impersonality in his
initial exposition of the “spirit” of capitalism, apart from his description of Frank-
lin’s “ethic” (sic) as ‘wholly transcendental and quite irrational’ when measured by
utilitarian standards [XX.16], where the idea of transcendence links it to the
predicament of the Calvinist confronted by an impersonal and transcendent god.
But this leads us into a quite different set of problems: that, however impersonal the
rule of capital might be, Weber suspected that there might still be something
personal and extra-rational in the capitalist “spirit” after all.50
Ascetic Protestantism also espouses an ‘unillusioned and pessimistically tinged
individualism’ [XXI.12; cf. PS i.234–6], in succession to the view espoused in the
lectures that the nascent capitalism of the city and national economies nurtured
‘individualism’ within an impersonal context. The situation of the individual under

48 Calvinism retained the term but gave it a drastically different, ‘impersonal ’ character:

[XXI.16–17].
49 Cf. Freiburg Inaugural [1895], MWG I/4.573. On Schmollerian ethics, Erik Grimmer-Solem,

The Rise of Historical Economics and Social Reform in Germany 1864–1894 (Oxford, 2003), ch. 4.1–4.
50 Below II.7.ii.
28 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

predestination is identical with that occupied by the individual under capitalism:

that of the ‘unprecedented inner isolation of the single individual ’ [XXI.11]. The
individual’s reaction to this situation is also the same: the need to take personal
responsibility for his actions. It is an idea that, besides being part of the elementary
toolkit of late nineteenth-century liberal individualism, must be taken in conjunc-
tion with a distinctive Weberian derivative therefrom: the idea of Bewährung, the
personal, ascetic, and meritocratic, ‘proof ’ of oneself before God and man, an
invented piece of Weberian pseudo-theology that is held to be a dominant impera-
tive of all ascetic Protestant conduct [e.g. XXI.31] [c]. In regard to the plight of the
individual, Weber signals the parallel between the (allegedly) historical situation of
the ascetic Protestant in the seventeenth century and that of modern capitalism at
an early point in the text when he points out that ‘a developed sense of responsi-
bility [is] quite indispensable’ in the modern, high wage economy [XX.23]. Much
later he returns to this theme:
The idea of man’s obligation towards the property entrusted to him, to which he subordin-
ates himself like an obedient steward, or even an “acquisitive machine”, settles on life with all
its chilling gravity: the greater the property becomes, the more burdensome the feeling of
responsibility for it—that is, if the ascetic temper withstands the test—so as to preserve it
undiminished for God’s glory, and to multiply it through unceasing labour. Particular
sources for the genesis of this style of life reach back even to the medieval period, like so
many components of the capitalist spirit, but it only found a consistent ethical foundation in
the ethic of ascetic Protestantism. [XXI.98]
Here, incidentally, is another of Weber’s admissions that the seventeenth-century
focus of the PE is not complete, and that the broader perspective of his earlier work
going ‘back even to the medieval period’ is to be preferred. In this instance he is
thinking of his doctoral dissertation of 1889 on medieval trading companies
[XXI.98 n. 64].51
A final dimension of religiously inspired personal responsibility was its radical
political implication. Speaking in public at Mannheim, Weber bluntly announces
that the ‘personally responsible individual’ created by the capitalist era is ‘an
opponent of authority’.52 The idea is then explained in more soberly analytical
form in the university lectures. His premiss is the decline of the state throughout
Western history, from an initial apex under the classical polis where ‘Everything
outside the oikos [or household was] political ’ to the modern situation where ‘the
state [is] only milit[ary] & polic[ing] organization’ (367). This progressive retreat
creates a space into which religion can insert itself:
Fading away of the Polis, first by conquest ([Roman] autocracy)
[then] individualism
Christianity.53

51 Zur Geschichte der Handelsgesellschaften im Mittelalter (1889), ch. 3.

52 MWG I/4.851.
53 Cf. ‘Die sozialen Gründe des Untergangs der antiken Kultur’ [1896], MWG I/6.126.
 A Situation Report c.1897 29

Here is one of the earliest statements of Weber’s fundamental identification of

religion as a sphere wholly outside politics that, owing to the innate power of
Occidental Christianity, could have uniquely radical political or (more accurately)
anti-political effects—always providing this power was channelled through the
‘individualism’ of ascetic Protestantism and not (for example) the bureaucratic
rationalism of the medieval papacy or the traditionalist conformism of the priest-
hood. The same thinking appears in more developed form in the PE. Formally the
text excludes politics [XX.11], but Weber cannot omit what he sees as the unique
extra- or anti-political incursions that religion can make into the political sphere.
Hence a wealth of references and even disquisitions in the notes, accompanied
by the odd strategic signal “above the line”: the ‘ascetic trait of character . . . was
dangerous to the state because it was anti-authoritarian’ [XXI.93].
Our preliminary conclusion is thus Janus-faced. On the one hand, the concep-
tual continuity between Weber lecturing in 1894–8 and the Weber of the PE is
strong and palpable, in regard both to capitalism generally, and to the need to
explain the religious transition from the personal ethic of the medieval church to
the impersonality of modern capitalism and modern Kultur. The importance of
religion is backed up by a general pronouncement that ‘The economic observation’
of life—and not merely the dogmatic Marxist and ‘materialist’ theory of
history54—is ‘necessarily one-sided’. Max Weber the professor of economics refuses
to be constrained by the limits of his alleged faculty: ‘Man with his own way of
developing his needs is always the carrier of Kultur, including the economy. Not
only economic circ[umstance]s take effect on their development, though they do also,
but [man’s] total conception of his place in the world (esp. religion . . . )’ (365) In
these 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. Yet 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. ‘Predestination’ appears just once
in the Heidelberg lectures—ironically at the very point where Weber was explain-
ing the importance of religion to man’s conception of his place in the world.
However, in this case it is invoked only as an instance of a foolish Marxist claim—
‘predestination = dependency on soc[ial ] conditions’ or the class structure (365)—
and no positive, religious function attaches to it. If this is a reference with any
significance for the future, it is a well-guarded secret.
So if we ask how Weber first came to think about the erudite seventeenth-
century theological and casuistical sources that form the empirical backbone of his
argument, we must leave the relative clarity of the lectures and enter the world of
shadows and suggestions that accompanies so much enquiry into the genesis of
Weberian thought. Perhaps the most obvious route to these English texts for a
German author lies through their reception by German Pietists. Weber himself

54 For the difference between the ‘economic’ and the ‘materialist’ or Marxist perspective:

»Objektivität« [1904], WL 165–7.

30 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

draws our attention to Philipp Jakob Spener’s reading of “English writers” and his
regard for Lewis Bayly and Richard Baxter [XXI.47 nn. 86–7; cf. 67 n.134]—two
of the principal “primary” sources for the PE, one of whom (Bayly or ‘Bailey’)
Weber read in a German edition [XXI.12 n.17]. Another root of his thinking in
1904–5 lies in the sectarian idea, and this trail may also lead to a German source. As
is clear from Weber’s application of the label of Täufer (literally, baptizers) to
groups such as the Quakers, who knew no sacrament of baptism, adult or other-
wise, he sees the sectarian component of seventeenth-century ascetic Protestantism
as descended from the radical religiosity of the original Täufer in the early German
Reformation; and the postulate of such a descent between the German radicals of
the sixteenth century and the English ones of the seventeenth had been made by
Hermann Weingarten as early as 1868.55 But, though this may well be a likely
starting point, it suggests no date or specific path of enquiry. Certainly it would be
unwise to underestimate Weber’s grasp of German Protestant theology, which,
regardless of his candid dislike and marginalizing of Lutheranism, made such a
considerable contribution to the structuring of the detailed argument of the PE.
Consider, for example, a typically casual yet knowing reference to the ‘thought-
categories of Ritschlian theology’ in 1892.56 Now Albrecht Ritschl was the single
most cited modern author in the PE, and inter alia the principal exponent of a
modern conception of the Lutheran Beruf, while Weber is in fact gesturing towards
the Beruf in this remark. All the same, this remains a present-day reference, as does
his more sympathetic appreciation of Hermann Gebhardt’s (anonymously pub-
lished) study of peasant Lutheranism, which dates from about the same time
[XXI.89 n. 44].57 In regard to the seventeenth-century materials that make up
the empirical substance of the PE, there is only silence.
Here then is an elementary calibration of the gap between where Weber stood
c.1897 and in 1904–5. In what follows we shall seek both to refine and to enrich
this picture—in the first instance by observing how he himself traversed this
interval, which marks such a great hiatus in his life.

55 Hermann Weingarten, Die Revolutionskirchen Englands (Leipzig, 1868), 85–6, 89–90, 104–5,

115–16, 209, 367.

56 ‘Zur Rechtfertigung Göhres’ [1892], MWG I/4.115. Weber’s meaning must be deduced from

his reference: Paul Göhre, Drei Monate Fabrikarbeiter (Leipzig, 1891) ch. 8. This canvassed a broad
range of religious solutions to the “social question”, including the hope that, via the efforts of the
Church, industrial workers could be restored to ‘a meaningful, ethically uplifting life-vocation’ (221).
57 Zur bäuerliche Glaubens- und Sittenlehre (Gotha, 1890); see MWG I/4.115, 271.
 3
A Narrative 1898–1905

I
From March 1898 the evidence of Weber’s declining psychological state becomes
unmistakable,1 and he began to fall short in his university duties. However, in the
first instance he cut only his routine lecturing obligations. He preserved for as long
as possible the graduate research seminar, which had been set up at his request only
a year before,2 until more or less complete breakdown set in by New Year 1900.
It was in this interim that a young Jewish student, Martin Offenbacher, came to
Heidelberg to pursue graduate study. He arrived in the autumn of 1898 for the
winter semester, and in 1900 produced the doctoral dissertation that is a principal
foundation of the opening chapter of the PE [XX.1–5].3
Offenbacher’s text displays a number of Weberian fingerprints at strategic
points, but we see little sign of the historical argument of the PE, for the good
reason that the focus of the dissertation is on the present day. There is, however,
one exception. In characterizing ‘the most significant origins of modern German
industry’, Offenbacher comments as follows:
all these individual phenomena are simply an expression of the fact that the general
undermining of traditionalism in acquisitive life in the 16th century which took place in
the wake of a realized money economy was, on the one hand, one of the worldly levers
behind the Reformation; but, on the other hand, it was powerfully promoted through the
break with inherited church authority. Nothing caused so powerful a strengthening of
technical and economic “progress”—i.e. the specifically modern development of the econ-
omy and Kultur—by reconciling it inwardly with the ethical feeling of the leading strata, as
the unleashing and legalizing of the acquisitive drive [Erwerbstrieb], something that was

1 Between July and September 1898 Weber stayed at a sanatorium by Lake Constance, giving rise

to Wolfgang Mommsen’s suggestion that there he made use of the ‘rich holdings’ of the Wessenberg
Library ‘in the social, economic, and financial history of Baden’ (MWG I/4.25 n. 67). If it were true,
this could have a significant bearing on Offenbacher’s dissertation or on the PE. However, the
Wessenberg Library does not keep records of library borrowings from this time, and the suggestion
must be dismissed.
2 See Weber to Baden Ministry of Justice, Public Worship and Education, 15.12.96, pr. MWG III/

5.19; cf. Lebensbild, 252, on arrangements for the summer semester 1899.
3 The publication date is given as 1900, but it did not appear until the beginning of 1901. The text

was held up in the press by the appearance of a Heidelberg dissertation from the theology faculty,
which Offenbacher felt obliged to notice: Konfession und soziale Schichtung (Tübingen, 1900), 100–[102].
However, this was the only part of the text prepared independently of Weber.
32 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic
brought about in still hesitant fashion by Luther, and in far clearer and more conscious
form by Calvin.4
Precisely because this is a historical statement, we can be fairly sure that Weber
stands behind it, and evidently it takes us back to the world of the university
lectures, when it speaks of ‘traditionalism’ (a specifically Weberian category)
[cf. XX.20]5 and ‘the break with inherited church authority’. Fleeting reference
to ‘the specifically modern development of the economy and Kultur’ is a renewed
testimony to the breadth of Weber’s horizons—this again looks forward to the PE
[e.g. XXI.107]—but overall we remained tied to Calvin (rather than later Calvin-
ism), and to economism. Indeed the remark about ‘the unleashing and legalizing of
the acquisitive drive’ is almost a quotation from Weber’s lectures on ‘Practical
Economics’.6 So there is a confirmation of established positions here, but no
advance.
So when did Weber escape from the lecture framework and turn his attention to
the seventeenth century and an Anglocentric focus, which might then form the
basis for an entirely independent work? One prompt in this direction was un-
doubtedly his reading of Georg Jellinek’s essay The Declaration of the Rights of Man
and the Citizen (1895). This was primarily an essay in legal history, but it also paid
some attention to Protestantism in colonial America as well as its more remote roots
in seventeenth-century England, and in this way obliquely suggested the historical
location of the PE. Hence Weber’s comment in the PE noting that he was
‘personally indebted to this text for its stimulus towards a renewed preoccupation
with Puritanism’ (though he wisely deleted this vulgar moment of personality when
the text was reissued in 1920) [XXI.42 n. 78].7 But though the comment is well
known today, its precise import is obscure. When did Weber receive this stimulus?
One might suppose that he read Jellinek on publication in 1895, but this evidently
made no difference to his lecture presentations down to 1898. In fact the first clear
sign that Jellinek had set him thinking comes from another text composed in
parallel to Martin Offenbacher’s in 1898–1900, and published in the same series of
the Economic Dissertations of the Baden Universities (a series set up on Weber’s
initiative in 1897): Marianne Weber’s surrogate doctoral thesis on Fichte’s Socialism
(1900).8
Now given the strong commitment of both husband and wife to intellectual
autonomy, it would be wrong to read this simply as a “(Max) Weberian” work.
Nonetheless, Max undoubtedly took an interest in it; and there are passages that
Marianne marked out as ‘particularly’ indebted to her husband and are readily
recognizable as such.9 Standing apart from these, however, is a long note on

4 Offenbacher, Konfession und soziale Schichtung, 23.

5 See also ibid. 15.
6 Cf. ‘Praktische Nationalökonomie’ fo. 46v: ‘Entfesselung u. ethische Sanktionierung des

Erwerbstriebes’; Offenbacher, Konfession und soziale Schichtung, 23: ‘die Entfesselung und
Legalisierung des Erwerbstriebes’.
7 See further Ghosh, ‘Max Weber and Georg Jellinek’, Saeculum, 59 (2008), 299–347.
8 The Preface is dated June 1900: Marianne Weber, Fichte’s Sozialismus (Tübingen, 1900), vi.
9 Marianne Weber, Fichte’s Sozialismus, vi.
 A Narrative 1898–1905 33

Jellinek’s essay.10 There can be little doubt that Marianne read it for herself: the
Jellineks were personal friends, while Georg had proved to be a somewhat unex-
pected convert to liberal feminist ideas about education. But, even if she does not
list this note under the category of passages deriving ‘particularly’ from her husband,
her reading can hardly have been entirely independent, given the importance of his
personal and intellectual relations with Jellinek. In such a context it was extremely
likely that there might be elements in Marianne’s note on Jellinek that did not derive
from her or Jellinek but from Max Weber—and such is in fact the case. What is
‘most interesting’ about the essay (she supposes) is the idea that ‘religious freedom’ and
specifically ‘freedom of conscience’ is the origin of all other human rights. Via the
original contract on which the American colonies were founded, ‘the fundamental
doctrine of innate human rights [was] carried over from the religious into the political
sphere’, and it was this religion origin that set a ‘limit to the complete power [of the
state]’.11 Now every element in this reading comes from Max Weber and not Jellinek.
For Jellinek the limit to state power was set by the law alone; its historical origin was a
purely antiquarian matter—a discarded remnant from the onward march of history
away from transcendental religion. It was Weber’s idea that the only true limit to state
power could be religious, that is, supra- and anti-political, so giving human rights a
truly exalted significance. The importance of the ‘political significance of [religious]
freedom of conscience’ as the central message of Jellinek’s text is made explicit in the
PE [XXI.42 n. 78], and is then further elaborated in the pre-war discussion of
hierocracy in ‘Economy and Society’, just as the crucial association between contract
and religiosity via religiously derived natural law (which Marianne’s text does not
explain) will be elucidated in the pre-war Sociology of Law.12 Note further Mar-
ianne’s reference to ‘the church as a community of believers’, an idea that looks
forward to the ‘believers’ Church’ in the PE [XXI.42 n. 78, 63, 64 n. 126], to the
fundamental distinction between church and sect, and so to Max’s emphasis on the
anti-political radicalism of the sects. This is the first sign we have of such thinking,
and marks an epoch in our narrative.
So a significant component of the outlines of the religious history that would
appear in the PE was present in Weber’s mind by June 1900, the date at which he
finished reading through Marianne’s work prior to publication.13 If in his lectures
he had posited a necessary conceptual relationship between the ‘world power’ of
religion and nascent capitalism in early modern Europe, leaving a space marked out
for historical enquiry, here (at the hands of Marianne) he implicitly marks out his
interest in English history and the Protestant sects. Nonetheless, this has nothing
to do with asceticism and capitalism—politics and sects are in principle separate
subjects—and there is not the slightest sign that Weber envisaged publishing on
any of these subjects at this time.
Indeed all the publishing projects he had in mind before 1900 are remote and
speculative. They are either of a minutely detailed empirical kind—such as the

10 Ibid. 7 n. 1. 11 Ibid. 7 and n. 1.

12 Resp. MWG I/22–4.677–8; I/22–3.599.
13 Meurer, Marianne Weber, 149–50.
34 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

statistical investigation of the relationship between patterns of land tenure and

population density in East Elbean Germany;14 alternatively, he contemplated
revising the lectures on ‘General Economics’ for publication.15 Now by its syn-
thetic and comprehensive character the latter was a significant statement; on the
other hand, it is tied to the pedestrian lecture format, with its systematic, repetitive
and conventional categories, and (even in Weber’s handling) to the limits of the
single faculty of economics. In these respects it is everything that he was rebelling
against at the end of the 1890s. There were no significant drafts of text apart from
the Outline and a précis of the First Book of the course printed for students in
1898,16 and however valuable the lecture notes may be to us today, they were not a
basis for publication: in Marianne’s estimate, they were ‘the purest pickled herring
salad’.17 Thus the outstanding feature of Weber’s first five years as a full professor
was that he had no definite conception of any major publishing project—which is
close to saying that in intellectual terms he had no agenda at all. The sense that
there might be room for meaningful political participation outside the university
had been closed off in the years 1895–6 with the collapse of the Protestant Social
Congress into bienpensant nullity and the onset of the reactionary ‘Stumm era’ in
social politics.18 Now this was surely crucial to Weber’s decision to accept a chair in
Heidelberg at the end of 1896, which signalled a more single-minded concentra-
tion on the academy.19 Yet it turned out to be a false start. His principal under-
taking in the later 1890s was, it would seem, simply that of learning to live as a full
professor formally attached to a single discipline and finding aspects of it intoler-
able. In this respect there is a great contrast with his life before 1895 and again after
1903, where he was not tied down to single-faculty specialization, where publica-
tion was fertile, and where every step he took was geared to a public impact of some
kind, even if it was not directly political.
Here, rather than in any medical history, is the true story and full extent of the
hiatus in Weber’s life at this point. He undoubtedly had a psychiatric (depressive,
bipolar) problem of some kind, but this was a lifelong condition,20 whereas the
events of 1898–1902 were unique. Indeed, if we measure his breakdown in terms

14 Rita Aldenhoff, ‘Einleitung’, MWG III/5.35–6 & n. 81. Had there been a prose text, it is

reasonable to expect that it would have survived, when the much less formed materials for the lectures
have done. But there is none.
15 To Helene Weber, 13.4.99, Nachlaß Max Weber 30/4 Bl. 78–9.— In addition, note the still

more speculative consideration of a Deutsche Agrargeschichte in 1896–7: MWG III/5.37–8; I/6.29

16 ‘Editorischer Bericht’, MWG III/1.118–19.
17 To Max Weber, n.d. [August 1900], cit. MWG III/1.166; cf. ‘Editorischer Bericht’, ibid.

119–20.
18 Weber last attended the annual conference in June 1897. In October the attempt by Nobbe,

Delbrück, and Harnack to censor Paul Göhre and to enforce the developing “unpolitical” tendency of
the Congress meant that, without formally exiting, Weber ceased de facto to be a member of the
association: to his mother, 17.10.97, Nachlaß Max Weber 30/4 Bl. 69; Martin Rade to Adolf Harnack,
25.10.97, Der Briefwechsel zwischen Adolf von Harnack und Martin Rade, ed. J. Jantsch (Berlin and
New York, 1996), no. 211.
19 See Weber to Adolf Hausrath, 15.10.96, pr. MWG III/1.17.
20 Marianne Weber found evidence of ‘nervous peculiarities and anxieties’ going back to Weber’s

earliest youth: Lebensbild, 35; cf. Max Weber to Emmy Baumgarten, 18.2.92, to Hermann
Baumgarten, [28].4.92, Jugendbriefe, 338, 343; to Marianne Schnitger, 2.7.93, pr. MWG I/6.72; to
 A Narrative 1898–1905 35

of physical and psychological symptoms alone, then the idea of a five-year hiatus in
his life is an exaggeration. In some sense, however exiguous, Weber struggled on at
Heidelberg until the end of 1899; while the earliest signs of intellectual recovery
date from the spring and summer of 1901.21 Nonetheless, there was a very real
rupture in 1900. His reaction to his cumulative psychological problems (medical
and other) was to seek retirement from his university post in January of that year.
The request was met by the grant of extended leave of absence, which led on to his
departure from Heidelberg in July 1900 for nearly two years.22 Now this applica-
tion to retire was a radical denial of the recent past. Weber would always be a
practitioner of academic “science” or Wissenschaft rather than a literary romantic;
and to that extent a university and academic context would remain essential to him.
Nonetheless, the proposal first made in 1900 led directly to Weber’s practical
abandonment of his professorial chair in 1903. It was because he had wiped the
slate clean in this way—he was freed, above all, from the constraint of having to
lecture within the boundaries imposed by a single faculty, when lecturing was an
undoubted source of psychological phobia23—that the way could be laid open for a
future career conducted along interdisciplinary lines, with the interdisciplinary PE
as its first, classical product.
It is easy to overlook the fact that someone such as Weber, the author of ‘Science
as a Vocation’ (1917/19), when “science” or Wissenschaft was undoubtedly his
vocation, could have had doubts about his early academic career; but such was the
case. This was the man who could state in 1892–3 that ‘I am simply not . . . a real
scholar’.24 Such a private confession within the family circle was accompanied by
the still more remarkable declaration to Lujo Brentano, a senior academic: ‘If
I personally have achieved “successes” in an academic career that I have neither
sought nor desired, then these things leave me rather cold; in particular they give
me no answer to the question as to whether it is really this career that is the proper
place for me.’25 Yet these statements become comprehensible when we consider
that Weber’s difficulty with scholarship or the ‘academic career’ was not a repudi-
ation of Wissenschaft, of intellectual and academic enquiry as such—that would

Marianne Weber, 20.7.94, Nachlaß Max Weber 30/1 Bl. 49. These complaints are essentially identical
to those so abundantly documented in the post-1905 Briefe.
21 Marianne to Helene Weber, 1.4.01; Marianne to Max Weber, 10.7.01, cit. Wilhelm Hennis,

Max Weber und Thukydides (Tübingen, 2003), 38, 44; Alfred Weber to Lujo Brentano, 27.8.01,
reporting that ‘thankfully my brother Max is getting better, albeit slowly’ (Alfred Weber, Ausgewählter
Briefwechsel, ed. E. Demm and H. Soell (Marburg, 2003), 153).
22 His first application to retire is dated 7.1.00: MWG III/5.22. A second request was sent on

5.6.00. This was the trigger that allowed him to leave Heidelberg altogether the following month:
Radkau, Max Weber, 258; cf. Lebensbild, 254–5.
23 Weber’s phobia about lecturing is frequently reported in correspondence: to Helene Weber

[13.4.99], 14.4.02, pr. Lebensbild, 252, 270, and can be traced back (at least) to his first arrival at
Freiburg: Marianne to Helene Weber, 9.3.95 [before 13.5.95], pr. Radkau, Max Weber, 894 n. 473.
There can be little doubt that the physical symptoms provoked by lecturing were psychosomatic.
Whether he could have sustained the burdens of lecturing on a continuous basis after 1919 is unclear.
As we shall see (II.4), his view of lecturing was quite unchanged at that time.
24 Resp. to Emmy Baumgarten, 18.2.92, Jugendbriefe, 338.
25 To Lujo Brentano, n.d. [c.1896?], pr. Lebensbild, 236.
36 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

indeed defy credibility. His doubts centred on the institutional structure of the
German universities (another theme of ‘Science as a Vocation’), and the blinkered
outlook of the professoriate who, taken overall, conducted their specialized schol-
arship in isolation and followed the conventional ‘academic career’ within a single
faculty, when he himself had ‘such a peculiarly many-sided mind’.26 This was the
mind that lay behind the absolutist pronouncement that appears at the opening of
the lecture course on ‘General Economics’, one that could have come from any
period of his life:
So: there exists only one sci[ence] of hum[an] community-life (sociology) and
its phenomena.
Everything [goes] in one salad: Law—
Hist[ory]— . . .
Psychol[ogy] . . .
even Logic . . . 27
If we add economics, which is taken for granted here, and theology to this list, we
then have a tolerably fair summary of the disciplinary range of the PE.
This cast of mind did not preclude acknowledgement of the complementary
need for specialization,28 but in the 1890s no single faculty had satisfied or could
satisfy him, and the idea that the shift in his formal terms of employment from
law to economics in 1894 was a moment of ‘decision between two very different
academic careers’, or that it represented a significant intellectual progression, is
illusory.29 Here we should recall that Weber’s major, early plunge into an “eco-
nomic” subject area—the subject of East Elbean labour in early 1892—was
accompanied by the announcement that the determinant factors in the enquiry
were ‘for the most part inaccessible to purely economic observation’, while his
inaugural lecture as a professor of economics contained a denial that there could be
any such thing as ‘independent economic . . . “ideals”’ motivating human con-
duct.30 As he told Friedrich Althoff (the powerful head of department for higher
education within the Prussian state) at the point when he decided to change
subjects, his allegiance to law and economics was a ‘combined’ one: ‘Given the
character of the combined faculties in which I am interested, I cannot conceal from
myself that it would never be easy to carve out a life position for me within the law
faculty [in Berlin].’31 Multidisciplinary combination was his first choice, and after

26 Otto Gierke to Friedrich Althoff [February 1893], pr. MWG I/1.87. Gierke was in no doubt that

this quality rendered Weber ‘a wholly exceptional phenomenon amongst the younger law dons’. For
Weber’s mature critique of the professoriate, see Ghosh, ‘Max Weber and the literati’, in Kay Waechter
(ed.), Grenzüberschreitende Diskurse (Wiesbaden, 2010), esp. 256–75.
27 ‘Allgemeine . . . Nationalökonomie’, MWG III/1.191.
28 Cf. ‘Science as a Vocation’ [1917/19], MWG I/17.80–2.
29 Knut Borchardt, ‘Einleitung’, MWG I/5.93; cf. Wilhelm Hennis, Max Webers Fragestellung

(Tübingen, 1987), 120–6; and Wolfgang Mommsen, ‘Einleitung’, MWG I/4.40, based on selective and
distorted quotation from Jugendbriefe, 372. All these authors rely implicitly on a late-twentieth-century
belief in economics as somehow more modern and relevant than law.
30 Resp. “Privatenqûeten” [1892], MWG I/4.102; Freiburg Inaugural [1895], MWG I/4.563; cf.

‘Allgemeine . . . Nationalökonomie [1894–8], MWG III/1.364–7.

31 To Althoff, 3.4.94, cit. MWG II/7.291 n. 9.
 A Narrative 1898–1905 37

that it became a matter of material incentives. Once arrived in Freiburg, he found

having to get up the materials of economic lecture courses from scratch distinctly
disagreeable.32 Meanwhile he continued to hold seminars in commercial law; he
maintained his interest in the stock exchange, which was primarily a subject for
lawyers and not economists;33 his lectures on ‘Agrarian Politics’ had a pronounced
legal orientation, with ‘the agrarian constitution’ as a central point of reference;34
and he even went so far as to announce major (four- and five-hour) courses on the
‘History of German Law’—courses that were not given in fact but that (in one case at
least) appear to have been cancelled only because of an accident.35 So no clear
academic gain or change was secured by his move, and Weber’s motivation in 1894
was as vulgarly material as it would be when he moved to Munich in 1919. The
prospect of securing a full professorship in 1894 was not a matter of academic status
to him; rather it meant the securing of that ‘life position’ that was necessary to a
newly married man, and an overdue assertion at the age of 30 of personal autonomy
both from his father and from the well-meaning but overbearing Friedrich Althoff,
‘the old monster’.36 But if this was so, then Weber’s complaints about his academic
and faculty situation were unlikely to cease—and they did not. He was already
talking about ‘resigning the professorship’ by 1897, and in 1898 he would complain
at the restriction of focus to which he was condemned by the faculty of economics.37
Only liberation from all faculty constraints would mean that the academic career
that had started in such doubtful fashion could be resumed on a more secure footing.

II
In the summer of 1900 the Webers ‘struck camp’38 and left Heidelberg for nearly
two years, spent primarily in Italy. Following the suggestions we have noticed in
Marianne Weber’s dissertation, some more tangible origins of the religious history

32 To Adolf Wagner 14.3.95, cit. Hennis, Max Webers Fragestellung, 122 n. 15; to Alfred Weber,

29.7.04, Nachlaß Max Weber 30/4 Bl. 99–100.

33 Knut Borchardt, ‘Max Webers Börsenschriften’, Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften:

Philosophisch-Historische Klasse, Sitzungsberichte, Jahrgang 2000, Heft 4, 26–7.

34 See the lecture manuscripts in MWG III/5.65–410. For the prominence of lawyers in Weber’s

audience, III/5.51.
35 The accident was the lapse of the ‘General Economics’ course announced by his junior colleague

von Schulze-Gaevernitz for the winter semester 1896–7: MWG III/1.158; cf. Borchardt, ‘Max Webers
Börsenschriften’, 35. Prof. Borchardt is uniquely good on Weber’s interdisciplinary tendency at this
date (34–7). However, he is uncertain how far he wishes to take this idea before Weber’s breakdown—
it is ‘a question mark’ (40)—and understandably does not discuss its possible implications for the
period after 1900.
36 To Clara Weber, 27.7.93, Jugendbriefe, 371.—While Weber effectively allowed Althoff to

dismiss the first approach from Freiburg University in July 1893, prior to his marriage in
September, when this was renewed in the new year he asserted his independent right of judgement.
Yet by now he held an extraordinary (assistant) professorship at Berlin and was accordingly regarded as
less attainable by Freiburg: Briefe, II/7.284–95; Roth, Familiengeschichte, 530–1, 540–2.
37 Max to Helene Weber, 15.6.97, cit. Wilhelm Hennis, Max Webers Wissenschaft vom Menschen

(Tübingen, 1996), 123; to Carl Neumann, 14.3.98, Nachlaß Max Weber 30/4 Bl. 72.
38 Lebensbild, 256. Strictly, Max went alone to a sanatorium in Urach, Swabia for seven weeks, and

was then joined by Marianne on 20 August.

38 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

of the PE can be traced to Rome, where the Webers spent nearly five months from
late September 1901 until March 1902. By now Weber was beginning to show
distinct signs of recovery from his nervous collapse, and, after reading Jacob
Burckhardt’s recently published Griechische Kulturgeschichte, he took up ‘all kinds
of historical things’.39 In January 1902 Marianne Weber reported:
He now goes more often to the [Prussian] Historical Institute, to chat with [Karl] Schellhass
and [Johannes] Haller. He is now quite impatient, if Schellhass cannot see him for a
while . . . We now live amidst all kinds of books which one would never otherwise read:
that is to say, Max is taking in a fabulous mixture, all kinds of things on the history,
constitution, and economy of monasteries, then Aristophanes (“the old so-and-so”), Rous-
seau’s Emile, Voltaire, Montesquieu, Taine’s collected works and English writers.40
This extraordinary mixture was typical of Weber: typical of the physical chaos of his
work-desk, and of a mind that was always looking across disciplinary boundaries
and life-spheres ‘in areas where at first one does not enquire’.41 But we also observe
specific authors such as Voltaire and Montesquieu (and in another report, Georg
Simmel),42 who will crop up in the PE [XX.11, 15 n. 2, 35]. Still more definite is
the reference to the historical study of monasticism, and it seems that it was in
Rome that the conception of pre-Reformation monastic asceticism presented in the
PE first took on real substance. Protestant asceticism may have been the telos of the
account in the PE, but as a pointer towards Weber’s interest in asceticism overall,
this is of central significance. However, just what books he read in this field—
brought to him from the library of the Prussian Historical Institute by his old friend
Karl Schellhass—we cannot say. It may be (for example) that when the PE notes the
development of Catholic asceticism from the Rule of St Benedict through the Cluniac
and Cistercian monks down to the Jesuits, or when it tells us that ‘the tertiary order of
Saint Francis was a mighty effort towards the ascetic penetration of everyday life’
[XXI.28, 30–1], Weber was drawing on his Roman reading.43 Yet of all the books
that are actually mentioned in the PE there are only two that he could have read in
Rome: that is, books on Catholic subjects present in the then limited library of the
Historical Institute. They were Döllinger and Reusch on the moral divisions and
casuistry of modern Catholicism [XXI.14], and an elementary handbook article on

39 Marianne to Helene Weber [6.12.01], pr. Lebensbild, 265.

40 To Helene Weber, 29.1.02, pr. Lebensbild, 267; cf. Hennis, Max Weber und Thukydides, 44. On
Schellhass, see Lebensbild, 102; Roth, Familiengeschichte, 507, 517 n. 10, 520.
41 Max Weber, Memorial Address for Georg Jellinek [1911], pr. Lebensbild, 484.
42 Marianne to Helene Weber [December 1901], pr. Lebensbild, 266.
43 I note some suggestive titles and their catalogue markings from the library of the Prussian

Historical Institute in Rome: Ludwig Traube, Textgeschichte der Regula S. Benedicti (München, 1898),
from Abhandlungen der Historischen Classe der Königlich Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften 21 [Ff
218]; Karl Müller, Die Anfänge des Minoritenordens und der Bussbruderschaften (Freiburg i. Br., 1885)
[Ff 515]; Ernst Sackur, Die Cluniacenser in ihrer kirchlichen und allgemeingeschichtlichen Wirksamkeit
bis zur Mitte des elften Jahrhunderts (Halle, 1892–1894) [Ff 290]; Eberhard Gothein, Ignatius von
Loyola und die Gegenreformation (Halle, 1895) [Fg 210]. I am indebted here to a handlist of titles from
the section of the catalogue on ‘Orden und Vereine der katholischen Kirche’ compiled by Edith
Hanke.
 A Narrative 1898–1905 39

‘Asceticism’ in Wetzer und Welte’s Kirchenlexikon [XXI.28 n. 56].44 Yet there is no

compelling reason to suppose that Weber read them in Rome, since these same books
were readily available to him in Heidelberg. In any case, the haul of just two items is
puny, and does not take us anything like as far into the historical argument in Part II
of the PE as the simple report of Weber’s interest in monasticism.
Still we cannot leave Marianne’s report without at least noticing the tantalizing
reference to ‘English writers’. Considered in relation to a text such as the PE, which
was crucially dependent on “English writers” [XXI.47 n. 87], it is potentially of
the utmost importance—but just who these writers were remains inscrutable. The
Prussian Historical Institute, the source of Weber’s learned book borrowings, had
been set up only in 1888 to facilitate the researches of German scholars into the newly
opened Vatican Archives. This meant that its then quite modest holdings—c.4,000
volumes in 190145—were targeted towards certain areas, German–Italian relations,
and Catholicism especially. It was not a general library, and certainly not a resource for
English Protestant authors, even well-known ones such as John Bunyan and John
Milton, let alone those such as Richard Baxter and Robert Barclay, who make up the
principal historical foundation of Part II of the PE.46 When Weber recalled his stay
in Rome in 1909, he mentioned only ‘the study of modern Catholic literature’, and
the theme of the monasteries is also the only one to which the contemporary
correspondence returns.47 So ‘the English writers’ must be set aside as an unresolved
enigma. But still his interest in pre-Reformation monasticism is itself of the greatest
significance, since this is the first clear sign we have of his interest in asceticism—the
theme with which monasticism is indelibly associated in the PE [XXI.28–32]. This
then raises another major if hardly answerable question: did this precede or succeed
work on, and interest in, Protestant asceticism? For the historicist Weber, the former is
not simply impossible: his brusque dismissal of Catholicism applied only to modern
Catholicism.48 Such evidence as we have, though it is far from conclusive, suggests

44 Weber refers to (rather than cites) I. v. Döllinger and F. H. Reusch, Geschichte der

Moralstreitigkeiten in der römisch-katholischen Kirche seit dem sechszehnten Jahrhundert mit Beiträgen
zur Geschichte und Charakteristik des Jesuitenordens (Nördlingen, 1889), and Johann E. Pruner, ‘Ascese,
Ascetik, ascetische Schriften’, in Wetzer und Welte’s Kirchenlexikon oder Encyclopädie der katholischen
Theologie und ihrer Hülfswissenschaften, ed. J. Hergenröther and F. Kaulen (Freiburg i. Br.,
1882–19032), i. 1460–9.
45 See the website of the Deutsches Historisches Institut in Rom, ‘Historische Bibliothek:

Geschichte und Bestände’ <www.dhi-roma.it/bibl_geschichte.html?&L=0>. One can also consult the

manuscript catalogue compiled by Bernhard Bess in 1903. My thanks to Edith Hanke for pointing this
out to me.
46 Silke Schmitt has examined the Webers’ borrowings from the library of the Deutscher Künstlerverein

in Rome and (although it does not suit her to say so) these are equally inconsequential: ‘Max Webers
Verständnis des Katholizismus. Eine werkbiographische Analyse’, M.A. thesis in Sociology, Philipps-
Universität Marburg (2006), 112–14, 157–9 cf. Lebensbild, 264.
47 To Tönnies, 19.5.09, Briefe; cf. Marianne to Helene Weber, 28.2.02, pr. Radkau, Max Weber,

318: ‘Max is at a library; he is reading a good deal about the organization of monasteries and religious
orders.’
48 Consider, e,g., Weber’s signature (alongside Heinrich Rickert, Ernst Troeltsch, and Dietrich

Schäfer) on a 1902 petition against the restoration of Catholic male orders in Baden: H. Walser Smith,
German Nationalism and Religious Conflict (Princeton, 1995), 105. Succinctly: Weber to Elisabeth
Gnauck-Kühne, 15.7.09, Briefe.
40 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

that, at least as a body of specific reading, monastic asceticism came first, in Rome, and
that Protestant asceticism was then added onto this after the return to Heidelberg. On
the other hand, the conceptual Weber could hardly have been interested in an idea
such as asceticism, with the meaning he gave to it, without knowing where he wanted
to go with it.
At Easter 1902 the Webers began to make their way home. Weber again
requested to be retired from his university post (unsuccessfully), and he began to
think about earning a living ‘perhaps by writing articles’, but not of a political
kind.49 Now there was little financial substance to this prediction, but still it was a
marker for the future. This was indeed how his life would be lived out in the years
through to 1909 (and again during the World War), and the PE is not be under-
stood except as a planned article publication for an academic periodical. Now in
the first instance the period after Weber’s return to Heidelberg in April 1902 appears
silent and obscure: the sources are practically blank until the autumn. Then
he accepted an invitation to contribute an essay on his predecessor in the Heidelberg
Economics chair, Karl Knies, for a Festschrift celebrating Heidelberg Professors from
the 19th Century, which was to be published the following August (1903), to
celebrate the centenary of the Napoleonic refounding of the university.50 It goes
almost without saying that he did not manage to produce a finished piece of work for
this celebratory and commemorative volume, and had he done so his strenuous
theoretical reflections would have been absurdly out of place.51 Work on it started
in October, and at first all went well. Weber claimed that ‘he had all the ideas
assembled in his head’, but at the end of the month he suffered a nervous relapse.52
Insofar as this had an intellectual rather than medical explanation, it lay in a radical
conflict between the essay’s high ambition and its original commemorative format.
Under the rubric of ‘the logical problems of historical economics’ (the essay’s
subtitle), Weber had decided to mark his escape from the shadow of specialist
economics, and to confront any and every problem he wished to, concerning its
methodology and premisses. He then resolved that Knies alone was not a sufficient
basis for such a totalizing agenda, and imported Knies’s contemporary Wilhelm
Roscher (who had no Heidelberg connection) as a second principal subject. As a
result the scale of the piece began to mushroom—and perhaps it was at this point
Weber began to be prey to psychological doubts. What was now the first part of the

49 Max to Helene Weber, 14.4.02, Nachlaß Max Weber 30/4 Bl. 84; cf. Marianne to Helene

Weber, [3.02], pr. Lebensbild, 268–9.

50 Heidelberger Professoren aus dem neunzehnten Jahrhundert: Festschrift der Universität zur

Zentenarfeier ihrer Erneuerung durch Karl Friedrich (Heidelberg, 1903). Georg Jellinek’s bland
contribution on ‘Die Staatsrechtslehre und ihre Vertreter’ was more typical of what was expected:
repr. Ausgewählte Schriften und Reden (Berlin, 1911), i. 314–43.
51 Weber was well aware of this: ‘Roscher und Knies . . . Erster Artikel’, Jahrbuch für Gesetzgebung,

Verwaltung und Volkswirtschaft, 27 (1903), 1181 n. 1. (This note is omitted from WL.)
52 Marianne to Helene Weber, [8.11.02], pr. Lebensbild, 273, which dates the breakdown to

fourteen days previously; see also Edgar Jaffé to Else von Richthofen, 8.11.02, Jaffé papers. All
references to the Jaffé archive have been generously supplied to me by Prof. Guenther Roth.—This
essay was preceded by a substantial book review for Heinrich Braun’s Archiv, and it may be that here
Weber was testing the water to see if he felt strong enough to write for publication. Receipt of the
manuscript is acknowledged in Braun to Weber, 14.10.02, cit. MWG I/8.35.
 A Narrative 1898–1905 41

essay, on Roscher, was not completed in draft for another six months, which appears
to have been a period of renewed psychological strain for Weber. Hence Marianne
Weber’s well-known description of it as the “essay of sighs”,53 which was only finally
sent off for publication in July 1903 to Gustav Schmoller’s Jahrbuch—a suitably
grave and academic location.54
The essay is significant for the history of the PE in several respects. It reminds us
that the ‘new phase’ of Weber’s intellectual production had two components: that
of methodological enquiry as well as the PE; and that these must be construed as
two parallel lines of reflection on the nature of human conduct in a social context.
The Festschrift invitation might have been an external, contingent event but,
divested of its celebratory character, it undoubtedly catered to a very real need on
Weber’s part, and simply writing it off as the “essay of sighs” will not do. In
particular, the essay devoted to Knies (‘Knies and the Irrationality Problem’),55
conceived in 1902 but only completed after the PE in 1905, is of the utmost
importance in that it contains the first extended statement of Weber’s ideas about a
social science based on the “understanding” (Verstehen) or “construction” (Deu-
tung) of human conduct measured according to the spectrum of its greater or lesser
rationality. It is the individualist counterpart to the structuralist component in
Weber’s thought supplied by the ideal-type, as set out in the essay on “Objectivity”
(1904). The spectrum from emotional to rational conduct is, of course, the pattern
according to which all behaviour in the PE is described, and Weber even made
borrowings from ‘Knies’ when revising the PE at the proof stage. (Here is an early
instance of his compulsive revision, accumulation and layering of textual material.)56
Yet the format, where Weber tries to expound his ideas in relation to a large number
of more or less current works by other people, while starting and ending with Knies, is
as rebarbative to the reader today as (one supposes) it was to Weber writing it. He
seems to have accepted the Festschrift commission in the belief that he could work out
his ideas around Knies, encouraged perhaps by memories of his student reactions to
Knies’ lectures.57 But in fact Knies was simply not intellectually substantial enough as

53 Lebensbild, 291. The quotation marks here may suggest that she is recalling a phrase or saying

from the time.

54 Marianne to Helene Weber, 4.7.03, pr. Hennis, Max Weber und Thukydides, 37–8. When

Weber sent it off, he supposed the piece was one of two roughly equal halves (on Roscher and Knies).
As “completed” in 1905–6, Knies had doubled in size: ‘Roscher und Knies’, Jahrbuch für Gesetzgebung,
Verwaltung und Volkswirtschaft, 27 (1903), 1221. The advertisement (on the inside cover of this same
number of the journal) states that the second half was due to come out in the next, January 1904,
number. If the takeover of the Archiv had fallen through—it was in train but finalized only after Weber
had sent off ‘Part I’—it is reasonable to assume that he would have continued with this essay; so the
projected completion date was not entirely mythical.
55 WL 42–145. The linked essay on ‘Roschers historische Methode’, which is primarily devoted to

the criticism of spurious ideas about historical evolution, is far from trivial, but it strikes us as much less
original today. In any case, ‘Knies’ was Weber’s starting point; ‘Roscher’ was in some sense a
displacement activity and must bear the principal responsibility for the failure to publish ‘Knies’
in 1903.
56 See the inserted notes in PE [XXI.29 n. 58a, 44 n. 79a, 52 n. 101a, 57 n. 114a, 60 n. 120a] and

some adjoining portions of text. These (and other) insertions will presumably be minuted in MWG I/9.
57 See the mixed messages in Weber to Helene Weber, 2.5.82; to Max Weber Sr, [24].2.83, 5.5.83,

Jugendbriefe 41, 71, 74.

42 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

an author, and so (in addition to using Roscher as a supplementary focus) Weber

dragged in a plethora of other writers (Wundt, Münsterberg, Simmel, Gottl, Lipps,
Croce) to enable him to make his points at second hand. The result was a sprawling
and apparently directionless catalogue, which has repelled, and so tended to elude,
readers ever since,58 and the significance of what he was doing would become clear
only from the much clearer systematic statement of 1913, ‘On Some Categories of a
Sociology of Verstehen’.
So much for what is known. This, however, leaves a space (April–October 1902)
for the suggestion that Weber’s first act on his return from Italy was to continue and
develop his work on the religious and historical materials he had probed in Rome,
and which began to look as if they might be suitable for an “article” of some kind.
Perhaps it was during these months that he started borrowing books from the
Berlin libraries ‘for a few short weeks’ at a time—Gisbert Voët’s Ta Asketika above
all [XXI.3 n. 3; cf. 75 n. 2]59—and that this was when the construction of the
detailed historical argument of the PE, of seventeenth-century ascetic Protestant-
ism, first got under way. Hence the undoubted fact that there was a stratum of
literature—Voët is the type—of which Weber was aware in the PE, but could make
no detailed use in the final text.60 Viewed in this light the essay on ‘Knies’, which
became ‘Roscher and Knies’, appears as an interruption—it certainly was an
external intervention—and the references made to materials from the PE in
‘Roscher’s Historical Method’, published in 1903, may reflect matter and ideas
that had germinated previously.61 Not only would this explain the (golden?) silence
of the sources regarding Weber’s activities between April and October 1902—had
he suffered a psychological relapse, they would surely record it62—but, as he
himself said a year later, it had required ‘an unheard of expenditure of time’ to
carry out the esoteric historical research and construction that make up Part II of
the PE.63 In fact there is no other period of comparable length and repose in the
calendar of his activities prior to the “actual” or final composition of the text
(beginning in April 1904), and we know that its empirical foundations were in
existence by the October of 1903, when Weber speaks of going back to ‘work over
the sources again for an essay in the Archiv’64—the first known reference to the PE
as such. The sense that as a body of work the PE had been in existence for some
time is evoked once more by Weber’s remark in June 1904 ‘that I only come back

58 e.g. Hennis, Max Webers Fragestellung, 143–5, 159–61.

59 Historian, 41, 44–6.
60 Note too the fundamental fact that the PE text was undoubtedly written in Heidelberg using the

resources of the university library. This is evident from a number of library books with Weber’s
marginalia in them, and also the correlation between his bibliographical citations and catalogue
holdings in noticeable cases where a wide variety of editions exists. The number of books cited in the
PE which are not in this library is extremely small, and almost all such cases are readily explicable [c].
61 WL 23 n. 2, 32 n. 3, 33 n. 1.
62 Heinrich Braun reports Weber as saying that his health was ‘relatively good’ in July: to Sombart,

25.7.02, Braun-Vogelstein Collection, Leo Baeck Institute.

63 Weber to Brentano, 10.10.03, Bundesarchiv Koblenz, Nachlaß Brentano Nr 67, Bl. 157–8.
64 Weber to Brentano, 10.10.03, loc. cit., emphasis added.
 A Narrative 1898–1905 43

to my chief work, the Protestant Ethic and Spirit of Capitalism, in sporadic

fashion’.65
A chance report from Marianne Weber, also relayed by Edgar Jaffé, might be set
against this hypothesis. In June 1902, when he was first establishing himself in
Heidelberg society, Jaffé went to pay a call on the Webers: ‘Max was at the Seminar
[building] and so I had a long conversation with Marianne regarding the women’s
question, systems of political economy etc.; . . . she is . . . very pleased with her
husband, who now works regularly and is preparing his lectures.’66 Now this is a
reminder that, until he secured final permission to lay down his teaching duties,
Weber remained formally committed to deliver lectures. For this reason announce-
ments in his name for university lecture series continued to appear after his return
from Italy. But, though he may occasionally have talked to Marianne in these
terms, if he did so he was saying what she wanted to hear. In reality she was just the
“silly goose” who so desperately wanted him to maintain his position as a professor,
and as such we cannot take her as either an informed or impartial witness to the
novel and unusual course he was now taking. That same day in June she herself
records Max dragging home ‘a whole heap of books from the [Seminar] library’;67
but did she know what they were? and even if she had had the curiosity, would she
have had the temerity, to enquire? There is no sign that he ever added to his lecture
notes from the 1890s, and no new lectures or seminars were ever given.68 Nor is
this surprising, since he regarded the resumption of lecturing as a psychological
impossibility, and had done ever since 1900. In short, his regular working habits
and heap of books may well relate to a germinating PE.69
Whatever the precise chronology, at some point detailed empirical foundations
additional to the Roman ones must have been laid for the religious history set down
in the PE. Viewed as a set of concepts and leading ideas, the PE is an entirely
explicable component within Weber’s intellectual evolution. What is more difficult
to explain, is the detailed act of empirical–conceptual (sic) construction that gave
rise to something called ‘ascetic Protestantism’ located in the seventeenth century.
He had no instinctive sympathy with the historical period (unlike ancient Rome or
Old Testament Israel), and would never attempt a historical construction of this
kind again, either in ‘Economy and Society’ or (more pertinently) the ‘Economic
Ethics of the World Religions’. However much historians today may distrust its
historically impure, “presentist” premisses, where explicit adhesion to modern

65 To Rickert, 14.6.04, Nachlaß Max Weber 30/4 Bl. 94.

66 Edgar Jaffé to Else von Richthofen, 7.6.02, Jaffé papers.
67 Marianne to Helene Weber, 7.6.02, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Ana 446.
68 For a summary, MWG III/1.57–63.
69 In another report from this time, Else von Richthofen records Weber as saying that ‘he now

remain[ed] an extraordinary [a.ordentliche] professor’, a statement that, whatever else it meant, again
signalled his intended withdrawal from the full (‘ordinary’) professoriate with its compulsory lecturing
obligations in line with his repeated requests to retire: to Edgar Jaffé, 18.5.02, Jaffé papers. Weber’s
professoriate after his retirement was distinctly ‘extraordinary’ in the non-technical sense. That is,
Weber continued to be regarded as a full or ordinary professor in terms of social address and status, but
he performed none of the duties (not even those of an extraordinary or assistant professor) and received
none of the salary. He became an ‘Honorary Ordinary Professor’.
44 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

concepts preceded the act of historical research, still this was an immense act of
historical, if not quite ‘purely historical’, labour [XX.53; XXI.109], carried out by a
man whose psychological condition never allowed him to work more than four
hours a day and on bad days much less.70

III
Between October 1902 and July 1903 Weber’s intellectual energies (and agonies)
appear to have been fully taken up with ‘Roscher and Knies’, interspersed with a
string of holidays. Psychologically he had not yet fully “returned” from Italy, and he
decided in principle that ‘for the time being his powers of work suffice only for 4
weeks, and then he must in fact go away again for another 4 weeks’, even if his and
Marianne’s precarious financial circumstances would not allow the literal fulfilment
of this prescription.71 (Recuperative holidays, taken apart from Marianne, would
now become another new, structural component of Weber’s life through to 1914.)
Nonetheless, in the spring of 1903 Weber’s position was clarified in two major
respects, which meant that, after the awkward half-start embodied in ‘Roscher’, the
‘new phase’ of his life and intellectual production centred on the PE could be fully
launched. The precondition of all else was Weber’s retirement from his professor-
ship and with it his salary, a step that was finally sanctioned in April 1903 (with
effect from October).72 By implication this was a politically subversive step: why
should anyone give up such an elite post in the state bureaucracy, especially when,
in cases of ill-health such as Weber’s, it could easily be turned into a sinecure? The
prolonged resistance of the university and state authorities to Weber’s proposal is
readily explained thereby. Even so, in making this move he was concerned only
about his own inadequacy and personal honesty; as noted, there was no animus
against Wissenschaft or universities as the necessary context within which academic
enquiry was carried out. Indeed, he wanted to remain an active member of his
Faculty, so as to retain a voice in doctoral promotion and the right to give special
lectures—but the Philosophy Faculty suspected a ploy to inflate the number of
economists thereby and rejected the idea.73 Still for the rest (as he reported to his
brother Alfred), ‘I don’t take my retirement in any tragic sense, since I have been
convinced of its necessity for years, and have only been weighed down by the fact

70 e.g. Marianne to Helene Weber, 1.10.02 [a good day], 10.12.02 [a bad one], pr. Lebensbild,

272, 274.
71 Marianne to Helene Weber, [8.11.02], pr. Lebensbild, 273. Weber was at Borkum (on the north

German coast) in September 1902; Nervi on the Riviera in December 1902–January 1903; Rome in
March–April 1903; Scheveningen (on the Dutch coast) in June 1903; and Ostend in August.
Marianne accompanied Max on only one of these trips, to Rome, where recuperation was to be
sought amidst Kultur and she might further her education, rather than through a return to Zen-like
Natur.
72 ‘Einleitung’, MWG III/1.59–60; Marianne to Helene Weber, 11, 21.4.03, Bayerische

Staatsbibliothek, Ana 446; cf. Lebensbild, 275–6.

73 Marianne to Helene Weber, 21.4.03, pr. Lebensbild, 275–6; Weber to Rickert, [1.16], MWG

II/9.266; Wolfgang Schluchter, ‘Einleitung’, MWG I/9 }.1.

 A Narrative 1898–1905 45

that there was no doctor honest enough to convince Marianne of the fact as well’.74
Marianne, however, accepted the rightness of Weber’s course at this point just as
little as she understood or accepted the idea that writing articles for the Archiv could
be a valid substitute for the professorial chair.
This retirement, rather than any revolution in Weber’s nervous health (which
would always remain fragile), was the major discontinuity effected by the turmoil of
the years 1898–1903. As I have suggested, its principal consequence was his release
from the boundaries (however elastic) of a single discipline. In this way he secured
the interdisciplinary freedom that is so eminently apparent in the PE, with its
mixed foundations in economics, theology, law, psychology, methodology, and
politics. This is surely one of the outstanding features of this most unusual text, and
it would continue to be the hallmark of all his later work, whether it was labelled
social science, social economics, the science of Kultur, or (after c.1908) sociology.
(The variety of labels is of no consequence, however much sociologists like to view
‘sociology’ as the acme of Weber’s career.) The PE may err in that some of its most
famous utterances—such as its famous denunciation of “specialists without spirit”
[XXI.109]—are too one-sidedly hostile to specialism,75 and this no doubt reflected
Weber’s recent sense of release in his new situation. All the same (as the text points
out elsewhere), the true mark of the interdisciplinary scholar who worked ‘at
“second hand”’ was that, while he was undoubtedly doing something that re-
specters of disciplinary boundaries were not, it was ‘self-evident’ and ‘simply
unavoidable’ that one should rely and continue to rely on the works of the
specialist. Any other course was ‘great’ and unwarranted ‘presumption’ [XXI.3 n. 3].
The outstanding feature of Weberian social science was precisely that it did not
aspire to offer a master or ‘general social science’ as advocated by Comte and so
many subsequent practitioners of ‘sociology’.76 It operated instead as a medi-
atory body, standing in reciprocal relationship with the plurality of specialized
disciplines. Given this truly radical difference, which has for so long been passed

74 Max to Alfred Weber, 5.5.03, Nachlaß Max Weber 30/4 Bl. 89. Marianne Weber quoted this

letter to Alfred after previously representing her own, very different, views: Lebensbild, 275–7; cf.
268–9, 271, 279–80. She did so as a transition to her next chapter, which was more upbeat (‘The new
phase’). Nonetheless, Weber’s resignation from his professorship was for her the endpoint of the
chapter called ‘Collapse’. So, although Marianne greeted the fact of Max’s recovery consequential upon
retirement with relief and gratitude (e.g. to Helene Weber, [20.12.03], Lebensbild, 291), what he did
thereafter remained a second-best solution given her prejudice in favour of conventional university
structures. Furthermore, she felt she was proven “right” in the long term by Weber’s return to the
professorial lectern at the end of his life, which appeared to cancel out this past failure. At Munich in
1919, ‘Weber seemed to be granted a second youth’, his ‘professional life came full circle’ (ibid. 675),
and the interim could then be seen as a process of a gradual recovery working back towards professorial
life, so overcoming the “collapse”. In reality, Weber’s resumption of university teaching was the
reluctant product of financial necessity; he still hated lecturing; and there is no certainty that he
either could or would have sustained it in the longer term—beyond, say, the stabilization of the mark
in 1924. Such is the measure of Marianne’s want of understanding at a fundamental level: Lebensbild,
203, 615–16; below II.4.
75 Contrast ‘Science as a Vocation’ [1917/19], MWG I/17.80–2.
76 Cf. »Objektivität« [1904], WL 165. See also ‘Allgemeine (“theoretische”) Nationalökonomie’

[1894–8], MWG III/1.191, 368.

46 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

over by Weber’s readers,77 we may wonder whether he was right to cave in on the
matter of terminology, and to adopt the thoroughly misleading Comtean label of
sociology for his own work after 1908. He believed that by publishing his own
Soziologie—what we know as the final draft of ‘Economy and Society’ in its aggres-
sively academic format—he could put an end to ‘the dilettante performances of
inspired philosophers’ such as Georg Simmel.78 But while its impact would certainly
have been greater had he lived after 1920, we may doubt whether the future profile of
sociology—and in particular, the want of agreement as to the definition of the
subject, let alone its methods—would have been fundamentally altered.
Roughly coeval with his professorial retirement, Weber found new employment,
so that between 1904 and 1909 (above all) he would be the senior editor and
guiding light of the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik (Archive for Social
Science and Social Policy).79 This was crucial in giving shape and definition to his life
after his return from Italy: it was a medium for unshackled interdisciplinary
utterance; and the Archiv was the journal where the PE would be published in
1904–5. How then did this attachment arise?
It was obvious to Weber that, if he did not have a professorial salary, then
‘article-writing’ was the obvious way to earn some money (though not necessarily in
sufficient quantities).80 All the same, securing a controlling editorial position was a
chance outcome, which depended on the coincidence of a set of independent
factors: the desire of a proprietor-editor (Heinrich Braun) to sell his internationally
respected, reformist–socialist journal, the Archiv für Soziale Gesetzgebung und
Statistik (Archive of Social Legislation and Statistics); the willingness of Edgar Jaffé,
scion of a rich Jewish mercantile house on the lowest rung of the academic
hierarchy at Heidelberg (a mere doctor), to fund the purchase of the journal in
the interest of his academic senior, Max Weber; the grudging acceptance by Werner
Sombart, a longstanding friend of Braun’s, of a place on the editorial board of the
re-launched journal so as to lend it continuity;81 and, last but not least, the role
played by Else von Richthofen in spurring on Jaffé. Else had been a good friend of
both Marianne and Max Weber since 1897 and, having married Jaffé after a rapid
courtship in November 1902, she was surely a significant contributory agent in
enlisting her husband’s financial support for the purchase of the journal. It is hard
to see why else he should have participated. Jaffé had little intellectual interest in the
Archiv—he never published in it before 1914, while his academic specialism,
finance, was one of the areas that Weber excluded from the journal’s remit as too

77 Wilhelm Hennis is an honourable exception, yet he too was obviously driven by his late-

twentieth-century disciplinary agenda: Max Webers Fragestellung, 118.

78 To Siebeck, 8.11.19, Briefe. On ‘Soziologie’, see, e.g., the advertisement for the Grundriss der

Sozialökonomik in AfSS 39,1, back cover, issued on 6.8.14.

79 For this section of text, see Ghosh, ‘Max Weber, Werner Sombart and the Archiv für

Sozialwissenschaft’, HEI 36 (2010), 71–100.

80 See, e.g., Max to Helene Weber, 14.4.02, Nachlaß Max Weber, 30/4 Bl. 84.
81 On continuity: Heinrich Braun, ‘Abschiedswort’, AfGS 18 (1903), v–vi; Weber, Draft Editorial

Notice 1904, BSB Ana 446, fo. 1r; »Objektivität« WL 160.

 A Narrative 1898–1905 47

narrowly technical.82 (However, Weber was not and, given his retirement, could
not be Jaffé’s academic patron in Heidelberg. So there was no question in this case
of a professor utilizing the considerable power over inferiors that German academic
hierarchy conferred upon him—even if we were to ignore Weber’s abhorrence of
such an idea as contrary to personal autonomy and the canons of pure Wissen-
schaft.)83 Yet, whether because of temperament or his commercial and business
background, Jaffé was not oppressed by the mundane quality of everyday editorial
work in the way Weber and Sombart were, and he adapted easily if invisibly to his
new role. In the honeymoon era of his marriage he even went so far as to hope that
Else might appear as part of the Archiv editorial team, ‘“Madame Editor”!’, working
as part of a marital cooperative.84
Nonetheless, Weber was a principal agent in this transaction, once the retiring
owner Heinrich Braun had set it in motion. Braun had always had friendly relations
with Weber, albeit on an occasional basis, because he recognized in Weber the kind
of left liberal who was adjacent to his own revisionist socialism, and on whom the
Archiv had always relied since its foundation in 1888.85 Like any good editor he
kept his ear to the ground. He was aware of Weber’s illness,86 and he now picked
up quickly on the latter’s re-entry into academic life.87 Weber’s first academic
publication after returning from Italy was a review essay for the Archiv at the end of
1902,88 and in the wake of this Braun wondered whether he might not ask Weber
to review Sombart’s Modern Capitalism—a work of central significance for the PE

82 See ‘Max Weber . . . and the Archiv’, HEI 36 (2010), 71–100, nn. 12 (‘Edgar Jaffé: the “third

man” ’), 222.

83 Jaffé’s principal academic contacts were Gustav Schmoller and Max Sering in Berlin; his

habilitation sponsor in Heidelberg was Karl Rathgen. Weber took a benevolent interest in Jaffé’s
career in the summer of 1902 and may well have put in a good word with Rathgen, but even this was
primarily on Else von Richthofen’s account and took place almost a year before the purchase of the
Archiv. See Jaffé’s ‘Lebenslauf ’ in Die Arbeitstheilung im englischen Bankwesen (Heidelberg, 1902), n.p.,
where Weber is not mentioned. Here as in all that relates to the Jaffés I am indebted to Guenther Roth
and his ground-breaking work ‘Edgar Jaffé and Else von Richthhofen and their Children’, based on the
archive of Christopher Jeffrey: Leo Baeck Institute MS 877 <www.lbi.org/digibaeck/results/?qtype=
pid&term=1505570>. See Roth’s published summaries: ‘Else von Richthofen, Edgar Jaffé und ihre
Kinder im Kontext ihrer Zeit’, Kay Waechter (ed.), Grenzüberschreitende Diskurse: Festgabe für Hubert
Treiber (Wiesbaden, 2010), 301–19; ‘Edgar Jaffé and Else von Richthofen in the Mirror of Newly
Found Letters’, MWS 10 (2010), 151–88.
84 Edgar to Else Jaffé, 17.9.03, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Ana 446.
85 Following his 1893 Report for the Verein für Sozialpolitik, Weber’s most important academic

publication on the subject of East Elbean labour had been published in the “old” Archiv in 1894:
‘Entwickelungstendenzen in der Lage der ostelbischen Landarbeiter’, MWG I/4.368–424. He also
wrote for Braun’s more current journal, the Sozialpolitisches Centralblatt in 1893–4: ibid. 272–81,
480–511.
86 e.g. Braun to Sombart, 6.4.02, Julie Braun-Vogelstein Collection, Part 2/47, Box 4, Folder 3,

Leo Baeck Institute, New York [hereafter ‘Braun-Vogelstein Collection’]. One obvious reason why
Braun was so well informed about Max Weber was his frequent contact at this date with Alfred Weber,
who was his first choice to review Sombart’s Modern Capitalism.
87 As early as July 1902 Braun tried to enlist Weber to review Modern Capitalism. Weber politely

declined: Braun to Sombart, 25.7.02, Braun-Vogelstein Collection.

88 The review of Philipp Lotmar, Der Arbeitsvertrag, appeared in AfGS 17 (1901–2), 723–34

(MWG I/8.37–61). It was written ‘within a few days’ and sent off on 14 October: Marianne to Helene
Weber, 20.10.02, pr. MWG I/8.35.
48 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

and yet one with which German academics were reluctant to engage, because of the
closeness of its historical argument to Marxism [XX.19 n. 1]. As Braun told
Sombart: ‘I am confident that [Weber] would understand the value of your
achievement, and despite a great many differences of viewpoint in detail, he
would do justice to your work.’89 Weber himself could hardly have penned a
more sympathetic and appropriate assessment of his relationship with Sombart.
However, when Braun began making soundings in May 1903 to sell his profitable
and distinguished journal in order to fund a new political weekly, he had no
thought of Max Weber as his successor.90 The obvious candidate for the editorial
chair was Werner Sombart. Not only did Sombart have outstanding intellectual
credentials as the internationally famous author of Socialism and Social Movement
(1896), but Braun and Sombart had been close collaborators at the Archiv almost
since its foundation in 1888, even if they were never truly intimates.91 Alongside
Sombart as the new editor, Braun hoped that the property rights to the journal
might be bought by a suitably “leftist” publisher, Gustav Fischer of Jena, who had
published Sombart’s lucrative lectures on Socialism. However, in mid-May 1903
both elements in this scheme collapsed. Sombart made it plain that, while he was
happy to be the kind of editor who was paid for having his name appear on the
front cover, he was not prepared to do the real work of editorship, even if supported
by an assistant. Meanwhile Fischer, though keen to publish and so direct the
Archiv, was unwilling to buy it outright.92
In this situation Braun fell back on Weber as his second-best option—he clearly
knew something of Weber’s prospective interest in editing an academic journal,
probably through Alfred Weber. Thus a fortnight later on 31 May we find Braun in
Heidelberg where, besides visiting his mother-in-law in hospital, he held a signifi-
cant conversation with Weber. He then reported back to Sombart:
During my visit to Weber the talk . . . took in my [Reichstag] candidacy, the [new political]
weekly journal, the purposes of the Archiv, and here it emerged that Weber would be
inclined to participate in the editing. We discussed a consortium to be formed that should
acquire and edit the Archiv, and Weber thought that in this respect Dr Edgar Jaffé should
also be taken seriously into consideration: he was living in Heidelberg, he was preparing his

89 Braun to Sombart, 25.11.02, Braun-Vogelstein Collection. This request was made after a

renewed downturn in Weber’s health in early November, and Braun received no reply (it was a
rejection) until February: to Sombart, 24.2.03, ibid.
90 Bärbel Meurer records Marianne Weber as stating in March 1903 that ‘there are all sorts of

negotiations in the air, Max will be asked to take over an academic journal with Sombart and Jaffé, the
matter is not yet settled, but it’s probable, but nothing must be said about it’ (to Sophie Rickert, 8.3.03,
pr. Meurer, Marianne Weber, 164). This clearly reflects what actually happened, but it can hardly
date from March, since Heinrich Braun had not even commenced sale negotiations then. The
correspondence is in a private archive and cannot easily be checked, but I suppose that the cited
extract comes in fact from Marianne’s next letter to Sophie Rickert of 16.6.03, at which date she clearly
was corresponding on this subject; cf. Marianne to Max Weber, 15.6.03, ibid. 166–7 nn. 76, 79.
91 For Sombart’s publications in the Archiv, see the ‘Register zu Band I–XVIII’, AfGS 18 (1903),

nos 493–520; cf. Braun, ‘Abschiedswort’, AfGS 18 (1903), vi. However, while Sombart’s participation
in the journal was continuous from 1889 to 1897, it had become less frequent thereafter.
92 Braun to Sombart, 13, 14.5.03, Braun-Vogelstein Collection.
 A Narrative 1898–1905 49
habilitation there, and was the husband of von Richthofen, formerly of the Baden factory
inspectorate.93
This one meeting mapped out much of the future disposition of the Archiv, if not
the publisher. (Fischer remained the publisher designate until after the actual sale of
the journal in July, when Weber and Jaffé took against his ‘very dictatorial’
attitude.94 It was in this somewhat accidental fashion that the foundation for the
close working relationship between Weber and Paul Siebeck was forged, and as we
shall see repeatedly below, it proved to be one of the utmost significance.)95 The
conversation plainly allowed for the purchase or acquisition of the journal, Braun’s
principal concern, while both Weber and Braun were agreed that the future
editorship should be a ‘consortium’ including Sombart—an arrangement that can
be traced both to Braun’s wishes and to Weber’s repeated testimonies of regard for
Sombart.96 Weber could rely on Jaffé’s willingness to participate and they had had
some communication prior to the meeting; but still Jaffé was not present and had
no say regarding Sombart’s presence as a co-editor, about which he complained.97
(The potential complication introduced by Sombart residing so far away from
Weber and Jaffé in Heidelberg is obvious.) On the other hand, Braun knew
nothing of Jaffé, and did not at this stage suppose that he would become the sole
owner. Thus one of Jaffé’s best credentials in Braun’s eyes was Else Jaffé, whose role
as a pioneering female member of the factory inspectorate evidently made a good
impression. Overall it is clear that Weber alone grasped all the elements of the
future settlement, and was central to its realization. Nor is this surprising, since he

93 3.6.03, Braun-Vogelstein Collection: ‘Gelegentlich meines Besuches bei Weber kam die Rede

auch auf meine Kandidatur, die Wochenschrift, die Aufgabe des Archivs, und dabei zeigte sich, daß
Weber geneigt sein werde, an der Herausgabe sich zu beteiligen. Wir sprachen von einem zu bildenden
Consortium, das das Archiv erwerben und herausgeben solle, und Weber meinte, es komme in dieser
Hinsicht auch der in Heidelberg lebende, dort seine Habilitation vorbereitende Dr. Edgar Jaffé, der
Gatte der früheren badischen Fabrikinspektorin v. Richthofen, ernstlich in Betracht.’ The Reichstag
elections, which saw Braun successfully elected, took place on 16 and 25 June. This delay, matched by
Weber’s recuperative absence on the Dutch coast at this time, would explain why the final decisions
and transactions waited a month until early July.
94 Edgar Jaffé to Max Weber, 5.8.03, BSB Ana 446. Siebeck entered into a contractual agreement a

fortnight later: Marianne to Max Weber, 23.8.03, cit. Meurer, Marianne Weber, 167.
95 Siebeck and Weber were connected prior to 1903: he published Weber’s Freiburg Inaugural

lecture, and the series set up by Weber in 1897, Volkswirtschaftliche Abhandlungen der Badischen
Hochschulen, out of which grew another series, Die Landarbeiter in den evangelischen Gebieten
Norddeutschlands (MWG I/4.688). Nonetheless, these were relatively minor and/or occasional
ventures, while Paul Siebeck’s personal intellectual interests and preferences lay in theology, not
secular social science. The real basis for a continuous working relationship grew out of the Archiv:
‘Max Weber . . . and the Archiv’, HEI 36 (2010), 80 & n. 80.
96 On four successive occasions in the years 1897–1907 Weber promoted Sombart as the first-

choice candidate for appointments to chairs in economics in Freiburg and Heidelberg: Weber to
Sombart, 8.2.97, Nachlaß Max Weber 30/4 Bl. 54; Lebensbild, 255; F. Biesenbach, Die Entwicklung
der Nationalökonomie an der Universität Freiburg im Breisgau (Freiburg, 1969), 225 n. 10; Volker
Hentschel, ‘Die Wirtschaftswissenschaften als akademische Disziplin an der Universität Heidelberg
(1822–1924)’, in N. Waszek (ed.), Die Institutionalisierung der Nationalökonomie an deutschen
Universitäten, Scripta Mercurae Verlag (St Katharinen, 1988), 206–10; Heinrich Braun to Werner
Sombart, 3.6.03, Braun-Vogelstein Collection; Weber to Alfred Weber, 22.6.07, Briefe.
97 Cf. Weber to Jaffé, 1.6.03, Nachlaß Max Weber, 30/4 Bl. 87; Meurer, Marianne Weber, 169.
50 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

alone could have recognized the almost unique suitability of a journal such as the
Archiv for his purposes, albeit because of its commitment to detached, impartial
enquiry in the social sciences rather than its political identity. After just one more
meeting between Braun, Weber, and Jaffé in early July, when the financial
settlement was agreed, the sale of the Archiv from Braun to Jaffé for 60,000RM
took place on 20 July 1903.98
Weber now had an outward role in life to replace his professorship, and the idea
of working for the Archiv was to dominate his thinking and intellectual output for
the next six years. The PE itself was conceived in the form of articles for a
periodical. Its first Part appeared in the second volume of the newly acquired
journal, and was undoubtedly meant to make a splash. When Weber said at this
time that the PE was his chef d’œuvre, this was not just an intellectual statement; it
also meant that it was his chief contribution to the Archiv.99 Yet the PE was not
originally designed for the Archiv—which again suggests that its outline had been
mapped out at an earlier date. Hence Weber’s apologetic statement that, while he
felt he had a legitimate intellectual purpose in the PE in seeking to ‘make a
contribution towards illustrating the manner in which “Ideas” generally become
effective in history’—a reference inter alia to Marxist theories about ideas in history
as the mere “superstructure” or “reflection” of material conditions [XX.18–19, 33,
53–4]—still ‘this journal [the Archiv] . . . in accordance with its programme, does
not generally involve itself in purely historical work’ [XX.53]. Similar doubts
regarding the suitability of working on the PE ‘within the framework of this journal’
are repeated at the close of the text [XXI.110 n. 86]. In plain language, a
disquisition of 110 pages on seventeenth-century religion and theology (Part II of
the text) was not at all what the journal’s secularized, reformist–socialist readership
was used to, even if some sections of Part I—most obviously that on the “spirit” of
capitalism—combined novelty and familiarity of subject matter in more acceptable
fashion. On the other hand, we must ask whether there was any journal to which
the multidisciplinary and quasi-universal PE would have been well suited. (The
stringently academic formatting of the PE is precisely analogous to that of the final
draft of ‘Economy and Society’ and, given the universalism of its ambitions, just as
paradoxical.) But however this may be, Weber now had a publishing platform from
which he was free to say pretty much what he wanted, provided it did not lead to
commercial collapse; and, whether the existing readers of the journal liked it or not,
the way was clear to finish and publish the PE in what was immediately recog-
nized as ‘his’ journal.100 So from this point on the narrative of Weber’s life and
the pace of his intellectual production accelerate. The ungrateful work on

98 Braun to Sombart, 9.7.03, Braun-Vogelstein Collection; Julie Braun-Vogelstein, Ein

Menschenleben: Heinrich Braun und sein Schicksal (Tübingen, 1932), 234. Jaffé‘s initial estimate of
the purchase price was only 30,000RM, so Braun was very much the victor here: Marianne to Max
Weber, 15.6.03, cit. Meurer, Marianne Weber, 166–7. At then current exchange rates, 60,000RM
amounted to £3,000 or $15,000.
99 Weber to Rickert, 14.6.04, Nachlaß Max Weber, 30/4 Bl. 94.
100 Gustav Radbruch to his parents, n.d. [4.04], Gustav Radbruch Gesamtausgabe, 17 (Heidelberg,

1987–), Briefe I; cf. ‘Max Weber . . . and the Archiv’, HEI 36 (2010), 95.
 A Narrative 1898–1905 51

‘Knies’ was suspended (although it was too important to be abandoned), and this is
the moment at which the PE emerges from the world of shadows and oblique
allusions, and becomes a visible project.
Three days after the sale of the Archiv had been finalized, another new and fertile
element entered Weber’s life: he received a formal invitation to speak at the St
Louis Congress of Arts and Science the following year on the subject of the social
scientific study of ‘The Rural Community’.101 This looked back to Weber’s work
on rural labour in the early 1890s and had in principle nothing to do with the PE.
Yet it surely had an impact on the text—not so much because of the experience of
going to America (that would have to wait until 1906–7 and the essays on the
Protestant sects) but because of the prospect of doing so. Why else was Weber
reading Ferdinand Kürnberger’s novel Der Amerikamüde about the cultural im-
pressions of a man who travelled to America [XX.14], if not as part of his
preparation for an American trip, a trip to which he had been looking forward
since 1893? And it was Kürnberger or the prospect of travel that reminded him of
Benjamin Franklin, an author he had known since childhood.102 The original and
erudite kernel of the PE is its second Part on ascetic Protestantism, and this is
formally confined to ‘the old capitalist countries’ of Western Europe [XXI.63]. The
first Part, by comparison, is a semi-detached miscellany, and so it seems entirely
reasonable that the employment of Franklin as ‘a provisional illustration’ of the
“spirit” of capitalism [XX.12]—though by no means an esoteric source before a
German audience103—should have arisen in this serendipitous fashion. When
Weber writes about the attitudes of ‘Germans’ to ‘the virtues of Americanism’
[XX.16], he is surely describing something of the agenda of his own reflections
prior to his American journey, as well as contributing to the text of the PE.104 The
sense of Franklin’s accidental status is enhanced when we recall that capitalism was
a familiar subject to Weber, yet he had never mentioned Franklin in this context
before. He had been thinking about the subject since at least 1890, and (as we have
seen) conceptually speaking there is little that is new in the portrayal of the “spirit”
of capitalism, except for its assembly in one place and its illustrative materials. Not
only is Franklin an absentee in the 1890s, but America hardly features.105 So it
seems undeniable that this section of the text was composed in or after the autumn
of 1903, and not before. Yet, because the ideas within it were long established, and
because Part II of the text was a separate entity, the fact tells us surprisingly little
about the history and genesis of the core text.

101 Wolfgang Schluchter, ‘Editorische Bericht’, MWG I/8.204. See further Historian, 77; ‘Max

Weber on “The Rural Community”: A Critical Edition of the English Text’, HEI 31 (2005), 327–66.
102 Roth, Familiengeschichte, 478–89, 478.
103 B. M. Victory, Benjamin Franklin and Germany (Philadelphia, 1915).
104 ‘Americanism’ carries a specific, religious, and ethical meaning at this date deriving from the

American “evangelical” Catholic Isaac Hecker: Weber almost certainly draws on this idea but
generalizes it [c].
105 Below I.4. The area of America that received Weber’s most detailed attention at this time

(though still not much) was Argentina: e.g. ‘Argentinische Kolonistenwirtschaften’ [1894], MWG
I/4.306–7.
52 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

Six weeks after the purchase of the Archiv, Weber arranged a meeting on the
island of Heligoland with Werner Sombart and Lujo Brentano to make plans for
the new journal—a short break after attending the meeting of the Verein für
Sozialpolitik in nearby Hamburg. One concern was simply to get to know Sombart,
his fellow editor; but he also wished to engage Brentano, the outstanding liberal
analyst of capital and labour from the older generation, to write a major review
article of Sombart’s recently published Modern Capitalism (1902). As he put it to
Brentano, he hoped that
from a quarter which possesses the necessary authority, & one which Sombart himself
recognizes unconditionally, the book may be allotted its position of proper importance
within the scientific work of the latest epoch. It would be of inestimable value if your
verdict, which in essence you expressed to me privately, should also be known publicly: that
the book maintains its significance and its value, regardless of whether just a few, or even
none, of its detailed positions prove to be permanently sustainable.106
What Weber wished to convey, and what he wanted Brentano to recognize,
whether or not he approved, was that there had been a paradigm shift away from
the older material analysis of ‘capital’—Brentano himself had evoked ‘the spirit of
capital’ as far back as 1870—to the new holistic analysis of ‘capitalism’, which
signified not merely (in Marx’s language) ‘the capitalist mode of production’ but
the entirety of ‘modern Kultur’ [XXI.107].107 For Weber Sombart’s excursion into
the psychological and kulturell sphere, though only a brief episode or gloss within a
broadly Marxist and materialist text,108 was at least a first step towards the
comprehensive realization of this idea, which would take place in the PE [cf.
XX.19 n. 1]. Sombart’s book and Brentano’s review would provide way-stations
towards the PE as well as striking publicity for the new editorial board of the
Archiv.109 In addition there was clearly a significant, free-ranging discussion on
interrelations between religion and the economy, which took in the Franciscans
(a subject of interest to both Brentano and Weber), ‘Calvinism’, and the Jews, where
Weber proved himself to be a good deal better informed than his companions,

106 Weber to Brentano, 4.10.03, Nachlaß Brentano Nr 67, Bl. 161–4.

107 Lujo Brentano, On the History and Development of Gilds, and the Origin of Trade Unions
(London, 1870), xv, 75, 87. See Ghosh, ‘From the “Spirit of Capital” to the “Spirit” of Capitalism’:
The Transition in German Economic Thought between Lujo Brentano and Max Weber’, HEI 35
(2009), 62–92, }II.
108 This was primarily just 20 pages on ‘The Genesis of the Capitalist Spirit’ out of 1,350 pages

overall: Der moderne Kapitalismus (Leipzig, 1902), i. 378–97. Weber’s references to the book in the PE
expand on this, but not greatly so.
109 Hartmut Lehmann’s insinuation that Weber composed the PE only because Brentano failed to

produce a book review of Sombart is audacious but unsupported: ‘Friends and Foes: The Formation
and Consolidation of the Protestant Ethic Thesis’, in W. H. Swatos Jr and Lutz Kaelber (eds), The
Protestant Ethic Turns 100 (Boulder, 2005), 1–22, esp. pp. 2–7. It is a development of his view that the
PE was ‘Weber’s reply to Sombart’s . . . Modern Capitalism’ (‘The Rise of Capitalism: Weber versus
Sombart’, in Hartmut Lehmann and Guenther Roth (eds), Weber’s Protestant Ethic (Cambridge 1993),
198). However, Weber’s explicit denials of this view, let alone the mass of evidence for his preoccupation
with capitalism in the 1890s, are not to be overridden: [XX.19 n. 1]; ‘Antikritisches’, 177.
 A Narrative 1898–1905 53

notwithstanding their considerable historical range.110 True to his code of silence

regarding work in progress, Weber did actually not mention the PE at Heligoland;
but, in the correspondence that ensued, he became more open about the existence of
‘an essay for the Archiv’, and supplied Brentano with a list of reading that came
straight out of his work on the PE.111
The 39-year-old Weber was unsuccessful in his somewhat naive attempt to
persuade the 59-year-old Brentano to dance to his tune; but with the arrangement
at the Archiv in place, it was as if the floodgates had opened in terms of intellectual
productivity. In sequence Weber produced: the great essay on “Objectivity” in
social science and social policy—at once a manifesto of editorial policy for the
Archiv and a statement on Weberian methodology (completed in February
1904);112 a major essay on Fideikommisse for the Archiv—a sharp protest against
a proposal to change Prussian land law so as to facilitate landholding in the form of
inalienable family trusts, thereby turning capitalist agriculturists into economic-
ally inert bastions of privilege (completed in April);113 Part I of the PE (in May–
June);114 and finally the text of his address for the St Louis Congress, together with
its historical introduction, published separately as ‘The Dispute over the Nature of
the Early Germanic Social Constitution’ (in July–August)115—though the last, a
reminder of Weber’s deep historical perspectives as of his long-standing interest in
later Roman history, was far too remote a subject to appear in the Archiv. Now this
batch of work was not a complete recovery from illness—as noted, this was partial
only; but it did reflect the achievement of a new personal and intellectual equilib-
rium, one that resolved the uncertainties that had been present in his mind even in
apparently happier times in the early 1890s. However, while the most important
items in this list of work are undoubtedly “new”—the essay on “Objectivity” and
Part I of the PE—the other three, relating to agrarian law and politics, have clear

110 On Franciscans and Calvinism: Weber to Brentano, 4, 10.10.03, Nachlaß Brentano Nr 67, Bl.

157–8, 161–4. On Judaism: Historian, 144–5.

111 Weber to Brentano, 10.10.03, Nachlaß Brentano Nr 67, Bl. 157–8.
112 Marianne to Helene Weber, 30.1, 15.2.04, pr. Lebensbild, 291; Lawrence Scaff, Max Weber and

America (Princeton, 2011), 18. However, it is not until 18 March that she can state ‘after a few days’
rest Max is now very industrious’ on the next piece of work (Lebensbild, 291). For contextual analysis of
the essay on “Objectivity”, see ‘Max Weber . . . and the Archiv’, HEI 36 (2010), 71–100.
113 ‘Agrarstatistische und sozialpolitische Betrachtungen zur Fideikommißfrage in Preußen’, MWG

I/8.92–88.—The completion dates are necessarily approximate. Weber reports a completion of the
text in mid-April: to Helene Weber, 13.4.04, Nachlaß Max Weber 30/4 Bl. 93; to Siebeck, 15.4.04,
MWG I/8.88. However, the essay was revised to his satisfaction only in late May: to Edgar Jaffé,
23.5.04, MWG I/8.88 & n. 43, and we should still allow for further revision at the proof stage.
114 This date is particularly speculative. Weber informed Siebeck on 12 April that he intended to

write an article for the Archiv on ‘Protestant ethic and capitalist spirit’ (cit. Hartmut Lehmann, ‘Friends
and Foes’, The Protestant Ethic Turns 100, 6). He was at work on it in mid-June: to Rickert, 14.6.04,
Nachlaß Max Weber 30/4 Bl. 94, and in late July it was being set in the press: to Siebeck, 20.7.04,
MWG I/8.88–9. By 17 July Weber was at work on the St Louis address et alia (see the next note),
which suggests that the first draft of Part I of the PE was now complete, though much revision and
complaints about proof setters was still to come.
115 Letters showing Weber at work on the St Louis address: to von Below, 17, 19 July, Nachlaß

Max Weber 30/4 Bl. 95–7; to Siebeck, 24 July, MWG I/6.230. The second of these shows that the
historical introduction to the St Louis address, ‘Der Streit um den Charakter der altgermanischen
Sozialverfassung’, was also written in July; cf. MWG I/6.240 n. 1; Historian, 77–8 & n. 11.
54 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

roots in the 1890s: a signal warning against supposing that the ostentatious novelty
of the “new” work signified any abandonment of ideas developed previously.
Indeed, the PE itself makes repeated reference to the subject of Fideikommisse
[XX.30; XXI.63, 88 n. 40, 98 n. 65].
So far as its external history is concerned, the last lap in the composition of the
PE is unusually straightforward. The Webers sailed from Bremen on 20 August and
arrived at Ellis Island, New York, on 30 August 1904; they returned to Cherbourg
on 27 November after an enthralling three months in America.116 In one sense this
trip is of the utmost importance; and in another it is not. There have always been
commentators willing to broach the unlikely hypothesis that Weber was so jejune
as to adjust the conceptual framework of the PE midway through publication
because of the impact made by his American journey; but it is not so. However
much he learned on other subjects, such as the Yankee assimilation of East European
immigrants, so far as the PE is concerned, the American journey offers little more
than a body of peripheral material in the footnotes. (He could indeed have
integrated this and other material to produce a major study of American Kultur
had he chosen to do so, but that would have been a separate subject.) There are
one or two small changes in detail, such as the nuances of the word ‘Gentleman’;117
and he discovered the importance of sport to Americans [XXI.108–9]; but Part II
of the PE, completed after returning from America, introduces no strategic shift in
ideas as compared to Part I, and the study of New World religiosity is consciously
excluded from the text [XXI.63]. America was immensely important to Weber,
but it was far too important for him to wait until 1904 to discover it. Thus it had
been a significant preoccupation (albeit one of many) since he was a schoolboy,
beginning with the inspiration he received from that embodiment of German–
Americanism, Friedrich Kapp (1824–84), who, famously, gave ‘To his young
friend’ a copy of his translation of Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography as a Christ-
mas present in 1875.118 Weber was still using this book when he wrote Part I of the
PE in 1904 (just as he took care to seek out Kapp’s daughters when he was in New
York) [XX.15 n. 3],119 and, as I have suggested, it was the prospect of America
rather than the actual experience of it that was most significant for the composition
of the PE. That experience was wonderful, intoxicating even, but primarily because
it formed a rich commentary on a pre-established agenda, as sketched in Part I of

116 See the authoritative account by Lawrence Scaff, Max Weber and America (Princeton, 2011),

Part I, supplemented by Guenther Roth, ‘Europäisierung, Amerikanisierung und Yankeetum: Zum

New Yorker Besuch von Max und Marianne Weber 1904’, in Asketischer Protestantismus, 9–31; and
idem, ‘Transatlantic Connections: A Cosmopolitan Context for Max and Marianne Weber’s New
York Visit 1904’, MWS 5 (2005), 81–112.
117 Common use of the term ‘gentlemen’ in everyday American speech coincided with Weber’s

established belief in the aspirational, meritocratic nature of American Kultur, and so the term takes on a
more democratic note in the 1905 text as compared to that of 1904: cf. [XX.27, XXI.29]. Even so,
Weberian ‘democracy’ and ‘aristocracy’ were never mutually exclusive categories.
118 Wilhelm Hennis, ‘Freiheit durch Assoziation’ [1995], Max Weber und Thukydides (Tübingen,

2003), 154. Cf. Weber to Hermann Baumgarten, 8.11.84, pr. Jugendbriefe, 139–42; Roth,
Familiengeschichte, 475–89.
119 Roth, ‘Europäisierung, Amerikanisierung und Yankeetum’, 10–20 passim.
 A Narrative 1898–1905 55

the PE and, more fully and for the present day, in his address to the St Louis
Congress.120 Meanwhile the unAmerican ideas that make up the conceptual and
historical kernel of Part II of the text, asceticism and rationality, were undoubtedly
established in Part I, before he sailed.121 So too was a commitment to ‘take the
productions of Calvin, Calvinism, and the Puritan sects’ as the starting point in an
investigation of the links between the old-Protestant ethic and the development of
the capitalist spirit’ in Part II of the text [XX.52]—although it is a common
misconception, sectarian religiosity was not something Weber discovered across
the Atlantic [XX.8, 10, 50].122 Hence his overall judgement on the American tour,
written just as it was ending:
Of course it cannot be said that the “academic” [wissenschaftlich] result of the journey for me
can be compared with the expense . . . I shall myself write a few critical assessments of negro
literature, and perhaps some other small pieces besides—but for my work on the history of
Kultur [the PE] I have not seen much more than where the things are that I ought to see; in
particular the libraries which I would have to use, and which are lodged amongst small sects
and colleges scattered far and wide over the country.123
Still, Weber was in such rude health as a consequence of his American journey
that from the moment of his return his eyes were set on completing Part II of the
PE, and complaints about the effort of writing are for once relatively muted. As
early as 10 December, we find him once more in the realm of seventeenth-century
religion, when he writes to Eduard Bernstein on the subject of Quakers and their
doctrine of “fixed prices” (although this material would come to the surface only in
his treatment of the ‘Protestant Sects’ in 1906–7) [i.219; CS 561].124 Another
reason for writing was to arrange a meeting with Bernstein, who was coming to
speak in Heidelberg, and it was almost certainly as a result of this meeting that
Bernstein lent him Robert Barclay’s 1676 Apology for the Quakers—which com-
pleted the series of casuistical compendia that supply the principal database for
Part II, a database that, as I have suggested, goes back to 1902 at least [XXI.67
n. 133].125 There follows a silence in the correspondence until 5 February 1905,
which presumably signifies a period of uninterrupted endeavour, before Weber

120 “The Rural Community”, HEI 31 (2005), 328–46, esp. 328–36, 345–6.
121 Note (i) the discussion of the worldly or unworldly character of the Christian confessions
[XX.6–8], which is a calculated anticipation of the idea of inner-worldly asceticism in Part II; (ii) the
listing of all the components of ascetic Protestantism except Methodism [XX.8–11]; (iii) emphasis on
‘a certain ascetic trait’ in Franklin’s behaviour [XX.31]; (iv) the fundamental statement about rationality
at [XX.35]; (v) identification of the agendum of the Beruf [XX.35–54].
122 Contra Scaff, Max Weber and America, 130–6, 145, 169, 190; Wolfgang Schluchter,

‘Einleitung’, MWG I/9 }6. See II.8.ii; Roth, ‘Europäisierung, Amerikanisierung und Yankeetum’.
123 Max to Helene Weber, [19.11.04], pr. Lebensbild, 317; cf. PE [XXI.3 n. 3], which repeats the

remark about libraries.

124 Bernstein Papers, International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam, D817.
125 The portion of text that indubitably derives from Barclay is very small: the discussion of ‘Quaker

doctrine’ [XXI.66–8], and some few references in the final section [II.2]. One of the latter derives from
Eduard Bernstein’s use of Barclay, rather than from Barclay himself, which supports the idea of a pre-
existing draft: [XXI.97 n. 59]. All the rest could easily have been worked into an existing manuscript as
additions.
56 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

presented a summary of this part of the text to the Eranos discussion group—the
interdisciplinary colloquium of Heidelberg academics set up in January 1904 for
the discussion of topics within the field of religion and neighbouring disciplines.126
His minute of the meeting is of particular interest as showing how complete is his
control of the argument, a month before its formal completion. At points we can
trace references to what will appear as sections of the final text, as well as exact
“quotations” of its language.127 On 2 March Marianne Weber reports that dicta-
tion of the text to a stenographer had begun, with Weber working from an
essentially finished manuscript (albeit one illegible to anyone else). A report to
his brother Alfred follows a few days later: ‘My life goes on variably. I have, amidst a
bearable degree of torment, at least finished my big article (Protestant ethic and
capitalism) for the June number’ of the Archiv. ‘Dictation for the typewriter is now
a real chore.’128 Of course, Weber was a perpetual reviser; final completion was an
elusive or indefinite goal, and today we can still identify a significant number of
later additions made at the proof stage, some quite substantial.129 But still, by early
April 1905 the process of dictation, and with it the first accessible draft of an entire
text, was complete.130

126 See the Eranos Group rules, esp. rule (b): Hubert Treiber, ‘Der “Eranos”—Das Glanzstück im

Heidelberger Mythenkranz ?’, in Asketischer Protestantismus, 75–153, here 82.

127 This short but important text was first printed by Hubert Treiber, ‘Der “Eranos” ’, 126–7. Now

see MWG I/9.220–1, which prints a fractionally corrected text.

128 To Alfred Weber, 8.3.05, Nachlaß Max Weber 30/4 Bl. 101–2. (‘Torment’ refers to the use of

drugs to make him sleep). Cf. Marianne to Helene Weber, 2.3.05, cit. Scaff, Max Weber in America,
185. Scaff suggests that there was no manuscript in existence prior to the dictation to the typist, but
this is unthinkable. A text of this complexity could not simply have emerged from Weber’s head. If
there were no manuscript, Weber would not have described the article as ‘finished’ in his letter to
Alfred, prior to the dictation taking place ‘now’.
129 See n. 56.
130 See Weber to Heinrich Rickert, 2.4.05, Nachlaß Max Weber 30/4 Bl. 105–6; cf. Marianne to

Helene Weber, 3.4.05, cit. Radkau, Max Weber, 380–1, Scaff, Max Weber in America, 185.
 4
Capitalism

So much for narrative history. We turn now to the history of the ideas that run
through the narrative, always bearing in mind our original question: where did the
‘Protestant Ethic’ come from? It will be clear by now that it is a good deal more than
‘the so-called Calvinism-capitalism-problem’ of the schoolroom.1 Its true history is
practically the same as the history of the mind of Max Weber, and the full range of
the text’s concerns is much the same as Weber’s complete inter- and multidisciplinary
agenda. Here we shall focus on the following principal themes: capitalism; politics
and nationality; religion; rationality and law. These headings will, I hope, provide a
sufficient introduction to the variety and fertility of this extraordinary text. But since
it comments, overtly or covertly, on just about every subject of concern to Weber at
the time he was writing, it will always overflow the boxes one makes for it.
* * * * *
One plausible starting point for the genesis of the PE is February 1892. On the 1st
of the month Weber’s habilitation as a lecturer at Berlin University became
effective, and with it a first crucial step to personal and academic autonomy. Ten
days later he signed up as a participant in the inquiry of the Verein für Sozialpolitik
into the condition of German rural labour—a subject quite unconnected with the
plan of work outlined in his application to habilitate.2 With equally little delay, he
then arranged for a supplementary inquiry into the labourers’ condition, under
the auspices of the Evangelisch-sozialer Kongress (the Protestant Social Congress) and
its General Secretary Paul Göhre, who was a friend. This would make use of the
country clergy as an alternative channel of information to the landowners, on
whom the Verein was relying, and within six weeks he began publishing a set of
articles outlining the direction he wished his enquiry to take.3 Simply as a statement
of pure energy or ambition this would be remarkable enough. What is more
remarkable is that in his journal articles the 28-year-old Max Weber had already
reached a set of analytical conclusions about the nature of the rural labour problem

1 Paul Honisgheim, ‘Erinnerungen an Max Weber’, 267; cf. 177, 210, 225, 264 for variations on

this mockery.
2 Hugo Thiel to Gustav Schmoller, 11.2.92, cit. MWG I/3.19. Weber could not have secured this

research commission, and especially in the most politically sensitive of all the regions subject to
enquiry, without prior establishment of his credentials. So he must have been known to Schmoller
previously—they were both resident in Berlin—but nothing more specific is known. For Weber’s
proposed programme of work after habilitation, see the October 1891 ‘Lebenslauf ’, pr. MWG
I/2.65–6.
3 ‘Privatenquêten’ [1.4.92–1.7.92], MWG I/4.74–105.
58 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

in Germany, and more especially east of the Elbe River. In this sense neither the
inquiry of the Verein, nor that of the Kongress, was strictly necessary,4 though no
doubt it was politic to reserve the most visible display of intellectual mastery until
after the notional inquiry period—such as occurred when Weber addressed the
General Assembly of the Verein the following year, in March 1893. Most striking of
all in our context is the degree to which the framework and premisses of his
thinking anticipate the framework and premisses of the PE twelve years later.
What this means, in the first instance, is that Weber identified the central object
of study as the ‘destruction of the labour constitution which had been bequeathed
historically’ in the period since c.1850.5 In that time ‘the normal traditional
relationship’ of rural society, where the landlord was a ‘political autocrat’ and yet
an ‘economic comrade’,6 had been overthrown by ‘the modern economic constitu-
tion’, ‘the money economy’, the ‘capitalist organization of the economy’, or, in
brief, ‘capitalism’.7 Political hierarchy and a community of material interests had
been replaced by economic hierarchy and the conflict of interests between landlord
and labour. It was a remarkable proof in an unlikely area of the rise of that
‘economic way of viewing things’, which was ‘on the advance in all areas’.8 Yet
the causes of this swing towards economism and capitalism were not exclusively, or
even primarily, material. Even when Weber spoke the language of empirical inquiry
in early 1892, his bias was clear enough: ‘It is an extremely rewarding task, to
investigate the psychological causes of this change.’9 And, since he knew his own
mind, the fig-leaf of open-ended enquiry was frequently set aside:
Time and again we come to the conclusion that the problems at issue are indeed associated
with external, material interests, but that they are of a subjective nature and lie within the
breasts of the men concerned. The conception the participants have of their situation—and
starting from the same objective situation this often varies wholly and quite unjustifiably—is
more important for us than the situation itself, and is the more important factor for the
future course of development. The rural labourer does not live by bread alone, and his being
is not framed by material interests alone but in large part by—illusions, as one might say
from a material–economic standpoint, or rather by factors whose psychological foundation
may be somewhat problematic to us but which is mainly inaccessible to purely economic
observation.10
The generic similarity of this inquiry with that of the PE will be evident. In both
cases Weber is interested in a broad movement between the poles of ‘traditionalism’
[XX.20–1] and capitalism; and in both cases ‘it is inner, psychological factors which

4 Weber’s subsequent assessments of the results of the Kongress inquiry ranged from the extremely

modest to the downright sceptical: ‘Die Erhebung des Evangelisch-sozialen Kongresses . . . ’ [1893],
ibid. 218–19; ‘Die deutschen Landarbeiter’ [1894], ibid. 318.
5 ‘Privatenquêten’, ibid. 89, original emphasis; cf. ‘Entwickelungstendenzen in der Lage der

ostelbischen Landarbeiter’ [1894], ibid. 371, 381.

6 ‘Entwickelungstendenzen’, ibid. 379, 373, 390, resp.
7 Review of Was heißt Christlich-Sozial? [1894], ibid. 357, 359; ‘Argentinische Kolonistenwirthschaften’

[1894], 301.
8 Freiburg Inaugural [1895], ibid. 553.
9 ‘Privatenquêten’, ibid. 80, original emphasis; cf. 89–90.
10 Ibid. 102; cf. 72, 86. See similarly ‘Die deutschen Landarbeiter’ [1894], ibid. 322–3, 341.
 Capitalism 59

are at stake, and not merely external facts’.11 And when he refers to the quality of
that ‘business intelligence’ that the modern bourgeoisie possessed in full measure
but that the politically trained landlords lacked, he is really evoking the “spirit” of
capitalism, just as he was when he appealed to the ‘capitalist character’ in his
General Economics lectures.12
The further point was that this process of change was essentially irreversible, like
the ‘steel housing’ (stahlhartes Gehäuse) [XXI.108] that represents the endpoint of
modern capitalist and rationalizing evolution in the PE. For Weber, social and
psychological change was not to be understood except as part of a cumulative
process of long-term ‘historical evolution’ or ‘development’ (Entwicklung). This
was not predetermined a priori according to an ‘immanent’ logical scheme
[XXI.56]; nor did it have the force of ‘an all-governing law of nature’;13 its power
derived instead from the fact that it was empirically cumulative over long periods of
time, where Weber, like most of his generation, took the whole of recorded history
as his reference point. Conceived on this grand scale, historical evolution was quite
simply part of ‘the nature of things’ and its course, like that of a big ship, could
hardly be deflected.14 All social phenomena had to be understood in this context.
For example, the variable nature of landlord–tenant relations in different districts
was only to be explained as ‘the endpoint of an evolution’, just as ‘the measurement
of wages in the countryside [was] not determined by labour performance but by
the minimum measurement of the labourer’s needs in accordance with their
traditional’—that is, historically bequeathed—‘standard of life’.15 However, within
the wealth of phenomena that daily life displayed, one needed ‘to be able to
distinguish between what was lastingly important for social evolution from what
was transitory’. To the question “How was this selection to be made?” Weber had a
clear answer: ‘that . . . is the very specific function within the division of labour
which falls to us scholars, who see things from a bird’s eye perspective.’16 The
trained scholar had a unique capacity to detect the underlying or overall trend—
‘the developmental trend’, or ‘tendency’. This—rather than any scrupulous love of
the past for its own sake—was what Weber meant when he described the analysis
given in the PE as ‘purely historical’ [XX.53; XXI.109]. Now this purely empirical
yet academically trained insight into the nature of developmental trends was a
source of great power, because only those who possessed ‘the clearer knowledge of
the sober laws of social life’ could understand the small space that remained open
to influence it.17 By contrast, those who denied trends that were objectively

11 ‘Privatenquêten’, ibid. 104.

12 ‘Die deutschen Landarbeiter’ [1894], ibid. 326; cf. ‘Argentinische Kolonistenwirthschaften’
[1894], 297; ‘Entwickelungstendenzen’ [1894], 371; Freiburg Inaugural [1895], 568; MWG III/
1.506; Historian, 106–7.
13 ‘Entwickelungstendenzen’, MWG I/4.421.
14 ‘Die Evangelisch-sozialen Kurse in Berlin . . . ’ [1893], ibid. 236.
15 ‘Entwickelungstendenzen’, ibid. 385, 390, resp.
16 ‘Die deutschen Landarbeiter’, ibid. 315; cf. ‘Monographien von Landgeistlichen . . . ’ [1893],

ibid. 277.
17 ‘Zur Rechtfertigung Göhres’ [1892], ibid. 119.
60 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

inevitable—such as the rise of capitalism—were ‘romantics’ or (later) ‘literati’.18

Capitalist evolution in the early 1890s thus supplies the first great example of one of
Weber’s most important analytical (yet also rhetorical) ploys, one that by the end of
his life had become almost incessant: the claim that ‘the facts are laid out in such a
way and not otherwise’,19 and woe betide anyone who tried to deny them.
So there was an essentially irreversible evolutionary movement towards capital-
ism at work on Germany’s most backward rural frontier, a replica of the process
Weber described in his General Economics lectures for the city economy in the
high medieval period. (The assured historicist had no qualms about spanning the
centuries in this way.) Furthermore, as we have seen, the nexus of ideas around
capitalism was the outstanding example of continuity within Weber’s thinking
either side of the great hiatus 1898–1902. One might suppose then that the most
secure and best-founded part of the PE would be that which related to capitalism;
but that would be a mistake. On the contrary, amidst the wealth of ideas that are
presented there with such assurance, capitalism is an exception, and Weber con-
fesses to a fundamental uncertainty regarding its status. Thus, when he first
introduces the “spirit” of capitalism in 1904, he feels he must resort to a delaying
tactic: ‘the final conceptual fix cannot stand at the beginning, but at the end of the
investigation’, so for the time being he (and we) must make do with ‘a provisional
illustration’ of the capitalist “spirit” in the form of Benjamin Franklin [XX.12].
However, there is no return to the subject later on, so there can be no ‘final conceptual
fix’, and this most aggressively and explicitly conceptual of thinkers is left without a
defined concept with which to pin down what he regarded as the central structure of
modernity.20 Examination of his work in the 1890s will show that some uncertainty
about capitalism had always been present in his mind; and that the outcome in 1904
is not merely continuous with the past but is in part explained by it.
If the obvious starting point for Weber’s enquiries into capitalism lay in the land,
we should not forget that those enquiries were both ancient and modern. He
studied both the decay of ‘the patriarchal system’ in East Elbean Germany21 and
the great slave estates of ancient Rome—a central focus of his 1891 dissertation on
Roman Agrarian History. Here too he found an identity between large landowning
and ‘Agrarian Capitalism’, but it was of a wholly different kind from anything
experienced in modern Germany, since it was based on slavery.22 He therefore
discarded it as an irrelevance, for reasons that, in origin at least, were classically
liberal. As he stated in 1896: ‘We have little or nothing to learn from the history of
antiquity in regard to the social problems of today. A proletarian today and a slave
in antiquity would have as little mutual understanding as a European and a
Chinese.’23 Such thinking had a twofold significance. First, if ancient and modern

18 See Ghosh, ‘Max Weber and the Literati’, in Kay Waechter (ed.), Grenzüberschreitende Diskurse

(Wiesbaden, 2010), 243–78.

19 WuG [1919–20], 176; cf. »Objektivität« [1904], WL 171: ‘So-und-nicht-anders-Gewordensein’.
20 See similarly »Objektivität« WL 192.
21 ‘Die Erhebung des Vereins für Sozialpolitik’, MWG I/4.140. 22 MWG I/2.215.
23 ‘Die sozialen Gründe des Untergangs der antiken Kultur’ [1896], MWG I/6.102. See similarly

Die römische Agrargeschichte [1891], MWG I/2.345–52.

 Capitalism 61

capitalism were historically divided in so radical a fashion, then it would be difficult

to conceive of a generalized “capitalism” as the basis of a more broadly founded
conceptual type. Secondly, the crucial thread that links and divides Weber’s Roman
and modern studies is his concern with ‘the magic of freedom’24—an elementary
foundation to Weberian ideas that has been greatly ignored. The central psycho-
logical factor driving the dissolution of modern agrarian patriarchalism in favour of
capitalism was ‘the mighty striving . . . for freedom’ on the part of the labourer; ‘the
urge that carries within it the marks of upwards striving, the urge to freedom and
participation in the goods of the Kultur of the present day’.25 It was only this
awakening from ‘dull resignation’ on the part of the masses, or at least of ‘the
ethically more capable elements’ among them,26 that drove them to opt for a life
that, seen in material terms or in terms of the stability and human satisfaction of
social relations, often made them worse off than before.27 There was then an
identity between modern capitalism and freedom: the labourers who were called
“free” were those paid in money wages. Money conveyed independence and
mobility, and, however inadequate or unequal these wages might be, they were
‘the most important symptom of [the labourer’s] personal freedom’.28
Now freedom—the free space outside the established structures of society and
Kultur—is a precious good for Weber: the same concern would be crucial to his
interest in charisma from 1905. But, good though it might be, the association
between capitalism and freedom meant that capitalism was problematic for the
analyst: its very quality of freedom made it elusive. The great beauty of the old
patriarchal system was that it presented such a clear structure of social hierarchy
and interrelation, which could be analysed and described minutely even as it
decayed. It is this precise description that makes up the bulk of Weber’s volumin-
ous work on The Position of Rural Labour in East Elbean Germany for the Verein
für Sozialpolitik.29 But what was there to say about its capitalist substitute ? If
patriarchalism was a ‘labour constitution’ or ‘organization’, rural capitalism was
merely a solvent ‘that produced both the movement [of labour] into the towns’—
thereby exiting the field of enquiry altogether—‘and the disorganization of this
[old] labour constitution’.30 By the same logic Weber referred to Germany’s
agrarian competitors—Russia, Argentina, and America—as ‘capitalistically disor-
ganized economies’, which might be economically superior owing to their freely
moving ‘swarms’ of ‘nomadic’, migrant labour,31 but which in terms of overall
Kultur were much inferior to an old and settled country such as Germany.

24 Freiburg Inaugural [1895], MWG I/4.552.

25 Resp. ‘Die Erhebung des Vereins für Sozialpolitik’ [1893], ibid. 152; ‘Monographien von
Landgeistlichen . . . ’ [1893], ibid. 281; cf. ‘Die deutschen Landarbeiter’ [1894], ibid. 340.
26 Resp. ‘Entwickelungstendenzen’ [1894], ibid. 374; ‘Die Evangelisch-sozialen Kurse in

Berlin . . . ’ [1893], ibid. 236.

27 Understandably this was contested: see Weber’s reply to Anton Sombart at the Verein für

Sozialpolitik in 1893: ibid. 203.

28 ‘Entwickelungstendenzen’, ibid. 392; cf. 409; ‘Die Erhebung des Vereins für Sozialpolitik’, ibid. 148.
29 ‘Die Arbeitsverhältnisse der einzelnen Bezirke’, MWG I/3.109–885.
30 ‘Die ländliche Arbeitsverfassung’ [1893], MWG I/4.174, emphasis added.
31 Ibid. 183, reiterated ‘Argentinische Kolonistenwirtschaften’ [1894], ibid. 292.
62 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

Of course, this does not amount to a negative dismissal of capitalism in general.

The single most important capitalist country, England, was marked neither by ‘the
great youthfulness of its social organization’ nor by the low level of Kultur to be
found in Argentina (for example).32 Weber was also emphatic regarding the
‘absolutely incomparable nature of industrial and rural economic circumstances’:
those ‘industrial labourers who [were] most completely proletarianized as wage
labourers’ represented ‘the most elevated stratum’ in their sector of the economy,
whereas the reverse was true of rural wage labour .33 So even if the money economy
was a mixed blessing on the estates of Eastern Germany with its compound of
individual freedom and social dissolution, it was entirely appropriate to the urban
industrial economy—just as the PE would suggest a decade later. But if Weber did
not regard capitalism’s fluidity as in principle negative, still its association with
freedom, mobility and want of formal ‘organization’ rendered it problematic as an
object of study, even within an urban context, and these qualities made it ephem-
eral and vulnerable in his eyes. Thus he identified the nineteenth-century epoch of
‘free competition’ and the Cobdenite ‘world economy’, of industrial capitalism
freed from all political constraint and support, as no more than a ‘transitional
period’ between two regulated mercantilist epochs: the historic mercantilism of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and ‘the healthy mercantilism’ in immediate
prospect.34 Because of his passionate adherence to conceptions of human freedom,
Weber was always on the lookout for signs of social and analytical fixity. Fixity and
even the strangulation of freedom are common features in his prospective visions of
the near future: the ‘steel housing’ in the PE is only the most famous example.
Hence these reflections in 1894 on the expiry of the transitional period, which
sound like a distant echo of J. S. Mill on ‘the stationary state’:
We do not know what will be the further course of technical–economic transformation. We
do not know, and it is doubtful as to how much justification there is for the illusion that, for
example, governs our industrial labouring masses, that we shall continue to advance
technically for a long time yet. The tempo at least will hardly continue at this rate. Only
then, when the present rapid sequence of technical remodelling has come to an end, will
humanity be in a position to give itself new, lasting and definitive forms of social organiza-
tion.35
Weber was quite wrong in his supposition that technical change would diminish,
and we hear no more of this after 1900; but the central point here is his belief that
contemporary capitalism was too elusive to be seen as a ‘lasting and definitive form

32 ‘Argentinische Kolonistenwirtschaften’ [1894], ibid. 297.

33 Resp. ‘Privatenqûeten’ [1892], ibid. , 94; ‘Die deutschen Landarbeiter’ [1894], ibid. 320.
34 Resp. Mannheim lectures [1897], ibid. 851; ‘Die deutschen Landarbeiter’, ibid. 339; reit.

Freiburg Inaugural [1895], ibid. 572; Discussion of Karl Oldenberg ‘Über Deutschland als
Industriestaat’ [1897], ibid. 631.
35 ‘Die deutschen Landarbeiter’, ibid. 339; the idea is repeated in Weber’s review of Was heißt

Christlich-Sozial?, ibid. 360. Cf. J. S. Mill, Principles of Political Economy (1848), Bk IV, ch. vi. Weber
undoubtedly knew of Mill’s Principles (MWG III/1.548, 699–700), though it does not feature on the
bibliography prepared for students in the 1898 Grundriss. Mill was always ‘der alte Mill ’, a man from a
previous generation, though not a mind to be dismissed lightly cf. MWG I/17.99.
 Capitalism 63

of social organization’. This is recognizable as part of a lifelong concern regarding

the vulnerability of capitalism, but it is also one of the roots of Weber’s analytical
and conceptual difficulties with capitalism in the PE—and this is something we
must come back to (I.8).
Perhaps though he might find greater certainty and definition elsewhere? In his
writings on the stock exchange and financial markets in 1894–6 he grappled with
capitalism in a more authentically modern context than that of rural society. We
cannot be sure why Weber took up this subject. It stands apart from the matrix of
landed studies that dominates his work before 1900,36 and thereafter he displays a
marked want of interest in “finance capitalism”, evidenced (for example) by his
unfriendly commentary on speculators and monied men as alien to modern
industrial capitalism [i.6–7].37 The most likely cause is a humdrum one: there
had been a major public inquiry into the operation of Germany’s stock exchanges,
and Weber, who was a professor in commercial law, could hardly avoid discussing it
in his seminar.38 Still, having taken up the subject, his discussion of it is striking
precisely because it is not merely technical. Thus the premiss for Weber’s concep-
tion of the stock exchange or bourse was not specific to financial markets
but generic, locating it within the wider capitalist economy: ‘It is a modern
market’39—a view that could come have straight out of his General Economics
lectures. This proposition was indeed followed by an examination of the differences
between the markets of the bourse and ordinary product markets, but still it led back
to the conclusion that they were ‘essentially alike’, not least because he held that the
financial market partook of another aspect of the democratic character of modern
capitalism: it was ‘a market for articles satisfying modern mass needs’.40 Now the
idea of the market would always be central to Weber’s conception of a capitalist
“ethic” (or prescriptions for conduct) because of its seamless mixture of free space

36 The need to repel agrarian phobia regarding futures trading in grain and flour was a significant

theme here, but only at a later date, in 1896: Knut Borchardt, ‘Einleitung’, MWG I/5.72, 75, 77–80.
Again, the prohibition on such futures trading proposed then was quite broadly supported; there was
no straightforward town/country divide.
37 Note the exclusion of financial subjects in general from the Grundriss der Sozialökonomik:

‘Vorwort’, GdS Abt. I (Tübingen, 1914), vii; cf. Knut Borchardt, ‘Max Webers Börsenschriften’,
Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften: Philosophisch-Historische Klasse, Sitzungsberichte Jahrgang
2000, Heft 4, 13–14, 37–43.
38 The earliest sign of Weber’s interest in this subject lies in the remark that he was discussing the

‘Stock Exchange Inquiry’ in his seminar: to Schmoller, 3.2.94, cit. MWG I/5.184. (The inquiry closed
on 11 November 1893, when its report was agreed, and this was published by the end of the year.)
However, Knut Borchardt exaggerates when he states that all Weber’s writings in this area, including
his two pamphlets on Die Börse (1894–6), were driven by an academic engagement with the inquiry
report, inspired by Levin Goldschmidt: ibid. 93; cf. idem., ‘Max Webers Börsenschriften’, 22–33. The
obvious motive for writing these pamphlets was not academic but the desire to instruct the working
men for whom they written (however excellent the intellectual quality of Weber’s exposition). Again,
the evidence for the impulsion of Goldschmidt is thin. As Prof. Borchardt admits (p. 30), the subject
was of little interest to him, and by 1894 his health was so far in decline that he can no longer be
accounted as intellectually active: he suffered a stroke in the spring of 1892; he gave up his lecturing
duties at the end of that year; and died in 1897.
39 Die Börse [1894], MWG I/5.139.
40 Ibid. 140; cf. 631–2. Note too the generic grouping in the Grundriss [1898], }17.I.4: ‘Markets,

stock exchanges and the business forms of trade’.

64 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

for (rational) calculation coupled with the ruthless meritocratic and competitive
discipline supplied by its inner laws: ‘whoever did not rise up was forced to sink
down’ [XX.29]. Seen in these terms, the market was not merely an economic
mechanism for setting prices, but Bunyan’s ‘Vanity Fair’: ‘the market of life’
[XXI.104, 73].41 Weber does not dwell on these aspects in his early writings,
though he does employ the striking expression ‘the market of life’ at this time;42 but
he says quite enough to show that his focus on the market idea in 1894–6 means
the same as it would in later life. For example, he notes in regard to the bourse that
‘the disciplinary power is a very strong one, at least in the most highly developed
type of the genre, the London Stock Exchange’.43 He also sees stock exchanges as
‘regulators and organizers’ of national economies;44 hence (in post-1900 termin-
ology) as implicitly rational. Another striking case occurs when he insists that
‘A strong bourse is simply not a club for “ethical Kultur”’ or vacuous moralizing,
yet at the same time he hopes that ‘the needs of “ethics” in these institutions can also
secure their rights’45—meaning that bourse rules and discipline should be upheld;
they should not be corrupted and weakened by speculation. Now this rejection of
the moralism of the Society for Ethical Kultur looks forward to a parallel condem-
nation in the PE [XX.53], and the thinking that underlies it: that pious or
sentimental moralizing should be dismissed in favour of the coolly disciplined
functional prescriptions for behaviour (“ethics”) imposed by an impersonal struc-
ture such as the market. The reference to “ethics” in 1896 has nothing to do with
moral values in any traditional sense, but prefigures the identical use of “ethic”
(with identical “”), in association with capitalism in 1904–5 [XX.16, 17, 29; cf. 32]
(even if by then the alternative terminology of the capitalist “spirit” is more
common). This is to anticipate the PE at a central point.
Nonetheless, focus on the idea of the market again illustrates Weber’s difficulty
with capitalism. The essence of the market lies in the transactions of individuals,
and this helps explain why the presentation of capitalism in the PE would be ‘one-
sided’ [XXI.110]: that is, devoted to questions of individual “ethics” and ignoring
wider organizational ‘forms’ such as the medieval city. Now this one-sidedness was
indeed one of the many forms of incompletion that Weber highlighted in the PE,
but, contrary to the assertions of many critics,46 it was not problematic in a
fundamental sense, and Weber undoubtedly thought that his ‘one-sided’ argument
in 1905 embraced ‘Asceticism and Capitalism’ as totalities [XXI.1]. His real
problem with capitalism was (as he tells us) a problem with the “spirit” (or ethic)
of capitalism itself [XX.11–12]: what was the status of this individual phenom-
enon? For, although Weber was undoubtedly an individualist thinker, his indi-
vidualism was social individualism. Individual conduct such as the capitalist “spirit”
became significant only ‘as a mass phenomenon’ [XX.20]. Vehemently though he

41 A ‘fair’ is of course a ‘market’, as is more evident in German: Jahrmarkt.

42 To Emmy Baumgarten, 22.4.93, Jugendbriefe, 368.
43 ‘Die Ergebnisse der deutschen Börsenenqûete’ [1894], MWG I/5.224–5.
44 Die Börse I [1894], ibid. 160. 45 Die Börse II [1896], ibid. 655. 46 Below II.5.iii.
 Capitalism 65

repudiated any metaphysical collectivity such as that of society as an “organism”47

or the national Volksgeist [XX.37], still the sum total of mass-individual conduct
influenced by ethical or other norms was ‘something other than a “mere summation
of individual forces”’, and this was true of market behaviour in particular: ‘even the
legally [let alone ethically] prescribed connection between buyer and seller with its
consequences is something other than the simple sum of the interests of the two
individuals, though it carries within it nothing mystical at all.’48 But what was
this something other? What was the wider conceptual placement of the capitalist
“spirit”?
Weber was well aware that, if he chose to make use of it, Marx had made
available an extremely powerful conceptual model of capitalist society: that of social
class. In speaking to the Protestant Social Congress in 1894, a forum where
awareness of competition with Social Democracy was crucial to the radical Chris-
tian adherents of the ‘proletarian principle’,49 he undoubtedly deploys the language
of class. Within the capitalist and money economy,
One phenomenon above all enters in, a phenomenon of surpassing significance: the
replacement of rule through personal relationships by impersonal class rule. We know of
the phenomenon and its psychological consequences from industry. When the worker
approaches the individual entrepreneur for higher wages, the entrepreneur refers him to
the force of competition. Only class can treat with class; the connections based on personal
responsibility binding the individual master and the individual worker disappear; the
individual entrepreneur becomes to a certain extent transferable [fungibel]; he is only the
type of his class. The connection based on personal responsibility disappears; something
impersonal, which we tend to call the rule of capital, enters into its place.50
But while Weber’s awareness of a broadly Marxist or socialist context is clear, this is
certainly not a Marxist statement.51 What concerns Weber is not the fact of social
hierarchy—there has always been ‘rule’ or Herrschaft by small numbers of social
superiors—but something else, which we have noticed before: the distinctive
modern and Occidental transition from a personal to an impersonal hierarchy
and its ‘psychological consequence’, which is one of ethical, not material, depriv-
ation. The first of his pamphlets on The Bourse (1894–6) for the Göttingen
Workers Library is quite precise when it speaks ‘of the rule of “capital” and not
of that by capitalists’.52 In a world of savings banks and shareholding, this is the rule
not of a class of persons but of a web of capital investments and receipts: ‘the
modern “commercial economy” . . . rests on the peculiar feature that everyone lives
continually off the returns from the labour of others, and himself works to satisfy

47 e.g. ‘Roschers »historische Methode«’ [1903], WL 11, 33–7; Sociology of Religion [c.1913],

MWG I/22–2.397–9; Wahlrecht und Demokratie [1917], MWG I/15.355–9.

48 ‘Roschers »historische Methode«’ [1903], WL 35 n. 1 at 36. Here is another point in this text

where Weber plainly has the PE in mind: above I.1.

49 Paul Göhre, Die evangelisch-soziale Bewegung (Leipzig, 1896), e.g. 163.
50 ‘Die deutschen Landarbeiter’ [1894], MWG I/4.327.
51 The hasty claim by Knut Borchardt that Marx had anticipated Weber in this respect is not to be

taken seriously: MWG I/5.148 n. 16.

52 Die Börse I, ibid. 148.
66 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

the needs of others.’53 ‘In England workers not infrequently possess interest-
bearing bonds’; but at the same time, large landlords across Europe have mortgages;
and so it can happen that ‘the landlord pays interest to the proletarian’.54 Now, in
saying this, Weber did not mean to overlook the elementary fact of differences in
wealth, and his understanding of the inequalities entailed by the capitalist economy
was always unsparing in its honesty.55 Nonetheless, he did mean to say that analysis
of ‘capitalism’ or ‘the modern economic constitution’ measured in purely material
terms and in terms of people’s interests, was ultimately a secondary concern. In
1894 quite as much as in later life, it was men’s ultimate values, as embodied in
Kultur, that were primary, and the Kultur of capitalism or ‘modern material Kultur’
[XX.53] was identified as a cross-class phenomenon, thereby overriding classical
Marxist analysis: it embraced both entrepreneurs and skilled labour standing side
by side at its heart. The only persons who were excluded were those who were
incapable of, or averse to, rational thought and conduct, such as peasants who
preferred to remain in touch with nature or unskilled, uneducated labour.
Now this thinking was of great importance, and these various insights would
remain lifelong components in Weber’s conceptual arsenal. But still they were not
sufficient for him by the time he came to write the PE in 1904. For in rejecting
Marxist class struggle, he had rejected the one scheme that undoubtedly supplied a
conceptual and universal–historical foundation for capitalism, without finding a
substitute to put in its place. Here again he had found no stable ‘conceptual fix’
[XX.12].
This is perhaps unsurprising when we consider that, for, Weber stock markets,
quite as much as peasants and unskilled labour, were very imperfect specimens of
modern capitalism. He tried hard to assimilate them to a generalized model of
capitalist activity, by emphasizing their “real” economic function—their benefit to
the economy as a whole—and drawing attention to what later he would have called
their rational properties: showing (for example) that the spreading of risk in futures
trading was a necessary insurance function of ‘an extremely real and solid’ nature, or
that the overall effect of markets on price movements was to regulate, not to
promote, large-scale fluctuation.56 Nonetheless, he could not conceal that naked
(and wholly “irrational”) financial speculation, bereft of any real economic func-
tion, reached ‘the highest degree of its development in stock exchange trading’, and
that the ‘advantages and dark side of futures trading were almost inextricably
mixed’.57 (Here is an ancestor of the supremely pithy formulation in 1919,
where he speaks of ‘the rationalization of speculation’ [i.9].) This was part of
a rooted belief that he shared with Marx, but not, for example, Lujo Brentano
[i.23 n. 2]+, that, in the final analysis, the authentic kernel of capitalism was the

53 Ibid. 154. 54 Ibid. 148 n. 5 (cf. 152), 154, resp.

55 See, e.g., Sociology of Law [c.1910–14]: MWG I/22–3.424–9.—Weber was a more considerable
opponent than Herbert Marcuse made out in his famous attack ‘Industrialisierung und Kapitalismus’,
Max Weber und die Soziologie heute (Tübingen, 1965), 161–80; but, precisely because Weber can take
it, Marcuse’s assault should always be read.
56 Die Börse II [1896], MWG I/5.641; cf. 651.
57 Ibid. 625, 651, resp.
 Capitalism 67

industrial capitalism that produced mass goods for use; not the financial capitalism
that was too easily tainted with the stigma of performing operations devoid of any
substantive, mass benefit. Hence Weber’s confessed failure in 1896 to situate his
popular account of The Bourse within the wider context of ‘the great financial
powers’, that is, banks;58 his refusal to make use of his investigations into the stock
exchange in the PE;59 and the more general sidelining of any financial explanation
for the origins of modern industrial capitalism there [XX.29], a feature that is most
marked when it demotes the traditional appeal to reform of the usury laws as a
motor of economic progress. As we have seen, there was justice in his contention
that the original PE ‘nowhere mentions the canonical prohibition on taking interest’
[i.56 n. 1]+.
Thus the real significance of his work on stock markets lay primarily in the
insights they prompted regarding more particular traits of capitalist conduct. As in
his analyses of East Elbean agriculture and the medieval city economy, Weber
anticipates the idea of the personal character or “spirit” of capitalism. Thus he is
able to highlight the contrast between the inner ‘character’ of behaviour and its
detachable outward ‘form’, just as he would do in the PE. Hence this conclusion to
The Bourse: ‘If one surveys this whole mechanism, the first thing that comes to light
is the falsity of the opinion that one could deduce the unreality and “gambling
character” of futures trading as such from its form.’ The reality or otherwise of ‘naked
speculative profit’ could be established only by examination of ‘the inner economic
aim’ of the futures trader and not ‘the outer form’,60 since the forms of such trading
were compatible with a wide range of practices carrying similarly varied ethical
implications: irrational speculation and prudent insurance against risk could appear
almost identical externally. And, having identified the need for ‘penetration into the
interior’ of this form of commerce,61 we then find that many of the features that
distinguish his ‘provisional illustration’ of the “spirit” of capitalism in the PE derive
not, as one might suppose, from sources read in 1902–4 but are already on display in
his discussions of the Berlin and Hamburg stock exchanges.
For example, a central feature of the capitalist “spirit” in 1904 is Rechenhaftigkeit,
the capacity and propensity to calculate. (The term is lifted from Werner Sombart,
but Weber’s verbal larceny was so widespread and thoroughgoing that little
importance attaches to its original sources) [XX.34; XXI.77 n. 7].62 Yet Weber’s
fascination with calculation, and not least with elementary virtuosity in the ma-
nipulation of numbers, had been brought out with great clarity a decade previously
in The Bourse. Thus the central difference between arbitrage and futures speculation
is that the first is ‘an example of pure calculation’. Furthermore, ‘the chances of
profit rest essentially on the speed with which an emergent regional price difference

58 Ibid. 619 n. 1.
59 The fleeting reference to the modern stock exchange’s attempt at the self-regulation of
speculative profits (the Differenz) via ‘black lists’ in the PE [XX.33 n. 1] is the exception that proves
the rule, since this was a gesture towards rationality and discipline within an overall context that was
irrational and undisciplined.
60 Die Börse [1894–6], MWG I/5.639, 641, resp.; cf. 652–3. 61 Ibid. 174 n. 17.
62 Cf. Werner Sombart, Der moderne Kapitalismus (Leipzig, 1902), i. 198, 207, 395.
68 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

is exploited’ at a particular moment, and ‘so [the arbitrageur] must perform truly
astounding feats of mental reckoning and his trade is amongst the most nervously
exhausting that there is.’63 It is clear that Weber was himself susceptible to the
‘romanticism of numbers’ he found in modern America [XX.30]—as evidenced by
the heavily statistical nature of his projected study of the demographic impact of
agrarian legal systems in the years 1896–8, or his later enquiry into ‘The Psycho-
physics of Industrial Labour’ in 1909, which caused him to deliver a somewhat self-
regarding paean to ‘a really enormous power and joy in work, unafraid of many
months spent personally sorting, counting and calculating’.64 When set against
statistical models such as these, which presumed great mass and regularity, stock
market speculation appeared ethically tainted by greed while futures trading,
because it looked to future outcomes, had a necessarily random (or irrational)
element. Since it did not operate under the pressure of present time and immediate
response (as in ordinary market transactions), it was ‘not a pure example of
calculation’, and so, after all, there was a limit to Weber’s calculatory enthusiasm
in this case.65
Another example of an early anticipation of the “spirit” of capitalism lies in
what Weber says about the pressure of time—something he felt from an early age.
Even as a teenager he was conscious that ‘time passes through one’s hands like
butter’; thus the sense of time passing slowly through ennui was something that
‘ought never to happen to reasonable people’,66 and there are many subsequent
utterances of this kind. But while his interest in calculation can be found across a
range of “early” writings from the 1890s (as, for example, in the lectures on
‘General Economics’),67 the bourse seems to have played a particular role in
causing him to reflect on the connection of time with capitalist behaviour,
because of the importance attaching to small time intervals, when prices and
rates of exchange could change by the hour or less. Hence the frequently repeated
reflection that ‘the money value of time has increased enormously since previous
centuries’, leading to the obvious inference that time wastage was unacceptable
[cf. XXI.76–7].68 We see then that, although Benjamin Franklin is the literal
source for that most central of exhortations in the PE ‘Remember, that time is
money’ [XX.13], this idea was clearly present to him ten years before: both in its
specifically economic application and as a holistic dictum governing the conduct
of life as a whole.
Something similar may be said of another famous ‘maxim’ in the PE that in
Weber’s eyes best embodied ‘the capitalist “ethic”’ (and one to which he would

63 Die Börse II [1896], MWG I/5.626.

64 ‘Zur Methodik sozialpsychologischer Enqûeten und ihrer Berarbeitung’ [1909], MWG
I/11.393. On agrarian systems: Weber to Brentano, 11.3.96, to Helene Weber, 2.5.96, to Marianne
Weber, 13.8.98, pr. Rita Aldenhoff, ‘Einleitung’, MWG III/5.35 n. 81, 38.
65 Die Börse II, MWG I/5.626.
66 To Fritz Baumgarten, 10.8.79, Jugendbriefe, 27. See also Radkau, Max Weber, 211–12.
67 e.g. MWG III/1.489.
68 Die Börse I [1894], MWG I/5.158; cf. ‘Die Ergebnisse der deutschen Börsenenqûete’ [1894],

ibid. 295; ‘Börsenwesen’ [1895], ibid. 576; Die Börse II [1896], ibid. 642.
 Capitalism 69

return repeatedly in later life): that ‘honesty is the best policy’ [XXI.71, 107
n. 83a]. Thus he first encountered this English proverb when he obtained a copy
of Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of Business Enterprise (1904) in America; but still the
idea is already present in his discussion of The Bourse when he emphasizes that
‘honesty is the strength of every social organization’.69 This in turn is but a derivative
of the emphasis on the qualities of fixity and regularity, which Weber deemed
essential to the functioning of the modern capitalist economy. Here, as in the PE,
the invocation of honesty carries an “ethical” (but not moralizing) connotation. All
stock exchanges were governed by plutocrats; but all classes, including the plutoc-
racy, contained a “morally” active core: that is, one that believed in upholding rules
and discipline. The aim then was to make sure that the honest element within the
plutocracy prevailed, since, by a typically Weberian paradox, honesty was not so
much a normative good but the best policy: it promoted the most functionally
efficient capitalism. (Once more we encounter Weber’s peculiar understanding of
“ethics” in a modern, post-Marxist and post-Nietzschean context.) The ‘proper
instrument’ to this end was ‘an organization of the bourse more along English lines’,
this being the national exchange that in his view was at once the most coherently
plutocratic and the one most possessed of the sense of ‘personal responsibility’70—and
here is another anticipation of the arguments of the PE.
Besides the rural economy and the bourse, Weber had one other form of access to
“capitalism” in the 1890s, and in this case it was a truly industrial capitalism. His
contact here derived not from a written or public source, but from a private and
personal one: his uncle and Marianne Weber’s grandfather, Carl David Weber
(1824–1907), who ran a linen weaving manufacture at Oerlinghausen near Biele-
feld. As Marianne reported, he was the model in the PE for the ‘“new style”
entrepreneur’ [XX.29] who imports the “spirit” of capitalism into the linen textile
industry c.1850.71 Now potentially he would seem to be of considerable signifi-
cance. He was, after all, Max Weber’s only direct access to an industrial entrepre-
neur, and he underlies the entire passage given over to the description and
evocation of the modern entrepreneur [XX.27–32], despite Weber’s use of a fictive
plural at some points so as to suggest that ‘I know of several cases of this kind’
[XX.29]. Here, as in the case of Franklin, Weber resorts to the procedure of
illustration through ‘a particular case’ [XX.27 & n. 1], and between them these
two illustrations embrace practically the entirety of what Weber has to say about the
“spirit” of capitalism. However, the fact that they are just isolated images confirms
the fragility of this construct-which-is-not-a-realized-concept.
Weber’s understanding of Carl David’s character and qualities was curiously
second-hand. There is no evidence of him visiting Oerlinghausen between the
point at which his nervous collapse set in and Carl David’s death in 1907, when ‘an
uncommonly strong character’ of this kind [XX.29] could have had very little
sympathy for Weber’s very weak-seeming malaise—one that even his mother found
hard to understand. Weber reports in the PE that one of the few meanings that the

69 Die Börse I, ibid. 172. 70 Ibid.

71 Lebensbild, 181–2; cf. Roth, Familiengeschichte, 250–6.
70 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

modern entrepreneur, or Carl David, could see in life was “to provide for the
children and grandchildren”, and this surely includes a reference to the favoured
status the young Marianne Weber enjoyed in his eyes [XX.30]. But though
Marianne was indeed a favoured grandchild,72 her attempt to tap him for funds
at Christmas 1899, when she and Max were planning to give up Max’s salary and at
the same time embark on prolonged foreign travel, was sharply dismissed by him
(as she reported to Max) with the remark that ‘we had indeed been very profli-
gate’.73 Here was the ‘hard sobriety’ of those who ‘did not want to consume but to
earn’ [XX.29]; a symptom of the ‘ascetic compulsion to save’ [XXI.101]. Thus Weber
would acknowledge at Carl David’s death in 1907 ‘that, for some years now, we
were of course placed further away from him’, and likewise his surprise at the size of
the testamentary legacy he made to Marianne; but still he would ‘always consider it
a happy chance, that it was once granted to me to come closer to him in better
days’—that is, before 1899.74 But what did even this earlier closeness amount to?
There is no sign of Weber spending extended amounts of time at Oerlinghausen
in the ‘better days’, nor is Carl David a significant presence in correspondence.
Marianne Weber might seem to be Max’s obvious link to this branch of the family,
but though she had an honest appreciation of the material comfort and social
elevation it had brought her, intellectually she had found it ‘horribly stultifying’.75
It may be then that Max Weber Sr, Carl David’s younger brother, was a principal
source of Max Jr’s information, though Carl David’s son-in-law, Bruno Müller, is
another possibility;76 but in any case it seems that here, as so often with Max Jr, the
regard he nurtured for a third party was of a somewhat abstract character, heavily
influenced by his own views and categories. As he told Marianne before their
marriage, he considered that their Westphalian relatives were happy in marriage
because of ‘the fulfilling and satisfyingly practical profession [Beruf] of [Carl
David]’, in contrast to ‘the arrogance of the “intellectual” [geistig] and scholarly
calling’, which was where his own lot appeared to fall.77 This idea is then carried
over into the PE when Weber suggests that in the final analysis modern capitalists
‘“have nothing” of their wealth for themselves except: the irrational sensation of the
proper “fulfilment of a calling”’.78 It should be said, however, that the central
theme in his mind in 1892–3, when he was just embarking on an independent
career, was more the impracticality and implicit futility of the academic life rather
than any specific alternative; and it was not just the capitalist Carl David but ‘every
artisan’ whom Weber envied in achieving the kind of practical vocational fulfilment
about which he himself was in doubt.79 Still, it is clear that Carl David did embody

72 See Roth, Familiengeschichte, 539–40, 549.

73 Marianne to Max Weber, 31.12.99, cit. Radkau, Max Weber, 451.
74 To Alwine Müller, 21.7.07; cf. to Alfred Weber, 3.9.07, for the more candid view: Briefe.
75 Lebenserinnerungen, 49, citing one of her own letters from the later 1880s.
76 When Müller died in 1913, Weber refers to meeting him at home in Berlin ‘more than 35 years

ago’: to Alwine Müller, 6.3.13, Briefe.

77 To Marianne Weber [summer 1893], pr. Lebensbild, 199.
78 [XX.31] [i.55]+. The addition of ‘proper’ (guter) in the 1920 text is a helpful clarification.
79 To Emmy Baumgarten, 18.2.92, Jugendbriefe, 339.
 Capitalism 71

the qualities associated with his “type” in the PE: he was a man ‘for [whom]
business with its constant labour had become “indispensable to life”’ [XX.30];
someone who had no intention of aping the nobility and setting up a Fideikommiß,
a landed estate legally protected from the rigours of the market.80 The capitalist
entrepreneur’s ‘calm modesty’, which is noted in the PE as a form of proud ascetic
restraint in lifestyle [XX.31], is a trait picked up in family correspondence,81 and it
is clear that the life of the Oerlinghausen household was not ostentatious. When
Marianne Weber states that ‘the forms of life were simple, but well thought out’,82
we are reminded of the ‘comfort’ of the bourgeois ‘home’ mentioned as an ideal in
the PE [XXI.100].
So Carl David could be fitted to the type of the capitalist, and presumably this is
what Weber had in mind when some years after his death he referred to Carl
David’s ‘admirable “greatness”, which measured and comprehended all things’.83
However, remarks of this kind do not take us far in the formation of ideas about
capitalism. Much of the description of Carl David and his “type” in the PE is
general in character. For example, when it invokes ‘clarity of vision and power of
action’ [XX.29], we may sense that there is a discipline at work within ‘a compact,
unitary personality’ such as Weber attributed to Carl David and the ascetic
Protestant alike [XXI.29].84 Hence that there is a holistic Weberian “ethic” present.
But we are never told anything specific about what these ‘ethical qualities’ might be.
If Carl David represents a sort of abstract ideal to his nephew, it is because he is
supposed to offer a satisfactory resolution to problems that Max Weber first
identified in his own life. In the PE the entrepreneur’s ultimate answer to the
‘meaning’ of his restless pursuit of life is that ‘business with its constant labour had
become “indispensable to life”’ [XX.30]. Now the personal (rather than avuncular)
derivation of this statement is clear, when we recall Max’s repeated protestations on
the same theme. For example, when he was disappointed at his failure to secure his
personal independence in the early 1890s, he said he became ‘wrapped up in what
I might call the automatic prosecution of my obligatory professional [or vocational]
work’.85 This association of work and ethical obligation is precisely reproduced in
the PE when it speaks of ‘the absolutely central ability of feeling that one has an
obligation towards one’s work’ in any labour force that was adequate to capitalism
[XX.24]. In 1898, in the throes of a nervous collapse that now precluded escape of
this kind, Weber commented that ‘my abnormalities expressed themselves in
previous years in a convulsive clinging to scholarly work as a talisman, without
my being able to say against what’. But this ‘need to feel oneself crushed beneath the
burden of work’86 was no different from the entrepreneur’s alleged credo that
‘labour had become “indispensable to life”’, except for the fact that Weber

80Roth, Familiengeschichte, 256.

81Weber speaks of Carl David’s ‘proud modesty’: to Alwine Müller, 21.7.07, Briefe.
82 Lebenserinnerungen, 39; cf. 9 on the ‘simple lifestyle’, and Lebensbild, 182.
83 To Alwine Müller, 6.3.13, Briefe. 84 Weber to Alwine Müller, 21.7.07, Briefe.
85 To Emmy Baumgarten, 22.4.93, Jugendbriefe, 367.
86 To Marianne Weber, 4.8.98, Nachlaß Max Weber 30/1 Bl. 65–6; cf. Lebensbild, 249. Nor did

Weber cease to think like this in later life: to Else Jaffé, 7.3.19, Briefe.
72 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

supposed it to have a psychologically satisfactory outcome, ‘the proper “fulfilment

of a calling”’ [XX.31][i.55]+, which presumably ruled out the chance of a nervous
collapse. (Note too the lament inserted in the 1920 text as to how ‘irrational ’
constant labour appeared, when ‘seen from the point of view of personal happiness’.
This carries a distinctly personal note [XX.30] [i.54]+.) None of this is to imply that
Weber the scholar was insincere in transferring and adapting ideas derived from his
own life to a different, capitalist context, since the idea of the Beruf or calling could
apply to any sector of society; but still it is a comment on the relative thinness and
lack of specificity of his external sources regarding capitalist “spirit”. The funda-
mental personal data behind the “spirit” of capitalism in relation to the Idea of the
calling owe more to the life of Max Weber than to that of his uncle.
Perhaps the most concrete thing we learn about the “new style” entrepreneur is
his secularity. Like his surrogate in the PE, Carl David was of the generation that
was brought up in the heyday of ‘liberal enlightenment’ [XX.30], a staunchly secular
creed, and Weber’s comment that ‘the “pious boredom” of paradise has little
attraction to a nature rejoicing in action’ [XX.30] comes to life when we realize
that this is not just a type description, but that of a real individual. As Marianne
Weber records, Carl David did not attend church, being ‘sober, empirical and not
religious’.87 Secularity also supplies the clue to one of Weber’s rare references to
Carl David in correspondence, when he comments that ‘he once lost a court case
because he would not take an oath, though he could have done so with good
conscience, since he “had never sworn” before!’88 But though this episode casts
light on the present, and on Weber’s emphatic insistence that ‘the religious root’ at
the origins of modern capitalism had now ‘died out’ [XXI.104], it tells us nothing
about the historical argument of the PE. (It will be evident from the context that
Carl David’s hostility to oaths was simply hostility to a religiously grounded
practice within an otherwise secular legal system, and not some praeternatural
display of affinity with Quaker practices touched on in the PE) [cf. XXI.65
n. 130]. Perhaps the one significant contribution that Oerlinghausen may have
made in this respect was to draw Weber’s attention to the value of Pietism as a
means of training and disciplining skilled female labour [XX.24], though this was
by no means an original idea [XX.10]. But this does not amount to much. At the
same time the PE simply takes for granted the general existence of a high-wage,
rationally calculating industrial labour force, and Weber’s empirical material on this
subject, which derives from his study of East Elbean rural labour, is essentially
negative: a comment on ‘traditionalism’ [XX.20; cf. 20–4].89 It is true that later
he tries to fill the gap, and this is the subject of his later enquiry into ‘The

87 Lebenserinnerungen, 11; cf. 9. Carl David is the probable source of the anti-clerical reminiscence

of the mutual reproaches of Lutheran and Reformed candidates for religious confirmation ‘in the
confessionally mixed regions of Westphalia’, which was retailed to the teenage Max Weber when he
was being confirmed in 1880: ‘Schlusswort’, 588 n. 22.
88 To Marianne Weber, 15.8.98, Nachlaß Max Weber 30/1 Bl. 72.
89 On industrial labour the PE merely recapitulates a brief paragraph on high wage labour in

‘Allgemeine . . . Nationalökonomie’ [1894–8], MWG III/1.589, including reference to Thomas

Brassey’s Work and Wages (1872); cf. [XX.22 n. 1].
 Capitalism 73

Psychophysics of Industrial Labour’ in 1908–9. But the fact of such an enquiry,

which was itself inconclusive, is practically a confession of previous ignorance as to
the mindset of the skilled worker.
Overall, while Carl David Weber may take up a not inconsiderable portion of
text, his and Oerlinghausen’s contribution to it is slim. Like Franklin he is at most
an illustration (or the source behind an illustration), and one with significantly less
content than the model capitalist “spirit” constructed around Franklin. He does not
constitute a kind of hidden resource, whereby personal contact would give Weber a
superior, more “real” insight into industrial capitalism, surpassing the desiccated
insights of books and print. On the contrary, academic sources make a third potent
force shaping the construction of the “new style” entrepreneur—in combination
with Weber’s personal life experience and perceptions of his relative.
For example, Carl David’s linen firm conformed to what Max Weber was already
construing as the classical model of industrialization, whereby ‘In all modern
countries’—which meant England above all—‘the second typical large industry,
next to iron manufactures, is the textile industry’.90 Hence the satisfying equation
between ‘the parvenus from Manchester’ and those of ‘Rhineland–Westphalia’ in
the PE, where Westphalia signified linen quite as much as Carl David [XX.27],
even if the Anglophile Weber held—not without reason—that English cotton
rather than Westphalian linen was the ‘greatest revolutionary in meeting modern
material needs’, having displayed a free-trade dynamism that subverted the autarky
on which German linen had relied.91 More importantly, Carl David could be
linked to the history of early capitalist industrial organization that Weber outlined
in his ‘General Economics’ lectures in the 1890s.92 This history was like that of
Carl David centuries later in that in both cases capitalist industry began with the
putter-out (Verleger): an organizing entrepreneur who supplied the materials and
took the commercial risk for the sale of goods produced by skilled industrial
homeworkers. Much later there followed a second stage, that of the factory system,
where labour was gathered into one place, and machinery and large amounts of
capital became more important. But for Weber the putter-out was more significant,
because more amenable to the type of psychological and kulturell argument that he
liked to pursue. The putter-out did not require large amounts of capital, especially
fixed capital, because there was no factory, and any “machinery”—most obviously
hand-looms—continued to be owned by the operatives. So there were no distract-
ing external and material requirements. The early entrepreneur did not need to be a
‘property owner’,93 or in command of large ‘supplies of money’, as did the builder of
a factory, and factory production could be sidelined as a mere question of ‘form’
[XX.28].94 The crucial qualities that were required were all “ethical ” [XX.29]. Now
Weber did not employ the term “ethical” at this point in the 1890s lectures, but the

90 ‘Industries’, The Americana [1907], MWG I/8E.41.

91 Marianne Weber, Fichte’s Sozialismus, 66 n. 1. This is a part of the text that is identified as
particularly indebted to Max Weber (p. vi).
92 ‘Allgemeine . . . Nationalökonomie’ [1894–8], MWG III/1.503–9.
93 Ibid. 507. 94 Similarly ibid. 505.
74 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

qualities he identified in the putter-out were just the same as those noted in the PE,
except that the picture in the lectures is fuller. Because the PE is not offering an
economic history of capitalism, it naturally omits discussion of the crucial transition
from the individual artisanal workshop to the more expansive organization of the
putter-out in early modern Europe. By contrast, the lectures portray this shift and
its consequence, the development of a “speculatively” (which in this context means
rationally) calculating capitalist entrepreneurial stratum, as general phenomena—a
presentation that, in this respect, is more persuasive than the ‘illustrative’ strategy of
the PE [XX.27 n. 1]. The starting point for the change lay with the continual
geographical expansion of markets. Hence:
Impossibility of production for [known] customers in the relevant industries
Prod[uction] f[or] a circle of consumers not pers[onally] known [to the producer], on the
basis of their needs, which require calculation.—Function of the entrepreneur indispensable
[therefore]. Production calculated on the basis of sale to strangers carries within itself risk of a
particular kind, unknown to artisan trade: speculative factor.95
Then we reach the transition described in the PE when the “spirit” of capitalism
drives out that of traditionalism [XX.27–30], but which in the lectures is not
confined to Weber’s fictional entrepreneur or Carl David Weber:
Capital[ist] Industry: Putting-out system: Competition
Driving down costs. Premium on this. Creation of markets.96
So the portrait of the innovative entrepreneur in the PE is both a ‘special case’,
serving an ‘illustrative purpose’ and drawing on a variety of family experience, and a
historical type within the development of capitalist organization across Western
Europe. In this light the use of Carl David Weber, as of Benjamin Franklin,
represents the attachment of a new illustrative label to a pre-existing historical
scheme. However, the new illustration and the previous scheme did not match
up in all respects. The great oddity about making use of Carl David in this way is
that he is chronologically a very late example of this type of entrepreneur. The
history outlined in the PE begins ‘about the middle of the last [nineteenth] century’
[XX.27], and in fact took place in its third quarter. Now this is several centuries
after the point of change identified in the lectures ‘in the course of the 16th century’,
when (as we have seen) capitalist “spirit” and form were thought to coincide: the
psychological and implicitly “ethical” qualities of the putter-out were already
present in the sixteenth-century ‘system of manufacture’.97 We see how striking is
the innovation brought about by the new religious focus of the PE, whereby
(for example) the capitalist “spirit” found ‘in the backwoods, petty bourgeois

95 Ibid. 504. The unusual use of the term ‘speculative’ in the sense of rationally calculating on a

future outcome is meant to harmonize industrial development with the behaviour of the bourse.
Treatment of the latter follows immediately after this section in the lectures and opens with a
recapitulation of this same point: ‘Consequence of greater interval between production & sale [is]
indispensability of speculation’ (511).
96 Ibid. 505. 97 Ibid.
 Capitalism 75

circumstances of eighteenth-century Pennsylvania’ was far removed from precedent,

pre-Reformation capitalist forms [XX.54]; and how, conversely, Weber’s neglect of
his early economics lectures constitutes one of the most important “empirical”
objections to the PE. The PE focus on the mid-nineteenth century is “late” in a
second sense, in that the classical point of transition away from putting-out to the
factory system as the pre-eminent representative of modern capitalist organization
had significantly preceded this in England, and was setting in by 1850 in Germany.
Yet the argument of the PE is untouched by this. One reason is that Carl David was
(in fact) an economic traditionalist who refused to give way to the modernizing trend,
and there was no move to factory production until 1903, when the change was
effected by his grandchildren.98 Owing to the stand-off in personal relations, Weber
had only heard about the new factory at the time of writing the PE;99 he had not seen
it; but in any case there was no reason to associate it with Carl David. For Weber the
putter-out was always the classical “ethical” exemplar of the entrepreneur, whereas the
factory owner was a more confusing and impure case. Factory construction imposed a
set of extraneous mechanical and fixed capital requirements that pointed towards
future ‘petrifaction’ [XXI.109],100 while gathering labour together under a single
factory roof might look as if ‘The worker has once more a master’, that is, a personal
ruler within the impersonal system of capitalist rule, or even as if there was some
analogy to the household economy of the classical oikos—a patriarchal and radically
anti-capitalist form in Weber’s eyes.101 So here was another problem in the concep-
tual formulation of capitalism.
Overall, our principal assessment at this point remains that which is given to us
by the PE in 1904: that Weberian capitalism was conceptually thin and problem-
atic in a fundamental sense, even though it displayed a wealth of innovative, post-
Marxist thinking. Here is an unresolved question to which we must return (I.8).

98 Roth, Familiengeschichte, 254; cf. the illustration, 255. When Weber analysed workplace

psychology at the Oerlinghausen factory in ‘Zur Psychophysik der industriellen Arbeit’ in 1908–9,
it is noticeable how his title (and to a large degree his text) avoids the term ‘factory labour’, while the
term ‘factory worker’ is never used.
99 Cf. Meurer, Marianne Weber, 176. 100 Cf. Mannheim lectures [1897], MWG I/4.851.
101 ‘Allgemeine . . . Nationalökonomie’, MWG III/1.509; cf. 514.
 5
Politics and Nationality

One of the easiest ways to suggest radical discontinuity in Weberian thought either
side of 1900 is to point to the prominence of politics in what he writes before this
date and its apparent absence afterwards, in both the PE and the majority of his
work prior to 1914.1 But any such discontinuity is spurious. It is true that in the
years 1903–14 Weber ceased to write in an engaged (rather than academic) way
about politics, because he regarded this as futile for the time being. However, the
point of discontinuity had occurred in 1895–6, when it became clear that any
prospect of a new, bourgeois–liberal departure in German politics following the
dismissal of Bismarck in 1890 was a mirage; it had nothing to do with the personal
hiatus in Weber’s life (1898–1902) or the facts of his medical biography. Further-
more, the idea that he had lost sight of one half of the ‘old, general types of human
ideals’2—politics—as a determinant of human conduct in the years before 1900,
only to rediscover it after 1914, is an obvious absurdity.
Politics are formally omitted from the PE, but for intellectual, not political,
reasons. We saw above that there might be pragmatic considerations in play here—
the political history of capitalism that moved from the city economy through the
mercantilist nation state on to the world economy offered relatively little novelty in
its treatment—but these were of secondary significance only. What was central was
the principled difference between politics and religion: the other historically ubi-
quitous human ideal governing conduct. For Weber politics had no original basis in
principle. It was rooted in ‘state force’ (Staatsgewalt) [XX.32] and struggles over
power (whether for its own sake or for a goal) between and within particular states.
Religion was the polar opposite. The doctrines of salvation religions, including
Occidental Christianity, were rooted in universal foundations, and generated
ethics—imperatives to conduct—that were universal.3 In principle, therefore,
politics and religion had nothing in common, and a treatise such as the PE that
examined the power of religiously generated ethics was bound to exclude politics.
Hence the signal that the latter belonged ‘in another context’ [XX.11; cf. XXI.14
n. 21]. Thus in July 1904 Weber considered writing an essay about ‘the
state doctrine of Anabaptism’ in Cromwellian England quite separately from

1 Wolfgang Mommsen, Max Weber und die deutsche Politik (Tübingen, 20043), 140–2.
2 Freiburg Inaugural [1895], MWG I/4.563.
3 The universalism of the ethical and salvation religions is only fully developed in the religious

writings of 1912–15: below II.5–6. But still the principled opposition between religion and politics is
perfectly clear in 1904–5, just as the idea of ‘salvation religions’ is documented by 1906: MWG I/
22–1.325; cf. ‘Agrarverhältnisse im Altertum’ [1907–8], MWG I/6.597.
 Politics and Nationality 77

the PE, since, however intimately its subject matter was connected with that of the
PE, it would have been a study of religious politics (had it ever been written).4
However, this elementary distinction is not the whole story. Because religion was
an extra-political frame of reference, it placed a significant premium on forms of
conduct generated by political exclusion [XX.5; XXI.70–1]. More importantly,
while religion was radically opposed to politics, it was nonetheless universal: it
claimed to direct ‘the whole man’, ‘the whole of life’, and hence ‘the whole conduct
of life [ganze Lebensführung]’.5 As a result, in a religiously formative and dynamic
era such as the seventeenth century, religiosity and its ethical imperatives invaded
the political sphere so as to set limits to it. This is the principal source of the wealth
of “political” reference that surrounds the main argument on subjects such as
natural law, human rights, and toleration. In all these cases limits to political
conduct can be traced back to religious principles, above all the radical egalitarian-
ism embodied in ‘the absolute condemnation of all “idolatry of created man”’
[XXI.65], leading to support for the state toleration of religious plurality on
‘positive–religious grounds’ embodied in human rights law [XXI.42 n. 78; cf. 14 n.
21, 46 n. 83, etc.]. Less prominent in the PE, but equally relevant, was the reverse
tendency, Caesaropapism [CS 577–8],6 where political power, which by definition
lacked a universal moral foundation, invaded the religious and ethical sphere. The
dependence of Lutheranism on support from secular states was notorious and this
was the Caesaropapist church par excellence [XX.54; XXI.9, 101 n. 69], although
even a Cromwell could fall prey to amoral Realpolitik once placed in high political
office [CS582]. In short, we can be quite sure that, even if it was formally excluded,
the author of the PE had not forgotten about politics, and in particular the frontier
between religion and politics. Further testimony to Weber’s cast of mind in the
years when he was allegedly not thinking about politics is given by the presence of a
post-capitalist, more obviously “political” treatment of Herrschaft as the principal
component of the pre-war drafts of ‘Economy and Society’.7
Nationality, unlike politics, is not formally excluded, and 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.8 Nonetheless,
here too there are questions of principle that must be confronted first. One of the
most potent attempts to reduce Weber’s intellectual and ethical pluralism to a

4 To Georg von Below, 19.7.04, Nachlaß Max Weber 30/4 Bl. 96–7.
5 e.g. [XX.3; XXI.27 nn. 51, 53]. Lebensführung is a religious category and hence (as the PE
endlessly tells us) it signifies the methodical, systematizing, rationalizing, and holistic conduct of life.
So whenever Weber uses the term Lebensführung, even without epithets, it always means ‘the entire
conduct of life’. Wilhelm Hennis deserves the credit for first identifying its importance, but because of
his secularity, he was blind to the fact that it was a religious category deriving from Ritschlian theology:
Max Webers Fragestellung (Tübingen, 1987), I.1, etc.
6 Weber did not invent this term, which may be traced back (at least) to Theodor Mommsen,

Römische Geschichte (Leipzig, 1856), iii. 357; cf. H. Weingarten, Die Revolutionskirchen Englands
(Leipzig, 1868), 436. However, he gave it much greater prominence.
7 Below II.7.
8 Weber’s Anglophilia was obvious to his early readers. See the extended borrowing from the

conceptual framework of the PE in Oscar Schmitz’ portrait of England: Das Land ohne Musik (Munich,
1914).
78 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

simple unity has been his classification as a nationalist—an idea that took root after
1918, when preoccupation with Germany’s future as a nation and nation state was
at fever pitch, but that, because of its convenience, has outlived this unpropitious
origin. Ernst Troeltsch, for example, who was appalled by Weber’s open admission
of value-pluralism, supposed that secretly Weber must share his horror, and that his
nationalism offered him a way out of the morass of scepticism and relativism:
‘Having passed through Judaism and Christianity, the European could only pray to
one value-god and so lift himself up out of the irreconcilable tensions between
values: this for Weber was national power and strength.’9 Others reached a similar
conclusion by different routes.10 The great attraction of such readings is that they
offer a very simple solution to a complex problem—“Max Weber”—but still there
is just a grain of truth in them. Weber undoubtedly supposed at Freiburg in 1895
that ‘the economic policy of a German state, likewise the value-criterion of a
German economic theorist, can only be German’, and even went so far as to call
himself an ‘economic nationalist’ in this sense. However, the limitation of such
statements will be apparent from the fact that on the same occasion he declared that
‘the nation state is for us not an indeterminate Something that one believes one can
elevate, the more its nature is veiled in mystical darkness; rather it is the worldly
power-organization of the nation, and in this nation state the ultimate criterion for
us . . . is “raison d’état”’.11 In short, the idea of the ‘nation’ added nothing to the
minimal political idea of the ‘state’ or ‘worldly power-organization’, and it is
regrettable that Weber’s condemnation of ‘mystical national fanaticism’ (this was
his ‘indeterminate Something’) as on a par with anti-Semitism is not better
understood.12
Weber found the idea of the nation conceptually indeterminate, and always kept
it at arm’s length if he could. His brief discussions of the subject before 1914 in
‘Economy and Society’ make plain his sense of difficulty: ‘“Nation” [Nation] is a
concept that, if at all unambiguous, cannot in any event be defined in terms of the
empirically shared qualities of those classed as its members.’ Again: the “Idea of
the nation” is an ‘empirically wholly ambiguous value-concept’.13 His uncertainty
derived from the fact that the “nation” fell somewhere between the two clear
poles supplied by the state and ethical religion, arbitrary power and universal
values. In theory it was much closer to the former: ‘Again and again when
considering the concept of the “nation” we find ourselves directed to its connection
to political “power”.’14 Yet the nation and the “national feeling” it inspired were

9 Ernst Troeltsch, Der Historismus und seine Probleme (Tübingen, 1922), 161; cf. idem., ‘Max

Weber’ [1920], Max Weber zum Gedächtnis, 46.

10 Friedrich Meinecke, ‘Drei Generationen deutscher Gelehrtenpolitik’, HZ 125 (1922), 248–83,

e.g. 274; Hans Staudinger, Wirtschaftspolitik im Weimarer Staat. Lebenserinnerungen . . . (Bonn, 1982),
21. Less reductionist but still giving a wide opening to this reading was Karl Jaspers, Max Weber:
Deutsches Wesen im politischen Denken, im Forschen und Philosophieren (Oldenburg, 1932), esp. 11–34.
11 MWG I/4.560, 565, 561, resp.
12 To Hermann Baumgarten, 30.4.88, Jugendbriefe.
13 ‘Politische Gemeinschaften’ [c.1911–12], MWG I/22–1.241, 246, resp.; cf. 189.
14 ‘Ethnische Gemeinschaften’ [c.1911–12], MWG I/22–1.190. That the nation is discussed under

the headings of both ‘Political’ and Ethnic Communities’ is a further sign of conceptual ambivalence
and uncertainty.
 Politics and Nationality 79

something more than this. Weber shared the conventional wisdom of today, that
‘the full conception of the nation’ was something that had ‘only been developed by
modern Occidental intellectual strata’, from the late eighteenth century on. As a
result ‘the naked prestige of “power” inevitably modified itself under the influence
of these circles into other, specific forms, and as a matter of fact into the Idea of
the “nation”’.15 So while the nation might be a derivative of the state and state
“power”, it was not simply a clone. It was in fact ‘a community of Kultur’, or at least
a ‘partial “community of Kultur”’.16 Hence the insistence that it was a ‘value-
concept’ (however ambiguous): it involved ‘goods of Kultur’, being embodied in
“mores” (Sitten) or more correctly ‘conventions’.17 The same idea underlies his
dictum that ‘in itself the “nation” is not a political concept’.18
When we reach Kultur, we reach the terrain of the PE. Here Weber issues further
warnings regarding the weakness and indeterminacy of the idea of the Volk, the
people or nation who precede any construction of the Nation by intellectuals: ‘The
appeal to “national character” [Volkscharakter] is not only a simple confession of
ignorance in general, but it is also wholly mistaken in our case’ (the PE) [XX.52].
This is part of his lifelong protest against the tradition of völkisch nationalism in
German Kultur going back to Herder, which attributed a unitary mystical character
to the people as a whole. Weber was relentlessly hostile to this—in this respect he
was a classical, Hegelian liberal: ‘Such concepts as “will of the people”, “true will of
the people” . . . They are fictions.’19 Instead he wants to take us back to a strictly
empirical construction of the people or nation based on particular mores and
conventions, and ultimately to the mass of individuals who make it up, with all
the weaknesses and contradictions that might imply. Hence this homily [XX.52]
[cf. i.194–5]+:
To ascribe a unitary “national character” to the English in the 17th century would be simply
incorrect historically. “Cavaliers” and “Roundheads” did not merely see themselves as two
parties, but as radically different breeds of men, and anyone who observes them closely must
allow that they were right. And a characterological distinction between the English merchant
adventurers and the old Hanseatic merchants is just as hard to locate as it is to establish
any other distinction between the English and German characters at the end of the middle
ages . . .
This brings us to a second point: that the PE offers a religious history that is supra-
national; its underlying unit of reference is ‘the Occident’ [XXI.28, 62 n. 123] or

15 Resp. ‘Hinduism and Buddhism’ [1915–16], MWG I/20.541; ‘Politische Gemeinschaften’,

MWG I/22–1.241
16 For the last: ‘Ethnische Gemeinschaften’, MWG I/22–1.187. While Weber not infrequently

referred to the nation as a ‘community of Kultur’ (e.g. Freiburg Inaugural [1895], MWG I/4.550;
MWG I/22–1, index s.v.), this was a category identification and no more. He vehemently repudiated
the idea proposed by Ludo Moritz Hartmann at the 1912 meeting of the German Sociological Society,
that the nation could be defined as a ‘community of Kultur’ in any uniform or homogeneous sense:
GASS 485, 487.
17 Cf. ‘Politische Gemeinschaften’, MWG I/22–1.246.
18 To Karl Voßler, 5.5.08, Briefe, II/5.563. 19 To Robert Michels, 4.8.08, Briefe.
80 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

Occidental Christianity. In this sense its story is not national or even “solely Anglo-
Saxon” [i.165 n. 2]+, and the primacy of religious values is unquestioned.
So, the nation was conceptually subordinate and indeterminate, but this does not
negate its empirical presence, especially when we come further forward in time.
While Weber is endlessly insistent that ‘religious ideas . . . are in their own right
quite the most powerful shaping elements on “national characters”—nothing can
alter this’ [XXI.101 n. 69; cf. 74, 110] [CS 581], he nonetheless allows religion and
nationality to meld, as when he speaks of ‘the peoples with a Puritan past’ [XXI.12;
cf. 57, 79 n. 17]. Indeed by a further paradox he insists that it is the difference
between German Lutheranism and English Puritanism that ‘has created those
differences [“in national character”] that we feel today’ [XX.52]. So the broader
Occidental history of the PE also includes the varying sub-histories of the compo-
nent Protestant nations and nation-states, England, America, Germany, and the
Netherlands, and however suspicious he may be of the perversions of “national
character”, Weber makes use of the label (as we see) as a necessary shorthand and
salves his conscience by the use of inverted commas. ‘The English, Dutch and
American Puritans’ were Puritans alike, but their national identification cannot be
dispensed with [XX.7].20 It is clear, furthermore, that he has definite profiles of all
the ‘Protestant’ nations, even if the profile signifies ambivalence of viewpoint in the
case of the Netherlands,21 or superficiality of ‘nationality’, that is, of national
identity, in the German one [XXI.37 n. 74]. Of these nations England is the
most important, even if, by another paradox, its importance is that it stands above
all other nations. So when Weber wanted an example that would stand for ‘the
whole world’—meaning the Occident—he instinctively found it in England
[XXI.62 n. 123]. Its primacy within the North European composite of ‘ascetic
Protestantism’ is also evident via his promotion of the essentially English soubri-
quet of ‘Puritan’. This is the only historically particular term that can be taken as an
approximate equivalent of that out-and-out conceptual novelty ‘ascetic Protestant-
ism’,22 and Weber gives formal sanction to Puritanism’s priority in the final section
of the text when he states that, ‘since English Puritanism, which grew up out of
Calvinism, offers what is logically the most consistent foundation for the vocational
Idea, we shall . . . place one of its representatives [Richard Baxter] at the centre of
the account’ [XXI.74].
Perhaps the best snapshot of England and its implied centrality occurs in the
opening section of the text, where national comparison has already featured largely
[XX.11]:

20 Weber had a similar idea in regard to the apparently unlikely terrain of classical antiquity: ‘the

political destinies and characters of individual countries were bound to have an influence’ on the
development of free labour and (accordingly) of capitalism: ‘Agrarverhältnisse im Altertum’3 [1908],
MWG I/6.350. More conventional is the restatement in the ‘Schlusswort’ [1910] regarding the
necessity of ‘the comparison of the character of the historical development of the different countries
influenced by ascetic Protestantism’ (p. 595).
21 See Historian, ch. 3.
22 Ibid. 10–12, 38–46.
 Politics and Nationality 81
Montesquieu says of the English . . . that they, “of all the peoples in the world, had gone the
furthest in three important things: piety, trade and freedom”. Should their superiority in the
acquisitive sphere—and also their suitability for political institutions embodying freedom,
something we shall have to touch on later, in another context—perhaps be linked to that
record of piety ascribed to them by Montesquieu?
There can be no doubt that the answer to this question is ‘Yes’; and that England’s
political fortunes are another central component of its elevation in his eyes.23 It
went almost without saying that England was the most ‘economically rationalized
country’ and that it was ‘the most developed capitalist country’ [cf. XX.35].24 Yet
its political history was at least as remarkable, because in Weber’s eyes this was one
of the principal agencies (alongside its religious history) behind the uniquely
prosperous situation enjoyed by the English nation c.1900. Piety, trade, and
political freedom supply the threefold root of this prosperity, and the only add-
itional dimension that Weber might have wished to add to Montesquieu’s view-
point is that of England’s imperial and world power. However, the omission is
repaired later on when we are reminded ‘that for England . . . Puritanism enables its
adherents to create free institutions and yet also to become a world power’ [XXI.77
n. 7], while incidental references to Cecil Rhodes and the Boer War have already
made the point by implication [XX.8, 44 n. 2].
Now this conception of contemporary England’s centrality minus the distinctive
religious history mapped out in the PE is clearly evident in Weber’s writings from
the early 1890s. Here his engagement with capitalism centred on the history of
England and English prosperity confirms the view that the capitalist component in
the PE was anticipated by his earlier work. As we saw, he regarded the English stock
exchange as at once the most plutocratic, the most disciplined, and—because it was
so focused on money—the most professional of all the stock exchanges: ‘Here then
the bourse is openly organized as a monopoly of the rich, professional traders have
empowered themselves in the manner of a trade guild . . . They form a kind of
“money-aristocracy” of bourse trading.’25 Now for Weber the ordinary meaning of
‘aristocracy’ was that of a meritocratic elite (rather than a backward status hierarchy),
in no way incompatible with the comprehensive meritocratic recruiting field implied
by ‘democracy’—and such is its ordinary usage in the PE.26 Thus he finds a parallel
phenomenon to the money-aristocracy in ‘the tendency towards the evolution of a
labour aristocracy . . . arising in the capital-rich English industries’, with its high
wages, its trades unionist shareholders, its uniquely high ‘standard of life’, and
‘“social peace” . . . where according to the specialists both sides [capital and labour]

23 Weber’s conflation of ‘England’ with ‘Britain’ was standard usage when he wrote, and we must

accept it as such. This did not prevent him from having a sophisticated understanding of Scotland as a
separate community of Kultur: [XXI.97 n. 59].
24 A continually repeated theme: ‘Schlusswort’ [1910], 588 n. 21; Sociology of Law [c.1910–14],

}5, MWG I/22–3.519; Sociology of Herrschaft [c.1913–14], MWG I/22–4.192.

25 Die Börse I [1894], MWG I/5.162.
26 [XXI.32, 37 n.74, 42 n.78, 46, 49–51, 79 n.17]. The alternative usage of “aristocracy” (sic) as

implying ‘feudal aristocracy’, hence conservatism, elitism, traditionalism, appears just once [XXI.86
n. 34].
82 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

are in essence winners’.27 In contrast to Germany, whether in the town or the

countryside, the parallel ‘aristocracies’ of labour and capital in England realized that
their fundamental common concerns were more important than any apparent
conflict of material interest alone. Here was the union of rational, meritocratic
capitalists with privileged, skilled labour that was the core social constituency of
the PE.
The one important difference between this conception of England c.1895 and
the PE in the seventeenth century is that the perceived source of social and national
union in the modern day was political and secular; not religious and historical.
Thus nineteenth-century Christian Socialism, which in Weber’s eyes included
Thomas Carlyle, is brusquely dismissed as a ‘purely ethical campaign against the
self-interest of [both] possessors and workers’, where ‘purely ethical’ signifies
‘impractical and . . . hazy’ (which is also a plausible reading of Carlyle).28 The
visible strength of the English was rather that they ‘everyday kept before their
eyes the dependency of their economic prosperity on their power political pos-
ition’.29 But regardless of any omission of religion—which is quite compatible with
the view adopted in the PE that the ‘religious root’ of capitalism had died out by
this time [XXI.104, 106]—Weber’s early admiration of England as the acme of the
free, parliamentary,30 capitalist and nationally competitive modern state remains
central to the genesis of the PE. The pervasive presence of Cromwell and the Saints;
the celebration of the Puritan revolution of the mid-seventeenth century as “the last
of our [bourgeois] heroisms” [XX.3] (a pointed sidelining of 1789); the uncon-
cealed admiration for ‘Gladstone’s political work’ as the embodiment of ‘ideals of
freedom’ deriving from ‘positive religious motives’ when compared to the senti-
mental “gratitude” or abasement of the Germans towards Bismarck [XXI.14 n. 21,
42 n.78]—these are more than adequate testimony to Weber’s national preferences
in 1904–5. Yet his particular interest in the way Gladstone carried the Liberal Party
caucus with him during the Home Rule crisis of 188631 most probably
originated—like his analysis of Bismarckian politics at this date—in monitoring
these events at the time as a young man. (This famous episode is indeed central to
Ostogorski’s famous account in 1902, but Weber’s focus on the charismatic leader
at the expense of the caucus is very different from Ostrogorski’s.)32

27 See ‘Entwickelungstendenzen’ [1894], MWG I/4.393–4, 412–14; ‘Die deutschen Landarbeiter’

[1894], ibid. 341; cf. Die Börse I [1894], MWG I/5.153.

28 ‘Arbeiterfrage und Arbeiterbewegung’ [1895/8], MWG III/4.160, 284, resp. The reference to

Carlyle in PE [XX.3] is borrowed and insignificant: Historian, 23–4. Weber has nothing to do with the
late and post-Christian celebration of Carlyle, which was almost as prevalent in Germany as in Britain
at this time: G. v.Schulze-Gaevernitz, Carlyle (Berlin, 1892); Paul Hensel, Thomas Carlyle (Stuttgart,
1901).
29 Freiburg Inaugural [1895], MWG I/4.566.
30 For Weber’s early awareness of ‘parliamentarism’, a theme more visible after 1900:

‘Vorbemerkung’ to the series Die Landarbeiter in den evangelischen Gebieten Norddeutschlands

[1899], MWG I/4.709.
31 Sociology of Herrschaft [c.1912–14], MWG I/22–4.202, 512; ‘Politics as a Vocation’ [1919],

MWG I/17.209–10.
32 M. Ostrogorski, Democracy and the Organization of Political Parties (London, 1902), i. 287–325.
 Politics and Nationality 83

Having said so much, it is important to understand the peculiar nature of

Weber’s “Anglophilia”. There was a range of academic contemporaries—Lujo
Brentano, Gerhard von Schulze-Gaevernitz, Hermann Levy, Wilhelm Hasbach—
who knew vastly more about life in England, because unlike Weber they spent
extended amounts of time there; they had extensive connections and even close
friendships with English people; and they liked to consume English goods. By
contrast, besides a fraught four days on honeymoon in 1893,33 the Webers took
just two holidays in the UK, very much as conventional tourists. In 1895 they spent
a month visiting the “romantic” countryside of the Scottish Highlands, the Heb-
rides and Southern Ireland (the one academic supplement here being Weber’s
interest in rural land tenure); and then in 1910 three weeks touring Canterbury,
Stratford-on-Avon and southern coastal resorts.34 On both occasions, this was
almost certainly primarily for Marianne’s benefit: in the first case as compensation
for a honeymoon that was in every sense over-hasty,35 and in the second lest she feel
(which was not so far off the truth) that she and Max never took holidays together.
At the end of the 1895 trip Max claimed it had put him off holidays altogether,
and, though he allowed that academic work would bring him back to England
‘often enough’, this never happened in fact, whether to investigate English medieval
company law (his idea in 1895) or the Quaker archives at Devonshire House [i.150
n. 4]+.36 In short, his admiration for England was, like so much in his life,
overwhelmingly an intellectual and conceptual construct; it did not derive from
immediate experience. This did not make it any less genuine—unlike so many of
his contemporaries, the Great War made absolutely no difference to his attitudes in
this respect—nor any less substantial as a set of statements about English politics,
law, society, and history. Of all the Western European analysts of England and
Britain in the epoch c.1800–1914, Weber was one of the very few who was not
dumbfounded by what seemed to Continentals the incredible English combination
of ultra modernity in industry with an unparalleled concentration of landed wealth
lodged in a medieval institutional structure;37 while his melding of supra-national
‘ascetic Protestantism’ with a national Puritanism was almost certainly one of the
best ways to connect England to a continental frame of reference without obliter-
ating its oddity. But we cannot say just where this conceptual construction came
from. Its outlines may be in place in the early 1890s, but what lay behind them
remains inscrutable. Erudite scholarship has shown, for example, that the Webers
had family connections with industrial and commercial enterprises in England, but
also that Max Weber paid no attention to them. He could have visited his Benecke

33 Max to Helene Weber, 28.9.93, cit. Roth, Familiengeschichte, 554.

34 The first is amply recorded: Max to Helene Weber, 14.8–9.9.95, Nachlaß Max Weber 30/12 Bl.
22–44; cf. Lebensbild, 218–28. By contrast, Weber seems to have been uninterested in leaving any
record of the 1910 trip: cf. Briefe, II/6.594–605, Lebensbild, 502–4, though he did suggest to Arthur
Salz (who had thought of coming along) that he was well out of it: Briefe [11.8.10].
35 Cf. Lebensbild, 218–19.
36 Weber to Fritz Baumgarten, 12.9.95, pr. Roth, Familiengeschichte, 556.
37 Examples of intelligent men in difficulties: G. W. F. Hegel, ‘On the English Reform Bill’ (1831);

Alexis de Tocqueville, Journeys to England and Ireland, ed. J. P. Mayer (London, 1968). François
Guizot with roots in Swiss Anglophile tradition was less disadvantaged.
84 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

relatives in the firm of Benecke, Souchay & Co. (London) when he came over in
1893, but he did not, and this forms a contrast to the visit paid by his parents in
1872.38 The most we can say is that Weber came from a north German liberal and
Protestant environment, which on political, commercial and religious grounds
ordinarily found England sympathetic and even admirable. But while this context
provides an obvious and perhaps even necessary starting point for his Anglophilia, it
in no way explains the exceptional and distinctive form his views of England took.

38 Roth, Familiengeschichte, 552, 554. All the same, Helene Weber’s priorities in 1872, with their

determined focus on Scotland and Walter Scott, seem to have been little different from those of
Marianne and Max in 1895: ibid. 699–701. See further Guenther Roth, ‘Weber the Would-Be
Englishman’, in H. Lehmann and G. Roth (eds), Weber’s Protestant Ethic (Cambridge, 1993),
83–121. If scholarship could have solved this problem, Roth would surely have done so.
 6
Religion

In the case of religion, unlike capitalism, the discontinuity between the PE and
Weber’s work in the 1890s is more readily apparent. As we have seen, there is
striking evidence for Weber’s interest in this area from the 1890s, centring on the
ethical implications of the rise of capitalist impersonality, which paradoxically
generated an enhanced individual responsibility in a world where human interrela-
tion was less “personal”.1 However, in the analysis of social behaviour in his own
day, religion is an absentee, and so our sense of the outright novelty of what comes
into the light in 1904–5 is so much greater. For example, Weber’s early emphasis
on ‘the deep drive to rise up’, especially on the part of ‘the most capable elements’
within rural labour,2 has some analogy with his later focus in the PE on those
‘upwardly striving strata’ within the Mittelstand and the petty bourgeoisie who were
‘“typical” carriers of the capitalist ethic’ [XX.26 & n. 1]. But in the 1890s there is
no animating scheme of ideas: neither Calvinist predestination, nor the inner
light of the Quakers, nor Franklin’s more secular “ethic” [XX.16]. Instead ‘this
decisive psychological side of the process [was] realized essentially unconsciously
by the participants’.3 And what might seem like an individualistic ‘urge towards
independence’—as it was in the PE [XXI.12]—was also in the modern day ‘the
preliminary stage’ to the development of ‘the communal class consciousness of
the modern proletariat’, which locked capital and labour into a conflict of interest
potentially detrimental to national efficiency and competitive power.4 Now none of
this is inconsistent with the argument framed in the PE. The latter confirms that in
the present day the ‘religious root’ that gave such a powerful original impulse to
capitalist conduct in the seventeenth century had died out [XXI.104, 106]. Again,
the modern conflict that Weber describes between capital and labour in the 1890s
is only one of ‘interest’ and not of fundamental values. As such it is not inconsistent
with the cross-class “spirit” of capitalism in the PE, embracing both entrepreneurs

1 Above I.2. I cannot accept Hartmut Lehmann’s suggestion that Weber made a radical ‘transition’

or ‘breakthrough’ from an essential sympathy with Kulturprotestantismus in the 1890s to a new (and
unspecified) world of ascetic Protestantism in 1903–4: ‘Max Webers Weg vom Kulturprotestantismus
zum asketischen Protestantismus’ [2004], Die Entzauberung der Welt (Göttingen, 2009), 21–35, here
29, 30. The idea that Weber originally found psychological and emotional ‘security’ within the
‘biotope’ (habitat) of Kulturprotestantismus rests on no evidence (24–5, 32), and so there is no need
to posit a ‘turning point’ away from it (31).
2 Resp. ‘Die deutschen Landarbeiter’ [1894], MWG I/4.340; ‘Privatenqûeten’ [1892], ibid. 100.
3 ‘Entwickelungstendenzen’ [1894], ibid. 392.
4 ‘Privatenqûeten’, ibid. 83, original emphasis; cf. ‘Die deutschen Landarbeiter’ [1894], ibid.

327–8.
86 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

and skilled labour. All the same there is no evident link here between the mid-
1890s and 1904–5.
Altogether the absence of religion from Weber’s analyses in the 1890s would
appear to be self-evident, and little more need be said: why should he talk about it,
when plainly it had no role left to play? Yet what is striking is just how much of a
role religion and ethics play in Weber’s mind at this time. There may be a
discontinuity between the 1890s and the PE in terms of the materials expounded;
but there is none in the assumptions of the investigator.
I have suggested that a principal root of Weber’s thinking in the earlier period
was his meritocratic and democratic liberalism. Yet this was a most unusual
liberalism, and not merely because of its democratic constituency. Perhaps its
most unusual feature was that, while it was ‘remote from god’ and “secularized”
[XX.6; XXI.3 n. 3, 11], it was by no means bereft of religious content. The claim of
continental liberalism to create a state based on the wholly secular foundations of
law and a constitution had been one of the most radical departures announced by
the French Revolution. Since then, and especially since 1870, there had been a deep
division between the liberal bourgeoisie and the churches, a division most overt in
Catholic countries, but by no means absent in the Protestant German states, where
the majority of the Lutheran clergy and hierarchy were politically and socially
conservative with strong links to monarchy and the old aristocracy. Of course
Weber would have nothing to do with the latter. Occasional invocations of “the
grace of God” by Kaiser Wilhelm II were quite simply ‘a blasphemous swindle’ [CS
579]. Nonetheless, the educated bourgeoisie of Wilhelmine Germany included
both secular liberals and a minority of rational modernizing Protestants—in par-
ticular the members of university theology faculties—and this was a boundary line
that Weber was prepared to cross. He was happy to avow himself a ‘liberal’ when
speaking as a member of the secular forum of the economists of the Verein für
Sozialpolitik;5 yet he was also a member of the Protestant Social Congress—the
omnium gatherum of Lutheran social reformers set up in 1890, triggered by the false
dawn of the Kaiser’s “February Decree” of that year, which appeared to herald to a
new era of social reconciliation. Here he promoted the use of the clergy in his social
and psychological enquiry into rural labour, though he knew that this provoked
deep scepticism ‘especially from the liberal side’.6 A typical example of such liberal
scepticism was supplied by his father, Max Weber Sr. As Max Jr reported to his
fiancée Marianne Schnitger in June 1893:
In our house there are of course special difficulties in taking an interest in these particular
[religious and social reforming] questions. The freethinking of the older generation is
generally accompanied by an extremely narrow intolerance, and anything that does not fit
its stereotype excites feelings not only of repulsion but even a kind of nervous anxiety. So
there are always disputes and attempts to settle them by force [of assertion]. Fear of the “man

5 ‘Die ländliche Arbeitsverfassung’ [1893], ibid. 174, 199; Weber to Brentano, [25].2.93, pr.

Jugendbriefe, 365.
6 ‘Die deutschen Landarbeiter’ [1894], MWG I/4.314.
 Religion 87
in black” is simply in the blood of our liberals, and causes them to suppose that in every
pastor there is at least a disposition towards hypocrisy.7
But this was a scepticism that he was prepared to confront.
By and large the PE remains scathing about ‘Lutheranism’, the institutional
Lutheran church and its conservative political profile, even if Weber was prepared
to make occasional (yet still ambivalent) concessions in favour of ‘a religious genius,
such as Luther’ [XXI.38; cf. XX.44–52]. Indeed the collapse of any reforming
initiative within the Protestant Social Congress in the years 1895–6, which Weber
ceased to attend after 1897,8 had given him a much greater incentive to speak out
in this sense. Nonetheless, the reputation of the Lutheran clergy as a form of “black
police” at the disposal of “authority” was ultimately an irrelevance [XX.24 n. 1].
What was important in the modern day was not the church but the operation of
religiosity in the form of its secularized historical legacy: this was a stage in the
continuous long-term evolution of society and Kultur that was not to be disturbed
by ephemeral ‘political and socio-political fashions’.9 For this reason reflection on
religion and its ‘secularization’, or carry-over into the secular world, remained
important. Hence a famous (if surprisingly personal) description of Weber’s
religious position in correspondence with the more conventionally irreligious
Ferdinand Tönnies in 1909. At an elementary level, Weber agreed with Tönnies’
view of the world, since he was ‘in religious terms absolutely “unmusical”’. Yet, as
this striking term implies, it made him ‘neither anti-religious nor irreligious’.10 After
all, musicality not unmusicality was the normal human condition, and this was
Weber’s way of saying that religiosity too had been the historically normal state of
affairs in all times and places, except the modern Occident [CS 581]. So Weber’s
want of religious musicality was very different from Tönnies’ atheism:
to you, for example, a “liberal” theologian (Catholic or Protestant) must quite logically be
the most hateful thing of all . . . [but] to me, though under the circumstances I may hold him
to be illogical, confused etc. (it all depends on the individual, of course!), he is infinitely
more valuable and interesting in human terms than the intellectual (and at bottom: cheap)
pharisaism of [Darwinian and materialistic] naturalism, which is indeed so unspeakably
typical [today], and in which there is less life than the former (it all depends on the
individual, of course!).

7 2.6.93, pr. Roth, Familiengeschichte, 511. (The first editorial insertion is Prof. Roth’s.) The

context for this letter lies in the publication the previous day in Die Christliche Welt of a report by Max
Jr on the inquiry by the Kongress into rural labour: MWG I/4.209–19.
8 He did not formally leave, but he washed his hands of it. The last straw was the public declaration

by Delbrück, Harnack, and Nobbe in October 1897 of a strict apartheid between the Congress and the
SPD: Max to Helene Weber, 17.10.97, Nachlaß Max Weber 30/4 Bl. 69; Martin Rade to Adolf
Harnack, 25.10.97, Der Briefwechsel zwischen Adolf von Harnack und Martin Rade, ed. J. Jantsch
(Berlin and New York, 1996), no. 211.
9 Vorbemerkung [1899], Die Landarbeiter in den evangelischen Gebieten Norddeutschlands, MWG

I/4.709.
10 Briefe, 19.2.09. The fact that Weber should make such a personal revelation to Tönnies was a

sacrifice he was prepared to make for the sake of Wissenschaft. The point of this personal “confession” is
the need for “value-freedom” in Wissenschaft—a correlative to Weber’s defence of the intellectual
freedom of German universities from external political intervention, which supplies the immediate
context of the letter. It may also be that Weber wanted to secure Tönnies’ support for this principle in
the nascent German Sociological Society, where it would become a central point of dispute.
88 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

Setting aside the formally correct but empirically unreal reference to Catholic
theologians, this was the mental framework that made possible Weber’s energetic,
yet thoroughly detached participation in the Protestant Social Congress in the years
1890–5. This was much the most important “religious” involvement of his entire
life. Before moving away from Berlin to Freiburg in late 1894,11 the Congress is
one of the guiding themes that govern his life, alongside the more conventional,
secular pursuit of an academic career. Now within the academic sphere Weber was
(as noted) a member of the Verein für Sozialpolitik as well. Yet, despite the
analogous status of two public bodies committed to social reform, it has not
occurred to secular moderns to draw any comparison between the Verein and the
Congress, and the priority of the Verein is routinely taken for granted.12 Nonethe-
less, despite the inbuilt sympathy of academic readers for an academic forum such
as Verein, and for the ‘thick books’ that Weber despised [XXI.110 n. 86]—his
900-page report for the Verein on The Position of Rural Labour in East Elbean
Germany is surely one of the most cited and least read works in his œuvre—the twin
secular and “religious” threads in Weber’s life must be considered as standing on a
footing of equality with one other. It was an equality understood and observed by
young Marianne Schnitger when she first came to know her cousin Max.13 The
Congress also generated close personal relationships of its own, and though we may
doubt that they offer a unique case of the essentially “closed” personality of Max
Weber opening up to an unrestrained intimacy (as Ernst Troeltsch famously
claimed),14 these ties were surely closer than any of Weber’s academic connections.
In particular to the avowed democrats amongst the disparate ‘Christian Socials’ of
the movement: Paul Göhre and Friedrich Naumann. Here then was a unique and
substantial “religious” engagement without any actual religious commitment. So
what were his motives?
There can be no doubt of Weber’s pragmatic interest in the possible political and
reforming uses of the Congress: for an investigation into rural society the clergy
undoubtedly had their uses, which they did not in urban society, and any good
researcher must tap possible sources of knowledge as and where they occur. Yet to
think in these terms alone is too desiccated an interpretation of the motives of
someone for whom ‘nothing [was] of value to a man as a man, unless he [could] do

11 Weber’s move to Freiburg did not imply rejection of the Congress, and when he moved there he

joined the Council of the Baden Verein affiliated to the national movement: Rita Aldenhoff, ‘Max
Weber and the Evangelical–Social Congress’, in W. Mommsen and J. Osterhammel (eds), Max Weber
and his Contemporaries (London, 1987), 194. Nonetheless, he now placed his own career interests
ahead of participation in a movement centred on Berlin, roughly a year before the political decay and
disunity of the Congress became apparent in late 1895.
12 Besides Rita Aldenhoff, see Harry Liebersohn, Fate and Utopia in German Sociology, 1870–1923

(Cambridge, MA, 1988).

13 Lebensbild, 133–45. Though undoubtedly predisposed to favour any evidence of Max’s affinities

with liberal Protestantism, Marianne’s testimony deserves credence when the question at issue is a
relatively simple one of broad priorities, of how Weber spent his time; not a technical academic one or
an understanding of his inner attitude.
14 ‘Max Weber’ [1920], in Max Weber zum Gedächtnis, 44. See n. 56 below.
 Religion 89

it with passion’.15 There was surely also an element of fascination with a world he
held to be ‘valuable and interesting in human terms’—and work for the Congress
was an example of the heady combination of disciplined intellectuality and pas-
sionate intensity that suffused all Weber’s work, whether formally neutral or not.
Thus on the one hand, he treated the Congress much like the Verein. It might not
be a purely academic or wissenschaftlich body but, as with the rest of his academic
work, he insisted that his work for the Congress was designed to lead to ‘the clearer
recognition of the sober laws of social life’; to the destruction of romantic ‘illusions’
and greater acceptance of the unshakable constraints imposed by historical evolu-
tion.16 However, the distinguishing feature of the Congress was that it took him
outside the constraining boundaries of a single academic discipline. The Verein was
no parochial body, but still its leading members were all economists. By contrast
the Congress offered some partial satisfaction to Weber’s deep thirst for Wissen-
schaft in a comprehensive sense, because it took in religion—the missing half of the
two ‘world powers’, religion and politics.17 So it was no accident that the inquiry
into rural labour by the Verein alone could not satisfy him. It had to be accom-
panied by the parallel ‘psychological ’ and ethically inflected inquiry conducted
through the Congress,18 and with but one exception his principal statements on
this subject are not made in the Verein but in the Congress or else in secular, but
methodologically open, journals such as Heinrich Braun’s Archiv.19 Overall,
Weber’s triple participation in the religious forum of the Congress, that of the
economists at the Verein, and the law faculty of the Berlin University before 1895
may be seen as a forerunner of the fully developed interdisciplinarity of the years
after 1902 (just as the narrowing of horizons that took place between 1895 and
1898 was predictably disastrous). There is no direct link between his work for the
Congress and the writing of the PE, but they are like products of a most unusual
mind, and participation in the Congress is an obvious precursor to the religious
focus of the PE.
In searching for the roots of this cast of mind, the most elementary understand-
ing of cultural formation tells us that we cannot begin at so late a date as Weber’s
work for the Congress in the early 1890s, when he was already nearly 30. We must
go back in time; and if we do so, the religious component in the PE will become a
good deal more comprehensible and less “discontinuous”. The principal biograph-
ical source to consider here is Weber’s mother Helene, a model liberal Protestant
and Christian Social: theirs was by far the most important personal relationship of

15 ‘Science as a Vocation’ [1917/19], MWG I/17.81; cf. [XXI.31, 34, 79]. In what follows I am

arguing against the excellent essay by Rita Aldenhoff, ‘Max Weber and the Evangelical–Social
Congress’, in Max Weber and his Contemporaries (London, 1987), 193–202. See also Liebersohn,
Fate and Utopia in German Sociology, 86–95.
16 ‘Zur Rechtfertigung Göhres’ [1892], MWG I/4.119; cf. ‘Die Evangelisch-sozialen Kurse in

Berlin . . . ’ [1893], MWG I/4.233–7.

17 ‘Allgemeine . . . Nationalökonomie’ [1894–8], MWG III/1.497–8.
18 ‘Privatenqûeten’, ibid. 80, original emphasis.
19 See the texts collected in MWG I/4. The exception was Weber’s initial presentation of his

findings to the Verein in March 1893: MWG I/4.165–207.

90 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

Max’s life.20 Without rehearsing the full extent of Weber’s youthful exposure to
Christian theology and ethics at home or through his mother’s relations, we may
note some characteristic features. Consider first the Bible text that was given to
Weber at his confirmation in 1879, and undoubtedly selected by his mother: ‘The
Lord is the spirit, but where God’s spirit is, there is freedom.’21 Now Weber was
not a believing Christian even at this date and considered that the rite of “confirm-
ing” adolescents in their church membership and religious belief was an ‘inner
falsehood’ [CS 578]. Nonetheless, there is no reason to doubt Marianne Weber’s
judgement that ‘Hardly any other Bible text could better have expressed the law
that governed this child’s life’;22 nor that the conception of freedom that lay at the
root of Weber’s distinctive conception of democracy—the ‘bourgeois freedom’ of
all to participate in the intellectual and ethical goods of Kultur23—was religiously
inflected. Thus freedom derived not from any political source but from radical
religiosity, the ‘very broad left leaning sympathy’ of his mother.24 On the other
hand, his teenage refusal to countenance any other-worldly, religious belief un-
doubtedly caused considerable distress to Helene. In his penultimate year at the
Gymnasium (high school), 1880–1, he was reading classical anti-clerical authors
such as Schopenhauer and D. F. Strauss (but not Nietzsche),25 and an instinctive
distaste for theology conceived as mere ‘doctrine’ or ‘school theology’ would always
stay with him [PS i.234; XXI.42]. Yet living away from home as a university
student in the years 1882–4 appears to have allowed him leeway to settle a body of
opinions that, however ‘remote from god’, remained emphatically religious.26 Thus
in June 1884 Weber would admit to his mother that a reading of the American
Unitarian W. E. Channing was ‘the first time for several years . . . that something

20 Max’s deathbed dedication of ‘Economy and Society’ to Helene, who herself had died only in

1919, is a fitting symbolic testimony: Lebensbild, 710–11. Besides her role as a mother, she was
instrumental in bringing about Max’s marriage to Marianne Schnitger, and Marianne was in many
respects—her core ethical perspectives, though not her deference—an extension of Helene: ibid.
185–7, 682; Max to Helene Weber, 12.4.14, Briefe, II/8.616.—On Helene: Lebensbild, chs 1–2;
Roth, Familiengeschichte, ch. XV.
21 2 Corinthians 3:17, cit. Lebensbild, 63. As always, I translate the Lutheran text.
22 Ibid. However deficient Marianne Weber may be in expounding Max’s social and political

theory, she is on more solid ground here, because the conventional, liberal, individualistic belief in
freedom was common to them both. It was also his principal gift to her, since his agreement to marry
her signified her liberation from the constraints of domesticity and childbearing. See my snapshot, ‘Life
and Work’, TLS, 19 June 2009, p. 9.
23 For the equation of democracy and ‘bourgeois freedom’, ‘Über das Progamm des

Nationalsozialen Vereins’ [1896], MWG I/4.621; see further ibid. 114, 281, 333, 340, 552, 564, etc.
24 Otto to Emmy Baumgarten 3.10.87, pr. Roth, Familiengeschichte, 512–14, here 512.

Baumgarten was no religious conservative himself, but Helene was well to the ‘left’ of him.
25 On Strauss, Max to Alfred Weber, 7.3.86; cf. to Helene Weber, 2, 16.5.82, Jugendbriefe, 205–9;

cf. 44, 48; on Schopenhauer, see Lebensbild, 48, supported by Max to Helene Weber, 17.6.82,
Jugendbriefe, 53. Max’s anti-clericalism was a commonplace at the time and in family memory: e.g.
Lebensbild, 50–2, 60–8; Roth, Familiengeschichte, 508 n. 3.—I am indebted to Sibylle Osswald of
MWG for confirming that there is no known reference to Nietzsche or Feuerbach in Weber’s surviving
correspondence during the eighteen-month gap in the printed Jugendbriefe, September 1880–April
1882.
26 See Helene Weber to [?Ida Baumgarten, n.d., summer 1884], pr. Lebensbild, 100–1; Max to

Helene Weber, 12.4.14, Briefe, II/8.615–6.

 Religion 91

religious has secured more than an objective interest with me’,27 and it was
probably after his return to full-time residence in Berlin from the autumn of
1884 that we find him frequenting the house of the New Testament theologian
Eduard Grafe, a young man of independent means and ‘a virtuoso of friendship’
who had come to Berlin to habilitate. There he met Adolf Jülicher and perhaps Karl
Müller as well, both of whom would become major scholars in the booming
Ritschlian school of religious history with its distinctively Lutheran fusion of
historical and theological enquiry, and both are cited in the PE [XX.46 n. 1;
XXI.5 n. 4].28 The contact is striking precisely because it occurs outside the family
sphere, and cannot be construed as a merely passive response to the religious
imperatives stemming from his mother and her relations. But still it was at this
time that the lifelong equilibrium between mother and son was established. As
Otto Baumgarten (Max’s theologian cousin who met Grafe, Jülicher, and Müller
only after he had done29) recorded in 1887: Helene had ‘brought about a certain
approximation to and sympathy for religious milieux, a just assessment of the
religious element as a practical force rather than a theoretical view, within the
more equitable and reverential mind of Max’.30
What these biographical data signify is Weber’s acceptance of the fundamental
humanity of religion, both as a near universal historical phenomenon, and as an
expression of something eminently real and ‘practical’ in the human psyche.
Feuerbach and Marx might have brought the Christian God “down to earth” in
the 1830s and 1840s, and Weber took it for granted that in their origins ‘the
various kinds of gods and demons . . . are determined quite directly by the econom-
ic situation and historical fortunes of individual peoples above all.’31 Even so he
maintained that, if the Christian or any other conception of a transcendent sphere
and the conduct deriving from it had been generated here on earth, then they could
not be dismissed. They must be studied and judged for the light they cast on this

27 To Helene Weber, 8/18.7.84, Jugendbriefe, 121. Marianne Weber missed the point here (and

has been followed by many since) when she supposed that she must then sketch out Channing’s
‘fundamental ideas’: Lebensbild, 92–4. The point was Max Weber’s religious history, which embraced
dozens or even hundreds of authors, not a textbook exposition of Channing.
28 Adolf Jülicher, Die Religionswissenschaft der Gegenwart in Selbstdarstellungen, ed. E. Stange

(Leipzig, 1925–9), iv. 173–4. Grafe arrived in Berlin in 1880 and made contact with Jülicher in
1882; he habilitated in 1884 and left in 1886 to take up an extraordinary chair at Halle. It is a
remarkable fact that, of all the people Jülicher met in Grafe’s house, Weber, who was then no more
than a student, was the only one he chose to recall forty years later: the breadth of Jülicher’s intellectual
perspectives and his hostility to “one-sided” specialization were no doubt bonds of sympathy between
them. Karl Müller knew Grafe even before he came to Berlin and also recalled with great warmth the
“open house” Grafe kept there, where he too met Jülicher: Aus der academischen Arbeit (Tübingen,
1930), 16–17. Müller left Berlin in the autumn of 1884 for Halle. However, the more likely (though
not the only possible) time for Weber’s being present was after this date.
29 Otto Baumgarten met Grafe et al. in Halle in 1887–8: Meine Lebensgeschichte (Tübingen, 1929),

82; cf. 84.

30 Otto to Emmy Baumgarten, 3.10.87, pr. Roth, Familiengeschichte, 512–13: an important

document. The ‘less equitable and reverential mind’ implicit here was that of Max Weber Sr.
31 Sociology of Religion [c.1913], MWG I/22–2.137–8. Weber does not mention Feuerbach, but

he was by no means a forgotten man, and is a frequent presence in the writings of the day c.1900: e.g.
Georg Simmel, ‘Das Problem der religiösen Lage’ [1911], GSG 12.154; cf. Die Religion [1906], GSG
10.67, 85, 117.
92 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

world and on the humanity that had produced them. In this sense the denial of
transcendency and religiosity was a radical error, even from an exclusively secular or
“humanist” starting point.32 These views are best expressed in a letter written to his
brother Alfred at the time of the latter’s confirmation in March 1884, when Max
was not quite 20 years old. It is a fundamental document:
You have become familiar with the doctrines of Christianity as they have long been upheld
and believed in our church, and it will not have escaped you that the conception of their true
meaning and inner significance is a very different one for different people; that everyone
seeks to solve in his own way the great riddles with which this religion confronts us in mind
and spirit. So you, like every other Christian, are faced by the demand to frame your own
view of these riddles, as a member of the Christian community [Gemeinde]; a task which
each person must solve, and each person does solve in his own way, though to be sure not at
a stroke, but on the basis of many years of experience throughout the course of one’s life.
Just as you yourself will solve the task that now confronts you for the first time, so in this
respect you will be responsible to yourself alone, to your conscience, your reasoning faculty
[Verstande], your heart. For I believe that the greatness of the Christian religion lies in the
very fact that it is available in equal measure to everyone, old and young, fortunate and
unfortunate alike; and that it is understood equally by all, albeit in varying ways, and has
been so understood for almost two thousand years. It is one of the chief foundations
underlying everything great that has been created in this [2,000-year] epoch; the states
that have arisen, all the great deeds that these have performed, the great laws and structures
that they have drawn up, yes, and science [Wissenschaft] too and all the great ideas of the
human race have developed chiefly under the influence of Christianity . . . So it has come
about that everything that we nowadays assemble under the name of “our Kultur” is based in
the first instance on Christianity; that today in the institutions and structures of human
society as a whole, everything is linked to it and depends on it—so much so that we
ourselves never notice and are no longer aware that in everything we do and think, we stand
under the influence of the Christian religion. Christianity is the common bond that links us
with all the peoples and persons who stand at a stage as high as ours, for even those persons
amongst us who do not claim to be, or call themselves Christians, and who wish to have
nothing to do with Christianity, have still appropriated the core ideas of Christianity and act
involuntarily according to its doctrines.33
Now most, if not all, of this extract could have been written by the enlightened and
detached Protestant theologians of the late nineteenth century: men who were
allowing more and more scope to unchecked, neutral, and empirical historical
method in order to map and understand Christianity, but who nonetheless believed
that, by appealing to a European history that was overwhelmingly Christian,
history would confirm Christianity’s essential “truth” or historical potency. Al-
brecht Ritschl (b. 1822), Adolf Harnack (b. 1854), and Ernst Troeltsch (b. 1865)
are only the most famous examples of an immensely fertile historicist movement

32 The Neanderthal level at which these subjects are discussed in the early twenty-first century is a

reminder that secular thought on religious subjects within a once Christian milieu has declined quite as
much in cultural significance as Christian thought. This suggests that the former is essentially parasitic,
something that the discourse of ‘secularization’ obscures.
33 To Alfred Weber, 25.3.84, Jugendbriefe, 106–7.
 Religion 93

that stood at the height of its prestige and expansive power in the years
c.1875–1914, and it is no accident that Weber should have had a substantial
intellectual engagement with all three.34 Compare Weber’s letter to one of Har-
nack’s, written to a school friend in 1869: ‘I don’t know whether you are one of
those persons who look down with contempt, or even indifference, on everything
that comes under the heading of religion and theology. Now one can view
Christianity how one wants; one can even grant that it’s an error; but is it not of
the greatest interest to trace the history of this error, and demonstrate to oneself
what world-shaping events and transformations it has brought about, in what
unusual paths it has guided the mind of past ages, how it has permeated our entire
Kultur and Bildung today, and is indissoluble from them.’35 So far as it goes, this
viewpoint is identical to Weber’s, but there is also an obvious difference between
the theologian-historians and Weber. The goal of Weber’s intellectual enquiries
was not Christianity itself, with a view to preserving or renewing it, but a modernity
that he was convinced was no longer Christian, despite the preponderance of
Christianity in its formation. Such is the central paradox of that profoundly
religious–historical text, the PE.
Weber’s letter makes it plain that we must now add 1884 to the possible starting
points in the intellectual life of the PE, for what he says to Alfred contains nothing
more or less than the essentials of the historical conception of religion that
underpins both the PE and the Sociology of Religion (c.1913) in ‘Economy and
Society’. Note, first, the almost complete separation between acknowledgement of
the power and force of Christianity in the world and any actual religious belief. Max
nowhere tells Alfred that belief in any supernatural theology is required in order to
be part of a Christian community, and when he places ‘those persons amongst us
who do not claim to be . . . Christians, who wish to have nothing to do with
Christianity’ within an enlarged “Christian” community, he is referring equally
to himself, to his father and even—by implication—to the situation of the Calvinist
in the PE, for whom there was ‘no god’ available to help him [XXI.11]. According
to this conception the significant impact of Christianity is secular: its deposit lies in
laws, states, Wissenschaft, and ‘the institutions and structures of human society as a
whole’, and has been at work for almost 2,000 years. Furthermore, the idea that this
Christian impact is of central importance to European history;36 that it works

34 See a forthcoming essay ‘The Lutheran Roots of the “Protestant Ethic”: Max Weber and the

Church Historians’, in Ghosh, Max Weber in Context (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz).

35 Adolf Harnack to Wilhelm Stintzing [1869], in Agnes von Zahn-Harnack, Adolf von Harnack

(Berlin, 1936), 39–40.

36 This capacious idea of European history can be found still earlier in Weber’s manuscript of

Christmas 1879 entitled ‘Betrachtungen Ueber Völker-Charakter, Völker-Entwicklung und Völker-

Geschichte bei den Indogermanischen Nationen’, which also encapsulates the idea of religiosity as a
fundamental component in the make-up of the Occident over an evolution spanning the whole of
recorded history: Lebensbild, 49–50; cf. J. Deininger, ‘Einleitung’, MWG I/2.4. Weber would have
found reinforcement for his conception of history as the ongoing tradition of Kultur in his neo-
humanist and legal education. Thus it was conventional for a lawyer to assert that ‘Roman law, just as
much as Christianity, is a component of the Kultur of the modern world’: R. Ihering, Der Geist des
römischen Rechts, I [1852] (Leipzig, 18784), }}1, 3. However, Weber’s exposure to Christianity was
earlier and went deeper than his exposure to Roman law.
94 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

through history alone, untrammelled by any prior ideas about a Christian eternity
(or rightness), and can be measured only by the secular, mutable standard of
historical impact—this is the purest anticipation of the ‘purely historical’ frame-
work of the PE [XX.53, XXI.109], though by its vast timescale this early letter also
anticipates the expanded perspectives we commonly (yet erroneously) delegate to
the later Weber. Another description he offers of Christianity’s impact is that it
supplies the foundation to the total assemblage of “our Kultur”. Here, too, is an
anticipation of the PE and Weber’s subsequent religious writings, since Kultur and
the formation of ‘modern Kultur’ is their central subject [XXI.107], and ‘capitalism’
is a synonym for ‘modern Kultur’ or ‘modern material Kultur’ [XX.11, 53–4;
XXI.107, 109]. However, Kultur was a less problematic idea for Weber than a
conceptually unresolved capitalism, and gives us a clearer idea of his concerns. One
of the most prolifically employed German words of Weber’s day—Friedrich
Meinecke would mock ‘the usual raving over Kultur’ in 190637—it has a weight
and significance that far outstrips the ornamental, aesthetic, and literary overtones
of the English ‘culture’. For Weber ‘the Idea of Kultur is a value-concept’.38 It is the
organizing idea of conscious or reflective life in its entirety, with ‘value-system’ or
‘code of values’ as its nearest English-language equivalents. In short, it is a secular
substitute for religion.
Note too the letter’s insistence on the individual responsibility of every Christian
believer, a theme we have already encountered. Only the individual can explain
religion’s ‘true meaning and inner significance’, and the young, like the older,
Weber is unsparing in his acceptance that this meaning will be ‘very different . . . for
different people’. This then points forward to the PE, where the apparently definite
and unitary commodity ‘religion’ will be broken down into the infinitely plastic
‘religiosity’, a mutable psychological resource (though the psychologizing of reli-
gion c.1900 was no monopoly of Weber’s).39 Aged 19 and writing loyally in
defence of a rite of religious confirmation that he did not believe in, Weber does
not spell out the implicit contradiction between this thoroughly individualistic
position and membership of a Lutheran church that derived its authority not from
the consent of individuals but from its claims as an institution of the state. Still we
may say what Weber could not: that his interest in ‘the Christian community’ or
Gemeinde points forward to his later interest in the more authentic Christian
communities exemplified by the Donatists of Augustine’s day and the Protestant
sects of the seventeenth century, which relied on no state support. Similarly his

37 Review of Jacob Burckhardt, Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen, HZ 97 (1906), 560.

38 »Objektivität« [1904], WL 175.
39 Cf. Georg Simmel, ‘Zur Soziologie der Religion’ [1898], GSG 5.266–86, here 266–72. Modern

British social historians’ understanding of ‘religion’ is surprisingly mechanical by comparison—an

unseen consequence of more fully developed secularization. Consider Hugh McLeod: ‘By “religion”
I mean belief in an all-powerful and benevolent Creator, worship of whom, and obedience to whose
commandments[,] offers the only path to individual and collective well-being, together with the
practices and institutions founded on such belief ’: Secularisation in Western Europe 1848–1914
(London, 2000), 13. Callum Brown cheerfully suggests that religion is unknowable, but then comes
back to the idea that ‘religion is founded upon “faith” – on belief ’: Religion and Society in Twentieth-
Century Britain (London, 2006), 8.
 Religion 95

private dismissal of the falsity of the Lutheran confirmation of adolescents fore-

shadows his sympathy for the Täufer in the PE and the ‘Protestant Sects’, for whom
the essence of the principle of adult baptism was that membership of the church
community could only be entered into by a responsible adult [PS i.220]. Even so
the 1884 letter does express the individualistic foundation to Weber’s thinking. Its
emphasis on the absolute sovereignty of the individual in regard to religion is the
origin of the individualistic component in the conception of religion presented in
the PE [XXI.12] and again in the ‘Protestant Sects’ [PS i.234–5], where authentic
religion cannot come from the external bureaucratic prescriptions of an institu-
tional church, but only from the personal decisions of individuals, who form social
groups on this basis.
So there is an irreducible post-Christian foundation present in Weber’s thought
from his earliest maturity. Most of the propositions just outlined—regarding the
importance of Kultur, the secular impact of Christian religion, the rights and
prominence of the individual personality—were acceptable not only to advanced
theologians but to the liberal Protestant laity such as Helene Weber, and she, her
sisters, and their families were the obvious sources of such thinking in Max Weber’s
mind. His interest in the problems of framing a modern Christian ethic also stands
adjacent to the widespread belief that modern Christianity needed to offer some
kind of “ethical” alternative to post-Darwinian monism and Marxist materialism, a
belief that united all the diverse strands within the Protestant Social Congress, even
if they could never agree on what that alternative should be. In Paul Göhre’s words:
‘In [its] lectures and presentations on social ethics, one believed oneself to be
occupying the area which best corresponded to the character of the Congress, the
area which belonged truly and exclusively to it.’40
Yet though the PE and Weber’s work in the 1890s are in part the product of
the cultural world of liberal and intellectual Protestantism, this is far from the whole
truth. If he was an unusual liberal, he was a still more unusual religious thinker, since,
however great his belief in the historically formative power of Christianity, he believed
that it was now extinct, regardless of the power of its secular, capitalist and rationalizing
offshoots. It lacked the necessary ‘force’ needed ‘for the penetration of life’.41 In other
words he was as much formed by his secular liberal father and a web of secular liberal
connections ranging from Friedrich Kapp to Theodor Mommsen, as by his liberal
Protestant mother and her extended family. The assertion of Marianne Weber ‘that it
was necessary [for Max] to choose between the parents’,42 and that he had made such
a choice in favour of his mother in the mid-1880s, must be rejected as a retrospective
judgement coming from someone with no direct knowledge, who was parti pris
in favour of Helene. It is contradicted by the contemporary assessment of Otto
Baumgarten (an unimpeachable Christian witness), who, after recording the evident
sympathy between Weber and his mother, observed that nevertheless ‘a decision
either–or’ between his parents and ‘an insight into the mistaken [secular] nature of

40 Paul Göhre, Die evangelisch-soziale Bewegung (Leipzig, 1896), 156.

41 To Harnack, 5.2.06, Briefe. 42 Lebensbild, 90.
96 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

his father’ was something ‘not to be found in him.’43 (Weber’s refusal to make
a choice of this fundamental kind must not be confused with the choice made during
the famous and much exaggerated family row of 1897, when Max and Marianne
upheld Helene Weber’s right to come and pay them annual visits, regardless of Max
Weber Sr’s wishes. Here Max Jr was simply upholding his mother’s personal
autonomy—a good liberal and secular principle, even if its feminist application
was too advanced for his father.)44 So to those who supposed that his enthusiasm
for the Protestant Social Congress indicated any kind of religious commitment,
he had a fairly tart response: ‘I am not at all a Christian–Social but a fairly pure
bourgeois’—where the bourgeoisie was also a central component of the secular
modern Kultur.45
One product of this mixed heritage in 1892–4 was that Weber went to some
lengths to explain to his Congress audience why the Christian religion was super-
seded and irrelevant to the social conditions of modern Germany—a quixotic
undertaking that by this date few secular liberals would have bothered to undertake,
and one that in principle no authentic Christian thinker could accept. A typical
statement of his position appears in his 1894 review of the book by Friedrich
Naumann, Was heißt Christlich-sozial? (What does it mean to be Christian-Social?).
Naumann was a Christian and democratic politician with whom Weber main-
tained lifelong personal ties until the elder man’s death in 1919. Yet throughout life
he was an unsparing, even brutal, critic of what he took to be Naumann’s religious
and sentimental illusions, and so it was here. For example, Naumann’s conception
of modern industry highlighted individual entrepreneurs who were great personal-
ities and household names, such as Krupp and Stumm—a position similar to
Werner Sombart’s conception of the pioneers of capitalism in terms of heroic
and plutocratic individuals such as Jacob Fugger [XX.14–15]. But for Weber this
was a major error. A thin stream of exceptional individuals had no doubt existed in
all times and places, yet they were peculiarly unrepresentative in the present day,
since the essence of capitalist modernity was its impersonality. As we have seen, the
impersonal thinking and procedures of capitalism lay at the heart of the problem
faced by conventional (Lutheran) religious thinking when it sought to confront
modern society.46 If social relations could be conceived only in terms of classes or
groups; if economic hierarchy and conditions were dictated by the interests of
invisible shareholders or impersonal market forces, rather than by the ethical and
religious qualities of individual entrepreneurs or workers, then personal religion in

43 Otto to Ida Baumgarten, 3.10.87, cit. Roth, Familiengeschichte, 513.

44 Roth, Familiengeschichte, 527–36.
45 To Adolf Hausrath, 15.10.96, pr. MWG I/4.38 n. 129; cf. ‘Die deutschen Landarbeiter’ [1894],

Freiburg Inaugural [1895], ibid. 335, 568. Below II.8.

46 ‘Modern historical evolution increasingly substitutes the impersonal rule of the class of property

owners in place of [“the personally directed large industrial enterprise”]; purely business connections
instead of personal ones, the obligations of money tribute to an unknown, invisible and intangible
power instead of personal subordination; and it thereby eliminates the possibility of conceiving the
relation between ruler and ruled in ethical and religious terms. This, and not any economic and social
defects deriving from the distribution of property, is the problem from a religious standpoint’: MWG
I/4.356–7.
 Religion 97

any conventional sense had no role left to play in the twentieth century. Such was
the intellectual problem to which he was responding in the PE in 1904–5, when he
constructed a deliberately odd religious genealogy with ‘a peculiarly concrete–
impersonal character’ [XXI.17], and an equally odd religious “ethic”, which was
uniquely important historically because it was capable of giving birth to a modern
Kultur that was ‘neither ethical, nor anti-ethical, but simply non-ethical’.47 The PE
goes beyond anything he said in the 1890s, by making plain his view that it was not
the case, as Naumann and Paul Göhre supposed, that modern capitalist industry had
simply arisen of its own accord, posing its own, entirely new problems to which a
personal, and in this sense traditional, religion had then to find a solution. On the
contrary, to a significant degree the capitalist ‘mindset’ (Gesinnung)48 and Kultur was
in part the result of a bizarre mutation of an originally personal and loving
Christianity. This mutation was produced by the theology of the predestinating
Calvinist god who issued his decrees on salvation and damnation oblivious to the fate
of any individual, or else by the unfeeling meritocratic “community” fostered within
the Protestant sects (a world of which Calvinism was also a part), thereby leading to a
‘sharp condemnation of the idolatry of created man and of any clinging to personal
ties with men’ [XXI.14 n. 31] [i.99]+. At first sight this will seem an extraordinary
argument—as indeed it is in the elementary empirical–historical perspective that
takes the evidence of the past rather than the agenda of the present for its starting
point. But for Weber modern capitalism and the rational conduct it epitomized were
forces exercising so powerful and so comprehensive an influence on human conduct
in his own day that he felt they could only be credibly explained as deriving from an
equivalently powerful and comprehensive source in the past; and this could only be
religion, because it was the only universal ethical power that had previously existed.49
It might not be the sole explanation of a modernity where universal ethics and
religiosity no longer prevailed, but it was certainly the principal one.
Yet, if Weber supposed that Lutheran (not to mention, Catholic) Christianity
was obsolete, one is bound to ask: how could he justify his early connections with
Christian Socials such as Naumann and Göhre, and (above all) his utilization of the
Protestant Social Congress for the purposes of social enquiry? Certainly there was a
paradox here; but not—if we are to judge by Naumann’s and Göhre’s personal
regard for Weber, or make comparison with early twentieth-century liberal theological
conceptions of the world—any perceived contradiction or dishonesty. In Germany
liberal Protestants contributed quite as much to The Secularization of the European
Mind in the Nineteenth Century as Marxists, materialists, atheists, and scientific
naturalists.50 The works of Ernst Troeltsch, whom Weber got to know only after
moving to Heidelberg in 1897, are a classical example, with their frank admission
that a once unitary Kultur founded upon the Christian religion had been shattered

47 Sociology of Herrschaft [c.1911–14], MWG I/22–4.635.

48 e.g. [XX.19, 20, 23, 26, 44; XXI.107]. 49 Below II.5–6.
50 I borrow the title of the book by Owen Chadwick (Cambridge, 1977). Its specific content has no

relevance here, but it deserves credit as laying down an agendum for research. Secularization is an
intellectual construct in the first instance; so, until intellectual secularization is mapped out, the
dimensions of secularization in society can hardly be calibrated.
98 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

from the eighteenth century onwards; and that the historical method and researches
that led to such a conclusion were bringing into question the “absolute” quality
of Christian values and belief.51 The foundations of the original Protestant Social
Congress were similarly unstable, so that Göhre (for example) would leave the
Congress in 1896 with Naumann, join the SPD in 1899, and abandon the
Protestant Church altogether in 1906.52 Conversely, Weber remained deeply
committed to a conception of human conduct being rooted in ultimate value-
commitments, that is, in ideal or kulturell terms. He was a passionate opponent of
‘so-called “relativism”, this philistine lingering in convention on the road to open
cynicism’,53 even if modern Kultur was emphatically not unitary, but included a set of
‘material’ value-commitments (‘the economic way of viewing things’) [XX.53–4],54
while the historically normal expression of idealism, ‘the religious root’, was now
extinct [XXI.104, 106]. Thus he continued to make absolutist, idealist, and person-
ally based pronouncements of the kind: ‘The transcendental presupposition of every
science of Kultur’—the human and social sciences—‘is . . . that we are persons with
Kultur.’55 In short, Weber transmuted classical German idealism quite as radically
as he did classical liberalism; but in neither case did he entirely lose touch with the
point of origin.
If the origin of this mindset lay with his mother, it would receive dramatic
confirmation in 1890–1, through the beneficent (if ephemeral) political climate
that gave rise to the foundation of the Protestant Social Congress, and more
particularly through his friendship with Paul Göhre, the General Secretary of the
Congress and an exact contemporary.56 In the summer of 1890, immediately after
the inaugural meeting of the Congress, Göhre had gone to his native Saxony to live
clandestinely as a working man. He then returned to Berlin to continue his
theological studies and wrote up what proved to be a sensational account of his
Three Months as a Factory Worker (1891).57 It was at this time he got to know Max

51 See resp. Troeltsch, ‘Protestantisches Christentum’, esp. 372–407, 450–1; Die Absolutheit des

Christentums (Tübingen, 1902), }}1–2.

52 Troeltsch was far too politically anaemic to attend the Congress in the 1890s, and, even after it

had become an emasculated talking shop under the Presidency of Adolf Harnack (1903–12), his
contact with it was marginal. His one and only significant contribution was in 1904: ‘Die christliche
Ethik und die heutige Gesellschaft’, Die Verhandlungen des fünfzehnten Evangelisch-sozialen Kongress,
abgehalten in Breslau am 25. und 26. Mai 1904 (Göttingen, 1904), 11–40, 53–7. See Der Briefwechsel
zwischen Adolf Harnack und Martin Rade, ed. J. Jantsch (Berlin and New York, 1996), nos 335,
473, 498.
53 To Karl Voßler, 5.5.08, Briefe, II/5.560.
54 Quotation in ( ) from the Freiburg Inaugural [1895], MWG I/4.561.
55 »Objektivität« [1904], WL 180.
56 They were both born in April 1864. Ernst Troeltsch lent a special aura to Weber’s relations with

Göhre when in his obituary tribute he stated that ‘he [Weber] had no very great need of other
people . . . to my knowledge the only strongly emotional friendship he had was with Paul Göhre’: Max
Weber zum Gedächtnis, 44. However, though Göhre’s friendship was important to Weber, it left no
discernible traces in later life, and the unique quality Troeltsch attributed to it is mythical. Troeltsch
had no personal knowledge of either Weber or Göhre during the period of their intimacy from the
autumn of 1890 to March 1894 (when Göhre took up a full-time parish priesthood in Frankfurt an der
Oder), and the appeal ‘to my knowledge’ is spurious.
57 Drei Monate Fabrikarbeiter (Leipzig, 1891) was published at the beginning of June (MWG

I/4.117 n. 30); 20,000 copies were printed by the end of the year.
 Religion 99

Weber, who left at least one discernible fingerprint on the text of the book,58 and
when it was published Weber took up the cudgels in Göhre’s defence against
conservative Lutheran critics. Here, while conceding that Göhre’s central premiss
was “nothing new”, he insisted on its importance: the reader of the book would find
that the workers with whom Göhre lived and worked were ‘persons of his own flesh
and blood, with essentially like needs of mind and spirit, who pursued their
material and inner interests, such as were suggested to them by the organization
of human society, with about the same degree of understanding and foolishness as
[the bourgeois, Christian reader] himself and those like him’.59 Here was the
essential democratic, cross-class premiss that was so important to Weber and later
to the PE. The idea of cross-class unity was not founded on an unreflecting
assumption of national solidarity, but arose instead from a religious premiss: the
belief that all men and women alike were ‘persons with Kultur’. Göhre’s frank
acceptance of this elementary assumption was to Weber a crucial ‘bridge’ linking
Christian believers not only with socialist factory workers, but with the secular
academic circles he inhabited, at a time when ‘every bridge [was] lacking’;60 and
Göhre was surely one of the most important examples of the reforming potential
apparently opened up by the newly founded Protestant Social Congress, which
encouraged him to make use of it for his enquiry into rural labour in 1892, with its
foundation in the “psychological” and ideal component in men’s make-up. For
Weber this premiss meant that at some point in the future the working class would
be treated as equals ‘on the ground of right and not of charity’.61 This did not point
to social levelling, but it did mean that Germany might one day have a ‘labour
aristocracy’ (or spiritual elite) like that of England; that one need not despair of the
national political future of the fatherland, because ‘the broad stratum of the
working masses [might] be incorporated into Germany’s bourgeois develop-
ment’;62 and that (in a pregnant phrase) class conflict might be ‘legalized ’. ‘The
sentimental fiction of the harmony of interests’ between capital and labour,
between the ruling and ruled classes, should be frankly discarded; but at the same
time, when one legalized class conflict, one was recognizing that this was a conflict
only of material interest, not of values.63 It did not contravene the unity required by
law or nationality; nor, more profoundly, the shared Kultur or primary value-
system that was available to all those who lived within the shadow of Occidental

58 In describing the workers’ sense of the infinite gulf between themselves and the “posh” (vornehm)

classes, Göhre notes that this ‘rarely had a personal edge . . . One of my friends once aptly called it an
objective hatred’: Drei Monate Fabrikarbeiter, 210. The friend was Max Weber: cf. ‘Die deutschen
Landarbeiter’ [1894], MWG I/4.327. Other traces might be suggested. For example, Göhre’s warning
in the first paragraph of his ‘Vorwort’ against illegitimate generalization of the results of a local inquiry
looks as if it comes from an academic source, and echoes Weber’s stringently academic emphasis on the
book’s methodological limitations: ‘Zur Rechtfertigung Göhres’, MWG I/4.110–11.
59 ‘Zur Rechtfertigung Göhres’, 110; cf. Drei Monate Fabrikarbeiter, 213. Here is another passage

where Weber could have been standing at Göhre’s shoulder as he wrote.

60 ‘Zur Rechtfertigung Göhres’, 118. 61 Ibid. 115.
62 Resp. ‘Die deutschen Landarbeiter’ [1894], ibid. 344; ‘Die bürgerliche Entwicklung

Deutschlands’ [1897], ibid. 816.

63 Review of Was heißt Christlich-Sozial?[1894], ibid. 351; cf. ‘Die deutschen Landarbeiter’,

ibid. 329.
100 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

and Christian tradition. This was a tradition (he supposed) with which the
bourgeoisie had a particular affinity, and the bourgeoisie was a social class to
which, pace Marx, the industrial working class as an educated, urban class un-
doubtedly belonged. Thus the PE is the history of ‘a specifically bourgeois . . . ethic’
[XXI.104–5].
Yet there was not much joy in this for the liberal members of the Protestant
Social Congress, because Weber was not offering a Christian way forward. He was
not, unlike Göhre, looking forward to ‘the ennobling, the Christianization of today’s
still wild and heathen Social Democracy, and the annihilation of its anti-Christian
materialist Weltanschauung.’64 On the contrary. When, for example, Weber adver-
tised the Congress lecture courses that had been set up to instruct interested laity
and clergy in current social problems, his salesmanship was of a distinctly bracing,
even negative variety:
The courses . . . will not place their main emphasis on laying out ways and means to solve the
great problems of the day—and observation of this limit demands a certain [stoical]
resignation—but quite the reverse: they seek to bring to light the full extent of the economic
difficulties, and on this basis work forwards so that the problems are correctly grasped in
their full extent and the practical questions are correctly formulated.65
(In telling the Christian Socials what a hard road they had ahead of them, he was
only speaking the truth, and though he did not predict it, he cannot have been too
much surprised at the collapse and fragmentation of the Congress after 1895.) This
was not a Christian view but a recognizably Weberian one: in its appeal to academic
science (Wissenschaft); its ascetic demand for ‘complete sobriety of judgement’; its
equally ascetic acceptance of the ineluctable working-out of the evolutionary–
historical process, or ‘the nature of things’;66 and its desire to educate the Lutheran
clergy in the nature of these hard realities. In all these respects Weber’s perspective
in the 1890s is identical with that which underpins the PE. Having said this, he
spared his audience some of the more unpalatable truths stated there: that the
active, Christian component in this religious history had taken place some centuries
earlier; that the decisive action had taken place largely outside Germany; and that it
was now too late for Germany to enact this formative history within her own
borders. Prior to the political reaction of 1895–6 he surely hoped to show that at
least a vestige of the English unity between Christianity and “liberalism” could be
made operative in Germany [cf. CS 581]—and yet (on the other hand) only a
historical conception of the kind set out in the PE could explain his counsel of
‘resignation’ in the present day.67

64 Drei Monate Fabrikarbeiter, 222, emphasis in original. Cf. ‘Zur Rechtfertigung Göhres’, where

Weber points out that for those such as himself ‘it is not possible . . . to re-awaken the impetuous urge
of idealism’; however, Göhre’s book is an ‘essay carried by the spirit of idealism’: MWG I/4.119.
65 ‘Die Evangelisch-sozialen Kurse in Berlin . . . ’ [1893], MWG I/4.236. The ‘practical questions’

Weber had in mind were ‘housing, Sunday rest, education of children and dietary practices’:
‘Monographien von Landgeistlichen’ [1893], ibid. 281.
66 MWG I/4.236. 67 Ibid.
 Religion 101

To conclude: it is clear from Weber’s speeches and writings in the 1890s 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 estab-
lished not merely by this date but fully twenty years before the first appearance of
the PE in 1904.
 7
Rationality and Law

At this point one might perhaps suppose that the “first” history of the PE, of its
evolution prior to first publication, would end. We have, after all, discussed its title
headings—capitalism and religion—and more besides. Yet this would be a great
mistake, one of the orrery of errors that stem from taking the PE in isolation from
the rest of Weber’s œuvre. Its title may refer only to Protestantism and capitalism,
but within the text itself there is a third major theme, rationality or the category of
the rational—and this, quite as much as Protestantism and capitalism, takes us to
the very heart of Weber’s thought-world.
The full measure of the importance of rationality to the PE is this: that the
historical thesis of Part II of the text is an assertion of the link not between a certain
form of Protestantism and capitalism (however construed), but between asceticism
and rational conduct, where Weber understands ‘asceticism’ as signifying proto-
rational conduct.1 Given the presence of capitalism in the title, it is understandable
that readers should have supposed that this was the telos of the argument: it is the
foundation of much empiricist criticism of the PE, in its ‘Search’ for ‘The Spirit of
Capitalism’, for ‘Economic Individualism’ and ‘Economic Action’.2 But this is a
misconception all the same. Consider, for example, Weber’s summary of his
argument at the end of the PE: ‘A constituent element of the capitalist spirit, and
not only this but of modern Kultur, was born out of the spirit of Christian asceticism:
the rational conduct of life on the basis of the vocational Idea’ [XXI.107]. Out of
respect for the title, one of the outer poles of the argument here is indeed the
capitalist spirit, but in fact the hard kernel is formed by ‘Christian asceticism’ and
‘the rational conduct of life’. These two are taken as synonymous, and their identity
is continually repeated throughout the text: hence ‘rational asceticism’, ‘ascetic
rationalization’, ‘the rational character of asceticism’, ‘ascetic, i.e. rational ’.3 Viewed
literally, the historical movement of the text is thus narrow and tightly defined:
from early modern proto-rationalism to modern rationalism minus the ‘religious
root’ that had triggered the process [XXI.104]. On the other hand, its theme and

1 Below I.8.
2 Cf. Gordon Marshall, In Search of the Spirit of Capitalism: An Essay on Max Weber’s Protestant
Ethic thesis (London, 1982); H. M. Robertson, Aspects of the Rise of Economic Individualism: A Criticism
of Max Weber and his School (Cambridge, 1935); Kurt Samuelson, Religion and Economic Action:
A Critique of Max Weber [1957] (New York, 1961), etc. Such critics may have egregiously misunderstood
what Weber meant by capitalism, but when they asserted that the historical argument of the PE never
reached its avowed goal, capitalism, they were in fact right.
3 Resp. [XXI.47, 93; 37 n. 74, 101 n. 70; 3 n. 3]; Eranos minute, 5.2.05, MWG I/9.220–1.
 Rationality and Law 103

concerns—rationalism, hence ‘modern Kultur’ in its entirety—were universal and

comprehensive.
But what then were the relative positions of capitalism and rationalism? In 1904
Weber expressed the hope (as we saw) that the final conceptual resolution regarding
capitalism and its “spirit” would be established by ‘the close of the investigation’
[XX.12]. But this did not happen and Part II of the text showed instead that
thinking about capitalism was being overlaid and overtaken by ideas about ration-
ality. In Part II.1, the historical kernel of the text, discussion of rationality and its
attributes such as system, method (Methodik), formal and logical consistency, is
more or less continuous once the theological premisses have been expounded. By
contrast there is just one reference to capitalism in more than seventy pages of text,
and this is a comment not on the nature of contemporary capitalism but on its
‘heroic’ character in the seventeenth century [XXI.1–73, 20]. In its final section the
PE does indeed return to the theme of ‘Asceticism and Capitalism’, but this return
is ambiguous. Besides the concluding summary, already cited, the text is accom-
panied by remarks such as the following: ‘the crucial factor is not mere capital
accumulation, but the ascetic rationalization of vocational life in its entirety’
[XXI.101 n. 70; cf. 103]. This then points forward to Weber’s retrospective
comment from 1910: ‘it was not the development and expansion of capitalism
that principally interested me, but the historical evolution of humanity, such as had
been created by the intersection of religiously and economically determined factors.
That was clearly expressed at the close of my [1904–5] essays.’4
However we judge the text as a whole, it is indubitable that its historical core lies
in the identity between asceticism and rationality. But if rationality is a third central
component of the PE, how is it to be explained? What were the origins of such
thinking? Once more we are confronted by the radical novelty of the PE when
compared to Weber’s previous work. Indeed, this is the most outright novelty of all,
when compared with capitalism (most obviously) or religion, where the ethical core
of Weber’s conceptual thinking (the contrast between personal and modern im-
personal ethics) can be identified in earlier sources. As we saw (I.2), the novel
discourse of what is rational and of rationalization (a fortiori the related idea of
asceticism) simply does not appear in his writings prior to 1900: we do not even
find the traditional usages of ‘reason’ (Vernunft) and ‘rationalism’ (a term that
Weber would take over and rework), let alone the novel appeal to what is (in
German, as in English) rational.
Here then is a major problem for genetic analysis, a problem that is magnified
when we consider the immensity of the European tradition of ideas about reason—
and yet I believe it will prove adequate to the task. Weber’s very first statement of
his thinking on this subject appears at the end of the section on the “spirit” of
capitalism (an early example of the open textual frontier between capitalism and
rationalism). It is synoptic and momentous, and he will repeat it several times in
later life—not least in the 1919 ‘Vorbemerkung’ [i.11]: ‘One can indeed “ration-
alize” life according to the most varied ultimate perspectives and in very different

4 ‘Schlusswort’, 580. However, it was easier for Weber to be more forthright regarding the

demotion of capitalism after 1907–8: see II.1.

104 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

directions. “Rationalism” is a historical concept containing a world of antitheses

within it . . .’ [XX.35]. Now this is a distinct repudiation of the traditional claim
made by ‘liberal enlightenment’ [XX.30], the world-view that supplied a cultural
foundation for nineteenth-century liberalism in Western Europe: that there could
be only one ‘reason’, because ‘reason’ was normatively good or right. In the new
Weberian world, this naive, Panglossian view is dismissed. ‘Rationalism’ (a term that
had previously signified Enlightenment thinking only in a disenchanted sense) is not
a moral good or an ideal; it is a formal or technical instrument, which can be
“perfected” only in a technical, formal, or logical sense, and so in the first instance it
may serve a variety of arbitrary, and in this sense ‘irrational’, starting points [XX.30,
35]. Nonetheless it is uniquely appropriate and indissolubly linked to the modern
Occident because the Occident is a Kultur uniquely committed to, and reliant upon,
technical, formal, and logical procedures which were also, in some sense, “goods”.
The revision of simple, unambiguous moral norms that Weber announced was
no arbitrary personal invention—its impact could never have been so great in this
case—but reflected a series of historical contexts. By c.1890 the idea that there was
a single set of agreed values for “all sensible men”, or even all liberals, across
Wilhelmine Germany and Western Europe was becoming an impossibility. In
German politics and society there was an evident fracturing of the homogeneous
national community envisaged before 1871, and of the values associated with it,
owing to the successive incursion or emergence of Catholic and Socialist commu-
nities of Kultur after so-called “unification”.5 Hence most famously the Kultur-
kampf (the struggle over Kultur, not the struggle between churches or faiths)
produced by competing liberal and Catholic “world-views” (Weltanschauungen)
in the 1870s and 1880s. There was an analogous process of dissolution in intel-
lectual and personal life, where the vogue for Nietzsche after 1890, and his
commitment to the “revaluation of values”—at once a radical attack on traditional
values, and a conservative yearning to re-create a newly authoritative code—stood
out as a dramatic symbol.6 This was accompanied by a much wider and less gaudy
intellectual current that was by no means confined to Germany. Ever more detailed
and voluminous historical analysis—something that Nietzsche was one of the first
to condemn—had emerged as the grinding mill that was slowly destroying all
universal and timeless certainties and replacing them by an infinity of historical
particularities, so leading to the naked—and at first sight appalling—relativism that
was the hallmark of Historismus (or historicism).7 So there was a sense of fracture

5 The rise of a demotic radical Right, which has been of much interest to historians interested in the

pre-history of Nazism, was a later phenomenon and—rightly or wrongly—made no significant impact

on Weber prior to 1919.
6 Foundations for the study of Nietzsche’s reception are laid in the Schrifttumsverzeichnis of Richard

Krummel—a twentieth-century Tillemont: Nietzsche und der deutsche Geist, 2 vols (Berlin, 19982). For
a briefer snapshot, Steven Aschheim, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890–1990 (Berkeley and Los
Angeles, 1992).
7 For Weber on Historismus, e.g., to Rickert, 2.4.05, Nachlaß Max Weber 30/4 Bl. 105–6;

Sociology of Law [c.1910–14], MWG I/22–3.610. On the rise of historical method and the volume
of production, consider (most simply) the proliferation of full or ordinary university chairs within the
German-speaking states: 5 in 1810, 56 in 1870, 105 in 1910 (a figure that then remained nearly stable
until 1960): Wolfgang Weber, Priester der Klio (Frankfurt, 1984), 47, 53.
 Rationality and Law 105

and unreconciled plurality at a series of levels: intellectual, social, kulturell, and

political. Such were the origins of a multiculturalism that, however different in its
components from the ethnically determined plurality that is more common in the
twenty-first century, was an undoubted precursor of our culture today; and it was a
principal focus of discussion in the universities, the seat of the historicist mode of
production that was employed throughout the arts and social sciences. In a famous
phrase palmed off onto Wilhelm Dilthey by Ernst Troeltsch, there was an ‘anarchy
of values’,8 and Max Weber’s language was no different when he spoke of ‘a chaos of
value criteria’, and ‘value irrationalism’, with ‘the differing value structures of the
world in unceasing conflict with each other’.9 It was under these circumstances that
in 1904—just at the time the PE was coming to fruition—Weber first began to
campaign for what he called “objectivity” and later “value-freedom” in academic
analysis. This was his response to the anarchy of values (and incidentally a central
index of his distance from Nietzsche). It was not, of course, a denial of values or
their plurality, but rather the reverse: accepting the fact of value plurality and
conflict as a datum, and on this basis attempting to set limits to its disintegrative
effect on Wissenschaft.10 Hence a series of notices in the PE about the need to avoid
‘value-judgements’, or complaints at their unwarranted intrusion.11
Such was the context for Weber’s “value-free” thinking, but why should he focus
on rationality within this context? One answer lies in the fact that he was a liberal, if
that term is taken in its broadest, continental European sense. Though he might
criticize an obsolete, enlightened liberalism, still the discourse of reason and ratio

8 The first use of this famous phrase occurs in Troeltsch’s own name: ‘Protestantisches

Christentum . . . ’ (1906), 379. After Dilthey’s death in 1911, Troeltsch attached the phrase to a
speech given by Dilthey on his 70th birthday: ‘Moderne Geschichtsphilosophie’, Gesammelte Schriften
II: Zur religiösen Lage, Religionsphilosophie und Ethik (Tübingen, 1913), 678. However, Dilthey had
only referred to ‘the anarchy of convictions’ displayed in historical analysis: Die tägliche Rundschau,
22.11.03, repr. Gesammelte Schriften V. Die Geistige Welt (Leipzig, 1924), 9. The distinction is not
merely pedantic. For, while he was fully seized of the tendency towards relativism contained in
burgeoning historical study, nonetheless, as a member of an earlier, less sceptical generation (b. 1833),
Dilthey always supposed that more thoroughgoing historical study could ultimately recover a firm
foundation of truth. The problem was thus an ‘anarchy of convictions’, ‘of philosophical systems’, or
‘of thought’, which might be clarified and dispelled: Gesammelte Schriften VIII: Weltanschauungslehre,
(Leipzig, 1931), 75, 194. Dilthey did not suppose, as Weber did, that there was an inevitable plurality
of irreconcilable value positions; only that there was an ‘emptiness’ which was the consequence of a
want of ‘counsel’—a euphemism for ignorance of Diltheyan Lebensphilosophie (ibid. 193–4). So there
was no Diltheyan anarchy of values.
9 Resp. Freiburg Inaugural [1895], MWG I/4.563; Sociology of Law, MWG I/22–3.628; ‘Science

as a Vocation’ [1917/19], MWG I/17.99.—The ingrained tendency of commentators in the social

sciences to suppose that the Methodenstreit (quarrel over method) of German-speaking economists
from the 1880s supplied the intellectual context here is far too mechanical a response—as if one
dispute over method must necessarily derive from another: e.g. Wolfgang Schluchter, Grundlegungen
der Soziologie I (Tübingen, 2006), ch. 3.A. By Weber’s day the Methodenstreit was considered to have
been resolved on the compromise basis that both historical and theoretical economics had obvious
virtues: Historian ch. 9. While it touched upon the problems Historismus posed for economics, it was
not concerned with the new agenda of value plurality and ethical relativism in Kultur as a whole. None
of the original participants in the debate experienced any doubt on these subjects because they came
from an earlier generation.
10 »Objektivität« [1904], WL 146–61.
11 [XX.53; XXI.5 n. 4, 6, 8, 21, 40 n. 76, 109].
106 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

[XXI.53 n. 108] was the established public discourse of classical European liberal-
ism, signifying a commitment to rational politics and law; to rational religion; and
to rational “science” or knowledge (scientia, Wissenschaft).12 So Weber’s reworking
of this discourse through the neologisms rational and ‘rationalization’, though it
represented an undoubted modification of liberal and enlightenment tradition, also
hoisted a flag of loyalty, which indicated a lineage going all the way back to the
modern origins of secular rationalism in the seventeenth century—the focal epoch
of the PE. (Hence the somewhat unlikely presence of Descartes in the text and his
incorporation, though a Frenchman and formally Catholic, in the composite
known as ‘ascetic Protestantism’ [XXI.28, 53 n. 108]). And while much of Weber’s
vocabulary was new, he preserved one item from the traditional lexicon, ‘rational-
ism’, partly because of the link in Latinate German between the words rational and
Rationalismus (one of innumerable linguistic and conceptual homages to the
cosmopolitan, neo-humanist culture in which Weber was raised), but also because
he wished to preserve something of its disenchanted meaning, as mechanical and
devoid of ideal content.
All the same, if the need to renew liberalism supplies a substantive origin for
Weberian rationality, the hallmark of Weber’s revised version of such thinking lies in
its formal quality. If rational thought and procedures were essentially a matter of form
rather than substance or specific commitments, then in principle anyone, from
whatever camp or background, Liberal or Catholic, Confucian or European, could
practise Weberian rationality: this was what made it “value-free”.13 When put in these
terms, the technical derivation of rationality becomes clear, since the outstanding area
of “formalism” in Weber’s thinking lay in the law, where the pre-eminent formal and
logically seamless quality of modern law was a truism taken for granted by legal
practitioners. Hence the elementary proposition enunciated in the Sociology of Law
(c.1910–14), that ‘all formal law is, relatively at least, formally rational’.14
Between c.188415 and 1894 (the ages of 20 and 30) Weber’s academic training
and early career fell within the faculty of law. By any quantitative measurement, this
was much the most formative experience in his early academic life, yet knowledge

12 Without entering on this subject here, I note that historical understanding of pre-1914 European

liberalism is much distorted today by (a) post-Hitlerian hindsight, which brings it into disrepute; (b)
the triumph of the Anglo-Americans in 1945 with their very different liberal tradition; (c) the
assumption that the history of liberalism c.1870–1933 is the history of liberal politics and parties
rather than of legal, rational and constitutional principles claiming universal status.
13 For the Chinese Confucian: »Objektivität« [1904], WL 156; for the Catholic (and the

Freemason): ‘Science as a Vocation’ [1917/19], MWG I/17.98.

14 Sociology of Law, MWG I/22–3.304/672; cf. 303–5. Bärbel Meurer’s argument that Weber’s

thinking on rationality is substantially indebted to Marianne Weber’s Ehefrau und Mutter in der
Rechtsentwicklung (1907) is not to be taken seriously, and has not been: Marianne Weber (Tübingen,
2010), 263–8. Nonetheless, it exposes the weakness of the orthodoxy which suggests that Weber’s
thinking—including that on rationality—was only fully developed after 1910; hence after Marianne’s
book.
15 Weber envisaged a legal career when he commenced university study in 1882, but it was not

until the winter semester of 1884–5 in Berlin that his lecture attendance narrowed down to law at the
expense of other subjects: Weber to H. Baumgarten, 14.10.84, pr. Roth, Familiengeschichte, 420;
Lebensbild, 102.
 Rationality and Law 107

of this fact is more than equalled by the blithe determination of his readers to ignore
such an inconvenient and (for the majority) esoteric detour.16 The absolute
centrality of law and lawyers to German and European public life is something
that has never struck deep roots in the English-speaking world, with its very
different legal traditions; and in the case of the PE such ignorance of the law may
seem justified, when the text recognizes both the importance of England and
something of its legal oddity. As a lawyer, Weber was well aware of the elementary
fact that English law was not like Continental law; that it was not conceived as a
formally and logically pure system. Hence the acknowledgement in the PE that ‘the
rationalization of private law . . . [was] at its most backward in some of the most
economically rationalized countries, especially England’ [XX.34–5], and this pos-
ition would be forcefully restated in the Sociology of Law. It was ‘not through but
in part despite the structure of its law that England secured its capitalist primacy’.17
However advanced English capitalism might be, English legal structures remained
notoriously medieval, so they could hardly be called into account in order to explain
the origins of a ‘modern’, ‘material’, and ‘capitalistic’ Kultur [XX.11, 53–4;
XXI.109]. But while this might be true—and Weber’s so-called “English problem”
is well known18—the idea that the PE can be read without an understanding of law,
or that Weber’s thinking was not crucially inflected by his legal training and
upbringing, is unsustainable. In fact law is one of the two principal disciplinary
contexts that helped generate the PE, alongside theology.
Law is important in at least two fundamental respects: not only in regard to
rationalism (or rationality), but capitalism as well—and this lies at the root of the
open frontier between capitalism and rationalism that we have already noted. The
law in which Weber was trained was not public and constitutional law. It was a
legacy of Germany’s longstanding want of formal political unification before 1871
and retained federalism afterwards, that such law was not the primary focus of legal
and academic attention. He was trained instead in the academically elite area of
private and commercial law seen as the quintessentially rational agent of modern
capitalist interests, and its conceptual progenitor, Roman law—the subjects in
which Weber habilitated. This was the law that lay at the heart of bourgeois society:
not, as Marx supposed, because it was a direct reflection of the power of wealth, but

16 There are honourable exceptions, but these authors are sociologists and lawyers, not historians,

whose interests (very reasonably) lie in the connections between Weber’s legal training and his
“sociology”. This perspective produces its own set of omissions, and the seminal importance of the PE,
the first significant appearance of Weberian legal formalism, is overlooked. Either (i) religion as a whole is
omitted—e.g. S. P. Turner and R. A. Factor, Max Weber: The Lawyer as Social Thinker (New York and
London, 1994), 176; or (ii) the PE is omitted—e.g. Hubert Treiber, ‘ “Wahlverwandtschaften” zwischen
Webers Religions- und Rechtssoziologie’, in Stefan Breuer and Hubert Treiber (eds), Zur Rechtssoziologie
Max Webers (Opladen, 1984), 6–68, see esp. 7–8 for the relevant textual corpus; or (iii) the PE makes
only a very brief appearance before being dismissed—e.g. Werner Gephart, Gesellschaftstheorie und Recht
(Frankfurt a.M., 1993), 563–4; Handeln und Kultur: Vielfalt und Einheit der Kulturwissenschaften im
Werk Max Webers (Frankfurt, 1998), 29; ‘Einleitung’, MWG I/22–3.110–13.
17 Sociology of Law, MWG I/22–3.519; cf. 631–5, etc.
18 e.g. D. M. Trubek, ‘Max Weber on Law and the Rise of Capitalism’, Wisconsin Law Review,

3 (1972), 720–53, here 746 ff.; Hubert Treiber, ‘ “Wahlverwandschaften” zwischen Webers Religions-
und Rechtssoziologie’, in Breuer and Treiber (eds), Zur Rechtssoziologie Max Webers, 41–55.
108 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

because its formal rationality, impersonality, and efficiency made it supremely well
suited to the transaction of commercial business. This is the subject area of Weber’s
qualifying dissertations on Roman agriculture and land law (1891) and medieval
company law (1889).19 Indeed if we ask after the origin of Weber’s belief that
‘capitalism’ and ‘modern Kultur’ were in principle one and the same thing [XXI.107],
the answer does not lie with the facts of German industrialization, nor with Marx and
the rise of Socialism (important though these surely were), but with an idea of law.
He did not suppose that law was a complete or even adequate instrument for the
understanding of modern society and its Kultur—hence the fact that, when writing
about Roman land law in 1890–1, he considered himself to be ‘about one-third
economist’;20 but still it was the first such instrument he used, and its formative
impact never left him. His brief realignment as an economist (1894–8) changed
nothing in this respect, where in any case the adjacency of law and economics within
the German universities (economics was placed in the faculty of law) and a German
intellectual tradition going back to cameralism must always be born in mind.
So it is that in regard to both capitalism and rationalism, as well as religion, we
must go back to the 1880s to understand Weber’s cultural formation. Not only
this, but the immediate origins of Weberian sociology stemmed from the provo-
cation offered by a lawyer Rudolf Stammler, who in 1896 propounded a ‘social
philosophy’ or (as Weber called it) ‘sociology’, which sought to explain
the relationship between Economy and Law, by arguing from legal premisses.21
Stammler’s views might be utterly mistaken in Weber’s eyes, but his procedure of
construing modern society and economy through categories derived from law—
above all the distinction between ‘form’ and ‘matter’ (Materie)22—was generically
the same as Weber’s. So alongside ‘the strongest inner antithesis’ between the two
men, there was also a palpable ‘external similarity’.23 And when Weberian
sociology was in a titular sense inaugurated in 1910 with its enquiry into the
relationship between ‘Economy and Society’, its starting point lay in a consider-
ation of the ‘Relationship in Principle’ between ‘Economy and Law’—the title
and problem posed by Stammler—based upon a set of elementary categories
about social formation which were ‘what Stammler “ought to have thought”.’24
However, it should not be supposed that this set of views arose after 1910, or
even in 1906–7, when Weber launched his well-known attack on Stammler.25

19 Medieval commercial law also led Weber to take an interest in medieval German commercial law

after 1889, though this interest may have been magnified so as to assist his job prospects: see the
curricula vitae 1889–91, MWG I/1.354, 357. But still this was supplementary. Roman law was
formative—both for Weber personally and for his conceptualization of Occidental Kultur.
20 To Hermann Baumgarten 3.1.91, Jugendbriefe, 327. This statement reflects the priorities of Die

römische Agrargeschichte, which was underway at this time: esp. c.IV.

21 See resp. R. Stammler, Wirtschaft und Recht (Leipzig, 1906), Einleitung; Weber, ‘Die Wirtschaft

und die Ordnungen’ [1910–14], MWG I/22-3.224 (eg).

22 Stammler, Wirtschaft und Recht (Leipzig, 1896), Bk II, Ab. 2–3.
23 ‘Ueber einige Kategorien . . . ’ [1913], WL 427 n. 1.
24 Resp. ‘Stoffverteilungsplan’ [1910], Bk I, III.4.a; ‘Ueber einige Kategorien . . . ,’, loc. cit.; cf.

WuG 1.
25 ‘R. Stammlers »Überwindung« der materialistischen Geschichtsauffassung’ [1907] WL 291–359;

cf. Weber to Oskar Siebeck, 28.9.06, Briefe, for the date of actual composition.
 Rationality and Law 109

On the contrary, his objections to Stammler, and the need to confront him, are
clearly outlined in 1904–5, either side of the PE, and were almost certainly in
process of germination from 1896 on.26 The idea that Weber simply gave up the
law in 1894 (as distinct from an assistant professorship in law), and then miracu-
lously and inexplicably took it up again in 1906–7, is without foundation.27
In short, law was quite fundamental to Weber’s intellectual formation, and far
too important to be omitted from the PE. So despite his “problem” with English
commercial law, there are nonetheless three pervasive legal themes in the text: the
specifically ‘formalistic legality’ of Puritans and ascetic Protestants [XXI.71 n. 140];
their substantive concern with natural law; and, most prominent of all, the legally
derived conception of their rational behaviour.
The association in Weber’s mind between formal law and rationality is most
explicit in the PE at the point noted above: his epoch-making discussion of the
plural nature of rationalism. This portion of text opens with the striking statement
that ‘the rationalization of private law, seen as a conceptual simplification and
grouping of legal matter, reaches what was hitherto its highest form in the
Roman law of later antiquity’ [XX.34–5]—a Weberian euphemism for the Digest
of Roman law commonly known in Germany by its alternative title, the Pandects.
Now this view of Roman law is evidently the very opposite of Weber’s dismissal of
English law as backward and unrationalized, but in one respect English and Roman
law are alike: neither has any connection to English capitalism. So Roman law can
have nothing to do with the argument of the PE except in virtue of its connection
with rationality. In 1904 this posed an apparently insuperable difficulty for Weber.
Roman law, in both the late antique and modern epochs,28 was the outstanding
example of a body of law formalized to a high degree that pointed forward to the
modern rationalizing cast of mind. Yet it appeared to lack any specific connection
to the historical evolution of Occidental modernity: the lynchpins of developing
rationality in early modern history seemed to lie in politics and religion—the
developing absolutist and bureaucratic state and ascetic Protestantism—not in
law. Even so, despite these obstacles, the example was so important to Weber

26 »Objektivität« [1904], WL 182–3. cf. 151 (‘social philosophy’), 170; ‘Redaktionelle

Bemerkung . . . ’, AfSS 20,3 (1905), 479 n. *. (The latter dates from late March 1905—i.e.
immediately after completion of Part II of the PE.) Previously, we find (i) a clear allusion to
Stammlerian “Materie” in the context of Weber’s advocacy of legal “formalism” in his 1902 review
of Philipp Lotmar, Der Arbeitsvertrag: MWG I/8.38. (ii) Stammler’s 1st edition is listed in the
Grundriss to Weber’s lectures on ‘General (“theoretical”) Economics’ (1898), and at a prominent
point: MWG III/1.117. The fact that Weber took the 2nd edition of Stammler’s book, which appeared
in 1906, as the basis for his published critique, is accidental.
27 Pace Werner Gephart, ‘Einleitung’, MWG I/22–3.9.
28 There is a slight tension between Weber’s evolutionary–historical desire to do justice to the

original rationalizing character of the codification of Roman law under Justinian in the sixth century—
the product (he supposed) of a bureaucratic imperative analogous to that at work in modern European
states (e.g. Sociology of Law, MWG I/22–3.575)—and his focus on the modern ‘reception of Roman
law’ (ibid. 578; cf. 582, 589, 619, etc.). Both emphases were important to him, since both were
important to his conception of modernity. As a result, in some cases the original Pandects appear as
already strikingly rationalized, but in others less so: ibid. 504, 507, 582.
110 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

that he refused to let it go unmentioned. Later on he relaxed, and the rationalizing

affinities between Roman law and ascetic Protestantism became more apparent to
him. In 1910 he would remark on the resemblance between the works of Baxter
and Philipp Jakob Spener, those stalwarts of the PE, when they pronounced on the
ethical problems raised by their correspondents, to the responsa of the classical
Roman jurisconsults; and given his view of the latter as peculiarly disposed to ‘the
reduction of what was specific to general principles by means of a scientific science
of method [sic]’, this was both a high compliment and a revealing gloss on the
original text.29 By 1913 he would finally accommodate law, and especially Roman
law, within the holistic—dare one say, more bland?—conception of general Occi-
dental rationalization that emerged at that date.30 But in 1904 there was no more
than the single mention of Roman law in the PE, in defiance of what Weber then
perceived as the historical logic of events. It was no more and no less than a brute
testimony to the impact of legal training on someone who habilitated in Roman
law, and who in the years 1892–4 was lecturing on the history of Roman law and
on the modern property law that was deduced from it.31
So Roman law was formative for Weber, and it would return to a commanding
position in later life [i.2, 11], but in 1904 it “did not quite fit”. Yet the fact that he
could not make use of Roman law as part of an evolutionary–historical argument
about developing rationality in no way prevented him from making use of the
concept of a formalized, that is, logically pure and complete, law that he derived
from his early training in modern private law, which was Roman in origin. For
private law, notwithstanding the existence of famous advocates, such as Otto
Gierke, of a specifically German law as the unique product of German history,
meant the civil law bequeathed by the reception of Roman law in the early modern
period, the usus modernus. Hence ‘the specifically modern systematization’ of
rational law was one ‘developed from Roman law’.32 It was an analysis to which
Weber gave brief and little noticed expression in two short essays of 1895 and
1902,33 and then a much fuller statement in the later Sociology of Law
(c.1910–14). In all three cases he offered an essentially like scheme, with a strong

29 Sociology of Law [c.1910–14], MWG I/22–3.503: ‘wissenschaftliche Methodik’; cf. ‘Schlusswort’,

592. See I/22–3.458 for another perceived connection between the Puritans and Roman law.
30 Historian, 220–36.—The strength of the association between legal formalism and rationalization

in the later Sociology of Law (c.1910–14) will be self-evident, since these ideas supply the twin
foundations on which its evolutionary narrative of Occidental law is based: ‘Our particular concern
here lies with the paths and historical fortunes of the rationalization of law; hence with the historical
evolution of its current, specifically “juristic” qualities . . . the direction in which these formal qualities
are developed’: MWG I/22–3.475.
31 See the courses listed in MWG III/1.801.
32 MWG I/22–3.303 cf. 578–85.
33 ‘ “Römisches” Recht und “deutsches” Recht’, MWG I/4.526–34; review of Philipp Lotmar, Der

Arbeitsvertrag, MWG I/8.37–61. The specific occasion of the former—a request to explain to liberal
Protestant readers of Die christliche Welt the nature of the divisions between modern supporters of
“German” and “Roman” law—was not of great interest to Weber, who saw it as an incitement to
spurious ‘legal chauvinism’ (526). Like the vast majority of the legal profession, he regarded the
conceptual hegemony of Roman law as unshakeable—it was the historically given basis of German civil
law, and history could not be altered. On the other hand, this did not predetermine the specific legal
instruments the system could generate when faced by present-day needs.
 Rationality and Law 111

emphasis on ‘formalism’ as the hallmark of current German law,34 and it was from
this premiss that the characterization of rational conduct in the PE derived in fact.
Now it is commonly suggested that the origins of this construction of modern
law lie with Rudolf Ihering (1818–92), surely the most novel and original German
legal thinker of the third quarter of the nineteenth century. However, despite
several points of contact, the idea of any substantial connection linking Ihering
to Weber must be dismissed, just as the temptation to link canonical thinkers
simply because they represent known points within a much wider and less known
historical stream must always be resisted.35 The major innovation of the mature
Ihering was his attack after 1860 on the formal and conceptual abstraction of
German civil law, mocking the practitioners of what he called ‘conceptual juris-
prudence’ as persons living in an unreal ‘juristic conceptual heaven’.36 Yet the
starting point of Weber’s conception of law as a formally seamless, conceptual
system, likewise his lifelong methodological veneration of ‘the concept’,37 lay in
precisely that conventional “conceptual jurisprudence”, ‘that whole cult of the
logical’,38 which Ihering wished to subvert—even if Weber had a sense of the
substantive limitations of purely conceptual law that had been lacking previously.
(When he affixed the novel label of ‘formalism’ to the law, he meant what he said: its
perfection or completeness was purely formal and not substantial—a sharp contrast
to previous tradition, which upheld German law as both formally and substantively
good.) Ihering interested Weber in general terms because of the breadth and range of
his ideas; like Weber’s friend and colleague Georg Jellinek, he was much more than a
mere legal specialist. But for all his originality Ihering wished only to displace one
“real” and external foundation for law—the philosophical idealism of his teacher
G. F. Puchta—by another more “real” one: that of individual and social ‘interest’.39
So he was in no way a “formalist” theoretician of law in the Weberian sense, where
law is in principle detached from any external foundation.

34 Review of Lotmar, I/8.40; cf. 48, 50 n. 10; ‘ “Römisches” Recht und “deutsches” Recht’, MWG

I/4.526.
35 This is the single most prevalent methodological fallacy of all Weberian studies that pretend to be

historical. Its classical form is the ‘method of resemblance’ where Weber is compared to another
thinker selected at the arbitrary convenience of the analyst, parallels are detected, and a causal
connection invented thereby. This commonly ignores: (1) prior empirical evidence of any
connection between Weber and the other author; (2) the differences between Weber and the second
author; (3) the fact that this single relationship must be set alongside Weber’s analogous relationships
with hundreds or even thousands of other authors; (4) properly contextual and extra-authorial analysis
of any kind. Intellectual history and amateur enthusiasm (however well meant) are two different things.
36 Scherz und Ernst in der Jurisprudenz (Leipzig, 1884), Abt. III, ‘Im juristischen Begriffshimmel’.

See originally Ihering’s satirical ‘Vertrauliche Briefe über die heutige Jurisprudenz’ [1860–6], repr.
ibid., Abt. I. For modern interest in Weber and Ihering, e.g. N. Roos, ‘Antiformale Tendenzen im
modernen Recht’, in Breuer and Treiber (eds), Zur Rechtssoziologie Max Webers, 237–46; S. P. Turner
and R. A. Factor, The Lawyer as Social Thinker (London and New York, 1994); Bernhard Quesnel and
Hubert Treiber, ‘Das “Ideal” konstruktiver Jurisprudenz als Methode’, Rechtstheorie, 33 (2002),
91–124, here }III.
37 ‘Science as a Vocation’ [1917/19], MWG I/17.89.
38 Der Geist des römischen Rechts [1852–65] (Leipzig, 1877–884), III.1 }}60, 321.
39 Ibid. III.1, }60 [1865]. This is the first theoretical (rather than satirical) statement of Ihering’s

mature viewpoint.
112 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

It is true that Ihering paid qualified homage to the legal ‘formalism’ of ancient
Rome in the first half of his career, before he established the contrary intellectual
positions for which he became famous, when he was still prepared to tolerate a
distinction between legal form and social reality.40 It is also true that Weber took
hold of a splendidly appropriate apophthegm from this early work and made it his
own: ‘Form is the enemy of arbitrary will, the twin sister of freedom.’41 Yet there
was no real anticipation of Weber’s views here. Ihering was expounding a long-
established stereotype about the importance of literal, even ritual, forms in ancient
Roman law—it can be found in Gibbon, for example42—and in his eyes it was but
an original or ‘residuary’ trait, with a strong affinity to the ‘childish spirit’.43 Weber,
by contrast, was interested not in the kind of formalism that stemmed from ‘seizing
on outward signs’, but in the formalism that arose from the ‘logical construction of
meaning’, which gave rise to ‘fixed legal concepts in the shape of strictly abstract
rules’.44 This was not an ancient idea but the central principle underlying modern
German law, part of an evolutionary–historical tendency that was growing ever
more perfect with the passage of time. In short, Max Weber was an engaged
modern thinker, not an intellectual historian. As such he took his ammunition
where he could find it, and his brusque removal of Ihering’s remark from its
original context is a reminder that the forceful approach to sources that is apparent
in the treatment of the seventeenth-century materials in the PE was by no means an
isolated proceeding. Meanwhile the later Ihering’s move away from a hegemonic
post-Kantian individualism and idealism towards a social and utilitarian conception
of law was a distinctly isolated point of view in the German-speaking states before
1900, socialists excepted.45 In this context we find once more that, despite the
considerable secondary importance of ‘interest’ to Weber’s thinking in regard to
both law and human conduct in general,46 he must ultimately be aligned with the
orthodox idealist majority, the original idolaters of law as a conceptual system, not

40 Werner Gephart sees this, but does not allow it to stand in the way of the conventional wisdom:

‘Einleitung’, MWG I/22–3.26–7; cf. 66 n. 76, 87. The later assertion (ibid. 689) that Ihering was the
‘theoretical founder of so-called conceptual jurisprudence’ is an extreme development of this curious
eclecticism, and is untrue in any ordinary sense of the word. Ihering undoubtedly invented the term
‘conceptual jurisprudence’ but only as a term of abuse.
41 The full quotation appears in ‘»Energetische« Kulturtheorien’ [1909], WL 419, but it occurs in

abbreviated form in Weber’s 1902 review of Lotmar, Der Arbeitsvertrag, MWG I/8.41. Cf. Ihering, Der
Geist des römischen Rechts, II.2 [1858] (Leipzig, 18834), }}45, 471.
42 Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. IV [1788], ch. 44: ed.

D. Womersley (London, 1994), ii 789–91.

43 Der Geist des römischen Rechts, II.2 [1858] (Leipzig, 18834), }}45a, 509, 507, resp. Note further

Ihering’s (conventional) interest in ‘the ethical side’ of these formal devices (ibid. 489, 508), which
contravenes the fundamental Weberian distinction between legal form and ethical substance. Indeed,
the later Ihering would seek to abolish this distinction more or less completely: Der Geist des römischen
Rechts, III.1 }61 [1865], ‘Das formale Moment des Rechts’.
44 Sociology of Law, MWG I/22–3.304.
45 For ‘social utilitarianism’, see Ihering, Der Zweck im Recht (Leipzig, 1877–84), xxvi (title to

ch. IX }19), ii.211, etc.—The judiciously mainstream Ernst Landsberg describes Ihering as ‘almost
solitary’ in the direction he took: Geschichte der deutschen Rechtswissenschaft (Munich and Berlin,
1910), III(ii).789; cf. 825.
46 See famously the ‘switchman’ (Weichensteller): ‘Einleitung’ [1919–20], MWG I/19.101.
 Rationality and Law 113

with Ihering.47 ‘Indirectly’ (Weber accepted) the impetus towards the rationaliza-
tion of law ‘almost always’ proceeded from the development of commerce and the
rise of persons with an economic interest in utilizing the law of property—and here
was the obvious ground for the close affinity between law and capitalism in his
mind. Nonetheless, there was no intrinsic link between economic interest—a
material and not a formal quality—and legal formalism. Hence the principal
driving force behind the evolution of Occidental law was not interest but the
propensities of the lawyers themselves, the ‘legal practitioners’: ‘The direction in
which these formal qualities [of law] develop, is . . . conditioned directly by what one
might call “inner-juristic” circumstances: the character of those groups of persons
who are in a position to exert a professional [berufsmäßig] influence on the manner in
which law is shaped’.48
The true starting point for Weber’s thinking was much more conventional.
Indeed there is great truth in the paradox—here was another component in his
hostility to academic personality—that he always strove to formulate what turned
out to be extremely original ideas in accordance with “self-evident truths”.49 Put
most simply, Max Weber the young university student, had studied the Pandects in
1882–3, 1884–5, and 1887–8, and this made a lasting impression on him. ‘The
methodical science of the Pandectists’ was the basis of Germany’s usus modernus of
Roman law, and this (as he reminds us in the Sociology of Law) was ‘the particular
form of the rationalization of law which . . . has remained specific to the Contin-
ental Occident.’50 Most Roman lawyers except Ihering were seized with the formal
perfection of ‘conceptual jurisprudence’ that arose from their subject—Rudolph
Sohm is an important example of this enthusiasm in our context51—and this
supplied a general environment for Weber. If the modern study of Roman law
had a particular point of origin, it lay with G. F. Puchta (1798–1846), commonly
regarded as the ‘second head’ of the historical school of law alongside Savigny.52
Weber read Puchta and relied upon his works as providing a canonical authority in
law comparable to that of Adam Smith in economics.53 Puchta’s evocation of legal

47 Further differences between Weber and Ihering include the latter’s desire to assimilate law to a

naturalistic categories such as physiology and anatomy, which is another facet of his materialism and
“realism”; cf. Der Geist des römischen Rechts, I }}3–4, 41, etc., and his endorsement not merely of
utilitarianism but of eudaimonism and happiness as the goal of men’s striving: Der Zweck im Recht, ii.
203–9; cf. PE [XX.16, 35].
48 Sociology of Law, MWG I/22–3.475; cf.583, 590, 622, 635, etc. Emphases on ‘directly’,

‘indirectly’, are mine.

49 Cf. »Objektivität« [1904], WL 147; ‘Knies und das Irrationalitätsproblem’ [1905–6], ibid. 46,

61. He knew nothing of the preoccupation with “originality” that infects so much modern academic
enquiry and that so easily leads to a primitive dilemma: whether to reinvent the wheel or to abolish it.
50 Sociology of Law, }8, MWG I/22–3.630, 635, resp.
51 Below II.7.ii.
52 Landsberg, Geschichte der deutschen Rechtswissenschaft, 459.
53 Max to Helene Weber, 4.11.82, Jugendbriefe, 59; cf. same to same, 2.5.82, ibid. 41 (on having

his head full of Puchta). His lecturer at Heidelberg was the distinguished Romanist Immanuel Bekker,
who criticized Puchta on historical grounds (see Hans-Peter Haferkamp, Georg Friedrich Puchta und
die »Begriffsjurisprudenz«, Frankfurt, 2004, 68–70), and who edited the Festschrift for Ihering in 1892
(Ernst und Scherz über unsere Wissenschaft). This accords with the suggestion in the Jugendbriefe that
Weber taught himself Pandektistik somewhat independently of his lecturers: cf. Weber to Hermann
114 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

‘form’, and its contrast with extra-legal ‘matter’ (Stoff ), may be more occasional
than systematic,54 but it was undoubtedly he who first posited and celebrated the
formal qualities of modern German private law. For Puchta law could be known
properly and completely only as a ‘system’, since in the form of a mere empirical
catalogue it would be endless. For this reason he spoke of ‘pure law’, of its
‘principle’, ‘abstraction’, ‘perfection’, or ‘completion’ (Vollendung).55 The ‘inner-
most principle of law’ was equality or uniformity (Gleichheit), and its central
undertaking was to impose that uniformity on the ‘stuff and substance’ that came
to it from free human behaviour. ‘Thus the movement of law is towards a
uniformity which gives a hard and cold appearance to the legal view of things . . .
The manifold quality of human nature becomes in law the colourless concept of the
person; law causes the wealth of external nature to disappear within the unifying
concept of property; and for the sum total of the infinite multiplicity of human
commerce, the concepts of claim and obligation suffice.’56 (There is an evident
anticipation here of the Weberian ideal-type in its function as an ordering mech-
anism for empirical multiplicity and infinity.) Furthermore, because law was a
system, it had to be understood as ‘a genealogy of concepts’57—a famous propos-
ition that was the tangible point of departure for Ihering’s satirical attack on the
‘juristic conceptual heaven’, of which Puchta was the very first denizen.58
Besides laying the foundations of widely diffused ideas about the formal and
systematic properties of law, Puchta established the concomitant (though less
widely trumpeted) principle that academic lawyers were the true guardians and
even creators of the law. He did so by laying down a standard, threefold classifica-
tion of the sources of law: publicly prescribed statute law; customary law; and the
law of the jurists, also known as ‘the law of Wissenschaft’.59 In principle, and in
agreement with Savigny, all law was ultimately traced back to the Volk (be it Roman
or German), hence customary law. However, Puchta was a university professor and
philosophical acolyte of Schelling, not a populist, and so in reality the law of the
jurists and of Wissenschaft took on a quite central position. This was especially so in
the absence of a unitary German legislature, where any appeal to statute law or the
law of the “state” was necessarily limited to the law of a particular Land—here was a
central plank in Puchta’s critique of Hegel and followers such as Eduard Gans when
they claimed that the highest form of law was political or constitutional.60 It was

Baumgarten, 14.10.84, pr. Roth, Familiengeschichte, 420: ‘chiefly I will work at home on the
Pandects.’ In the winter semester of 1886–7 Weber attended lectures in Berlin by the Romanist
Heinrich Dernburg, which generated a ‘serious preoccupation with Pandektenrecht’: Weber to
Ferdinand Frensdorff, 22.1.87, Jugenbriefe, 215, and his various Lebensläufe (MWG I/1.352, 354–5).
54 G. F. Puchta, Cursus der Institutionen [1841–7] (Leipzig, 18819), Bk I. Encyclopädie, e.g. }}12,

31, 33, 35.

55 Ibid. }}33, 31, 21, resp. See also chapter headings chs 3, 4.
56 Ibid. }}4, 8, resp.; cf. }31.
57 Ibid. }33.
58 Scherz und Ernst in der Jurisprudenz (Leipzig, 1884), Abt. III, ‚‘Im juristischen Begriffshimmel’,

253: ‘The first who presented himself, called himself Puchta . . . ’.

59 Puchta, Cursus, Bk I. Encyclopädie, }15 ; cf. }}12–20.
60 Landsberg, Geschichte der deutschen Rechtswissenschaft, 456 etc.
 Rationality and Law 115

not states but university jurists who brought the underlying ‘principles and rules’ of
the law to light; they were the ones who ensured that law remained true to itself as
‘something reasonable [Vernünftiges]’, even though it might have originated in
popular freedom; it was they who traced out the genealogy of concepts, who gave
‘systematic connection’ to individual law clauses, and who if necessary resolved
legal antinomies and filled gaps.61 In a famous axiom Puchta stated that ‘Wissen-
schaft is always something productive’,62 and in this way academic lawyers became
the guides and spokesmen of the Volk. Hence the further proposition that ‘cus-
tomary law’—on the face of it the undiluted voice of the people—‘can also be
jurists’ law.’63 In short, Puchta developed a conception of German law and legal
practice that, whatever the outward source of its claim to legitimacy, was rooted in
the universities and Wissenschaft—something that Savigny had not done, but to
which he as a university professor readily agreed. Now it may be that Puchta
personally became something of a figure of fun in the wake of Ihering’s satirical
assault published in 1884 with the sub-title A Christmas Gift to the Legal Public,
although by this date the young Weber had read him at least twice. Nonetheless,
the principles he established, though of course subject to continuing academic
debate, were far too substantial to be so lightly dismissed.64 In particular, his
emphasis on the universities as the guardians and conscious centre of law remained
a hegemonic conception thereafter, and the autonomy of German law, with its
separate and prior claim to supply a national identity, was not undermined by the
Bismarckian unification of the German states in 1866–71, and the idea that the
corporate strength of German law was correlative to the longstanding absence of
unifying political institutions was one that Weber shared.65 Here then is one
obvious root for his distinctive conception of Wissenschaft as collective and
impersonal—an idea that seemed incomprehensible and even horrific to contem-
poraries66—and, more specifically, for his insistence in the Sociology of Law that

61 Puchta, Cursus, Bk I. Encyclopädie, }}15, 20.

62 Puchta, Das Gewohnheitsrecht (Leipzig, 1828–37), i. 146.
63 Puchta, Cursus, Bk I. Encyclopädie, }15.
64 For an exposition of Puchta’s or “Puchta-Ihering’s” reception and the complexity (or

uncertainty) of the questions involved: Hans-Peter Haferkamp, Georg Friedrich Puchta und die
»Begriffsjurisprudenz« (Frankfurt, 2004), ch. 2, esp. 46–78. In fact the earliest sources (apart from
Ihering himself) to suggest that Puchta personally had become slightly ridiculous do not date until after
1900: Gierke in 1903 and Landsberg in 1910 (Geschichte der deutschen Rechtswissenschaft, 48). Even
then no one took up the mantle of Ihering and translated his satire into a serious theoretical attack on
Begriffsjurisprudenz. As Ihering himself admitted: ‘All jurisprudence operates with concepts; juristic and
conceptual thinking are synonymous, and in this sense all jurisprudence is conceptual jurisprudence,
Roman jurisprudence first of all . . . ’ (Scherz und Ernst in der Jurisprudenz, Abt. IV, 347). For Weber’s
early reading of Puchta: n. 53.
65 Sociology of Law [1910–14], MWG I/22–3.347–8, 583–4, 631–5. Of course unification had a

considerable impact within legal circles, but still the twenty-five-year construction of the Bürgerliches
Gesetzbuch after 1871 was a reincarnation of the autonomous identity of the law at the federal level:
Michael John, Politics and the Law in Late Nineteenth-Century Germany (Oxford, 1989).
66 See Ghosh, ‘Max Weber and the literati’ in Kay Waechter (ed.), Grenzüberschreitende Diskurse

(Wiesbaden, 2010), }IV. Prior to Weber, men such as Theodor Mommsen and Adolf Harnack had
recognized that Wissenschaft was a collective undertaking. Nonetheless, in their conception there was
an institutional centre—most obviously the Berlin Academy of Wissenschaften—with men such as
themselves at its head: thus ultimately the principles of disciplinary hierarchy and personal control were
116 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

law is not merely rational, systematic and scientific, but something constructed in
this way by professional and academic jurists. It was practically self-evident that ‘the
modern, rational university education in law’ was ‘the purest type’ of a theoretical
training in law, in contrast to the empirical training nurtured by the English.67
But if the establishment of German law as a formal and conceptually pure system
was an essential starting point for Weber, it did not lead to Weberian conclusions.
This is a reminder of the elementary fact that, though legal training was indeed
crucial to Weber’s cultural formation, he could always see beyond the law, both in
the years c.1884–94 as well as afterwards. Puchta, like most of his successors,
continued to believe that law had both a real and a formal side: on one side there
was no doubt the ‘strict law’ of conceptual logic and system, but on the other there
was moral and normative sanction. In Puchta’s day the ultimate basis of the
wissenschaftlich law of the jurists lay in its objective ‘truth’, while the authority of
the Volk was in principle something higher than the legal appeal to mere reason.68
This was succeeded by the doctrine of the positivity of law, associated in differing
ways with Gerber, Laband, and then Kelsen: that is, of the self-sufficiency and
sovereignty of law in its own right. By contrast, Weberian formalism sought to
enforce a radical separation of law as a technical and formally perfect instrument
from any normative or substantive foundation. Self-evidently legal systems made
normative claims, but these did not supply a basis on which to analyse or classify
those systems—and refusal to proceed along such “value-laden” lines was, of
course, basic to all Weberian typology or sociology, whether in law, Herrschaft, or
religion. The underlying context, and cause, of Weber’s innovation here was not
legal, but lay in those trends (noticed above) within German and European Kultur
that had provoked his dismissal of a single, normative ‘reason’: that is, the collapse
of any agreed, “objective” system of values that could supply a secure foundation for
either a legal or a socio-political system, a collapse due to the impact of ‘historicism’
(Historismus), ‘relativistic–evolutionist scepticism’ and ‘in general, the progressive
destruction and relativization of all meta-juristic axioms’.69 In this state of meta-
juristic dissolution the legally trained mind could respond in two opposite direc-
tions: either by promoting and entrenching the formal and autonomous qualities of
law, so as to set it apart from social and historicist flux—such was the path taken
not only by Weber but also by Hans Kelsen in his so-called ‘pure theory of law’
from c.191170—or else by seeking to render the law more open and accessible to
the external, historical motion of the society around it. The latter was the viewpoint
of the so-called ‘Free Law’ movement from 1903 onwards, including men such as
Hermann Kantorowicz and Weber’s Heidelberg colleague Gustav Radbruch, who

maintained: Harnack, Geschichte der Königlichen Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften (Berlin,
1900), i. 977–83, 1042–3.
67 Sociology of Law, MWG I/22–3.484.
68 Puchta, Cursus, Bk I. Encyclopädie, }}9, 18, 2, resp.
69 Sociology of Law, MWG I/22–3.610, 609, 611, resp.
70 Kelsen’s Reine Rechtslehre was not published until 1934, but his approach is already established in

Hauptprobleme der Staatsrechtslehre (Tübingen, 1911), and in the methodological tract Über die
Grenzen zwischen juristischer und soziologischer Methode (Tübingen, 1911).
 Rationality and Law 117

supported the introduction of an element of voluntarism into the legal process—

above all through judicial initiative—so to allow space for the intrusion of extra-
legal factors. Alongside them stood Eugen Ehrlich, the advocate of an explicitly
“sociologically” (that is, socially) determined law (though not on Marxist lines).71
A third possibility was that of outright reaction: the attempt to revivify the Kantian
and ethical foundations of law in lieu of the prevailing legal positivism whereby the
law was its own sanction: this was the path taken by Rudolf Stammler with his
appeal to a ‘correct’ or ‘right law’. Weber, however, did not allow that this was in
any sense a legitimate course to pursue—in contrast to the ‘Free Lawyers’, with
whom he had good personal relations regardless of their intellectual differences—
and here was another reason for his critical attack on Stammler in 1906–7, though
it is unlikely that he would have bothered to write against him on this ground
alone.72
Now Weber engaged closely with all of these thinkers in the years 1902–14, a
process that reached an outward climax at the inaugural meeting of the German
Sociological Society in October 1910, where he was instrumental in ensuring that
Kantorowicz spoke on the theme of ‘Legal Science and Sociology’.73 But what
distinguishes him from his legal contemporaries is that he was no longer con-
strained to operate as a lawyer in a faculty sense after 1894. More especially, he was
no longer any sort of single-faculty academic, once he had escaped the snares of his
economics chair in 1903. Accordingly, the ideas about legal formalism that derive
from his legal training c.1884–94, though springing from a context that was widely
understood within legal circles, became more than just legal ideas. Indeed in their
later reception they hardly feature as legal ideas at all: hence the much greater
importance of a figure such as Kelsen within twentieth-century legal thought,74
even though Weber’s “formalism” had much in common with Kelsen’s juristically
“pure” starting point. But where Kelsen used his idea of ‘pure law’ to entrench the
sovereignty or positivity of a self-sufficient public law over all else, Weber’s
formalism not only supplied him with a conception of law, but became the
springboard for a set of radical ideas that could be applied to social behaviour in
general; hence to the entire range of human and social sciences. While one man drew
on the formal, logical, and systematic power of law to buttress its power of normative

71 Grundlegung der Soziologie des Rechts (Leipzig, 1912); cf. Weber, Sociology of Law, MWG

I/22–3.432, 582, etc.

72 ‘R. Stammlers »Überwindung« der materialistischen Geschichtsauffassung’ [1907] and

‘Nachtrag’, WL 291–383; cf. Sociology of Law, MWG I/22–3.629.—The ‘obvious’ name in

Weber’s legal acquaintance who is missing here is Georg Jellinek; but in this context he (b. 1851)
belongs to a former and outmoded generation. Weber was by no means a simply disintegrative thinker
but nor was he a system-builder, unlike Jellinek. The antithesis between formal and substantive law,
and a distinction in principle between the practice of lawyers and the needs of society, lie at the root of
his approach, as they did for the younger generation. Jellinek, by contrast, still hoped that the ‘two
sides’ of law, the social and legal, could be harmonized and united, and the attempt to create such a
unity lies at the root of his final great work of synthesis, Allgemeine Staatslehre (Berlin, 1900). This is
not to deny Jellinek’s significance for Weber, which is discussed below.
73 Weber to Kantorowicz, 18.9.10, Briefe, etc.
74 In this respect Weber is almost as much neglected by Germans as by English speakers: Siegfried

Hermes, ‘Das Recht einer “soziologischen Rechtslehre” ’, Rechtstheorie, 35 (2004), 195 & n. 2.
118 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

command, the other ‘would not go beyond a purely formal consideration of legal
norms’,75 and instead transferred a set of legal ideas, above all the idea of form, into
the sphere of economy and society at large, where form could act as a neutral vessel,
capable of carrying or servicing a variety of different substantive values.76
Weber’s strategy was generically alike in all its applications: an appeal to
formalism—hence to logic, to autonomous, abstract, and artificial conceptual
structures—as a means of limiting and controlling the anarchy presented by plural
and competing value systems. The legal origin of this type of argument is illustrated
by his remarks in 1902 when he was arguing against class bias within the law: ‘let
there be no mistake: in political as in economic war one feeling opposes another,
and when once the purely formal basis of the law is left behind, very opposite
conclusions can be deduced from such general feelings, depending on one’s personal
Weltanschauung.’ Only adherence to ‘formally equal law’ could overcome ‘one-
sidedness’ and ‘the complete anarchy of the class struggle’, and allow one to navigate
between the Scylla of employer interest and the Charybdis of the workers’.77 But his
primary concern was to apply this logic outside the law, and so there is a significant
formal component—a separation between neutral, logical form and substantive
values or Weltanschauung—within a series of major innovations, which he pioneered
or exhibited for the first time in 1904–5. First, the argument that in principle
“science” (Wissenschaft) or intellectual enquiry must be an “objective” or (in post-
1910 language) “value-free” zone, capable of performing a significant function for all
enquirers, because, like law, the act of “scientific” investigation was detached from its
value-premisses. Next, construction of the major conceptual instrument of the
“objective” social science, the ideal-type, which like a body of law was to be artificial
and logically pure—a ‘cosmos free from contradiction’, although in this case logical
purity was not merely a form of detachment from an arbitrary value-foundation but a
device to control the infinity and ‘chaos’ of the empirical materials of “science”.78
And, last but not least, the proposition that human conduct could and should be
classified according to its degree of formalism. Thus the purest and most character-
istically modern, though not the “best”, type of conduct was formally rational
conduct, marked out by its seamless consistency and logic, which could be analysed
apart from its specific value-premisses [XX.35], and which in the unique case of the
modern Occident could then produce an autonomous structural deposit—the ‘steel
housing’ (stahlhartes Gehäuse) of capitalism or later bureaucracy, which no longer
relied upon the support generated by its value-specific ‘religious root’ [XXI.108; cf.

75 Hans Kelsen, Hauptprobleme der Staatsrechtslehre (Tübingen, 1911), ix. Kelsen is citing from

Weber »Objektivität« AfSS 19 (1904), 45 [WL 170], and isolates their differences with clinical
precision.
76 The operation of the transference and reworking of legal concepts in the social sphere was so

fundamental that Weber spent much time reflecting on it: see esp. ‘Knies und das
Irrationalitätsproblem’ [1905], WL 86–8; ‘Stammlers »Überwindung«’ [1907], WL 322–59; ‘Die
Wirtschaft und die Ordnungen’ [1910–14], MWG I/22–3.191–247; ‘Ueber einige Kategorien’
[1913], WL 439–40.
77 Review of Lotmar, Der Arbeitsvertrag, MWG I/8.49–50 & n. 10.
78 »Objektivität« [1904] WL 190 (‘cosmos’); 177, 197, 207 (‘chaos’). ‘Cosmos’, the opposite of

‘chaos’ in classical Greek, automatically connotes rational order for Weber; cf. [XXI.17].
 Rationality and Law 119

104, 106], and which was similarly closed and watertight. (It is true that such
structures might provoke personal outrage, as they famously did in the PE, but still
they did not embody any value position, because they were impersonal, rational, and
in fact precisely ambivalent in their implications. The ‘housing’—not ‘cage’—em-
bodied by capitalist enterprise and bureaucracy might limit free space, but still
capitalism and bureaucracy provided indispensable services in advanced societies,
which could not be supplied by any other means. They were ‘iron facts’ or
evolutionary–historical necessities)[c].79
These were all major announcements in the areas of social science and (more
contentiously) social policy,80 but insofar as Weber’s thought was formal or formal-
istic, its original intellectual source was the law. This is the true gauge of the
importance of his formative legal training and experiences.81 By contrast, the
neo-Kantian philosophy of Weber’s colleagues Heinrich Rickert and Wilhelm
Windelband, though often hailed as central for Weber’s methodological and formal
thinking,82 was in reality a marginal and superficial phenomenon, regardless of
Max and Marianne Weber’s personal links with the Rickerts. At first sight Weber’s
avowed reliance83 on a Rickertian concept of Kultur defined in terms of human
values might seem to align him with neo-Kantianism. However, his clash with
Rudolf Stammler, another neo-Kantian,84 albeit with no personal connection to
Rickert and Windelband, alerts us to the perils of such a supposition. Like
Stammler they refused to acknowledge the irreducible conflict of values that was
so central to Weberian thought. They were modern enough to see that one was
confronted by a plurality of values in the first instance, but still they sought to rise
above this, to continue to uphold values as objectively agreed and unitary. This in
turn meant that formalism of the Weberian type was something they never even

79 ‘Das neue Deutschland’ [1918], MWG I/16.381; cf. Historian, 9 n. 10. Weber’s famous

complaint about the ‘steel housing’—that ‘ “job fulfilment” cannot be placed in direct connection
with the highest spiritual values of our Kultur’, hence that loyalty to the Beruf was ‘subjectively
perceived as simple economic coercion’—was a personal statement, a recollection of his revulsion at
the professionally constrained life he had led between 1894 and 1899 [XXI.108]. Even in 1905 he
admitted that this was a subjective value-judgement [XXI.109]—he was in fact whingeing like a
romantic or literatus—and his later judgements on specialization, capitalism, and bureaucracy were
more balanced.
80 The imbroglio at the Verein für Sozialpolitik in September 1905 was the first outing for “value-

free” thinking in a social policy context.

81 Current commentary is surprisingly uninterested in Weberian legal formalism. Besides Wolfgang

Schluchter (see II.7 n. 132), consider Siegfried Hermes, who, having begun his Weberian studies by an
examination of Soziales Handeln und Struktur der Herrschaft (Berlin, 2001), effectively denies that
Weber had any independent legal thought apart from his ideas on Herrschaft: ‘Das Recht einer
“soziologischen Rechtslehre” ’, Rechtstheorie, 35 (2004),195–231, here 224–6, 229–30. Belatedly he
admits that Weber also had ‘a second “formal concept of law” ’ (231), but the presence of this quite
different idea merely proves to him what a complicated evolution the text of the Sociology of Law has
had. Formalism becomes one of the internal ‘differences, inconsistencies and breaks’ in the text that
interest him in his capacity as a textual editor (199), and in this way it is intellectually marginalized.
82 For this attribution in law: Hermes, ‘Das Recht einer “soziologischen Rechtslehre” ’, 208–11;

217–19 adds in Emil Lask, following Fritz Loos, Zur Wert- und Rechtslehre Max Webers (Tübingen,
1970), 107–9.
83 Stammlers »Überwindung«, WL 343 n. 1.
84 Claudius Müller, Die Rechtsphilosophie des Marburger Neukantianismus (Tübingen, 1994).
120 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

considered. So while it is true that Weber accepted the neo-Kantian and Ritschlian
categories of Kultur and values, his idea of Kultur as plural and irrevocably divided
was the antithesis of theirs.85
So the kernel of the link between law and rationality lies in Weber’s conventional
and yet sharply honed conception of modern German law as ‘a logically clear
system of rules, one that is logically free from contradiction in itself and, above all,
in principle seamless’.86 As a result we find a set of attributes in Weber’s conception
of Occidental law that are essentially the same as those attached to asceticism and
rationality in the PE, and that explain his presentation of the latter in these terms.
For example, the most common epithets applied to rational asceticism relate to its
‘systematic’ and ‘methodical’ quality [XXI.27–39 passim]; but these are also char-
acteristics of the law. ‘Systematization’ is a central component of legal ‘rationaliza-
tion’, just as it is in the case of asceticism.87 Again, a high point of the ‘methodical’
conduct of ascetic Protestantism is its propensity to generate a Methodik (methodism
or science of method),88 but Weber appeals to just the same idea when he outlines
the power of Roman law in determining the intellectual framework within which
modern German law operates: ‘the ties’ of modern specialist jurisprudence ‘to the
conceptual stock and the Methodik of Roman law remained . . . indissoluble.’89
Above all, law is logical, which recalls Weber’s cerebral enthusiasm for Calvinist
theology—its ‘superb rigour’, its ‘iron rigour’ and ‘quite unique consistency [Konse-
quenz]’ [XXI.11, 54, 39; cf. 47]. (Here was an entirely new version of the conceptual
heaven that Ihering so mocked.) The idea of logical consistency extends to the
‘consistent exercise of ascetic virtue’ by the Quakers [XXI.84], and so contributes to
the conceptual unification of ascetic Protestantism as a whole. It is always konse-
quent, rigorous or consistent [XXI.98]. Again, Weber’s encomium on the ‘magnif-
icent self-contained unity [Geschlossenheit]’ of Calvinist theology [XXI.36] will be
replicated almost exactly when he writes in the Sociology of Law of ‘the logically
“closed nature” [Geschlossenheit]’ of modern positive law.90 There is indeed some
slight slippage between these two accounts in that, whilst law is logical (logisch),
ascetic Protestantism is only consistent and rigorous (konsequent), presumably in
recognition of the fact that it is not a judicial system. However, outside the PE, in
the methodological writings of the same date, Weber is less nice and more willing to
evoke ‘the compelling power of purely logical thought’ and ‘a priori constructions’ in
world-historical ‘Ideas’, or holistic schemes of thought.91 It is in virtue of their power
of logical construction (he holds) that ‘the most radical innovators stand under the
influence and impress of the Calvinist belief in predestination, of “l’homme machine”
and the Marxist belief in [bourgeois] catastrophe.’92 And when Weber evokes

85 Cf. Sociology of Law, MWG I/22–3.629. Fritz Loos understood the empirical point very well,

but resolutely refused to allow this to deflect him from aligning Weber’s work with Rickert’s wherever
possible: Zur Wert- und Rechtslehre Max Webers, 4–16, 39–41, 48, etc.
86 MWG I/22–3.303; cf. 583; ‘Die Wirtschaft und die Ordnungen’, ibid. 192, etc.
87 Ibid. 302. 88 e.g. [XXI.35, 48 n. 89, 57, 70, 73].
89 Sociology of Law, 587–8. 90 Ibid. 610; cf. 626.
91 »Objektivität« [1904], WL 198.
92 ‘Roschers »historische Methode«’ [1903], ibid. 23 n. 2.
 Rationality and Law 121

“l’homme machine” (mechanical man)—signifying here Enlightenment rationalism

as symbolized by de la Mettrie’s work of that name (1748)—he reminds us of
another similarity between rationalizing social ideas and the law, since a further
element in the stereotypical perception of modern law was its mechanical quality. It
was ‘a technically rational machine’, while ‘struggle against a technically complete
structure [of law] [was] analogous to the old struggle of manual labour against the
machine.’93 In this it was also akin to rational capitalism at the beginning of the
twentieth century, which operated regardless of the volition of individuals on a
‘mechanical foundation’ [XXI.108].
Nonetheless, if generic similarity is the primary feature, there are also differences
between Weber’s accounts of ascetic Protestantism and law. For example, the
systematic and mechanical perfection of the law tended to reduce the modern
judge to ‘an automaton of law clauses and precedents’94—but though these
mechanical attributes might also apply to modern inhabitants of the ‘steel housing’
built by rationalizing capitalism [XXI.108], this certainly could not be said of the
seventeenth-century Puritan, with his intense, meritocratic, and in this sense
aristocratic commitment to ‘proof ’ of his personal qualities (Bewährung) [XXI.17
n. 22 etc.]. Again, consider the proposition that what gave Roman law its hegem-
ony in the construction of modern law was ‘its technically greater perfection . . . not
because it was “Roman” but because it was juristically-technically more perfect law.’95
Now the idea of Technik—of both technical intellectual procedure and its product,
technology—is central to Weber’s conception of modern law. It is also one of the
few strands in his pre-1900 thinking that visibly anticipates his later thinking on
rationality, and it will re-emerge as a sub-component of rationality after that date.
However, while Technik is closely associated with modern capitalism [XX.4, 23 n.
1, 26 n. 1, 34], it has no connection to ascetic Protestants. Instead, they are marked
out as distinct [XXI.109], since ascetic Protestantism was powered not by the
inertial, technical force of a capitalism that was safely ‘in the saddle’ [XX.23; cf.
17–18], but by the voluntaristic agency of men driven by an alternative impersonal
and transcendental power: that of the ‘next world ’ [XXI.3]. Most striking of all, the
language of ‘formalism’, which, quite as much as that of rationality and rational-
ization, is the umbrella rubric under which Weber’s idea of law is subsumed, is
applied to ascetic and rationalizing Protestantism only in a legal context. Puritans
are indeed marked out by their ‘formalistic legality’ [XXI.71 n. 140], but still
seventeenth-century asceticism overall is not ‘immanently formal’ in the way that
the law is, because at that date it still possessed a religious and substantive root.96

93 Resp. Sociology of Law, MWG I/22–3.514; ‘ “Römisches” Recht und “deutsches” Recht’ [1895],

MWG I/4.531. See also the close of ‘Ueber einige Kategorien’ (WL 474). This looks forward to the
discussion of ‘Economy and Law, their Connection in Principle’ (MWG I/22–3.191–247), which
follows immediately afterwards in ‘Economy and Society’ in 1914: ‘Einteilung des Gesamtwerkes’.
94 ‘ “Römisches” Recht und “deutsches” Recht’, MWG I/4.534; cf. Sociology of Law, MWG I/

22–3.624, a practically identical formulation.

95 ‘ “Römisches” Recht und “deutsches” Recht’, 528.
96 Sociology of Law, MWG I/22–3.623.
122 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

What lies behind these differences is the fact that law is simply an ‘instrument’.97
‘A system of law’, Weber tells us in the Sociology of Law, ‘can be “rational” in very
different senses, depending on which rationalizing tendencies are pursued in the
unfolding of legal thought.’98 Now this is, of course, a clear echo of what is said
about the plurality of rationalisms in the PE [XX.34–5], but still it leads into a
distinction that the PE does not make explicit: that ‘“rational” law-making and law-
finding can be rational in either a formal or material respect.’99 Law can be a
formally and technically perfect instrument, available to all who are able (can
afford) to use it; alternatively, the primary concern of a legal system may be the
fulfilment of extra-legal, political, and religious ends, such as the material and/or
spiritual welfare of the population as a whole.100 Here obeisance to the rational end
takes priority over, and may operate at the expense of, the formal rationality of the
legal system. Now why does the PE not make this significant distinction between
formal and material (or substantive) rationality? Is it simply because it is too “early”
a text, which comes six or seven years before the Sociology of Law? And should we
then reason from the PE (1904–5) forward to the Sociology of Law first drafted
c.1910, as representing a later advance in Weber’s thinking? I think not. The
formal/material distinction is clearly implied in the PE when it states that ‘One can
indeed “rationalize” life according to the most varied ultimate perspectives’
[XX.35], and it was hardly possible that Weber should have conceived of legal
formalism by 1895 without having an idea of its antithesis. Similarly Weber’s
interest in the formal side to natural law is clear, even if the word ‘formal’ does not
appear, when he tells us that, important though its ‘material content’ might be,
‘what concerns us is not the substance, but the impulse to ethical conduct’ it
provided along formally systematic lines, through the systematic conduct of life
[XXI.23 n. 36].
The PE’s failure to mark out the distinction between material and formal
rationality is, I suggest, a function of what it was convenient to present in a text
that in its format was ‘purely historical’ [XX.53], and not typological (as ‘Economy
and Society’ would be). Ascetic Protestantism begins as a materially rational creed,
directed towards the most substantial of all ends: salvation in the next world—that
telos ‘of which we modern men can have simply no conception any more’ [XXI.74].
Self-evidently, then, ascetic Protestantism cannot be ‘immanently formal’ in the
manner of law. Nonetheless, as is well known, Weber’s argument is one of
‘unforeseen and actually undesired consequences’ at precisely this point [XX.53].
Eternal salvation may have been the original imperative behind conduct in the
seventeenth century, but still the consequences of this imperative lay in ‘this world’
[XXI.44]. Thus materially rational Protestantism generated methodical, systematic
and internally consistent types of behaviour that could serve the purposes not only

97 ‘ “Römisches” Recht und “deutsches” Recht’, MWG I/4.527: strictly ‘combative instrument’

(Kampfmittel ).
98 Sociology of Law, MWG I/22–3.301; cf. 475, 511 where the mantra is repeated.
99 Ibid. 303–4.
100 Patriarchal administration in early modern Europe is a typical example, though it is kept within

limits by other factors that maintain the momentum of Occidental formalist evolution: ibid. 513–17.
 Rationality and Law 123

of religious salvation in the next world but of formally rational conduct in this.
Then, as Weber repeatedly tells us, the substantive ‘religious root’ of ascetic
Protestantism died out [XXI.104] with the eighteenth-century ‘switch’ (Umschlag)
to utilitarianism [XXI.75 n. 3, 76 n. 6, 79 n. 17]. Thereafter conduct was based
purely on the satisfaction of this-worldly ‘interest’, propped up not by any sub-
stantive value-scheme, but by the inertial power of the ‘steel housing’ of modern
capitalism and vocational specialization [XXI.108], whose only connection with
living humanity was as the residue of the religious Kultur of a previous era: this was
the ‘lifeless machine [that] is congealed spirit’.101 In this way substantively rational
religious asceticism in the seventeenth century gave way to formally rational
conduct in the nineteenth.
Given the mixed nature of this evolution, it will be clear that the introduction of
a fully worked-out distinction between material and formal rationality, cutting
across a continuous historical process, would only have muddied the account—to
say nothing of the fact that what were mere articles in a learned journal were already
hopelessly overladen with theoretical and conceptual innovation. Ascetic Protest-
antism is not identical with the ideal-type of formal Occidental law for the simple
reason that these are two different historical individuals. However, they both
presume the same underlying conceptual framework in regard to rational conduct,
with its central distinction between formal and material rationality, and there can
be no doubt as to the chronological priority of law in establishing this framework in
Weber’s mind by the early 1890s if not earlier. In other words we should reason
from the early establishment of ideas about formal and implicitly rational law
forward to the PE (even if the principal, though not sole, surviving textual deposit
of these early ideas happens to lie in a text, the Sociology of Law, that was written
only some years later).102
One last question remains. Just as the history of ascetic Protestantism does not
resemble the history of law, so the history of law—at least as perceived by Weber in
1904—did not resemble the rationalizing evolution he wished to portray in the PE,
even if the modern end-point of these histories coincided. In particular, there was
Weber’s “English problem”: the discrepancy between legal history and the Anglo-
centric history outlined in the PE arising from the fact that English commercial law
was not technically modernizing and implicitly rational, even if English capitalism
was. Here, it may be said, was an unshakeable limit to the significance of law for the
PE. However, although there undoubtedly was an “English problem”, this is not
the whole English legal story, because the body of law contained in the PE is not
confined to private and commercial law after all. There is one major legal theme in
the text that has not so far been considered:103 lex naturae or natural law, the
Occidental tradition of ideas going back to classical antiquity that founds law

101 Parlament und Regierung [1917–18], MWG I/15.464.

102 See also the Appendix.
103 There are, of course, many more detailed “legal moments” in the text, ranging from the doctrine

of “adequate” causation to the curious byway, which starts with the justum pretium of the canon laws
and ends with the principle of fixed (or specified) prices promoted by the Quakers [CS 561–2]
anticipated at [XXI.71, 85 n. 32].
124 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

a priori on “natural”, ethically absolute and universal, properties. Now it may be

that this appears in typically “suppressed” form, as a set of signals in the notes.104
However, this is an outstanding example of the proposition that Weber’s notes are
not just notes but a secondary panel of text ‘below the line’ [XXI.75], without
which the text above the line cannot be understood; and the persistency and
frequency of these references show just how important the subject is. There
are fundamental Weberian propositions and assumptions that are expressed only
once or twice in a lifetime; so when he returns to a subject a dozen times within a
single text, we should pay attention.
Natural law is remarkable in a simple and radical sense: it was not part of Weber’s
legal education and training prior to 1894, because the school of natural law that
had been so powerful in Protestant Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries had been definitively buried at the beginning of the nineteenth by the so-
called “historical school” of law, with Savigny and the academic development of
Roman law at its head. Thus the chief enthusiasts for natural law amongst Weber’s
German contemporaries were not lawyers, but men with interests in ethics and the
history of philosophy: Ernst Troeltsch and Ferdinand Tönnies.105 Whatever school
of legal thought one belonged to, there was no future for natural law within the
nineteenth-century German states, and Weber himself makes no bones about the
fact.106 Further marks of its alien status were that natural law was emphatically
normative and substantive, and not formal—it appealed to ‘“nature” and “right
reason [Vernunft]”’107—and was primarily a scheme of public and state law, not of
private, civil and commercial law. Yet, as we have seen, it was the latter which was
the area of Weber’s legal studies and training prior to 1894, and the intellectual and
theoretical powerhouse of German legal culture from Savigny and Puchta on-
wards.108 It is thus a real oddity within the scheme of legal evolution described
in the Sociology of Law: so much so that, at the latter’s opening, Weber suggests
that natural law will not appear there at all but rather in the more politically focused
Sociology of Herrschaft; and when he does come onto it, it is clearly set apart in a
section of its own (}7).109

104 [XX.41 n .1, 42 n. 1, 43 n. 2, 47 n. 3, 48 n. 3; XXI.3 n. 3, 17, 23, 67 n. 134, 90, & nn. 47a–b].
105 Tönnies, like Weber, found inspiration in seventeenth-century England, but, where Weber
looked to a radical ascetic Protestantism, Tönnies was moved by the atheistical and materialist Thomas
Hobbes—a symptom of the two men’s radically different views of the role of religion in history:
Tönnies, ‘Anmerkungen über die Philosophie des Hobbes’, in Vierteljahresschrift für die
wissenschaftliche Philosophie (1879–81); Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (Leipzig, 1887), Bk III;
Thomas Hobbes: Leben und Lehre (Stuttgart, 1896), Ab.viii. The only significant contributions by
lawyers to the study of natural law were historical: besides Georg Jellinek (discussed below), Otto von
Gierke, Johannes Althusius und die Entwicklung der naturrechtlichen Theorien (Breslau, 1880).
106 Sociology of Law, MWG I/22–3.610–14. 107 Ibid. 601.
108 The subordinate intellectual importance of state law in the nineteenth century is clear from the

exiguous space allotted to it in Hermann Rehm’s Geschichte der Staatsrechtswissenschaft (Freiburg,

1896), three pages (260–2) out of 262, or Ernst Landsberg’s authoritative survey, Geschichte der
deutschen Rechtswissenschaft (Munich and Berlin, 1910), III(ii). Weber’s typically Romanist view that it
was ‘the historical evolution of private law, which after all makes up legal history’ (to Helene Weber,
2.5.82, Jugendbriefe, 41) was mainstream and representative.
109 Sociology of Law, MWG I/22–3.298/670.
 Rationality and Law 125

The extraneous and maverick intrusion of natural law has caused considerable
problems for commentators who seek to construe Weber as a rigorously systematic
thinker,110 yet the sustained interest the PE displays in the subject shows that this
oddity had a significant connection to his core agenda. Indeed its significance is so
great that in the Sociology of Law he calls it ‘the third great body of world law’, after
the civil law schemes of the Romans and Anglo-Saxons (the English). It is the type of
‘rational legislation’, a label that sets it apart from law created by jurists, since here
‘rational’ means both formal and material.111 So natural law introduces a substantive,
(anti-)political and egalitarian, element into the otherwise purely formal scheme of
the evolution of Occidental law: above all this means the doctrine of natural and
‘fundamental’ human rights at law [XXI.46 n. 83]. As Weber admits, ‘there can be no
such thing as wholly and purely formal natural law’, though his commitment to legal
formalism is such that he works hard to dilute any wholly material conception
thereof.112 But while this may be conceptually impure and messy, Weber’s history
of law now begins to look much more like the history of ascetic Protestantism with its
peculiar combination of material and formal rationality, as it progressed from one to
the other. Furthermore, the formative era of modern, Grotian natural law is precisely
the same as that of the PE: ‘the most fateful epoch of the 17th century’ [XXI.36]. Last
and by no means least, natural law offers an answer (though it is unlikely that legal
historians will find it satisfactory) to Weber’s “English problem”. For, though the
English may have been backward in their commercial law, still the Puritans—those
ascetic rationalizers and legal formalists whose cast of mind (Gesinnung) would
produce modern capitalism—were in his eyes adherents of an extremely radical,
rights-centred, modernizing natural law, ‘the specific legitimating form of structures
created by revolution.’113 So the English were in touch with rationalizing law after all,
and satisfied what was for Weber a key litmus test of modernity.
In short, 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. Legal evolution begins with the same mixture of formal and material
rationality that we observed in the PE; there follows the same ‘lurch’ or ‘switch’
away from an ethically propelled conception into mere utilitarianism and the
management of interests;114 and it ends with modern capitalism as the principal
user of a formally rational but ethically rootless legal system, ‘a technically rational
machine’ that has put the material and ethical imperatives of natural law behind
it.115 Note, however, that while natural law is obsolete in the modern world, this

110 Jürgen Habermas finds Weber’s argument ‘confusing’: Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns

(Frankfurt, 19874), i. 357. Wolfgang Schluchter adopts the more radical but untenable solution of
construing Weber primarily as a public rather than a private lawyer Die Entwicklung des okzidentalen
Rationalismus (Tübingen, 1979), 154–5.
111 Sociology of Law, MWG I/22–3.592–3.
112 Ibid. 599; cf. [XXI.23 n. 54]. For the formal element in natural law: below II.7.iii.
113 Ibid. 596; cf. 520 for the Puritans’ demand for a ‘systematic codified law’, which can stem only

from their support for natural law.

114 The thought in PE [XXI.75 n. 3] is repeated in identical terms in Sociology of Law, MWG I/

22–3.609; cf. 602.

115 Sociology of Law, MWG I/22–3.514.
126 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

does not mean that it is any less relevant than an equally obsolete ascetic Protest-
antism or the still more remote Judaic input into Pauline Christianity made in the
early Christian era. For Weber, historical evolution is an empirical accumulation,
and modern Kultur is the cumulative product of all the deposits made in past
epochs. If a past input is missing, then modern Kultur is necessarily impoverished.
So finally we must ask: who or what was the source that, at some point after 1894
but before 1904, caused him to expand his scheme of Occidental legal evolution so
as to take in the politically congenial, yet intellectually heterogeneous, theme of
natural law? Of course when the question is put in this way, the answer is clear. It is
Georg Jellinek’s essay of 1895 on The Declaration of the Rights of Man—the text to
which (as we saw) Weber was ‘personally indebted for its stimulus towards a
renewed preoccupation with Puritanism’ [XXI.42 n.78], and which he must have
read at some point between 1895 and 1897.116 Now this was indebtedness of an
odd kind, but it was indebtedness all the same. Jellinek’s essay told Weber nothing
about England (his loyalties were Austro-German); nor about Puritanism and
religion (he was a secularized Jew, whose principle experience of Christianity was
of Catholic persecution and discrimination in Vienna); nor was he an enthusiast
for natural law, which, quite conventionally, he regarded as outmoded.117 None-
theless, simply by touching on the connections between radical Anglo-American
religiosity and natural law and human rights in the seventeenth century, Jellinek
unwittingly triggered in Weber’s mind a crucial element in the chain of ideas we
have been sketching out: above all, the idea that, besides the evident claims of early
modern England to have witnessed political and religious revolution and to stand at
the gateway of unprecedented economic success, there might also be a significant
connection between Puritanism and law, hence with rationality. In this way
seventeenth-century England and the Puritanism of which it was the principal
(but not sole) seat might be seen as prototypes of a rationalizing modern Kultur. So
when Weber speaks of his reading of Jellinek leading to a ‘renewed’ preoccupation
with Puritanism, I suggest this means a stimulus to consider the Puritan ethic and
mindset in a historical context, whereas previously his enthusiasm for England (so
far as we can see) had been primarily contemporary. Here it is worth noting that the
stereotype of the English as a Puritan nation remained a contemporary currency,118
and so enshrined the kind of seamless past–present continuum that was so import-
ant to Weber. It is true that law remains a side issue in the text of the PE because,

116 We cannot say precisely when Weber first read Jellinek’s essay. Was it when it was first

published in 1895 or when Jellinek came into Weber’s circle of friends as the latter moved from
Freiburg to Heidelberg in early 1897? Weber took up his post in April 1897, but the two men first met
at Christmas 1896: Jellinek to Ludwig Felix, 29.12.96, cit. Klaus Kempter, Die Jellineks 1820–1955
(Düsseldorf, 1998), 277 n. 95.
117 Die Erklärung der Menschen- und Bürgerrechte (Leipzig, 1895), 48–53. See Ghosh, ‘Max Weber

and Georg Jellinek: Two Divergent Conceptions Of Law’, Saeculum, 59 (2008), 299–347.
118 e.g. August Bebel, Die Frau in Vergangenheit, Gegenwart und Zukunft [1879] (Zürich, 18877),

83; Friedrich Nietzsche, Jenseits von Gut und Böse (1886) }228; cf. }189; Wilhelm Dilthey,
Biographisch-literarischer Grundriss zu der allgemeinen Geschichte der Philosophie [1905], Gesammelte
Schriften (1914–2006), XXIII.109; Oskar Schmitz, Das Land ohne Musik (Munich, 1914), 274–85;
Thomas Mann, Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen (Munich, 1918), 238.
 Rationality and Law 127

for all their adherence to natural law, the Puritans did not effect a legal revolution in
England, but “only” a revolution in general Kultur—just as Weber himself ultim-
ately attached more importance to that general Kultur, and to religion and politics,
than to the heteronymous sphere of law. Nonetheless, though they are largely
“below the line”, the repeated references to the lex naturae supply a specifically legal
accompaniment to the historical argument of the PE and its pioneering exposition
of Weberian rationality.

APPENDIX: THE SOCIOLOGY OF LAW

The use made of the Sociology of Law to fill out our picture of the legal and formalistic
context of the PE deserves more detailed consideration. The Sociology of Law originated in
1910, and was then subject to successive waves of redrafting and revision in detail down to
1914 (see ‘Stoffverteilungsplan’ (1910): III.4.a.2; MWG I/22–3.263–70). Thus it postdates
the composition period of the original PE (1902–5) by anything between five and twelve
years. (A typical Weberian elasticity!) Despite this interval, I suggest that there is no
fundamental change between the two texts in regard to Weber’s views on the formalism
of the law and the derived idea of formal rationality; hence that it is legitimate to make use of
the later text in interpreting the earlier one. This is on the following grounds. (i) The
conception of legal formalism central to the Sociology of Law is already the basis of Weber’s
conception of the law in all the “early” sources that we have: the essay on ‘ “Roman” and
“German” law’ (1895); the review essay of Philipp Lotmar’s Der Arbeitsvertrag (1902); and
the emphatically formalist description of the law presented to the Verein für Sozialpolitik in
September 1905, just six months after completion of the PE: MWG I/8.271–2. Ideas about
the association of the law with formalism, and the distinctive Weberian conception of
modern freedom as a ‘formal freedom’ (that is, resting on freedom at law, the absence of
slavery), also appear frequently in other writings from the 1890s: see ‘Entwickelungs-
tendenzen in der Lage der ostelbischen Landarbeiter’ (MWG I/4.389, 391, 419, 440) and
the lectures on ‘General Economics’ (MWG III/1.302, 533, 701). (ii) As noted in the text,
the idea of legal formalism (as distinct from the extra-legal employment of this idea) is not
original to Weber, but precedes him. So much of its detailed working-out in the Sociology
of Law is not a uniquely Weberian property and is independent of the evolution of Weber’s
personal views. (iii) There is no period of major study of the law by Weber after 1894, and
he records no principled shift in his views in this area, as he does in regard to rationalization
and capitalism. Perhaps for this reason no modern scholar has argued for a later shift in
Weber’s views in regard to formalism. (iv) It is true that the Sociology of Law departs from
the views he held in the early 1890s in two important respects: in linking the law to
rationality, and the prominent position it gives to natural law (}7). But here it simply takes
account of developments signalled in the PE in 1904–5. (v) However, it does not depart
from either the PE or his earlier views in any other respect because law is untouched by the
major shift in Weber’s thinking that sets in c.1907–8: that is, when he ceases to construe (or
resolves not to construe) capitalism as the primary modern form of Herrschaft. The central
subject of the Sociology of Law is the development of an autonomous, formal law whose
primary extraneous social function is the indirect servicing of capitalist “interests”. Weber
knows when writing it that he must come on to write about Herrschaft (see the forward
references in MWG I/22-3.668, 670), but this is not his subject here. So it continues to offer
a capitalist-related perspective on the world, and this is a crucial component in Weber’s
128 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic
continuing allegiance to the idea of capitalism as central modern, historical phenomenon
[i.4]. In this respect it might be described as a conservative document, whereas the Sociology
of Herrschaft represents a step forward, as the first positive statement of the typology of a
trans-historical Herrschaft. (vi) The initial conception and drafting of the Sociology of Law
precede the shift in Weber’s thinking in 1913–14 away from a stadial conception of
Occidental history, also broken up between ancient and modern history, towards a scheme
of a single unitary process of ‘rationalization’. It was only this later development that had
consequences for law beyond the position outlined in the PE, since it allowed for the
inclusion of Roman law within modern Occidental evolution, contrary to its exclusion in
the original PE [XX.35]: Historian, 231–4. Surprisingly this development is not considered
or commented upon in MWG I/22–3.
 8
A Whole Text?

Having dissected the PE, we must now view it whole, and assess the results of
dissection. The principal conclusion is simple and obvious: it is the comprehensive
ambition of the text, its embrace of almost all subjects of concern to Weber,
reflecting something like the full panoply of his intellectual and disciplinary
interests. It does indeed contain 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’, as is common today,1
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.
In this spirit we may add yet one more dimension, which is very much a case of
‘last not least’ [XX.6]. This is the relationship between the PE and the new
methodological and conceptual tools that Weber developed around it. That these
are inextricably linked is graphically illustrated by the composition history of the
relevant texts (I.3). Of the two principal methodological statements Weber made in
the years 1902–6, the first on ‘Knies and the Problem of Irrationality’ was (so far as
we can see) conceived after he first started work on the PE in 1902 and interrupted
this. Following the purchase of the Archiv in July 1903, it was then set aside in
favour of the PE, and only brought to completion after the PE had been finished. In
addition, the moment he resumed work on ‘Knies’, significant borrowings from it
were incorporated into the final text of the PE.2 The second major statement, on
‘Objectivity’ (1904), interrupted work on the PE in the winter of 1903–4, when
the latter was at an advanced stage. However, in contrast to the commission to write
on Knies, on this occasion the interruption was brought about by Weber himself; it
was relatively brief in duration; and it served his own interest—for this was the
manifesto designed to introduce the relaunched Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft.3
Even so, the overall sequence of events explains why in June 1904 Weber would

1 e.g. William H. Swatos and Lutz Kaelber (eds), The Protestant Ethic Turns 100: Essays on the

Centenary of the Weber Thesis (Boulder, CO, 2005).

2 Above I.3 at n. 56.
3 Modern commentators’ preoccupation with the ‘Geleitwort’ is a trivializing distraction from this

central fact: see Ghosh, ‘Max Weber . . . and the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft’, HEI 36 (2010), 71–100,
here 81–6, 94–5.
130 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

speak of returning to his ‘chief work’, the PE, ‘only sporadically’,4 and these three
pieces of work must be taken as a single unit.
The methodological essays introduce three central ideas, which outline practic-
ally the entirety of Weber’s thinking in this area. In this respect they resemble the
PE and show once more that the years 1902–6 were seminal beyond all others.
However cumbersome and oblique its form, the essay on ‘Knies’ outlined the
scheme of human behaviour that is the foundation of what we know today as the
verstehende Soziologie: the classification of individual and especially mass-individual
[cf. XX.20] conduct in a social context in terms of the degree to which it could be
“understood” or “construed” as formally meaningful and rational. Then the essay
on “Objectivity” laid down the essential principle of “value-freedom” in academic
enquiry, even if in 1904 this came under the less resonant heading of “objectivity”,
where “objective” signified ‘detached from all values’.5 It also outlined the theor-
etical structure of the “ideal-type” in (1904):6 the conceptual mechanism by which
the infinity of individual and mass-individual conduct could be grouped in large-
scale units. This was an essential precondition for writing Weberian history, such as
the PE, or later on, historically founded Weberian sociology.
These ideas are taken over as if self-evident into the PE. Its historical argument
was a portrayal of human conduct according to the degree of its rationality in a
specific historical context. Weber does not rely here upon the methodological terms
of Verstehen (understanding) and Deutung (mental construing or construction of
conduct):7 they were not imperatively necessary in a non-methodological text and
undoubtedly required methodological exposition before they could be meaning-
fully employed, at a time when the statement in ‘Knies’ was not available. None-
theless, the essential idea—the definition of Deutung as ‘the mental ordering of
empirical reality’—was clearly formed in his mind. The phrase is a persistent
mantra throughout the essay on ‘Objectivity’8 while the first significant use of
the term verstehen goes back to Weber’s ‘General Economics’ lectures in the 1890s
(even if at that date this is an exceptional event): ‘[The humanities, Geisteswis-
senschaften] seek to teach how to understand [verstehen] historical and present-day
proceedings . . . we wish to grasp [begreifen] these, i.e. to be able mentally to re-enact
[nacherleben] them in ourselves.’9 The deposit of this thinking in the PE lies in its

4 To Rickert, 14.6.04, Nachlaß Max Weber 30/4 Bl. 94. 5 WL 185.

6 WL 184–212.
7 Deutung appears twice in the PE in its Weberian meaning, though it is not necessary to have read

the essay on ‘Knies’ to understand it. The first usage is a late insertion that derives from ‘Knies’ [XXI.44
n. 79a], and the second may well be: it is placed at the end of a note, and marked off as separate
[XXI.79 n. 17]. V/verstehen is more elusive, because of its ambiguity: ‘understanding’ has both a
common-sense meaning and a Weberian one (see n. 9). Alongside many common-sense usages, there
are a few usages in the original PE that can be understood in a Weberian sense, but need not be [XX.34;
XXI.3].
8 It first appears at WL 150, where it is equated with Deutung. Further, precise use of the vocabulary

of Deutung, verstehen, nacherleben etc. occurs later on (ibid. 189); but even here Weber does not draw
attention to the technical significance of what he is doing here.
9 MWG III/1.360. Weber always worried about the term v/Verstehen, since its common-sense

meaning—“I understand what you have just said or done in my presence”—was different from the
sense in which he wished to use the term: the retrospective “understanding” of conduct by the analyst
 A Whole Text? 131

persistent emphases on the now classical Weberian term Handeln (conduct)

[XXI.22, 26, 55, 76]. It is most unlikely that contemporary readers understood
why he was repeatedly drawing attention to this term, but to us it is obvious: it
meant “conduct understood in a Weberian sense”, that is, measured according to its
degree of rationality—which is of course what Part II of the PE does. Calvinist
doctrine is ‘the most logical’, hence most rational, template against which all else is
measured [XXI.36];10 Pietism and Methodism diluted this by ‘a stronger cultiva-
tion of the emotional side to religion’ [XXI.44; cf. 54–60], while the ethic of the
Täufer was ‘in principle heterogeneous when set against Reformed doctrine’
[XXI.63]. Weber himself had no doubt about what he had done in the PE. As he
tells us in ‘Knies’: ‘constructions [Deutungen] performed “subjectively”’ by the
analyst were the instruments ‘with which an analysis in the history of Kultur
of . . . the connections between religious and social transformation in the Reforma-
tion era would work’.11 Both here and in the better-known restatement of 1913,
‘On Some Categories of a Sociology of Understanding’, he would draw repeatedly
on the PE as a practical exemplar of his methodological innovations.12
Weber’s explicit commentary in the PE on the need to avoid the ‘intermixing of
historical representation with value-judgements’ in an academic work was a simpler
but still more momentous innovation [XXI.5 n. 4]. Today in calm, politically stable
societies it may seem like common sense, but that is too easy and imprecise a
conception. In Weber’s day it was the assertion of a value-commitment to a
universal, value-free Wissenschaft standing outside politics and religion (or any
other life-sphere), in a historical context where universities were state institutions
that de facto or de iure excluded socialist party members,13 and many academics
were similarly unwilling to recognize that a line could and should be drawn
between academic enquiry and personal value-commitments, without erasing the
latter. Understandably, then, the question of value-freedom became a hotly con-
tested issue both in the Verein für Sozialpolitik and in the German Sociological
Society, where Weber’s view was by no means that of the majority and was even the
occasion of his withdrawal from the latter in 1912.14 (Let it never be said that the
relationship between Weber and sociology was straightforward or harmonious.)

according to a specific conceptual schema, detached in all respects from the agent being “understood”.
For this reason v/Verstehen had routinely to be used in conjunction with supplementary terms that
clarify this (nacherlebend, erklärend, deutend). So there can be no doubt that Weber preferred the use of
Deutung, where there was no such ambiguity, in 1905 (‘Knies’, WL 92–5), and the problem regarding
v/Verstehen would always exist (WuG 3–4). What remains unexplained, therefore, is why he should
have placed ‘verstehende Soziologie’ in the title of the essay on ‘Categories’ in 1913. Presumably he
preferred simplicity (albeit with ambiguity) in his title; but still the modern canonization of v/Verstehen
in a Weberian context is somewhat mechanical and unthinking.
10 Cf. WL 194 on the ‘limiting concept’, 197 on Calvin’s doctrine of predestination.
11 ‘Knies und das Irrationalitätsproblem’ [1902–6], WL 77.
12 WL 77–8, 122, 139, 429, 435–6.
13 See most obviously and prominently the Prussian lex Arons of 1898.
14 To Hermann Beck, 22.10.13, Briefe; cf. Der Werturteilsstreit: Die Außerungen . . . im Ausschuß des

Vereins für Sozialpolitik (1913), ed. H. H. Nau (Marburg, 1996).

132 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

But still the connection between the theory of value-freedom and its practical
application in 1904–5 is clear and needs no elaboration here.15
The relationship between the PE and the ideal-type, though equally real, is not
quite so straightforward. The common assumption that the text links two ideal-
type concepts (ascetic Protestantism and capitalism) is mistaken.16 To be sure,
ascetic Protestantism was intended as an ideal-type [XXI.4], although even here the
real type construct was ‘asceticism’ rather than ascetic Protestantism, which con-
tained a distinct, if veiled, conceptual impurity.17 It was a classical example of
Weberian procedure in that the type, and above all the type heading, had little
obvious connection with historical reality. Hence the outraged reaction of a neo-
Rankean such as Felix Rachfahl, an example of the person who (as Weber antici-
pated in 1904) ‘takes up the position that knowledge of historical reality should or
could be the replication of “objective” facts “without any presuppositions”’ being
made by the analyst.18 There was indeed no such thing as ‘ascetic Protestantism’ in
the minds of contemporaries in the seventeenth century—this was what lay behind
Rachfahl’s question: ‘What is asceticism?’19 Yet Weber was not wrong to describe
his enquiry in the PE as ‘purely historical’ [XX.53], but with this difference: his
enquiry started from a conception of the present, not the past, and then worked
backwards, looking for historical answers by ‘causal regression’ (a favourite phrase).20
So it was no coincidence that, as we have seen, seventeenth-century ascetic Protest-
antism was the very last piece of the historical jigsaw that makes up the PE to be put
into place, even though it is the principal subject. By contrast, capitalism, and in
particular its “spirit” or ethic, was a case where Weber could frame no defined
‘historical concept’ [XX.12], and so there could be no ideal-type here. All the same,
the aggressive and obtrusive reference to methodological thinking at this same point
in the PE is important in that it explicitly marks out a failure to translate a developed
ideal-typical theory into conceptual–historical practice. Without a knowledge of that
theory and the failure that it defines, the status of capitalism in the text, and with it a
central strand in Max Weber’s intellectual history, would be incomprehensible.
When this methodological component is factored in, we see still more clearly
than before the extraordinary intellectual range of both the PE and Max Weber,
which places him in a German encyclopaedic tradition going back through Hegel
and Marx to Leibniz. Yet this should not blind us to the fact that the immediate
foundation of his catholic and interdisciplinary thinking lay in an unflinching
recognition that by 1900 academic science (Wissenschaft) had entered a phase of
specialization, such as had never been known before; and that specialization alone
could now provide a secure and durable foundation for academic enquiry.

15 See further [XX.53; XXI.6, 8, 21, 40 n. 76, 99, 109].

16 e.g. H. H. Bruun and Sam Whimster in Max Weber, Methodological Writings (London, 2012),
xxv. Bruun, Science, Values and Politics in Max Weber’s Methodology (Aldershot, 2007), 41–7, is more
nuanced but also more agnostic.
17 Below II.6.i. 18 »Objektivität« [1904], WL 192.
19 ‘Kalvinismus und Kapitalismus’ [1909], Kritiken und Antikritiken, 88.
20 e.g. »Objektivität« [1904], WL 163, 178.
 A Whole Text? 133

“Science” like the vocational Idea described in the PE had to draw on ‘all the
advantages of the division of labour’;21 and interdisciplinarity by definition had to
be rooted in a series of specialized disciplines (law, theology, economics, politics,
psychology etc.). These two poles were equal and reciprocal. Accordingly Weber
denied the possibility of ‘a general social science’ standing above specialist know-
ledge,22 the holy grail, and mirage, of so much sociology in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries, or indeed that there could be any single, master science
(philosophy being the outstanding candidate amongst Weber’s contemporaries).23
This is what distinguishes him from all the classical sociologists of the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries, beginning with Comte and Spencer, down to
Durkheim, Tönnies, and Simmel;24 as also from Marx, and his belief that a
comprehensive social theory might be derived from a foundation in economics.
The PE is the most compact expression of this interdisciplinarity in Weber’s uvre,
and the only tolerably complete one.
A second general assessment of the PE arises from consideration of its genesis. Its
starting point lies in a set of foundations that derive from the 1880s and 90s, prior
to the great personal hiatus of 1898–1902. First, a conception of contemporary
capitalism as an impersonal force, distinguished by a variety of specific traits, such
as calculation, regard for rule-bound conduct (such as honesty), and a conception
of time as a measurable resource, where no moment should be wasted. Next, a
conception of Christianity as central to the long-term evolution and formation of
Western or Occidental Kultur. During the period of its effective historical existence
this was the one truly universal force within that Kultur (even if it was accompanied
by other more narrowly defined life-spheres or ‘life orders’) [XX.32]. Hence it was
the primary, though not the only, shaping force in the evolution of Kultur down to
Weber’s own present, however ‘distant from God’ this might now be [XXI.11, 68].
However, in the present it was in a state of terminal decline, and a principal cause of
this collapse was the ethical problem posed by an impersonal capitalism for a
Christian religiosity founded on “personal” relations and ethics. Taken together,
these ideas were a more than sufficient basis on which to write a text reflecting on
the relationship between ‘The Protestant ethic and the impersonal ethic or “spirit”
of capitalism’, and while there is no suggestion that Weber ever intended to write an
essay on this subject prior to 1902, the phraseology of the title (apart from the
Sombartian garnish of “spirit”) might as well derive from the 1890s. Yet it does not
comprehend the full content of what he actually wrote, because between 1902 and
1905 Weber added something new. His Anglophilia, the expiry of any hopes for a
socially reforming German Lutheranism in 1895–6, and his reading of Georg
Jellinek (I.3), suggest that he had already conceived in embryo the idea that the
principal religiosity shaping modern Kultur was Anglocentric, Calvinist, and

21 »Objektivität« [1904], WL 170; cf. ‘Science as a Vocation’ [1917/19], MWG I/17.80–3;

‘Allgemeine . . . Nationalökonomie’ [1894–8], MWG III/1.191–2.

22 »Objektivität« WL 165.
23 See Ghosh, ‘Max Weber and the literati’, in Kay Waechter (ed.), Grenzüberschreitende Diskurse

(Wiesbaden, 2010), 243–78, here 268–73.

24 Cf. ‘Allgemeine . . . Nationalökonomie’ [1894–8], MWG III/1.368–70.
134 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

Puritan. Nonetheless after 1902 he created something entirely new (or felt able to
give expression to it for the first time, given his new condition of disciplinary
freedom): ascetic Protestantism, the historical subject of the PE. What was this?
The conceptual kernel of ascetic Protestantism was not Protestantism but
asceticism (Askese), where asceticism and mysticism defined the two opposite
poles of behaviour within the category of ‘salvation religions’. (The last term first
surfaces, fully formed, in Weber’s writings in 1906, but it was almost certainly
present in his mind previously, alongside the thought structure of which it is
part.)25 These were religions that promised salvation or release (Erlösung) from
the injustices of the world, where salvation was achieved either by the performance
of active ethical conduct within the world, even though standing at odds with it—
asceticism; or the conscious abjuration of the world and any conduct within it:
‘flight from the world’ or mysticism [XXI.28, 40 n.76]. Weber’s thinking here is
entirely original, but nonetheless it arises within a specific context: the Protestant
theology of the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries.26
Mainstream Lutheran opinion c.1900 was represented by the ‘thought categories
of Ritschlian theology’, with which (as we have seen) Weber was familiar from an
early date.27 Albrecht Ritschl, the outstanding theologian of the period 1875–90,
the model modern Lutheran, and by far the most cited secondary author in the PE,
was deeply hostile to both religious asceticism and mysticism. In his view correct
religious behaviour lay in unconstrained engagement with the secular ‘world’ and
its concerns, so it was in some sense invisible and required no label. By contrast,
religious behaviour that drew attention to itself, as in some way separate from the
world, was a psychologically deviant regression to pre-Reformation Catholicism.
The common label for such behaviour was mysticism—a subject that was much
discussed, both because of the search for more personal forms of religion at the end
of the nineteenth century and also because of Luther’s well-known interest in the
early German mystics [XX.40], something that even Ritschl could not deny outright.
If it was mentioned at all, asceticism was lumped together with mysticism, since it
too embodied a set of distinctive, medieval religious practices.28 Such was the general
context within which Weber set to work after 1902. Ritschl supplied him with the

25 [Hausverband, Sippe und Nachbarschaft, 1906], MWG I/22–1.325; cf. ‘Agrarverhältnisse im

Altertum’3 [1907–8], MWG I/6.597. The vocabulary of Heil and Erlösung appears in the PE, but since
ascetic Protestantism is not (in Weber’s eyes) an authentic salvation religion, the term ‘salvation
religions’ is not required. See below II.6.iii.
26 Of the many areas where Nietzsche’s influence on Weber has been suggested, this is perhaps the

most unlikely. Nietzsche’s conception of ‘ascetic ideals’ differs from Weberian asceticism at almost
every point, but in any case his initial, pejorative identification of asceticism as a negative repudiation of
‘sensuality’ is deeply conventional, and hardly differs from the ordinary Ritschlian starting point:
Nietzsche, ‘Was bedeuten asketische Ideale?’, Zur Genealogie der Moral (Leipzig, 1887), }2; cf.
Hubert Treiber, ‘Zur Genese des Askesekonzepts bei Max Weber’, Saeculum, 50 (1999), 247–95,
here 275–82.
27 ‘Zur Rechtfertigung Göhres’ [1892], MWG I/4.115.
28 Albrecht Ritschl, Geschichte des Pietismus (Bonn, 1880–6), i. 27–9, etc.—Unionist theology was

the work of those who sought to reconcile Reformed and Lutheran theology in the interests of the
Union of the churches promoted in many German Länder after 1815. Amongst Weber’s sources,
Matthias Schneckenburger is the most important example: Historian, ch. 6.
 A Whole Text? 135

type categories asceticism and mysticism, as behaviour standing apart from the
world, but he made them into opposites and gave the priority to asceticism over
mysticism. However, the positive understanding of asceticism was suggested to him
by a quite separate source: his reading of Reformed and Unionist theology. Here
‘ascetics’ (Asketik) was a technical term, signifying the branch of theology covering
practical piety or praxis pietatis.29 Weber seized on the idea that religiously deter-
mined ethical conduct (pietas) was the product of regular, disciplined ‘exercises’
conducted according to a prescribed religious scheme, where exercitia was the
translation, and equivalent, of the Greek asketika. Hence the title of a book he
noted as being of particular importance by the famous Dutch Calvinist, Gijsbert
Voet:
Æ `ŒÅØŒÆ sive exercitia pietatis (1664) [XXI.75 n. 2]. Overriding any
distinction between ‘ascetics’ (the branch of theology) and ‘asceticism’ (the type of
religious conduct), he therefore construed asceticism as a complete disciplined
scheme of life, a ‘systematization of the conduct of life’ (Lebensführung) [XXI.34],
which in virtue of its system, logical consistency, and completeness, he deemed to be
both formally and substantively rational. (Substantively because it achieved certitudo
salutis, the assurance of salvation from the world secured by action taken within it)
[XXI.19, etc.]. Hence recurrent emphasis in the PE on ‘the rational character
of asceticism’ [XXI.3 n. 3]. Mysticism by contrast was contemplative, a-social,
a-rational, ‘acosmism’ [XXI.54 n. 109]. So asceticism was nothing less than the
substantive religious origin of modern, formally rational behaviour, where the ‘trans-
cendent goal’ the latter served was no longer heavenly blessedness, but fulfilment of
the duties of the worldly Beruf [XXI.28].30
So in 1902–5 Weber overlaid his original idea, ‘The Protestant ethic and the
impersonal ethic or “spirit” of capitalism’ with another one: ‘The ascetic Protestant
ethic and the “spirit” of rationalism’. It was a slight yet profound shift. In regard to
religion the conceptual adjustment to an argument centred on rationalism could be
made without too much disturbance, because religion and rationalism were both
universal phenomena in Weber’s eyes. His earlier thinking about impersonality,
which found a historical point of departure in the inscrutable and impersonal
Calvinist ethic, may have been linked to a modern capitalist outcome, but the
idea of impersonality itself was not specifically capitalist. Capitalism was by no
means the only impersonal structure in modernity, and Weber could easily identify
alternative examples, such as rational bureaucracy.31 However, the chief case to
consider here is the idea of the Beruf or calling, since this is the principal link that
Weber draws between Protestantism and capitalism.
Now the Beruf was an “older”, pre-1900 idea. It was (for example) the particular
category Weber had in mind when he alluded to the ‘thought categories of
Ritschlian theology’ in 1892.32 Ritschl had emphasized ‘the loyal fulfilment of

29 Heinrich Heppe, Geschichte des Pietismus und der Mystik in der Reformirten Kirche (Leiden,

1879), 151, citing Voet,
Æ `ŒØŒÆ (1664), 81.

30 I summarize Historian, 41–6.
31 Sociology of Herrschaft [c.1911–14], MWG I/22–4.160, 209, 234.
32 ‘Zur Rechtfertigung Göhres’ [1892], MWG I/4.115.
136 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

the Beruf ’ prescribed by the Augsburg Confession (1530) as a practical and

thoroughly conventional expression of the fact that modern Christianity, unlike
monasticism, ‘is conceived not as fleeing the world but as filling and permeating
it’.33 This idea was then appropriated by Weber in a sharply different, if not
absolutely contradictory, sense. Predictably its Ritschlian origins made it incon-
venient for Weber’s contra-Lutheran purposes in certain ways. For example, it
necessitated the otherwise anomalous insertion of a discussion of the Lutheran
origins of the Beruf [XX.35–52], where it had to be anaesthetized. It might supply
the beginnings of a genuine innovation, but ultimately the Lutheran form of the
Beruf remained pointing in ‘a traditionalist direction’ [XX.45]. Conversely, what-
ever the interest displayed in it by Lutheran theology at the end of the nineteenth
century,34 the calling was simply not a leading category for seventeenth-century
Reformed or sectarian thought, so that, despite Weber’s promotion of the term in
the text, the reader is never persuaded that s/he is reading about ‘The vocational
Idea of ascetic Protestantism’ in Part II of the PE, regardless of its title [XXI.1]. Yet
in a fundamental sense the Beruf was not ultimately problematic. For, while it was
economistic and capitalistic in its principal textual presentation—it signified the
division of labour and the ‘conception of monetary acquisition as an end in itself ’
[XX.32; cf. 42–3]—it was not confined to the socio-economic sphere. The Beruf
was not just the foundation of the Smithian or economic division of labour, but
embraced ‘every legitimate calling or profession’ [XX.43]; and as we saw (I.4),
Weber’s interest in the Beruf in the early 1890s was not confined to theology or
economics, but related to his personal predicament as a young academic seeking to
understand the world. In this context it raised the universal dilemma posed by
remorseless modern specialization of function, at once necessary yet narrowing—
and this was its primary significance. Hence, as he wrote in 1893, ‘I have never had
any respect for the concept of the “vocation”, since I thought I knew that, to a
certain extent, I fitted into a fairly large number of positions’, and this was an
attitude that, he felt, placed him at odds with the modern world, where ‘only the
man with a profession [Berufsmensch] was judged complete’.35 This concern was
then reproduced in the PE, where ‘modern vocational labour’ divided on efficient,
capitalist principles was also ‘specialized labour, with its consequential renunciation
of mankind’s Faustian universality’ [XXI.107; cf. 87]. So the problem raised by the
Beruf was not just a problem of capitalism, but one of specialization; and hence of
developing rationalization within multiple life orders as universal religion decayed.
Most simply: ‘vocational asceticism’ was ‘rational’ by definition [XXI.21 n. 33],
while in its historical origin the idea of the calling was explicitly not tied to the
terrain of capitalism alone [XX.17].

33 Ritschl, Geschichte des Pietismus, i. 39, 41.

34 See also Karl Eger, Die Anschauungen Luthers vom Beruf: Ein Beitrag zur Ethik Luthers (Giessen,
1900): PE [XX.41 n. 1, 46 n. 2].
35 Resp. Max to Marianne Weber [summer 1893]; Marianne to Helene Weber (reporting Max),

10.12.02, pr. Lebensbild, 197, 274. The thinking in the second letter is not new, but it may well reflect
meditation on this theme provoked by working on the PE earlier in 1902.
 A Whole Text? 137

A similar analysis can be performed on the related and now famous Weberian
concept of Lebensführung (the conduct of life)—another idea derived from Ritschl.
However, for Ritschl the Christian ‘conduct of life’ was a secondary idea only, in
the service of a higher and more important one, the normative Christian ‘ideal of
life’ (Lebensideal), and what most concerned him was the promotion of that ideal in
all areas of life.36 What concerned Weber was the idea that all aspects of life should
be systematically organized around the end prescribed by the Beruf. Here the
principal emphasis lay on the systematic and organized nature of conduct rather
than the end itself, which could be very varied given the multiplicity of occupations
(Berufe) in modern society. Now Lebensführung could be conceived in a specifically
capitalist manner: such was the implication of the capitalist dictum ‘time is money’,
where every instant of time should be organized around ‘the “calling” of earning
money’, so producing a ‘“chrematistic” conduct of life’ [XX.13, 31]. But it was not
necessarily so, since systematization of conduct was a hallmark of formal rationality
generally. Thus in the historical Part II of the PE, the historical origin of Lebens-
führung lies in ascetic and proto-rational tradition. Weber derives it from medieval
monasticism—how Ritschl would have writhed at this!—and ‘the world-historical
significance of the monastic conduct of life’ was that ‘it became a systematic and
completely formed method for the rational conduct of life’ [XXI.28].37 At the
conclusion we find that Puritanism always favoured ‘the tendency towards a
bourgeois, economically rational conduct of life’ [XXI.103], where three separate
ideas jostle—bourgeois, economic, and rational—but the emphasis suggests that
Weber gives the priority to the rational quality of Lebensführung.
The superimposition of a new set of ideas about rationality was more obviously
problematic in regard to capitalism than it was for religion. Where religion and
rationality were in principle universal phenomena, capitalism was not. It was just
one of the life spheres broken down in the modern world into separate rationalized
‘orders ’: the ‘economic order’ or ‘cosmos’ [XX.17, 31; XXI.82, 108].38 This
produces a noticeable tension in the text. For example, most of the chapter on
the “spirit” of capitalism is socio-economic in its content—we read about Benjamin
Franklin, Jakob Fugger, the doctrine of high wages, the physiological capacities of
Silesian and Mecklenburg labour, and Carl David Weber—but near the close the
horizon alters. Weber asks whether the ‘moral qualities’ underlying today’s capit-
alist “spirit” stem from the heritage of ‘liberal enlightenment’ [XX.30], and so by
implication from pejorative rationalism? He insists, in answer, that the
premiss where a man exists for his business and not the other way round is
fundamentally (substantively) ‘irrational’; but that there is ‘a certain ascetic trait’

36 e.g. Geschichte des Pietismus, i. 15, 23, 38; ii. 118, 120 (Lebensführung); i. 42–3 (Lebensideal).

Note that there is no author apart from Ritschl who gives the intrinsically bland idea of Lebensführung
any discursive prominence.
37 Emphasis added.
38 It is commonly assumed that the idea of the ‘life orders’ arises only in Weber’s post-1912 work,

most obviously the ‘Zwischenbetrachtung’ of 1915; but the original text of the PE shows quite clearly
that this is a mistake. The idea of the Lebensordnungen probably derives from Ritschl, Geschichte des
Pietismus, i. 33, 62, 83, 96, etc., or more generally from Lutheran theology. See below II.6, n. 117.
138 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

in Benjamin Franklin’s Advice to a Young Tradesman [XX.30–1]. Again, and more

explicitly, he ponders whether or not ‘the evolution of the “capitalist spirit” may
most simply be understood as a partial phenomenon in the overall development of
rationalism’ [XX.34], but decides that it cannot, because ‘rationalism’ in its
traditional and pejorative meaning can signify mere ‘Voltaireanism’, while there
is no rationality in English commercial law, even though in his eyes law is the
outstanding example of formal rationalization accompanying capitalist develop-
ment [XX.35]. But if capitalism is not simply “economic rationalism” [XX.34],
what is it?
This is no doubt the most flagrant example of the unresolved tension between
the capitalist and rationalist modes of thought, but the debate continues through-
out Part II. As noted above (I.7), the historical argument in Part II.1 is dominated
by the identity between asceticism and rationality, with capitalism a noticeable
absentee [XXI.1–73], but these proportions are partially reversed in the final
discussion of ‘Asceticism and Capitalism’ [XXI.74–110]. Outwardly, as the title
suggests, this is dominated by ideas about capitalism. Hence the economistic
opening to Weber’s final summary of his argument [XXI.99]:
Innerworldly Protestant asceticism—perhaps we can summarize what has been said so far in
this way—therefore exerts its full weight against the unconstrained enjoyment of property; it
is a straitjacket on consumption, and especially luxury consumption. On the other hand, its
effect is to release the acquisition of goods from the constraints of the traditionalist ethic; it
unlocks the fetters set upon acquisitive striving, in that it not only legalizes this but regards it
as directly willed by God (in the sense outlined).
Yet this is by no means the whole truth about this chapter, and there is a great deal
that can only be explained in rational rather than directly capitalist terms. For
example, the Christian and Puritan condemnation of sexual pleasure (Erotik),
according to which intercourse within marriage should be devoted ‘exclusively to
the procreation of children’—assuming one could not, as in the case of Max and
Marianne Weber, adhere to ‘the maintenance of virginity’—is a ‘rational construc-
tion of sexual relations’, which can be justified in terms of health and hygiene, but
on no capitalist ground [XXI.79 n. 17].39 The same is true of the Puritan aversion
to sport, which might serve a political, ‘anti-authoritarian’ aim, and finds a limit in
‘the rational goal of the recreation necessary to physical efficiency’, but is governed
by no semblance of capitalist reasoning [XXI.93]. This also applies to the clutch of
phenomena Weber considers under the heading of ‘the capitalist lifestyle’ (literary
culture, fine art, Wissenschaft, theatre, dress) [XXI.92–8], where the heading is
much needed because these subjects have so little to do with capitalism. The
historical starting point throughout is proto-rational, Puritan asceticism, and, in

39 Weber is neither Malthusian nor anti-Malthusian. He understands the fall in the birth rate across

Western Europe, which leads to the conclusion that, ‘so far as can be seen, increasing well-being [goes]
with decreasing numbers of children’: ‘Allgemeine . . . Nationalökonomie’ [1894–8], MWG III/1.335;
but this is a historically local outcome only. History teaches that population is a matter not just of
Natur but of Kultur, and that differing Kulturen produce quite different outcomes: ibid. 323–44. This
suggests a want of interest in children similar to that he displays in his personal life.
 A Whole Text? 139

the case of Wissenschaft above all, the modern telos of the argument is formal
rationality (although this goes unstated at this point) [XXI.94; cf. 53 n. 108].
Knowing how frail the connection to capitalism is, Weber inserts a final, brief
“capitalist” paragraph stating that these ‘goods of Kultur’ are limited by the fact that
‘they must not cost anything’, before retreating to what is practically a tautology: that
the ‘significance’ of the capitalist lifestyle—the heading he has just invented—‘for
the development of capitalism is obvious’ [XXI.97–8].
Even where Weber appears to be making overtly “capitalistic” arguments, their
meaning cannot properly be construed in these terms. As we have seen, he
insistently repeats the idea that seventeenth-century asceticism undergoes a ‘switch’
into eighteenth- and nineteenth-century utilitarianism, hence the realm of ‘private
economic interests’ [XXI.75 n. 3, 76 n. 6, 83]. Yet his conception of modernity is
not utilitarian. It is true that in his view modern capitalism ‘was identical with the
greatest good of the greatest number’ because he regards it as supremely technically
proficient at producing goods en masse for the democracy: it is against luxury and
for ‘the “standardization” of production’ [XXI.96; cf. 77, 99]. However, he does
not make the argument about the production of mass goods explicitly in the PE
because, as we have just seen, ‘Inner-worldly Protestant asceticism . . . is a strait-
jacket on consumption’ [XXI.99].40 For Weber the evolution from asceticism to
modernity is all about active and rational ‘conduct’, Handeln: or, in capitalist terms,
production and not consumption. Thinking primarily about one’s ‘sustenance’
(Nahrung), along the lines of Christ’s prayer “Give us this day our daily bread”, was
not modern and Occidental but ‘typically antique and Oriental’ [XX.45] [i.74]+.
More generally, there is no connection in principle between the substantive
rationality of capitalism as a provider of goods, and the formally rational conduct
of modern man, which is the principal theme by 1905. So despite the pronounced
utilitarian emphasis of the closing argument, with its evocation of Quaker
‘comfort’ [XXI.100], Weberian modernity is ultimately nothing to do with uncon-
strained pleasure, eudaemonism, hedonism, “happiness”, or “use” (Nutzen) [XX.16,
35]. Weber’s attempt to convey his argument in terms of established ethical categor-
ies compatible with materialism is not viable because that argument is primarily
centred on the development of an impersonal and formal rationality of conduct. This
is neither materialistic nor compatible with any established ethical category.
Similar difficulties affect his arguments regarding capital and labour. He suggests
that the product of the ascetic ‘straitjacket on consumption’ and ‘compulsion to save’
is ‘capital formation’ [XXI.101]. But here again he has tied himself in a knot, since
he has long insisted that supplies of money and capital are entirely secondary to the
ethical formation of the capitalist spirit [XX.29], and so he has to backtrack and
admit that (as we saw) ‘the crucial factor is not mere capital accumulation, but the
ascetic rationalization of vocational life in its entirety’ [XXI.101 n. 70]. Rational
argument also trumps “capitalist” argument in regard to labour. Readers like Ernst

40 For explicit statements: ‘Allgemeine . . . Nationalökonomie’ [1894–8], MWG III/1.134–5, 137,

503–10, 520; ‘Agrarverhältnisse im Altertum’3 [1907–8], MWG I/6.713; Sociology of Herrschaft

[c.1911–14], MWG I/22–4.427.
140 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

Troeltsch, who could not accept Weber’s ethically subversive arguments in favour
of formal rationality as the necessary accompaniment to value plurality, seized upon
remarks such as the following to suggest that Weberian modernity was not about
rationality after all, but about labour and hard work: ‘the religious valuation of
continuous, unceasing, systematic, worldly vocational labour . . . was of course
bound to act as the most powerful leverage imaginable for the expansion of that
conception of life which we have here designated the “spirit” of capitalism’
[XXI.101]. For Troeltsch asceticism remained a religious (not a proto-rational)
cast of mind, and he supposed that the primary effect Weber deduced from
asceticism was ‘the high, objective and impersonal valuation of labour . . . that is,
the abstract duty to labour’.41 In this way Troeltsch became one of the earliest
proponents (perhaps the very first?) of what is surely the most popular of all the
many misconstructions of the argument of the PE: that it advocated a Protestant
work ethic. (Of course the sources of this were manifold: the idea that hard work
sustained capitalism can as easily be derived from the Marxist labour theory of value
or the prejudices of employers as from idealist theology). But still this was a
mistake, for as Weber has already told us, ‘Not labour as such, but rational labour
in a calling is what God really required’ [XXI.84]. The rational, formally complete
organization of a whole life towards an end was far more important than sweat or
long hours. Rationality rather than any allegedly economic criterion was what really
determined the nature of the modern, and so it is we reach the final conclusion to
the whole text, which must, with apologies, be cited again: ‘A constituent compo-
nent of the capitalist spirit, and not only of this but of modern Kultur, the rational
conduct of life on the basis of the vocational Idea, was born out of the spirit of
Christian asceticism’ [XXI.107]. At this point there can be no dispute. Weber’s
argument is not about capitalism and the capitalist spirit alone—indeed it touches
only a fraction or ‘component’ of the latter—but something more: modern Kultur
defined in terms of rationality.
But if this is the last word, it remains the case that for most of the time the
capitalist and rationalist arguments in the PE are placed in a relation of more or less
peaceful coexistence: they can be pulled apart as I have done, but plainly this was
not what Weber intended. Such coexistence was possible only because his concep-
tion of capitalism was to a large extent like his conception of rationality. Weberian
capitalism was itself holistic and expansive, and it should always be stressed just how
far and by how much its range outstripped Marx’s focus on the ‘capitalist mode of
production’.42 The objects of capitalism might be material, but capitalism itself was

41 ‘Arbeit und Askese’ [1915], KGA 13.45. Troeltsch suggests that Weber’s second derivation from

asceticism is ‘the rationell character of . . . labour’, where the established term rationell, meaning
empirically or instrumentally rational, was his lifelong rereading and derailment of Weber’s novel
category of the rational: formal, logical, and systemic rationality. But still it takes us back to labour.—
In his extended engagements with Weberian ideas 1905–12, Troeltsch focuses at length on Weber’s
religious arguments, such as asceticism or the sectarian idea, but not on his secular, “value-
free”construction of modernity, which he ignores. So it is only in a minor review such as this that the
(evidently inadequate) attempt to confront and rework Weberian modernity rises to the surface.
42 Cf. Richard Passow, ‘Kapitalismus’: Eine begrifflich-terminologische Studie (Göttingen, 19272);

Marie-Elisabeth Hilger, ‘Kapitalismus’, in W. Conze et al. (eds), Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe

(Stuttgart, 1972–97), iii. 442–51.
 A Whole Text? 141

the cast of mind, ‘the “capitalist” mode of thought’ [XX.44], that placed value on
those objects: as such it represented a ‘modern material Kultur’, that was hardly
distinguishable from ‘modern Kultur’ as a whole [XX.53; XXI.107]. Thus ‘the
economic way of looking at things’ (as he put it at Freiburg in 1895) was on the
advance ‘in all areas’, such as (for example) politics, law, and Kultur.43 Capitalism
might be only one of the ‘life-spheres’ or ‘orders’ [XX.32, 34], yet Weber persist-
ently tended to privilege it over all others, because he conceived it as the most
characteristic of modernity—and this was a lifelong tendency, as is clear from his
famous late reference to capitalism as ‘the most fateful power of our modern life’
[i.4]. Hence the holistic character he attached to it in another, still more famous
image: ‘Today’s capitalist economic order is an immense cosmos into which the
individual is born; it is presented to him, at least as an individual, as a housing
[Gehäuse] that in practice cannot be modified, and in which he must live’
[XX.17–18; cf. XXI.108]. In the same way the categories of the Beruf and
Lebensführung, which govern the whole of life, can be read as either capitalist or
rational, while central features of capitalist behaviour such as the ability and
‘propensity to calculate’ (Rechenhaftigkeit) [XXI.77 n. 7] could also be—and
were—construed as outstandingly rational. Nor were such crossovers accidental,
since the principal source for Weber’s thinking about both rationalism and capit-
alism is one and the same: his idea of law—the second principal context for the PE
alongside theology. In short, the frontier between capitalism and rationalism was a
very open one. and capitalism could in many ways seamlessly metamorphose into
rationalism, even if in Weberian capitalism the importance of substantive factors
was far greater than in Weberian rationalism, where the novelty and originality of
Weber’s thinking were all to do with its formal quality.
From this analysis it will now be clear what was the nature of Weber’s uncer-
tainty regarding the spirit or ethic of capitalism in 1904. He could not decide what
was the conceptual status of capitalism and its impersonal ethic relative to ration-
alism. They were both like and unlike. If rationalism and rationalized Kultur were
in principle more universal in scope than capitalism, still capitalism also connoted
something more than rationalism: an idea of freedom, an indefinable free space
standing outside the regular and rule-bound framework of rationalism (I.4). Weber
said he hoped to find ‘the final conceptual definition’ of capitalism and its ethic ‘at
the end of the investigation’ he was then commencing [XX.12]. Now the conclud-
ing discussion of ‘Asceticism and Capitalism’ is indeed an extended meditation on
the relationship between proto-rational asceticism, capitalism, and modern ration-
alism, but though one might say that it reached a kind of conclusion when it found
that rationality and modern Kultur were something greater than capitalism, this was
by no means a complete statement. Above all, it says nothing about capitalism as
such. The most important guide to the tendency of Weber’s thought here is not a
statement but a silence: the refusal to equate capitalism with economic rationalism
or rationality, in contrast to the way in which statements about (or presuming) the

43 MWG I/4.561, emphasis added.

142 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

identity between asceticism and rationality are commonplace. But if capitalism was
not simply rational, again we may ask: what was it? If our first conclusion was that
the PE was intellectually comprehensive in its agenda and ambition, the second is
that it was not complete at the one point where Weber most wanted to reach a
completion. (There were of course many other, advertised forms of incompletion,
but he could flaunt these precisely because, however substantial they might be, they
did not trouble him.) In both respects, its comprehensive agenda and unresolved
doubt, the PE of 1904–5 left a rich seam for future thought and reflection.
 PART II

T H E SE C O N D H I S T O R Y O F
T H E P R O T E S T A N T ET H I C — AND
O F M A X W E B E R , 1 9 0 5 – 1920
 Proem

We come now to the “second history” of the Protestant Ethic, covering the years
between its first publication and the issue of an amended text that practically
coincided with Weber’s untimely death in the spring of 1920. Thus his last
surviving letter records that he had ‘reviewed all the corrected proofs to the essays
on the Sociolog. of Religion’:1 that is, the first volume of the Collected Essays,
containing the PE, the ‘Protestant Sects’, and some of the most important compo-
nents of the ‘Economic Ethics of the World Religions’ (the ‘Introduction’ and
‘Zwischenbetrachtung’ or ‘Interim Reflections’). This is both an intellectual and a
documentary history. The PE was by no means at the forefront of his mind
throughout these years, but still it would be a continuous presence. It was neces-
sarily the focal point of all his later religious enquiries, such as the ‘Economic
Ethics’ (1912–), because it was the only statement he ever made about Occidental
Christianity (however incomplete), and his focus never deviated from that of ‘the
son of the world of modern European Kultur’, who was hostile to exoticism for its
own sake: no “Orientalist” he [i.1 cf. 12–13]. Furthermore, because the PE was not
just a religious-historical enquiry but a compressed introduction to the totality of
Weber’s intellectual universe, almost all his subsequent writings of whatever kind
stand in a substantial relation to it. In particular this means the three major
sociologies of Herrschaft, law and religion that make up the bulk of the surviving
drafts for ‘Economy and Society’ (1910–)—the work that became the principal
focus of his intellectual life from 1913 onwards.
Similar connections will be found in his other major works. As we shall see, the
book-length treatment of ‘Agriculture in Antiquity’, written in 1907–8, was an
axial moment in the development of his thinking about capitalism, and stands in a
line of direct continuity to problems thrown up by the PE. So too does the
unfinished working paper on ‘The City’ (c.1908), which is first sketched in outline
in ‘Agriculture in Antiquity’.2 These were followed by something completely
different: the empirical investigation into ‘The Psychophysics of Industrial Labour’
(1908–9). Yet this too stood in direct connection to the PE, being an attempt to
show that skilled labour in the present day displayed the same kind of “rational”
wage-earning and vocational characteristics attributed to it in the PE [XX.19–24].
The idea that Weber was an exclusively conceptual thinker, rather than a balanced
advocate of the ‘mental ordering of empirical reality’,3 is much mistaken, and, just as

1 To Paul Siebeck, 30.5.20, Briefe; cf. GARS i (Tübingen, 1920). 2 See II.8.v.
3 »Objektivität« [1904], WL 150, etc. Emphases added.
146 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

the PE had relied on Carl David Weber for its portrait of an exemplary capitalist
entrepreneur [XX.27–31], so it was to the new factory in Oerlinghausen that
Weber went to do his fieldwork on ‘industrial labour’. Since it was empirical and
inconclusive, it will (with regret) largely be passed over here; but still it was a legacy
of the PE. Moving forward in time, we find that even his wartime political
journalism has a significant genealogy going back to 1904–5. The 1917 pamphlet
Suffrage and Democracy in Germany contains one of his most important late
statements on capitalism which could have come straight out of the pages of the
PE. When one adds the mesh of connections, genetic and conceptual, that bind the
PE to the series of Weber’s methodological writings, as also to the late lectures on
‘Science’ and ‘Politics as a Vocation’ (1917–19), texts which, however secular their
subjects might seem, must be situated within the broader context of Weber’s
religious ideas, it becomes clear how difficult it is to find areas of enquiry in his
œuvre that have no significant connection with the PE. We are left with instances
such as the projected enquiry into the press that Weber promoted in 1909–10, for
which he never found funding,4 or his contemporary-historical reports on the
Russian Revolution of 1905–6, although here too the conceptual framework of
Occidental Kultur set out in the PE, from which Russia is essentially excluded,
remains basic to an understanding of the latter.5 There is no one Weberian text
from which all the rest of his thought can be deduced; nonetheless, the PE draws
upon almost all of his thought prior to 1904, and is then seminal for almost all the
principal conceptual developments or workings-out that took place after 1905. If
there is no ultimate “central question” or single “problematic” underlying Weber’s
work as a whole6—he was too much of a disciplinary pluralist and historian for
that—it would be still more mistaken to suppose by way of reaction that his œuvre
is just a miscellany. There is a coherent set of historical and conceptual highroads
that command the body of this œuvre, and the PE is the central way-station through
which most of them pass.
Another facet of this “second history” lies in the revisions Weber made to the PE.
Though these were ratified in the late summer of 1919 (or subsequent proof
stages), they were by no means all conceived then. It may be a convenient
shorthand to speak of a “1920” text, because it was published in that year, but
such a dating is otherwise misleading. The textual history of the PE is not to be
reduced to a stark choice between what Weber thought and wrote in1904–5
and what in 1919–20, though this has been the assumption hitherto.7 On the

4 ‘Vorbericht für eine Erhebung zur Soziologie des Zeitungswesens’ [1909], pr. W. Hennis, Max

Weber und Thukydides (Tübingen, 2003), 139–49, cf. 130–8.

5 See, for example, the analysis of ‘The historical origin of modern “freedom” ’ in Western Europe:

‘Zur Lage der bürgerlichen Demokratie in Rußland’ [1906], MWG I/10.270–1. Weber here suggests
that Russia might be entering a path of Europeanization analogous to the USA (272); but, since this
prospect is uniformly opposed by all his other writings, it would seem that the remark was inserted to
encourage the Russian liberals in 1905, to whom he was personally connected.
6 Cf. Wilhelm Hennis, Max Webers Fragestellung (Tübingen, 1986), trans. Keith Tribe, Max

Weber’s Central Question (Newbury, 2000); Friedrich H. Tenbruck, ‘Das Werk Max Webers’, KZSS
27 1975), 663–702, e.g. 691.
7 Dirk Kaesler (ed.), Max Weber, Die protestantische Ethik (Munich, 2004), ‘Vorwort’, 26.
 Proem 147

contrary, the way Weber thought and wrote mirrored his conception of historical
evolution as a sequence of progressive accumulation, in that he had an ingrained
tendency to add ever fresh layers to an original composition. (Significant deletions
by contrast were very few, and rewriting still less.) So the revisions to the text that
were first published in 1920 present an aggregate record of a history going back to
1906–7; and in contrast to the original genesis of the PE, this process of slow
accretion can be traced in some detail, even if Weber’s characteristically Puritan
‘self-control’ and ‘reserve’ in matters personal are still present to hamper our
enquiries [XXI.28–9 & n. 58]. After 1907 he never revisited the seventeenth-
century religious sources on which the PE was founded; but still, as new books
came out that bore on the PE, it would seem that he entered marginal additions in a
personal copy of the original text taking account of this new work.8 He must have
kept some record of this kind, since it is certain that he did not read all the materials
newly cited in the revised text at a stroke in the late summer of 1919, even if he did
subject his previously accumulated comments and remarks to a final review at that
time. So both within the text and outside it, the PE has a more or less continuous
intellectual history through the fifteen years down to 1920. It may not yield an
absolutely comprehensive view; but if we are to take a prism through which to lay
bare the intellectual life of Max Weber, then the history of the PE, its genesis and
afterlife, is much the best.

8 Cf. Weber to Siebeck, 2.4.07, Briefe.

 1
1905–1908: Going into Hibernation

In its original form the PE was positively ostentatious in advertising its incom-
pleteness, containing over forty references to matters that would have to be
discussed ‘later’ or ‘in another context’, to say nothing of the programme of future
work mapped out in its final paragraph. But what did this mean? Weber’s habit of
announcing future work that would never appear is well known. It is clear, too, that
signalling awareness of incompleteness could serve as a pre-emptive defence mech-
anism, which might be turned against critics who assumed “too much”.1 So there
was a gap between Weber’s sophisticated awareness of perceived deficiencies in his
text and any actual plans for future work: current incompleteness did not neces-
sarily imply future completion, let alone immediate continuation. That he had
doubts about the practicality of completing the PE is suggested even in the original
text when, having outlined a programme of future work, he comments on its
prospects: ‘whether one or other of the supplementary problems outlined above can
still be discussed within the limits of this journal is unclear, given its agenda. On the
other hand, I am not much given to the writing of thick books which would have to
rely so heavily on alien (theological and historical) works, as would be the case here’
[XXI.110 n. 86]. The note of caution here is confirmed by a remark he made in a
letter to his brother Alfred when he was completing the original text: ‘Working up
“Protestantism” into a book must proceed . . . at a slow tempo. To do this I need to
travel once more to England and the United States, and until that is possible, there
is plenty of time . . .’. In the meanwhile he would be ‘happy to return to studies of
methodology and agrarian politics’,2 and though the latter proved a blank, con-
tinuation of the methodological studies begun with the essays on ‘Roscher’s
Historical Method’ (1903) and the manifesto on “Objectivity” (1904) would
prove a staple of his output in the two years following the completion of the PE
in March 1905, supplemented by an unexpected plunge into contemporary ana-
lysis and reportage of the Russian Revolution in late 1905 and early 1906.
One moral of these original doubts is clear enough: that while the PE would
always remain a central statement of his views about modernity, Weber had no
especial liking for its seventeenth-century subject matter, which relied ‘so heavily
on alien (theological and historical) works’. His instinctive preferences were the
conventional products of his education and milieu: the classics and Biblical history.

1 ‘Kritische Bemerkungen’ [1907], 245–6; ‘Bemerkungen’ [1908], 278–9; ‘Antikritisches’ [1910],

177–8, 183, 194 n. 23, 196 n. 28, 199 n. 33, 201.

2 To Alfred Weber, 8.3.05, Nachlaß Max Weber 30/4, Bl. 101–2.
 1905–1908: Going into Hibernation 149

Correlative to this was the recognition, even as he was writing the PE in early 1905,
that there were ‘specialists’ on his doorstep such as Ernst Troeltsch, for whom
works of theology were not alien, and who would ‘of course sort out these things
better than I could ever hope to do’ [XXI.3 n. 3]. Repeatedly we come back to the
fact that Weber was not ‘a historian in the narrower sense of this term’,3 someone
who expected to develop a mastery over specific forms of source material within a
specialized subject area. (The nearest exception to this is his interest in the history of
ancient Rome; yet even here those of his later works that include substantial
amounts of ancient history—‘Agriculture in Antiquity’ and ‘The City’—vastly
exceed any single subject area.) He was instead ‘the outsider who “construe[d]”
history’ from a sharply detached, present-day standpoint.4 So although the revision
and completion of the text remained a live issue in the years 1906–8, even at this
time it was a secondary item on Weber’s list of priorities, as his energies and
enthusiasms transferred elsewhere. Thereafter it vanishes from the horizon almost
completely, before coming back into view in 1912–13 as the Occidental centre to
his comparative enquiries into the ‘Economic Ethics of the World Religions’. Even
then a full resuscitation of the text would be effected only as a result of an
extraneous event: the hiatus produced by the World War.

I . A NARRATIVE

Weber’s detachment towards the PE was apparent from the first. Part II of the text
was published in June 1905. The following September Georg von Below, with
whom Weber enjoyed close relations at this time and who was the Chair of the
Committee of the “Association of German Historians”, proposed that Weber give
one of the “keynote” lectures (as we would say) at the 9th German Historians’
Conference at Stuttgart the following April under the heading: ‘The significance of
Protestantism for the rise of the modern world’. The choice of subject clearly
derived from the PE, and today one would suppose instinctively that he would have
been bound to accept such a splendid opportunity to publicize and promote his
ideas. Werner Sombart had accepted a similar invitation in 1903 to discuss the
historical arguments of his Modern Capitalism (1902), and although he had been
subjected to some harsh empirical criticism as a result, still Weber praised von
Below, the principal critic on this occasion because, regardless of any judgement
that might be passed, it signalled the kind of serious engagement with Sombart’s
work that had been lacking elsewhere [XX.19 n. 1].5 Yet with a signal lack of
interest in his own creation (let alone its future canonical elevation), Weber fended
off von Below’s proposal. He suggested that Ernst Troeltsch should address the
Conference instead—a suggestion von Below accepted—on the basis of an ‘excel-
lent performance’ in his book-length essay, ‘Protestant Christianity and Church in

3 e.g. ‘Kritische Studien I.’ [1906], WL 216. 4 ‘Antikritisches’, 178.

5 On Weber’s relations with von Below see an essay ‘The Lutheran Reception of the “Protestant
Ethic” ’ in my forthcoming collection Max Weber in Context (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz).
150 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

the Modern Era’, for Paul Hinneberg’s multi-volume collective work Die Kultur der
Gegenwart (The Kultur of the Present Day).
Now this was an important work. It is the most complete statement of
Troeltsch’s views on Christianity in a modern (post-1700) context—far more so
than the better-known Social Doctrines of the Christian Churches and Groups
(1908–12). All the same, when Weber wrote to von Below, it had not been
published. Troeltsch was indeed hard at work on it, and it was twice hailed in
anticipation in the original PE [XXI.3 n. 3, 14 n. 21]; but by September, it existed
only in proof, before appearing in print at the turn of the year 1905–6.6 In short,
Weber’s trust in Troeltsch was of a strikingly open and uninhibited kind—and this
is true throughout the years 1905–12. In a characteristic piece of reasoning he
conceded to von Below that Troeltsch’s thinking ‘might at many points go back to
the stimulus of our conversations and my essays [the PE] (and perhaps more than
he knows)—but he is the theological specialist and is in control of the decisive point:
the leading [Christian] Idea. If the specialist has presented a comprehensive work,
then he is the one who in my opinion should appear in public. It would look very
odd, if I were to do so.’7 Now Weber was not being modest simply for modesty’s
sake: there were good grounds for this judgement. Phobia about giving public
lectures had been one of the external symptoms of his nervous collapse (though it
had not held him back at St Louis in 1904), and this may have been conclusive in
itself. But there were intellectual grounds as well. As a religious sceptic he was not
‘in control of the leading Christian Idea’, while his primary argument—that,
whatever ‘stimulus’ he or the PE might provide, final judgement thereon must lie
with the ‘specialist’—went to the heart of his conception of modern Wissenschaft
and academic enquiry, as set out in the PE [XXI.3 n. 3], in the essay on “Object-
ivity” (1904), and again, and most famously, in the lecture on ‘Science as a
Vocation’ (1917/19): that there should be a reciprocal relationship between the
interdisciplinary thinker (or ‘dilettante’) such as himself and the specialist. The first
enjoyed the luxury of propounding ideas and hypotheses, but their empirical
testing must be left to the latter.8 This ground of principle and Troeltsch’s apparent
acceptance of the contract it implied, rather than any consideration of personal
sympathy, was why Weber’s trust in Troeltsch was so unreserved. (However, once
the reciprocal working relationship ceased in 1912, the cut-off may also help
explain why Troeltsch’s sense of personal alienation became so profound).9 It was
renewed testimony to the extreme lengths to which Weber was prepared to carry
his belief in the ‘elementary obligation of academic [wissenschaftlich] self-control’ in

6 Volker Drehsen, ‘Einleitung’, KGA 7.66–74.

7 Weber to von Below, 23.[9].05, Nachlaß Max Weber 30/4 Bl. 130. The copy letter is dated
August, but since it opens with an allusion to the imminent meeting of the Verein für Sozialpolitik on
25 September, September must be the correct date.
8 Resp. »Objektivität« [1904], WL 214; ‘Science as a Vocation’, MWG I/17.80–3.
9 Certainly this was not simply produced by their quarrel in 1914: see the excellent character sketch

of Weber by Troeltsch in his letter to Heinrich Dietzel, 22.10.17: F. W. Graf, ‘Ernst Troeltsch’s
Evaluation of Max and Alfred Weber’, MWS 4 (2004), 101–8, here 106–8 (Troeltsch, KGA 19).
 1905–1908: Going into Hibernation 151

restraint of personality.10 The immediate practical consequence was that, so far as

he was concerned, the ‘purely historical’ ideas of the PE [XX.53] might be left to
sink or swim according to their merits, while he pursued other, methodological,
and Russian-revolutionary enthusiasms.
Nonetheless, Weber was prepared to make at least one addition to the PE in
1906 by writing an essay on the Protestant sects in America. Now the origin of his
interest in the sects lies in Part I of the PE, composed in 1904 prior to his American
tour. Here he makes it plain that the intended focus of the PE was a dual one—on
‘the striking role of Calvinism and the Protestant sects in the history of capitalist
development’ [XX.50 cf. 8–10]—and that these represented two equal pillars in his
argument. Prima facie Calvinism supplied the principal individual and psycho-
logical input, deriving from the theology of predestination, and the sects the social
one, deriving from their nature as meritocratic voluntary communities [cf. XXI.72].
Not only were these two components equal, but in Weber’s eyes they constituted a
unified subject. The majority of the announcements in Part II of the PE regarding
the future work necessary to complete the text may relate to the sects, but this does
not mean that they had been omitted. In fact they are a significant presence within
the PE itself throughout its discussion of the religious groups that make up ascetic
Protestantism, including Calvinism.11 The idea of an integral unity between the
social and individual components of Weber’s Protestant enquiries also underlies
the strictly repetitive nature of the title of the second essay on the sects—‘The
Protestant Sects and the Spirit of Capitalism’—even though by the time Weber was
reviewing this for final publication in 1919, capitalism had long since ceased to be
the principal focus of his conception of modern Kultur.
A striking illustration of the seamless and undivided nature of his thinking comes
from December 1904. Immediately after his return from America and before he
started to write Part II of the text, he wrote to the revisionist socialist Eduard
Bernstein, who had published a substantial study of radical politics in seventeenth-
century England.12 He was seeking information about source materials regarding
the Quaker ‘system of fixed prices’ for ‘my essay, one article of which you have
perhaps seen in the “Archiv”’, i.e. the PE.13 ‘Fixed prices’ signified the convention
associated with the Quakers whereby economic goods had a fixed price stated in
advance of any market exchange. For Weber this gave an ethical and empirical
foundation to rational calculation in the market as compared to the emotional,
unstable and primitive practice of ‘haggling’ [PS i.219 n. 2]. It was thus one of the
most important “sectarian” contributions to modern rationalizing behaviour within
the economic sphere. Yet it is not mentioned in the PE as we have it; it emerges
only later in the essays on the sects. So the implication of this contact with
Bernstein, as of the statements made in Part I of the text, is that Weber’s original

10 »Objektivität« [1904], WL 200. 11 Below II.8.ii.

12 ‘Kommunistische und demokratisch-sozialistische Strömungen während der englischen
Revolution des 17. Jahrhunderts’, in E. Bernstein and K. Kautsky (eds), Die Geschichte des
Sozialismus in Einzeldarstellungen (Stuttgart, 1895), i. 507–718.
13 To Bernstein, 10.12.04, D817 Bernstein Papers, International Institute of Social History,

Amsterdam.
152 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

intention in 1904 was to include a treatment of the distinctive social contribution

of the sects to capitalism immediately after completing the more individualistic Part
II of the PE. Because of this entirely normal authorial aspiration—to write the
whole of the work that one currently has in mind—there are very few suggestions
for further work going beyond the PE in Part I; none relates to the sects; and none
supposes that the work in progress will be incomplete [XX.11, 18, 49–50]. It is true
that Part I also contains a substantial announcement of the theme of the Beruf or
calling [I.3], which looks forward to Part II as we have it and which in Weber’s eyes
is primarily an individual category—the individual’s conception of life within a
specialized occupation. But while this clearly suggests that Part I would be followed
by a Part II that would be individualistic in its focus, it cannot be taken as implying
that this was all of what was to come.
In this light we can now gain an idea of the degree of incompleteness of the PE as
it turned out. There ought to have been a Part III on the sects in their religious and
historical context that would have given them their necessary equality with the
individualist treatment of theology and vocation in Part II of the text: together they
would have made up ‘the complete series of essays as originally intended’.14 Such
an essay would have been broadly equal in dimensions to Part II (in particular
its Calvinist–Pietist component); and it would have enjoyed the same academic
or wissenschaftlich format, with the same ‘appalling undergrowth of footnotes’
[XXI.5 n. 4], so that it too might have appeared in the Archiv. As such it would
have far outweighed the ‘short survey’ that was finally published as the ‘Protestant
Sects’ in 1920 [i.220]. But if this was his original intention, it follows that any
reading of the PE that focuses on its individualist argument in isolation from its
social enquiry into the meritocratic voluntary community is mistaken. However,
at some point early in 1905, during the composition of Part II, the idea of a
continuation and completion of the PE going beyond the vocational Idea lapsed.
This is why the long section [II.1] on ascetic Protestantism is broken-backed. The
treatments of Calvinism and Calvinist-derived Pietism, the kernel of the individu-
alist side of his argument, are full and complete in both length and learning
[XXI.5–57]; by contrast, the treatments of Methodism and the Täufer are notice-
ably brief and incomplete [XXI.57–72]. Formally the latter pair are linked to the
individualizing argument that proceeds from Calvinist, predestinarian theology,
but in reality these links are either weak or non-existent. Methodists were notori-
ously divided on the issue of predestination, hence the “Calvinist controversy” of
1770 [XXI.59], and Weber does not conceal ‘the indeterminacy of the religious
orientation of Methodist ethics’ when seen in this light [XXI.60]. Meanwhile the
Täufer ignored the transcendent and inscrutable Calvinist God altogether in favour
of an “inner light”.15 Weber tries to compensate, and finds that at some points their
views were ‘practically equivalent to Reformed [Calvinist] doctrine’, but all the
same ‘predestination was repudiated’ by them [XXI.68].16 Plainly neither group fits
the Calvinist, vocational, and formally individualist framework. What this means in

14 ‘Schlusswort’, 581. 15 Below II.6.i.

16 Cf. ‘Schlusswort’, 591, for an admission of these difficulties.
 1905–1908: Going into Hibernation 153

fact is that both groups have been included here as trailers for the sectarian idea,
since a proper treatment in Part III will not now appear. Although outwardly they
look forward to the future completion of the text in line with the cloud of forward
references in the notes, they would not exist at all, except as a substitute for
completion and an excuse for its postponement.
The sectarian focus is quite clear in the section on the Täufer. Because they are
present here only on sufferance, as a foretaste of greater things to come, the section
begins and ends with extended apologies. The admission made at its opening is as
explicit as could be desired, though we may also include (in italics) the textual
insertions made at this point in 1919, which are still more candid [XXI.62 n. 123]
[i.151 n. 1]+:17
As regards the sketch which follows, it should be noted that its brevity is to be ascribed to the
circumstance that, as regards the particular problem to be discussed in t h i s ›chapter‹, the
religious foundations of the “bourgeois” v o c a t i o n a l Idea, the ethic of the Täufer is of only
very limited significance. It added nothing absolutely new to it.—The far more important
social side of the movement is ›deliberately‹ set aside for the present.
Yet despite the ‘deliberate’ omission of the ‘far more important social side of the
movement’, Weber still insists on presenting the central distinction between institu-
tional “churches” and voluntary “sects” so that, at least in conceptual outline, the
argument of the PE is complete [XXI.64]. Again, at the end of this section of text, to
compensate for the ‘weakening of the Calvinist vocational Idea’, Weber introduces a
series of ‘anticipations’ of his sectarian argument [cf. XXI.71], to show that Täufer had
as much to contribute to modern capitalism and rationality as any Calvinist. The first
is their refusal to hold state (i.e. bureaucratic) office—a gesture towards the formally
excluded, but extremely important, subject of sectarian politics (or more accurately,
their religiously generated anti-politics) [XXI.70–1]. Next, he cites the English
proverb that “honesty is the best policy”, which he had discovered in Thorstein
Veblen’s Theory of Business Enterprise (1904) when in America [XXI.71]. For Weber,
besides its suitably chilled “ethical” content mixing honesty with policy, this maxim
was an implicit gesture towards the doctrine of fixed prices and its sectarian con-
text18—his concern when writing to Bernstein in December 1904. But this part of its
meaning would have been lost on readers in 1905, since it is only when the idea of
rationalizing “fixed prices” was set out in the essay on the ‘Protestant Sects’ (PS) that it
was ‘consciously brought into connection’ with ‘the early capitalist principle: “hon-
esty is the best policy”’ [i.219]. Still the importance of the idea may be judged from
the fact that it is placed at the very head of the historical part of the PS (following its
opening, contemporary, American part). In other words, if Part III on the sects had
been written as originally intended for the historically focused PE, it might well have
stood at the opening to the whole. Finally, Weber looks forward to the theme of

17 Weber’s emphases appear in spaced type; ›chapter‹ indicates words in the 1905 text emended in

1919–20, but that make no difference to our argument here.

18 Cf. [XXI.85 n. 32]; Thorstein Veblen, Theory of Business Enterprise (New York, 1904), 52.
154 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

‘church discipline’ (where for ‘church’ we must read ‘religious group’) [XXI.72]:19 the
ascetic and rationalizing discipline of conduct, which is significantly more powerful
when imposed by the judgement of sectarian equals rather than by the predestinating
God in isolation. This will be a principal theme in the second half of the PS and the
heading under which the argument as a whole is summarized in the conclusion
[i.227–9, 233–4].
The sectarian status of Methodists in the PE is less apparent. Weber does not
make it explicit, as he does in the case of the Täufer, presumably because (as he tells
us in 1906) he felt that Methodism was not such a pure exemplar: it ‘represent[ed] a
peculiar mixture of “church” and “sect”-based principles’ [CS 578]. In addition
Methodism lacked the totemic, politically radical significance of the Täufer, and so
this brief section of text [XXI.57–61] all too easily appears as a minor superfluity.
Nonetheless the sectarian impetus behind his thinking is clear from the unrevised
1905 text, when he was more open about his purposes in this respect than in 1920.
Methodism, he tells us, added ‘nothing new’ to the development of the vocational
Idea—in this respect Methodists and Täufer are alike—and as such it is strictly
irrelevant to Part II of the PE. All the same, ‘It will . . . become important once more
for our set of problems, when we come on to the consideration of the social ethic’
[XXI.61]—the ethic of the sects—and this preliminary announcement is the sole
reason for its presence in the PE. The final section of the PE on ‘Asceticism and
Capitalism’ [XXI.74–110] continues the uneasy compromise, whereby the sects are
‘provisionally’ present and no more [XXI.61, 72]. Here ascetic Protestantism can
be treated ‘as one collective mass’, something that will not be possible in ‘later
discussions’, i.e. those that focus on the sectarian idea; but all the same the principal
focus will lie with Richard Baxter, the representative of Calvinism, because it ‘offers
what is logically the most consistent foundation for the vocational Idea’ [XXI.74].
The result is a chapter dominated by Baxter and Calvinism, with Robert Barclay
and the Quakers (the English descendants of the Täufer) meriting only occasional
references amongst a small flotilla of supplementary texts, and with no Methodist
text present at all.
Thus we reach the ambivalent position that Weber occupied when he termin-
ated the PE in March 1905. The insertion of so many references about what needed
to be done ‘later’ and ‘in another context’ undoubtedly implied some commitment
to completing his work, but they must also be read as a sign that, whatever the ideal
final outline of his “Protestantism” (‘Protestant Ethic’ plus ‘Protestant Sects’) might
look like, it was not going to be realized immediately. ‘Later’ now meant ‘at a later
date’, not ‘later on in the same text’, for Weber had no intention of continuing his
Protestant studies in 1905. If we ask why he abandoned his original three-part
scheme, there are several possible reasons, such as nervous exhaustion or a reluc-
tance to inflict any more religious history on the subscribers to the Archiv.
However, the intellectually substantial explanation, which cannot be proven

19 ‘Church’ as an adjective does not always signify the opposite of ‘sect’ because, owing to the

hegemony of the church idea in German consciousness and language, it is a normal description for
‘religious groups’ of all kinds.
 1905–1908: Going into Hibernation 155

directly but is central to Weber’s thinking on the subject throughout the period
1904–14, is that a genuinely complete treatment of the sects had to include a
discussion of their socio-political as well as their socio-economic significance (II.8).
Hence Weber’s interest in writing about ‘the state doctrine of Anabaptism’ in the
Cromwellian period in 1904,20 through the essay on ‘“Churches” and “Sects” in
North America’ in 1906, down to the treatment of hierocracy in the Sociology of
Herrschaft (c.1911–14). Politics or anti-politics was simply too important a theme
to be omitted. Yet formally at least, regardless of the many outbursts in the notes
where he gave vent to his vehement convictions, Weber had excluded politics at the
opening of the PE. It was a subject to be discussed ‘in another context’ [XX.11].21
For this reason he proposed in 1904, when Part I of the PE was already complete and
in the press, to write about the state doctrine of Anabaptism (the contribution the
mid-seventeenth-century sects had made to the development of natural rights) quite
separately: not in the Archiv but in Georg von Below’s Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial-
und Wirtschaftsgeschichte. Thus presentation of the sects in the PE was compromised
from the first, and it must be supposed that in early 1905 Weber recognized this:
that even a fully developed Part III would in fact be seriously incomplete.
This narrative of difficulty and partial failure supplies the underlying context for
the two essays on the sects written in 1906–7. Neither was a straightforward
response to the need to “fill the sectarian gap” left by the PE. The first, on
‘“Churches” and “Sects” in North America’, was most probably drafted in February
or March 1906 during a lull in Weber’s Russian work.22 It was evidently not a
continuation of the PE. The stimulus to write it arose from his experience of
America in 1904—a sharp contrast to the PE with its formal exclusion of American
religiosity in favour of a concentration on ‘the old capitalist countries’ [XXI.63]. It
was not an academic essay, but a short newspaper article originally designed for the
secular, liberal Frankfurter Zeitung. (The fact that it is better known today in the
revised version published in a religious journal, Die Christliche Welt, is somewhat
misleading.) As such it was bereft of the length and the academic format of the PE,
not least its panoply of footnotes, though such pretentions were extremely import-
ant to Weber, in order to persuade specialists to take his work seriously. (In 1915 he
would belittle the original text of ‘Confucianism’ because, owing to its lack of
apparatus it looked like a set of ‘newspaper articles’, even though, as is abundantly
clear from its subject, this was an academic project.)23 Furthermore, the subject
area was not, as it had been in the PE, that of early modern Europe and ‘the most
fateful epoch of the 17th century’ [XXI.36] supplemented by backward glances to

20 To von Below, 19.7.04, Nachlaß Max Weber 30/4, Bl. 96–7.

21 See similarly [XXI.56 n. 113, 83 n. 27, 90 n. 47a], which all apply this formula to political
subjects.
22 He finished the first of his chronicle-articles, ‘On the Situation of Bourgeois Democracy in

Russia’, at the end of January 1906 and did not decide to start ‘Russia’s Transition to Pseudo-
Constitutionalism’ until mid-March: Weber to von Bortkiewicz, 12.3.06, Briefe; cf. W. Mommsen,
‘Einleitung’, ‘Editorische Berichte’, MWG I/10.13–14, 75–8, 282. The sectarian content of Weber to
Adolf Harnack, 5.2.06, is also suggestive here: Briefe.
23 To Paul Siebeck, 22.6.15, Briefe.
156 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

medieval monasticism and Talmudic Judaism, but a contrast between present-day

America and the equally contemporary deficiencies of the Lutheran state churches
in Protestant Germany. Yet for someone such as Weber, with an entrenched
commitment to genetic analysis going back ‘thousands of years’,24 this was a
significant deviation. But perhaps the greatest difference is that suggested above:
although its time period and subject area are very narrow, ‘“Churches” and “Sects”’
is qualitatively the most complete single statement Weber ever made about the
sects, since its two sections cover both the socio-economic and the socio-political
significance of sectarian behaviour. This is not true of the subsequent essay on the
‘Protestant Sects’, which follows the PE in formally excluding politics as an
agendum [i.214], even if, as always with Weber, his thought can never be entirely
divided, and its evocation of religious life outside politics includes occasional
references to ‘democracy’, ‘citizenship’, and ‘rights’ [e.g. i.217–18].
So ‘“Churches” and “Sects”’ was only a very oblique supplement to the PE. The
predictable consequence was that, setting aside Ernst Troeltsch (who read Die
Christliche Welt and had the benefit of personal briefing from Weber), it was
ignored by all the early secular critics of the PE down to 1920: notably, Felix
Rachfahl, Lujo Brentano and Werner Sombart.25 Yet when Weber sought to
advertise its merits in the “anti-critical” debates of 1910 and complained that
Rachfahl had ‘deliberately ignored’ it, he also cast light on its inadequacies, since
by his own admission it was ‘of course very sketchy’.26 Thus while he wished to
draw attention to the essay as a preliminary statement of his views on the sects, he
was also relentless in his insistence that the PE remained incomplete and required to
be supplemented. Hence his conclusion in 1910: that serious discussion of ‘the sect’
was ‘not possible’ at this time.27
One might suppose that after the writing of ‘“Churches” and “Sects”’,Weber’s
wrestlings with Protestantism and modernity would lapse. But here an external
factor supervened. Shortly after the second and final version of ‘“Churches” and
“Sects”’ had been published in June 1906, Paul Siebeck suggested that, given the
demand for the back numbers of the Archiv containing the PE, it should be reissued
as a book.28 Weber did not dismiss the idea, but at the time he was feeling
‘somewhat cross and low’ over his Russian work for the Archiv and forgot about
the matter.29 In March 1907 the patient Siebeck renewed his proposal. Weber’s
immediate reaction continued to be negative: ‘My essential doubt just now is this: at
some point I would like to pursue the subject and then perhaps issue the whole as a

24 ‘The Rural Community’ [1904], HEI 31 (2005), 346.

25 Karl Holl was however another theologian reader: ‘Der Neubau der Sittlichkeit’ [1919],
Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Kirchengeschichte I. Luther [1921] (Tübingen, 19232), 243 n. 2.
26 Resp. ‘Schlusswort’, 577; ‘Antikritisches’, 185 n. 14.
27 ‘Antikritisches’, 202. On the incompleteness of the PE: ibid. 177, 194 n. 23, 196 n. 28, 199 &

n. 33, 201, etc.

28 Siebeck to Weber, 17.7.06, Briefe II/5.119 n. 3. We lack an adequate study of Paul Siebeck, a

fortiori of his relations with Weber. Silke Knappenberger-Jans, Verlagspolitik und Wissenschaft: Der
Verlag J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck) im frühen 20. Jahrhundert (Wiesbaden, 2001), is an institutional
history focused on the period after 1913.
29 Weber to Siebeck, 24.7.06, Briefe.
 1905–1908: Going into Hibernation 157

book, if you were prepared to do so . . . I am afraid that I may block the path to
making a proper book out of the topic in future, if I agree now to a partial edition
(which could only be a corrected but essentially unaltered impression).’30 However,
this negative was not absolute. Siebeck, with typical publisher’s optimism and
blithely oblivious to Weber’s detestation of intellectual compromise, supposed in
reply that it would be a simple matter to publish any later thoughts separately, in a
second instalment (Lieferung).31 Weber, who was on Lake Como trying to calm his
neurasthenia, hastened to disabuse him about this, but allowed that after all the PE
might be reissued in something close to its present form prior to a more thorough-
going revision:32
I would be against labelling the essay formally as a “1st instalment”. Rather I would prefer to
explain in a short Foreword (taking up 4 pages) that the work is to be continued. Also
I might possibly add the beginning of a continuation at the end, which is contained in an
essay previously published in the “Christl[iche] Welt”. . . . Some alterations and supple-
ments to the currently existing text are unavoidable. I will perhaps undertake these shortly
after my return, & to that end would ask for 1 copy each of the two [Archiv] numbers
[containing the original PE].
What then would be the financial terms for a separate edition?
Weber had a sufficient respect for money, at least at the level of bourgeois ‘comfort ’
as distinct from ‘ostentation [and] trumpery ornament’ [XXI.100 & n. 68], and at
this date (April 1907) he and Marianne needed every penny they could get in the
absence of a professorial salary. In answer to Weber’s question about terms, Siebeck
offered an honorarium of 900 marks, equivalent to about a quarter of Weber’s
annual income at this point,33 and this may just have tipped the balance in
persuading him to take up work on the PE at this time. Certainly incentives were
sorely needed in 1907. This was Weber’s worst psychological relapse in all the years
after 1902, and his output (published and unpublished) was practically nil. Seen in
this light, the very modesty of the PE project suggested by Siebeck may, on
reflection, have been an attraction. In fact work on and around the PE (including
the two short “anti-critical” essays against Karl Fischer written in April and
October)34 would seem to be Weber’s only known academic work in an otherwise
barren period between March and October 1907.35 Hence a series of cautiously

30 Weber to Siebeck, 24.3.07, ibid., responding to Siebeck’s of 21 March.

31 Siebeck to Weber, 30.3.07, Briefe II/5.276. 32 Weber to Siebeck, 2.4.07, ibid.
33 Siebeck to Weber, 6.4.07, offers 75M per publisher’s “sheet” (16 pp.) up to 12 sheets, or a

maximum of 900M: MWG II/5.279. For his overall income: to Sombart, 20.8.06, Briefe. At this low
moment in his fortunes, it was still more than double that of a skilled German worker.
34 Cf. Weber to Oskar Siebeck, 29.4.07, 17.10.07, Briefe.
35 The one major work Weber published in 1907 on Rudolf Stammler—AfSS 24 (1907),

94–151—was sent to the press in September 1906: to Oskar Siebeck, 28.9.06 Briefe. Failure to
complete its continuation by March 1907 is the first clear sign of a psychological downturn: to Oskar
Siebeck, 7.3.07 (cf. WL 360–83). Within the March–October interim we might add to the desultory
work on the PE some correspondence (such as a famous letter to Else Jaffé of 13 September); faculty
agitation on behalf of Georg Simmel (from May onwards); and the psychological self-analysis, ‘Bericht
über pathologische Veranlagung, Entstehen, Verlauf und Art der Krankheit’, written in June 1907:
Briefe II/5.393. Major academic production resumes with the commencement of ‘Agrarverhältnisse im
158 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

hopeful remarks in letters to the Siebecks, father and son, during the spring. April
29: ‘My powers of work are wholly uncertain. I will try to make the “Protest. Ethic”
ready for the separate edition . . .’ May 10: ‘I am turning now to the review of the
“Protest. Ethic”.’ To these epistolary remarks should be added Weber’s public
statement regarding ‘the separate edition of the [PE] essays which on publishing
grounds is no longer to be avoided’—words penned in April and published in July
1907.36 However, the Webers’ situation began to change in July, with the death of
Carl David Weber. The legacy they would receive in his will would relieve Max and
Marianne Weber of any real financial difficulty prior to the onset of significant
wartime inflation in 1917–18, although they neither knew of, nor expected it,
having been out of favour with Carl David ever since Max’s nervous breakdown.
Immediately after the funeral Max took what was primarily a month’s recuperative
holiday on the Dutch sand dunes by the North Sea, but he interspersed it with time
spent in the Amsterdam and Leiden libraries ‘to see what they have on “Calvinism”
and the like’.37 Mixing academic work with a holiday conceived as psychiatric
therapy was a unique oddity that would not be repeated; but at the end of the
holiday period (in early September), he was not too displeased with himself: ‘In
Holland the weather was awful. I spent more time in the Leiden & Amsterdam
libraries than I did by the sea (Calvinism!). Things are going better—but can I do
hard work?’38
In the history of a canonical text, even these small motions can be important. We
see from them (first) that it was in the spring of 1907 that the general scheme of
revision for the PE as we have it today was laid out. It never did achieve the
“complete” status suggested by all those references to necessary future work in
the text of 1905, because there never was a further major phase of work, whether
in the ‘sect-colleges’ of rural America or amidst the library collection on ‘the history
of the Quakers’ at Devonshire House in London (as Weber fondly suggested) [XXI.3
n. 3][i.150 n. 4]+. Instead it remained an ‘essay’ (or pair of essays), albeit much the
most important one, that was gathered up in the set of Collected Essays on the Sociology
of Religion in 1919–20, having been subject only to modest revision in detail. At no
time was the text rethought as a whole, even if ‘some alterations and supplements to
the currently existing text [were] unavoidable’.39 There is, for example, no compari-
son in scale between the series of fractional alterations to the PE accumulated across
the years 1907–20, where the sum total of new text runs to c.20 per cent of the
original, and the revision of ‘Confucianism’, carried out primarily in 1919–20, which

Altertum’ in late October–early November. An October starting point is suggested by Weber,

‘Bermerkungen’, AfSS 26 (1908), 278 & n. 3, remarks that were probably penned in October: cf.
Weber to Oskar Siebeck, 17.10.07, Briefe. A later letter to Marie Baum (4.2.08) points to a November
starting point; but such generalized retrospection cannot be relied on too closely.
36 ‘Kritische Bemerkungen’, AfSS 25 (1907), 246; cf. 247 n. 8; Weber to Oskar Siebeck, 29.4.07,

Briefe.
37 To Marianne Weber, 17.8.07, Briefe. Weber worked on and off in the Amsterdam University

library between 17 and 27 July.

38 To Alfred Weber, 3.9.07, ibid.; cf. to Marianne Weber, 28.8.07.
39 To Siebeck, 2.4.07, Briefe.
 1905–1908: Going into Hibernation 159

was more than doubled in size.40 For this reason, when at last the PE was republished
in 1919–20, it would always remain an ‘older essay’ in Weber’s eyes [cf. i.12],
regardless of any alterations to the text made since 1905. It is then entirely legitimate
to take the 1904–5 text as the “master” text or normal point of reference. Indeed,
given the modesty of the later additions, it is almost inevitable, and in all that follows
unqualified reference to “the PE” will refer to the text of this date.
Another reason for conceiving of the revised text as essentially “old” is that
Weber’s modest ‘alterations and supplements’ were a cumulative process across the
whole period 1907–20, with the centre of gravity in 1907. Changes were almost
certainly entered piecemeal in the copy of the PE contained in those back numbers
of the Archiv he requested from Siebeck in April 1907, starting at that date. We can
usually locate the dates at which these supplementary insertions were made, and
this reveals the priority of the year 1907. The first wave of alterations entered in the
spring of that year, which continue to make considerable use of materials already
available to him in 1904–5, represent the majority of all the erudite and scholarly
additions to the final text—as distinct from broad interpretative glosses on topics
such as the nature of capitalism or “de-magification” (Entzauberung), which com-
monly date from 1919. By contrast the number of changes entered in the years
1908–14 was much smaller, being no more than a set of specific responses to
occasional publications [c]. Finally, Weber went through the whole text once more
with great rapidity in the late summer of 1919. At that date he could (had he
wished) have rewritten additions made earlier, but not in such a way as to alter their
specific, textual and erudite content—as we shall see (II.4), he simply did not allow
time for this. So in most cases their provenance remains clear, and it is possible to
date the vast majority. Sometimes the point of origin can be targeted to the day,
as in the case of Moritz Bonn’s ‘observations . . . in the Frankfurter Zeitung’ [i.81
n. 3]+, which, but for the accident of Weber’s insomnia, we can imagine him
confronting at breakfast on 9 April 1907.41 Again, what is the origin of the remark
‘see the good Zürich dissertation by J. Maliniak (1913)’ [i.50 n. 2]+, if not when his
old pupil Heinrich Sieveking, Professor at Zürich, sent him a copy of the disser-
tation in March 1913, at which time Weber read it, and judged it ‘very good ’?42 The
one aspect of Weber’s thinking in March 1907 that does not quite tally with
the final outcome in 1919–20 is the proposal for ‘a short . . . Foreword ’ to announce
the future continuation of the PE. Even so this anticipates the 1919 ‘Vorbemer-
kung’ or Prologue [i.1–16],43 as a device for explaining the status of a PE text that is
in some respects incomplete, but remains substantially worthy of republication.

40 The original 1915 publication of ‘Confucianism’ in the Archiv ran to 108 pages; that of

‘Confucianism and Taoism’ in GARS to 260 (i.276–536). Since both were set by the same printers,
and it was commonplace to take over whole pages unaltered where possible, this is quite an accurate
guide to proportions. By contrast, the PE took up 155 pages in the Archiv and 190 in the GARS
(i.17–206), though to this may be added that part of the ‘Vorbemerkung’ (i. 1–16) that relates to the
PE, and the PS (i. 207–36).
41 4.Morgenblatt, p.1a. 42 To Sieveking, 10.3.13, Briefe.
43 Talcott Parsons’ translation of this as the ‘Author’s Introduction’ is familiar but not usable, since

it introduces a confusion with the actual ‘Introduction’ (Einleitung) to the ‘Economic Ethics of the
160 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

A second conclusion is that it was in 1907 that the essay on the ‘Protestant Sects’
was first composed, although hitherto, following the mere fact of its date of
publication, it has been regarded as a “1920” text. (This is not to deny that
Weber made revisions to this text, analogous to those he made to the PE, when
he reviewed it at speed in 1919–20.) In its structure the ‘Protestant Sects’ (PS)
follows the course Weber outlines in his correspondence with Siebeck in April
1907. There he described the essay on ‘“Churches” and “Sects”’ published in the
Christliche Welt as ‘the beginning of a continuation’ of the PE—and, of course, the
opening of the PS is both a continuation of the PE and a recapitulation of the first
section of the 1906 essay.44 Some days later he moved on a step: ‘Regarding the
incorporation of the article from the “Chr. Welt”’—into the proposed new edition
of the PE—‘you will of course grant me discretion? I must see whether I can rework
it appropriately, so that it does not disturb the possible further course of the
book’45—and an appropriate reworking of the essay from the Christliche Welt to
fit in with the historically based and academically formatted PE is precisely what the
‘Protestant Sects’ is. The 1906 essay supplies the contemporary subject matter of
the first half of the new text [i.207–18], before ‘we look back into the church
prehistory of these Protestant sects . . . back to the 17th century’ [i.218], at which
point the new essay reconnects with the European materials and historical epoch
that are central to the PE. Taking the anomalous text of ‘“Churches” and “Sects”’
as a starting point was not ideal; nor was the brief summary of historical materials
that followed [i.218–35], which fell far short of any treatment of the sects com-
parable in scale to the PE as originally projected; but still it was a completion of
sorts. It was because of its 1907 origin that Weber would group the PS with the PE
as one of ‘two older essays’ in 1919 [i.12]. Indeed he had made the same point in
1917, when he looked forward to the publication of ‘a future collection’ of his
essays on the world religions, ‘in conjunction with other older and some still
unpublished essays’46—by which he meant the PE, the PS, and a précis of ‘The
City’.47 This remark alone makes it clear that the ‘Protestant Sects’ was not a
creation of 1919, but had long been in existence, slumbering in a desk drawer.48

World Religions’. There are however many ‘Vorbemerkungen’ in Weber’s oeuvre, so I shall refer to the
‘Vorbemerkung’ of 1919–20 (its date of composition).
44 Weber to Siebeck, 2.4.07, Briefe. 45 Weber to Siebeck, 13.4.07, Briefe.
46 ‘Die Wirtschaftsethik der Weltreligionen: Das antike Judentum I’, AfSS 44 (1917–18), 52 n. *.

This passage was deleted when ‘Ancient Judaism’ was reprinted in 1920: GARS iii.1, MWG I/21.234 n.g.
47 On ‘The City’, below II.8.v.
48 On the date of the PS, note further: (1) the use of materials that can only have come from the PS

in the pre-war text of ‘Economy and Society’: MWG I/22–4.671–2 on Quakers and fixed prices; cf. PS
[i.218–19]; 676 on the Half-Way Covenant cf. [i.217 n. 1]. (2) The literature used in the PS. Weber
cites only three books that we know him to have encountered after 1907: Ernst Troeltsch’s
Soziallehren, where he claims to have influenced Troeltsch and not vice versa [i.207 n. 1]; Étienne de
Boileau’s thirteenth-century Livre de Métiers, which derives from reading done for the ‘Outline of
Social and Economic History’ in the winter of 1919–20 [i.235 n. 2] cf. MWG III/6.219, 475; and
Scott Pearson’s Heidelberg dissertation, Der älteste englische Presbyterianismus (Edinburgh, 1912)
[i.220 n. 1], though Pearson also cites four other post-1907 titles that Weber borrows without
having consulted them [c]. So Pearson is the only post-1907 source bearing on the Protestant sects
cited in the PS, and its local and coincidental provenance is clear. Furthermore, all Weber’s references
 1905–1908: Going into Hibernation 161

Yet though the foundations for a conveniently limited reworking and reissue of
the PE were laid in the spring and summer of 1907, no publication took place. If in
May 1907 Weber was assuring Paul Siebeck that he was turning to the task of
reviewing the PE preparatory to its reissue, after his return from the Dutch libraries
he published only the second brief “anti-critical” reply to Karl Fischer in October
before the trail of the PE goes cold.49 In July 1908 Siebeck would again enquire
politely how the revision was coming along, and Weber gave the sort of reply
familiar to authors and publishers the world over: ‘At the moment I am locked into
work for the enquiry of the V[erein] f[ür] Soz[ial]Pol[itik] into industry’—meaning
the preparatory methodological statement that would lead into his work on the
‘Psychophysics of Industrial Labour’.50 ‘I cannot withdraw from this. But work on
“Capitalism” [the PE] is already fairly advanced, and as soon as those preliminary
labours [for the industrial enquiry] are settled, I’ll finish the thing off.’51 Now there
is no reason to doubt the accuracy of what is said here: that work on the revision of
the PE was ‘fairly advanced’ after his prolonged, albeit psychologically enfeebled,
tinkering with the project between April and October 1907; that a draft of the
‘Protestant Sects’ was in existence; hence that the new, albeit modest, book edition
of the PE was close to realization. But it is equally clear that Weber was allowing
other projects to supervene. The PE was no longer top of the agenda or even a work
in progress; instead it had become a work that would be completed ‘as soon as . . .’,
i.e. at some unspecified point in the future. After July 1908 complete silence
descends, and for almost a whole year Weber would devote his attention to the
enquiry into ‘Psychophysics’.52 Meanwhile the focus of Siebeck’s claims on Weber
was also shifting. In August 1908 he asked whether Weber would be prepared to
assume the editorship of an entirely new version of a multi-volume reference work,
the Handbuch der politischen Ökonomie (Handbook of Political Economy)—a major
project in its own right, and one that would lead Weber into the writing of
‘Economy and Society’, the task that dominated the last decade of his life.53
Despite a certain amount of wrangling as to the precise terms under which
Weber was engaged, by the end of the year it was agreed that he and Siebeck
were united in an ‘active partnership’ to undertake the Handbuch.54 In this way his

to it occur in the notes and (in fact) at the ends of notes. In short, this is the clearest possible case of
marginal and fortuitous addition to a previously established text.
49 Weber to Oskar Siebeck, 17.10.07; cf. same to same, 3.11.07, Briefe.
50 ‘Inquiries into the selection . . . of the work force within self-contained big industry’ [1908]:

MWG I/11.78–149.
51 27.7.08, Briefe.
52 Weber started thinking about this project in September 1907, but it became a continuous

concern only after the meeting of the Verein sub-committee in June 1908. Work was completed in
early June 1909: Wolfgang Schluchter, ‘Editorische Berichte’, MWG I/11.65–77, 150–61; Weber to
Siebeck, 23.5.09, Briefe.
53 Siebeck to Weber, 1.8.08, pr. MWG II/5.648. In 1914 the title would become Grundriss der

Sozialökonomik.
54 Siebeck to Weber, 28.12.08, pr. Wolfgang Mommsen, ‘Die Siebecks und Max Weber’,

Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 22 (1996), 25. There is nothing so straightforward as a direct acceptance
of this engagement on Weber’s part, more a developing but implicit agreement: to Paul Siebeck, 27.8,
30.8, 19.9, 5.10.08 etc., Briefe. See also Wolfgang Schluchter, ‘Entstehungsgeschichte’, MWG
I/24.12–13.
162 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

future had become more or less fully committed, and after 1908 no more would be
heard of the PE as a publishing project until 1915. It had indeed gone into
hibernation.

I I . CAPITALISM AND RELIGION, 1907–1908

Why was this? Why was a project that was ‘already fairly advanced’ set aside? There
is no documentary answer—we could hardly expect confessional testimony of this
kind from Weber—but there was a sufficiency of intellectual deterrents at work,
besides the improvement in the Webers’ financial circumstances. First, in regard to
capitalism. When Weber broke off his desultory labour on the PE in October 1907,
it was to rewrite his entry on ‘Agriculture in Antiquity’ (‘Agrarverhältnisse im
Altertum’) for a multi-volume “handbook” on the “sciences of state”.55 He could
simply have revised his previous (1898) entry on this subject; but what had then
been a conventional entry in a reference work now became a medium-sized book,
and was substantially a new project. The central element of novelty was also what
gave the text its intimate connection with the PE: capitalism. In a long ‘Introduc-
tion’ Weber returned to the question of what, conceptually, was the status of
capitalism—a question that (as we saw) had been left unresolved by the original PE
and constituted its outstanding weakness. Reviewing the PE earlier in 1907, even
for an essentially limited republication, could only have kept this problem firmly in
view, while nothing could have been more natural for a man of Weber’s neo-
humanist training, and concomitant belief in viewing history as a ‘continuum’
across its recorded entirety,56 than to develop his views via a return to ancient
history—both to his own work from the 1890s, and to the ancient historians’
suggestions about the relationship between Roman capitalism and modernity from
Theodor Mommsen down to Eduard Meyer. That capitalism was Weber’s major
interest here rather than the specific data of ancient history is also clear from the
summary presentation of his work to the Eranos discussion group in February 1908
(by which time it was complete), when his subject was ‘Capitalism in Antiquity’,57
while the bulk of the remaining work was rather less welcome: it was ‘hard labour’,
‘graft’, ‘appalling forced labour’.58 At the same time, it is noticeable that once he had
started working on ‘Agriculture in Antiquity’, his shorthand description of the PE
changed. Previously it had been ‘Protestantism’, ‘Protest. Ethic’, or ‘Calvinism’;
now it became ‘Capitalism’ and the ‘Spirit of Capitalism’ (and this habit was

55 Handwörterbuch der Staatswissenschaften (Jena, 19093), ed. J. Conrad. Given the breadth of

Weber’s concerns, the simple translation of his title is the only plausible one. The English title offered
by R. I. Frank, The Agrarian Sociology of Ancient Civilizations (London, 1976), is symptomatic of the
well-meant but unwise freedom that characterizes the translation as a whole. There is no such thing in
Weber’s uvre as an ‘agrarian sociology’, and ‘Agrarverhältnisse’ is not connected to the sociologies in
‘Economy and Society’.
56 ‘Agrarverhältnisse’3, MWG I/6.706, 725.
57 XXVIth meeting, 23.2.08, pr. MWG I/6.752–3.
58 Resp. to Marie Baum, 4.2.08, to Marianne Weber, 9.3.08, to Osckar Siebeck, 26.12.08, Briefe.
 1905–1908: Going into Hibernation 163

continued in the titles of the two “anti-critical” essays of 1910)59—as if capitalism

was the sole thing that mattered.
In regard to the general history of capitalism, Weber did no more than confirm
his views from the 1890s. Then, following on from the liberal moralism of Theodor
Mommsen’s Roman History (1854–6, 1885), he had identified ‘slave labour organ-
ization’ as ‘the indispensable foundation of Roman society’, where the largest and
most “advanced” components of the ancient economy were slave plantations.60
This was the foundation for his insistence on the radical discontinuity between the
ancient and modern worlds: ‘Simply on account of the increasing significance of
unfree labour’, the rise of an ancient ‘commercial economy . . . is in itself a quite
different type of phenomenon from the rise of free industry in the medieval
cities . . . The analogies with medieval and modern phenomena which seem to
confront us at every point are wholly unreliable, precisely because of those entirely
different foundations’—i.e. slavery.61 This rupture meant that the capitalism
discussed in the PE in 1904 would always be modern capitalism, ‘today’s capitalism’
centred on ‘the specifically modern capitalist economy’ [XX.17, 19]. It was thus ‘a
“historical individual”’ [XX.12], a unique occurrence like ascetic Protestantism,
and not a ‘generic concept’ like the typological concepts that govern the Weberian
sociologies, such as Herrschaft, rationality, asceticism or feudalism, which embrace
series of generically similar phenomena regardless of their unique contexts (al-
though both categories were ideal-types).62 This remained the essence of Weber’s
view in 1907–8 and thereafter. His presentation to the Eranos discussion circle
‘sought in the first instance to deduce the character of ancient capitalism in contrast
to modern from the character of slave labour and its influence’.63 It is true that he
now accepted in principle what had been only a suggestion before: that there had
been a Roman ‘capitalism’ in the large-scale slave enterprises (Betriebe) producing
oil, wine and other high price goods for the market.64 Hence there was a minimum

59 ‘Antikritisches zum »Geist« des Kapitalismus’, AfSS 30 (1910), 176–202; ‘Antikritisches

Schlusswort zum “Geist des Kapitalismus” ’, AfSS 31 (1910), 554–99. These titles do not mean, of
course, that Weber refuses to discuss religious issues here. See also Weber to Oskar Siebeck, 26.12.07;
to Paul Siebeck, 27.7.08, Briefe; one exception is Weber to Oskar Siebeck, 10.2.08, where he refers to
“Protestantism & Capitalism”.—Entitling the anti-critical essays in this way can also be explained as an
implicit acknowledgement of a division of labour between Weber and Ernst Troeltsch in replying to
Rachfahl. In Troeltsch’s words, Weber’s aim was ‘a psychological-genetic cognitive inquiry regarding
certain, principal forms of capitalism’, whilst his was ‘the portrayal of the religious element in
Protestantism and its place relative to the contexts of Kulturgeschichte’: ‘Die Kulturbedeutung des
Calvinismus’ [1910], KGA 8.149–50; cf. Rachfahl, ‘Nochmals Kalvinismus und Kapitalismus’,
Kritiken und Antikritiken, 216.
60 ‘Die sozialen Gründe des Untergangs der antiken Kultur’ [1896], MWG I/6.108.
61 ‘Agrarverhältnisse’1 [1897], MWG I/6.149. The culprit who argued for analogies between the

ancient and modern worlds—and against overrating the significance of slavery—was Eduard Meyer,
Die wirtschaftliche Entwickelung des Altertums (Jena, 1895).
62 On this distinction: »Objektivität« [1904], WL 201.
63 ‘Kapitalismus im Altertum’, MWG I/6.752.
64 ‘Agrarverhältnisse’3, MWG I/6.336–7; cf. the isolated but consistent reference to slave

‘capitalism’ in ‘Agrarverhältnisse’1 [1897], ibid. 204, which supersedes the more diffuse invocation
of this idea in Die römische Agrargeschichte [1891], MWG I/2.216–17 and in the review of Was heißt
Christlich-Sozial? [1894], MWG I/4.357.
164 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

commonality between the ancient and modern worlds based on a minimal, formal
definition of capitalism: ‘“capital” must always be understood as acquisitive capital
in the private economy’.65 Such a formal definition bereft of ethic or “spirit” had
already appeared in the PE in 1904 (where, however, it was deemed inadequate)
[XX.25–6], and anticipates the similarly dull and low-key definition set out in the
Vorbemerkung in 1919: ‘the disposition in fact to compare the estimated monetary
result with the estimated monetary input’ [i.6].66 Nonetheless, the principal point
was not this formal commonality but the qualitative rupture between the ancient
and modern worlds. It was in 1907–8 that Weber started to refer consistently to
‘modern capitalism’ to distinguish it from the ancient version, and this led to a series
of revisions in the PE inserting the word ‘modern’ before ‘capitalism’ or ‘capitalist
spirit’.67 When in 1919 he insisted that the modern Occident was home to a
capitalism ‘which has developed nowhere else in earth: the rational-capitalist
organization of (formally) free labour’ [i.7], formally or legally free labour stood in
contrast to slave labour, the principal illustration of which was ancient Rome.
However, there was also significant movement in Weber’s ideas. Positing the
existence of an ancient capitalism in contrast to that of modernity gave rise to an
extended comparison between the two, and in this way he filled in much of
the external definition of modern capitalism, the “second side” to the subject that
had been practically absent in 1904. A picture emerged of a fully developed Roman
capitalism based on slavery; on the warfare that supplied slave labour; hence on
political decision-making. It was a ‘politically anchored’ capitalism, and ‘only
indirectly economic’,68 and this became the leading note for all forms of capitalism
that were not modern, Occidental, and directly economic: ‘the capitalism of
adventurers and speculative traders and every conceivable kind of politically deter-
mined capitalism’ [i.11]. Modern capitalism by contrast was pacific; it had a
continuous and autonomous existence regardless of political intervention; and it
was based on free labour. These external conditions permitted a far more refined
and more rational probabilistic calculation of purely economic, market opportun-
ities and so catered for the quintessential capitalist propensity to calculate, Rechen-
haftigkeit.69 Hence Weber’s interest in the apparently tedious subject of accounting
procedures [i.8]. A more substantial component of capitalist organization was
supplied by the capitalist enterprise or Betrieb that was ‘industrial’ by definition.
For Weber as for Marx, the monied capitalism of the rentier or the banker was not
authentic capitalism, although this is what the word ‘capitalist’ had signified prior
to the publication of the first volume of Capital in 1867. Specifically, the Betrieb
had to be based on an interlocking division of labour and function, in contrast to
the assembly of persons working side by side within a workshop in antiquity
(ergasterion), carrying out separate, but not mutually interdependent tasks.70

65 ‘Agrarverhältnisse’3, MWG I/6.335. 66 Cf. WuG, 44–58.

67 MWG I/6.337; cf. 695, 704, 709–15; PE [i.23 n. 2, 34, 42, 45, 49 & n. 2, 53, 189]+.
68 MWG I/6.722, 715. 69 Ibid. 357.
70 Ibid. 329–30, 344, 358, esp.
 1905–1908: Going into Hibernation 165

In all these respects we see Weber framing a definition of a specifically modern

capitalism in terms of its “second side”, that of external organization or ‘form’ [cf.
XX.25, 28],71 and ‘Agriculture in Antiquity’ supplies the essence of what would be
repeated in the much better-known ‘Vorbemerkung’ of 1919–20 [i.4–12]. Yet
these accounts remain summaries only, and nowhere in Weber’s œuvre is there
much empirical hinterland to modern capitalism. Neither the type-construct of the
city economy in the ‘General Economics’ lectures (1894–8), nor the brief and
pedestrian snapshot of factories and their ‘techniques’ in the ‘Outline of universal
social and economic history’ (1919–20), points in this direction, while the latter—
the highpoint of any “economism” in the later Weber—was not intended for
publication, being a ramshackle and hastily assembled compilation of pre-existing
materials for student consumption.72 So however important capitalism was to
him—as it surely was—Weber never intended to offer a portrait of external
capitalist organization of any depth or substance. To put it another way, he was
never a business historian or analyst of the firm (unlike several of his economist
contemporaries). The more fundamental point is that, while this external definition
of capitalism is undoubtedly a valuable supplement to the PE, it does not touch,
let alone resolve, the original uncertainty expressed in the PE, which related to
the capitalist “spirit” or ethic, the inner kernel of Weberian capitalism [XX.12].
The fact that the PE was (as Weber tells us) a ‘one-sided’ presentation, devoted to
the inner man, his ‘ethic’ or “spirit” [XXI.110], was not problematic in principle
(though scholars have frequently supposed it was);73 but his uncertainty about how
to construe the inner man certainly was.
In fact Weber settled his “problem” with capitalism not by confronting it and
creating the secure concept of capitalism that had previously been missing, but by
sidelining it. In ‘Agriculture in Antiquity’ he moves on in two ways, where each
represents a displacement of the capitalist agenda announced in 1904. First, the
focus of his historical thought moves away from the ruptured history of capitalism
to the history of the ancient and modern city, which he takes to supply the external
preconditions for the development of modern capitalism. Hence the subject posited
in conclusion: ‘we will survey once again the character of the ancient polis and shall
ask this above all: how is it related to the “city” of the middle ages.’74 In his 1890s
lectures, as we saw (I.2), the late medieval city economy, and not ascetic Protest-
antism, was the point at which modern capitalism was born; now he returned to the
city, albeit it was no longer hailed as the birth place of modern capitalism, out of

71 See also ‘Antikritisches’, 201, on ‘the reverse causal relation’ or “second side” in regard to

capitalism.
72 Resp. MWG III/1 }10; III/6.339–42. The ‘Outline’ draws heavily on the 1890s lectures, but the

original organizational centre, the late medieval/early modern city economy, is missing from the
account where it ought to appear, although related materials appear at various points (II.3–5,
III.4–5). Instead it appears only near the end, in the form of a précis of ‘The City’ at IV.7. This
eccentric organization stems from the conceptual demotion of the city economy c.1908 outlined below
(II.8.v); while Weber’s failure to achieve any new resolution or clearer organization in the lectures
confirms what we know already: that in the winter semester of 1919–20 his principal energies were
devoted to rewriting ‘Economy and Society’.
73 Below II.5.iv. 74 MWG I/6.692, see 690–716.
166 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

deference to the argument of the PE (II.8). Its attraction in Weber’s eyes was that,
in contrast to the history of capitalism and slavery, there was an underlying thread
of continuity between ancient and modern history—and the importance of his
historicist belief in long-term evolutionary–historical continuity is of central sig-
nificance here. Already in the 1890s, he had held that the Occident was set apart
from the Oriental world from the beginning of recorded history by its ‘individu-
alism’, the release of the individual from overwhelming group identities such as
kinship groups, which was also ‘the primitive starting point of feudalism’. In this
context feudalism, as an alternative to the all-embracing, suffocating power of
unitary centralized states such those of the Pharaohs or the Persians, was a
progressive force, and the origins of Occidental feudalism (in Weber’s eyes) lay in
the ‘city feudalism’ of classical antiquity.75 He did not pretend then or in 1907–8
that focus on the city produced a simple continuity forward across the ancient–
modern divide—far from it—but still there was no rupture as in the capitalist case.
In both ancient and modern periods cities were distinctive and dynamic forces
promoting an individual, formally free identity within a unique Occidental trad-
ition, even if in the medieval case this meant the supersession of rural feudalism and
concomitant serfdom. Hence the survey of the ancient and medieval history of the
city at the conclusion to ‘Agriculture in Antiquity’, which forms the kernel of
the succeeding treatment in the fuller (and more appropriately titled) essay on ‘The
City’ (c.1908).76 These texts thus anticipate the palpable shift of emphasis regis-
tered in the ‘Vorbemerkung’ of 1919–20, where the capitalism of 1904–5 has
become an ostentatiously ‘bourgeois capitalism’, which then raises the need to
consider ‘the rise of the Occidental bourgeoisie and its peculiar character, some-
thing which does indeed stand in close connection with the rise of the capitalist
organization of labour, but is of course not simply identical with it’ [i.10].
The second way in which Weber looks forward in ‘Agriculture in Antiquity’ is
towards the emergence of bureaucracy, hence legal and rational Herrschaft, as the
primary conceptual focus of his thinking about modernity in place of capitalism. In
the PE Weber had started with a provisional and unresolved capitalism and
capitalist “ethic”, and had ended with a discussion that was ultimately weighted
in favour of rationality. This implicit tendency within the PE was now finally
ratified, as capitalism was subordinated to a category conceived as purely rational:
bureaucracy. Here was the crucial resolution to the fundamental uncertainty that
Weber had expressed regarding capitalism in 1904, and in this sense ‘Agriculture in
Antiquity’ is the true completion of the PE. Nonetheless, the emergence of
bureaucracy as the principal embodiment of rational Herrschaft also had a history
of its own. Of course he had never had any great love for particular bureaucratic
institutions such as the Prussian state or the Lutheran church,77 but given his belief
in the necessity of confronting unpleasant contemporary realities, it remains

75 ‘Agrarverhältnisse’1 [1897], ibid. 147–8. 76 See II.8 Appendix.

77 e.g. ‘Zum Preßstreit über den Evangelisch-sozialen Kongress’ [1894], MWG I/4.477;
‘ “Römisches” und “deutsches Recht” ’ [1895], 526; [Zum Vortrag Oldenbergs, 1897], 634;
[Gutachten zum Heimstättenrecht, c.1897], 660.
 1905–1908: Going into Hibernation 167

remarkable just how little Weber says about bureaucracy as such in the 1890s. The
obvious explanation lies in the separate identity and even hegemony of capitalism in
his thinking at this point, where bureaucracy represents another part of the new
nexus of ideas that emerged after 1902 under the heading of rationalism, but which
largely stands outside the PE. With just a few exceptions—it is accepted that
capitalism brings an ‘industrial officialdom’ in its train [XX.5], and the presence
of the counting house or business office (Komptoir, Kontor) is quietly noted [XX.28;
XXI.98 n. 64]78—the “capitalist” terrain of the PE is notably free of reference to
bureaucracy, except in a negative sense: ‘prelates and officials’ are looked down
upon by authentic Puritans, while the economic commitment of the Quakers is
enhanced by their exclusion from public office [XXI.29, 70].79 However, from
1904 on Weber would make a series of increasingly emphatic pronouncements
about bureaucracy, which mark its appearance as an alternative conceptual focus
alongside capitalism. At St Louis in September 1904 Weber asserted the apparently
humdrum fact of ‘the importance of the class of state officials’ in Continental Europe
and Germany. He lent the idea of bureaucracy something of its true depth, and
disclosed a personal interest in the subject, by linking it to the German universities: a
set of state institutions whose principal social function was the legal training of
bureaucrats. He also insisted that, despite possessing very different “business” and
anti-bureaucratic ideas about the state, the United States would nonetheless broadly
follow the German and European path of bureaucratization.80 It was another
element in the ‘Europeanization’ of America that he forecast in the PE [XXI.88 n.
40]. In 1905–6 he then repeated this forecast in much bleaker terms when discussing
the Russian Revolution. Even within Russia, a country standing outside the Occi-
dent (or at most on its frontier), he supposed that a ‘reactionary’ bureaucracy would
become more ‘rationalistic’: there would be a ‘bureaucratization of the administra-
tion’ that would render it more efficient and as such more worrying.81
Now Weber’s future predictions commonly look forward to a state of gloomy
fixity where the last remaining space for free movement has been extinguished. The
‘steel housing’ at the conclusion to the PE is only the most famous example
[XXI.108], and such predictions go back (at least) to the 1890s economics lectures,
when he decided that the classically English and Cobdenite model of the inter-
national economy operating free of any political support or constraint was about to
give way to a new mercantilism, where the world economy would be confined
within a closed framework of competing national–imperial blocs. The collapse or
Götterdämmerung of a free capitalism would give way to a ‘new organized society of
[an] unknown type’. It was ‘unknown’ in that it would not conform to the familiar
Marxist model of a socialist utopia; but what Weber did know (or thought he did)

78 This can be traced back to ‘Allgemeine . . . Nationalökonomie’ [1894–8]: MWG III/1.531,

580, 599.
79 There is little change to the “1920” text, but Weber now allows that the vocational loyalty of the

Pietist has something in common with that of ‘officials’: see the insertion at [i.145]+, previously missing
at [XXI.56].
80 ‘The Rural Community’ [1904], 333–4; »Objektivität« WL 201.
81 ‘Zur Lage der bürgerlichen Demokratie’, MWG I/10. 269–70 (US), 263, 279 (quotations).
168 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

was that the future society would be more regulated and increasingly subject to
‘bureaucratic administration’.82 Something like this prediction would be repeated
in much shriller tones a decade later at the close of ‘Agriculture in Antiquity’: ‘today
capitalism is the pioneer of the bureaucratization of the economy’.83 However, the
foundation of Weber’s argument had now shifted in a crucial respect. (Outside the
years 1902–8 there is never outright discontinuity in Weberian thought; only
tectonic shifts.) He was no longer lecturing on the modern economy and the future
degeneration of capitalism, but analysing the deep historical foundations of bur-
eaucracy. By 1907–8 bureaucracy not capitalism had become the formal centre of
his thinking, even if bureaucratization penetrated both the capitalist private econ-
omy as well as the state structure.
This led to a second set of conclusions to ‘Agriculture in Antiquity’, alongside
those relating to the city. The later Roman Empire had ‘become a service state
[Leiturgiestaat]84 on the Hellenistic and Egyptian model’, and through a web of
‘monopolies, state workshops, compulsory guilds, collective responsibility . . . for
taxes and all the other forms of compulsory service . . . the ancient state had slowly
but surely suffocated [ancient] capitalism.’ From this it followed that ‘Every bur-
eaucracy has the tendency through proliferation to achieve the same effect. Ours
too.’85 In this conception bureaucracy—unlike capitalism—is in some sense an
ever-present possibility, even if its embodiments are historically specific and vari-
ous. So Weber could conceive of European and Mediterranean history as a
‘historical continuum which leads from the Pharaohs to our Kultur’ today, where
the starting point was given by a Pharaonic Egypt that had ‘first realized two
institutions in a perfection never yet repeated: 1. The principle of compulsion:
the binding of property to state function . . . and 2. bureaucratic administration.’86
Since the bureaucratic option—what Weber calls ‘bureaucratism’—was ever-
present, preaching the dangers of modern bureaucracy in an article on ancient
history was no more inapposite than lecturing the Verein für Sozialpolitik about
Pharaonic Egypt and its close approximation to modern Germany—as he did in
1909.87 So bureaucracy had a number of advantages over capitalism as a conceptual
focus. First, given its tendency to proliferate within and outside the state, it was
almost equally comprehensive in its range. Next, the ever-present nature of bureau-
cracy made it more usable as a transhistorical sociological category, alongside other
timeless categories he had already identified (such as feudalism).88 This was in sharp
contrast to capitalism, broken-backed between the ancient and modern worlds.
But, above all, bureaucracy could be construed by Weber as purely rational when

82 ‘Allgemeine . . . Nationalökonomie’ [1894–8]: MWG III/1.525, 533, 531.

83 MWG I/6.723–4. 84 From classical Greek: leitourgia.
85 MWG I/6.720, 721, 723, resp. 86 Ibid. 706 (cf. 725), 438, resp.
87 [Die wirtschaftlichen Unternehmungen der Gemeinden], MWG I/8.362.—On ‘bureaucratism’:

MWG I/22–4.156. This term, like rationalism, feudalism, and capitalism, has the virtue of signalling a
cast of mind and not just an object—bureaucracy—though it is hard to stand out against all reference
to the latter.
88 MWG I/6.322; cf. MWG I/22–4.380–453.
 1905–1908: Going into Hibernation 169

capitalism could not, although this idea would not be set out explicitly until he
turned to the treatment of ‘bureaucratism’ in ‘Economy and Society’ after 1910.89
So ‘Agriculture in Antiquity’ was an important step. It registered what was really
the only first-order, conceptual movement in Weber’s thought subsequent to the
appearance of the PE. The conceptual centre of his conception of modernity was
not to be capitalism uncertainly defined and only loosely linked to rationality, but
bureaucratism that was rationalizing by definition. This movement of thought
sealed the reversal of his earlier career movement in 1894, when he moved away
from the law to take up a post in economics. Having exited economics as a faculty
by resigning his chair in 1903, he had now come “back to law”, albeit in a very
unusual way: that is, he used legal formalism as the principal resource for the
conceptual construction of an interdisciplinary ‘sociology’ centred on formal ra-
tionality, with the institutional centre of that sociology lying in the legal–rational
rule or Herrschaft of lawyer–bureaucrats. After 1908 a holistically conceived capit-
alism was never again the subject of sustained theoretical reflection by Weber, even
if its contemporary historical centrality was undoubted. In a broader perspective,
this was a movement away from the economistic milieu associated with Marx and
socialism, the Verein für Sozialpolitik and ‘the social question’, back to the legal and
rational roots of classical liberalism and the drive to renew this.90 At the same time
Weber was completing a movement opened by the PE, with its pioneering
construction and elevation of rationality. As noted (I.7–8), the principal textual
argument of the PE is not an argument about capitalism (the movement from
Protestantism to capitalism), but an argument about rationality (the origins of
modern secular rationality in a rationalizing religious asceticism). So the further
development of his views away from capitalism in 1907–8 did not imply any
repudiation of the text overall. If that had been the case, the PE could not have been
republished. Nonetheless it was to all outward appearances a blow to a work
entitled ‘The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism’, which would require
careful explanation in 1919 [i.4–13]; and if an intellectual movement was designed
to cast doubt on the merits of reissuing the text in largely unaltered form in
1907–8, this was surely it.
However, there was another, equally weighty reason—in this case, an attraction
rather than an obstruction—causing Weber to set aside the continuation and
development of the religious component of the PE. But where the operation of
his shifting thinking about capitalism was a silent process of thought, the impetus
here was external and decisive. It was, in brief, Ernst Troeltsch. We have already
seen how, even in 1905, Weber was looking towards Troeltsch’s work to supersede
his own, because of his belief that the hypotheses of the interdisciplinary thinker
must be left to the empirical testing of the specialist, and this was especially so when
Troeltsch was such an unusual, one might even say Weberian, specialist: someone
who, albeit within the confines of a single discipline (theology), was prepared to

89Sociology of Herrschaft [c.1911–14], MWG I/22–4.157–234. Below II.7.iii.

90See my essay ‘From the “Spirit of Capital” to the “Spirit” of Capitalism: The Transition in
German Economic Thought between Lujo Brentano and Max Weber’, HEI 35 (2009), 62–92.
170 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

present his views in ‘a comprehensive work’, and in a chronological perspective

hardly less broad than Weber’s own.91 In 1905 Weber had had in mind Troeltsch’s
long essay on ‘Protestant Christianity and Church in the Modern Era’ (1905–6).
But in April–May 1907 Troeltsch took a further step when he announced to
friends that he was embarking on a ‘work on “The Christian Church and
the Social Problem”’, better known to posterity as his great work on The Social
Teachings or Doctrines (Soziallehren) of the Christian Churches and Groups
(1908–12), a review of the workings of Christian ideas within their social context
from the early Church onwards.92 Now, when he was writing ‘Protestant Chris-
tianity’ in 1905, the religious–historical component of the PE (Part II) had not
been available to him except during the (admittedly extended) interval he allowed
himself to revise the proofs.93 The fact that Troeltsch decided to retread much of
the ground he had only just covered in ‘Protestant Christianity’—above all the
Lutheran Reformation in the sixteenth century and the “Weberian” epoch of the
seventeenth century—was a remarkable testimony to the power of Max Weber’s
‘over-mighty personality’ upon him, and of a need fully to come to terms with the
PE and ‘“Churches” and “Sects” in North America’.94 In this respect the Social
Doctrines is a central text in the early reception history of the PE: it stands as a
religious equivalent to Werner Sombart’s “second wave” of studies of capitalism

91 Weber to von Below, 23.[9].05, Nachlaß Max Weber 30/4 Bl. 130.
92 Troeltsch to Adolf Harnack, 19.5.07, cit. F. W. Graf, »endlich große Bücher schreiben«, in
F. W. Graf and Trutz Rendtdorff (eds), Ernst Troeltschs Soziallehren, Troeltsch-Studien, Bd. 6
(Gütersloh, 1993), 27–50, here 30–1. On 28 April Troeltsch had described the new project more
elliptically as “social historical studies”: to Friedrich von Hügel, loc. cit.
93 The manuscript of ‘Protestant Christianity’ was sent to the publisher ‘at the latest at the

beginning of April 1905’ (Volker Drehsen, ‘Editorischer Bericht’, KGA 7.67), although usage of
Part II of the PE, published in June, is clear from both text and citations: e.g. ‘Protestantisches
Christentum’, 453–6. But while Troeltsch was enormously impressed by the PE and harboured a sense
of inferiority in regard to Weber’s grasp of the social and secular working of religion comparable to
Weber’s respect for Troeltsch’s authority in matters religious, he could not alter the design of a text that
was already complete in draft. The only component of the PE he could absorb at all thoroughly was
Part I, from 1904; but so far as religion is concerned, this offers prolegomena only. In this sense the
Soziallehren was a project ‘waiting to happen’ from the moment Part II of the PE was published.
94 Ernst Troeltsch, ‘Meine Bücher’, in Die Philosophie der Gegenwart in Selbstdarstellungen (Leipzig,

1923), 9.—Troeltsch also traced the origins of the Soziallehren to a commission to review a book
(Martin von Nathusius, Die Mitarbeit der Kirche an der Lösung der sozialen Frage) ‘for the Archiv [ für
Sozialwissenschaft: Soziallehren]’, 950 n. 510. However, this review commission almost certainly came
from Weber. Troeltsch insists here (very fairly) that he did not go down the road of “sociological”
enquiry except to serve his own purposes, which included a prior interest in the social functions served
by Christian churches. Still it was only the existence of Weber that gave him the confidence to enter on
this inquiry on such a grand scale. In this sense we may say that without Weber the Soziallehren would
not have existed.—Troeltsch’s autobiographical statement is surely right in locating the principal
impact of Max Weber as falling in the years after the composition of the PE: ‘Meine Bücher’ 5–6.
Troeltsch was an exceptionally self-aware man, and I must prefer his own delineation of his relations
with Max Weber to the contrary thinking of Friedrich Wilhelm Graf, who in a series of splendid essays
supposed that the most significant moment of intellectual dialogue between Weber and Troeltsch
occurred earlier, c.1898–1904, yet operated primarily via unwritten or unpreserved sources: However,
see now an important restatement of his views in Fach Studien zu Troeltsch und Weber (Berlin/Boston,
2014), 1–79.
 1905–1908: Going into Hibernation 171

between 1909 and 1917 as a measure of the unique intellectual impact the PE had
on men who were major thinkers in their own right.95 But, if Weber had a great
impact on Troeltsch, Troeltsch’s impact on Weber was hardly less great, albeit as a
suppressant rather than a stimulus.
In the first of his “anti-critical” essays in defence of the PE (1907), Weber had
brushed aside the somewhat mechanical criticisms of the obscure schoolteacher
Karl Fischer with the remark that ‘an empirically [sachlich] fruitful critique in this
area of infinitely interwoven causal connections would only be possible given a
mastery of the source material, something which eludes him.’ He then added a
note: ‘I await such a critique from the theological side as the most competent . . . ’96
This remark, with its pointed emphasis, was written in April or May 1907,97 and
was almost certainly an allusion to Troeltsch’s new project. It is inconceivable that
the two men had not discussed this step, which was predicated on their interrela-
tionship and had such significant practical consequences for them both. Now
anticipation of the future appearance of Troeltsch’s work did not decisively rule
out the kind of limited revision of the PE that Siebeck and Weber had in mind.
Indeed it may well be that Weber’s acceptance of Siebeck’s proposal to reissue a
largely unaltered PE, a decision also taken in April 1907,98 was initially encouraged
by the knowledge of Troeltsch’s new project. He felt he could proceed with a
minimal reworking with a clear conscience, since the prospect of any more
thoroughgoing revision and completion was now definitively set aside until
Troeltsch’s work should have been completed. Thus the remark announcing that
he was looking forward to a ‘most competent’ theological review and critique is
attached to precisely that point in his “anti-critical” essay where he announces that
he can no longer put off issuing a new, separate edition of the PE. But however this
may be, Weber’s position swiftly mutated from viewing Troeltsch as an excuse for
republishing the PE with only a modicum of work attached, into one that justified
putting off republication altogether.
No doubt he might have had qualms about such a procedure had he thought of
Troeltsch as an opponent—Weber was not going to entrust the review of his
interdisciplinary hypotheses to just anyone. But he knew that Troeltsch was
extremely receptive to his way of thinking, without being a mere servile imitator.
He could no doubt gauge this directly through personal interchange in Heidelberg,
but we can measure the degrees of affinity and sympathy through printed testi-
mony. Here Troeltsch’s 1906 address on ‘The Significance of Protestantism for the
Origins of the Modern World’ to the German Historians’ Conference at Stuttgart

95 i.e. beginning with ‘Der kapitalistische Unternehmer’, AfSS 29 (1909), 689–758, through Die

Juden und das Wirtschaftsleben (1911), Der Bourgeois (1913), Luxus und Kapitalismus (1913), Krieg und
Kapitalismus (1913), and culminating in the second, and entirely recast, edition of Der moderne
Kapitalismus (1916–17). Cf. Troeltsch, ‘Max Weber’ [1920], Max Weber zum Gedächtnis, 44.
96 ‘Kritische Bemerkungen’, AfSS 25 (1907), 246 & n. 7. Original emphasis.
97 The manuscript was sent in on 29 April 1907 (Weber to O. Siebeck, Briefe), the day after

Troeltsch’s earliest recorded announcement of his new plan. However, the note could have been added
later at the proof stage.
98 Weber to Siebeck, 2.4.07, Briefe.
172 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

offers a fully developed position statement immediately prior to undertaking the

Soziallehren. In a display that was typical of his reception of Weber’s work,
Troeltsch was candid about the fact that he was standing in for Weber and, apart
from the significant shift from ascetic Protestantism to Protestantism (allowing for
the inclusion of Lutheranism), his title well captured the full scope of the PE.99 He
borrowed wholesale from the PE on Calvinism, asceticism, and capitalism; and
he conducted an overt dialogue with Weber personally.100 Yet at the same time, he
maintained his own intellectual identity and autonomy on matters of fundamental
concern, such as upholding the ‘freer and more inward’ character of Lutheranism
relative to Calvinism (something that for Troeltsch was crucial to its contribution
to modernity).101 On the delicate but important question of sectarian religion, he
reserved his position. He accepted that modern Calvinism had moved from being a
‘salvation institution’ (Weber’s term)102 to being a ‘free church’, but he did not yet
use the term ‘sect’ in a modern, Protestant context.103 Above all, his primary
agendum was the history and ideal truth of Christianity, and hence its ability to
withstand modernity, rather than (as in Weber’s case) the nature of modernity
conceived in irrevocably post-religious terms. And yet these differences were not
problematic, for they were the kind of differences that these two “modern” men
were well capable of sustaining and accepting, agreed as they were that the
mainstream of European history was a social and religious history; and that, in
their own day, there was an ‘anarchy of values’, of ultimate positions and prefer-
ences.104
Weber’s retreat from the PE was effectively announced in his second short reply
to Fischer, written in September–October 1907 (immediately prior to commence-
ment of work on ‘Agriculture in Antiquity’), though not published until the
beginning of 1908. It appeared in the same number of the Archiv für Sozialwis-
senschaft as the opening instalment of Troeltsch’s ‘Soziallehren’,105 and there can be
no doubt that, both as Troeltsch’s scholarly partner and as one of the journal
editors, Weber had seen what Troeltsch had to say. Such was the context for a new
announcement regarding ‘the direction of later investigations which will follow in
future towards the completion, interpretation and further checking’ of ‘my argu-
mentation’ in the PE:106

99 ‘Die Bedeutung des Protestantismus für die Entstehung der modernen Welt’, HZ 97 (1906),

1–66, 1 n. 1.
100 Ibid. 28.
101 Ibid. 27. Note similarly the description of the modern ‘Christian idea’ (p. 47). Here, although

Troeltsch seeks an equitable balance between Lutheranism and Calvinism, his actual definition favours
his own understanding of Lutheranism: ‘the unlimited individualism of the Christian ideal of the
personality on the one hand . . . and on the other, the spirit of patience and accommodation directed
towards salvation and what lies beyond’.
102 Heilsanstalt: [XXI.18 n. 24; 37 n. 74, 42 n. 78, 52 n. 102].
103 ‘Die Bedeutung des Protestantismus . . . ’, 24; cf. 29–30, 35. Troeltsch uses the term ‘sect’ only

in a medieval pre-Reformation context, where its conventional status secondary and inferior to the
universal church is upheld: 60–1.
104 Troeltsch, ‘Protestantisches Christentum’, 379.
105 AfSS 26/1 ( January 1908), 1–56 (Troeltsch), 275–83 (Weber).
106 ‘Bemerkungen’, AfSS 26 (1908), 278 n. 3.
 1905–1908: Going into Hibernation 173
The fact that I cannot yet present these has its cause not so much in empirical [sachlich]
difficulties but partly in personal circumstances [health] which are of no concern here; partly
in some other [methodological] works of a quite different character—as anyone who has
glanced at the »Archiv« will know; and partly in the circumstance that in the meanwhile my
colleague and friend E. Tröltsch has, in the happiest manner, taken up a whole series of the
problems which lay along my route, in accordance with his own sphere of thought
[theology], and I wished to avoid useless parallel work (at a point where he could command
far greater empirical knowledge).
This was the moment at which Weber practically set aside his interest in the PE—
not unconditionally, but indefinitely. It is true that this renunciation was followed
by an expression of the hope that he would get back to the major work of
developing the PE in 1908, and that ‘in the meanwhile [he would] at least be
able to review the essays for a separate edition in the spring’.107 Perhaps so. But
Weber knew that his publisher Siebeck would be reading what he had written, and
in reality this was the language of mañana. It was a language Weber understood
perfectly, and he did not hesitate to confront the Siebecks, father and son, with it:
‘Later: everything!, now: nothing!’108 Even the limited revision and republication of
the PE was being consigned to a receding future, while Weber’s attention had
shifted to work on other projects—beginning with ‘Agriculture in Antiquity’.
So Weber’s “Protestant” project (PE and PS) was given a dual quietus in 1907–8,
on both its capitalist and religious sides. In such a situation it was understandable
that the claims of Troeltsch, a symbol of Weberian success and academic impact,
rather than Weber’s retreat or sidestep over capitalism, should become the principal
explanation for the failure to develop the PE. Troeltsch’s superior qualifications as a
specialist theologian would be cited in this way in 1907; in 1910; and again in the
final PE text of 1920 [i.206 n. 1]+ and at the opening of the ‘Protestant Sects’ [i.207
n. 1]. By 1910, having seen a fair proportion of the ‘Soziallehren’ in article form in
the Archiv, Weber could state still more confidently that ‘So far as my own, earlier
studies permit me to make a judgement, I can see no decisive point of any kind,
where I would have reason to go against [Troeltsch’s] portrayal.’109 In particular he
had been able to witness Troeltsch’s announcement of the ‘sect type’ as one of the
fundamental social doctrines of historic Christianity in March 1909—a hitherto
unprecedented movement and concession by the latter.110 Troeltsch meanwhile
had also described Weber’s ‘empirical findings regarding Calvinism’ as ‘correct in
all essentials’.111 Now the fact that the PE had been empirically “tested” and upheld
by an esteemed specialist would not deter Weber from returning to the field of
religious–historical enquiry after 1912, once the Soziallehren had been completed;
but so far as the presentation of post-Reformation Protestantism was concerned,
this would remain in the form laid down in 1904–7, with only minor alterations.
Thus by 1910 talk of the continuation and completion of the original PE now lay

107 Loc. cit. 108 Weber to Oskar Siebeck, 10.2.08, Briefe. 109 Ibid. 178.
110 ‘Die Soziallehren der christlichen Kirchen’, AfSS 28.387–417, here 387–407; cf. SL 358–80,
and PE [i.153n. 1]+ referring to Troeltsch AfSS 28.391n. 194.
111 ‘Die Kulturbedeutung des Calvinismus’ [April 1910], KGA 8.150.
174 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

explicitly in the past rather than in an unreal future. Hence in 1909–10 language of
the kind ‘Had I continued my essay . . .’, where failure to do so was to ‘my lasting
disadvantage’.112 If he retained ‘the hope of continuing . . . [his] work’, it related
only to ‘those parts’ of it touching on the sectarian communities, Quakers and
Baptists—this after all was the elementary deficiency that formally remained, so
long as the essay on ‘Protestant Sects’ was unpublished. However, he could say
nothing of this in 1910, and adhered instead to a line that was already implicit in
the PE in 1905 [XXI.3 n. 3]: that any continuation ‘presupposes of course a
renewed stay in America’—a possibility that had now receded to vanishing
point.113

112 ‘Antikritsches’, 177, 201, resp.; cf. 194 n. 23, 196 n. 28, 199 n. 33. Emphases added.
113 ‘Schlusswort’, 566 n. 10 at 567–8. At this period Weber’s speculative travel plans focus on
Russia, whereas he never voiced a wish to return to America at any date after 1904.
 2
The “Anti-Critical” Essays

The years 1908–12 represent the low-water mark for the PE. Weber inserted
occasional comments provoked by new publications in his copies of the original
articles, but, insofar as his neurasthenia would allow for any fixity of purpose, his
attention was now fixed elsewhere. From mid-1909 onwards this increasingly
meant his work for the multi-volume Handbuch der politischen Oekonomie (pub-
lished as the Grundriss der Sozialökonomik, Outline of Socio-Economics), which in
the years 1910–14 expanded from a role that was principally editorial, accompanied
by a modest series of short articles, to the point in January 1913 where he would
become absorbed by ‘my great contribution (Economy and Society . . . )’, ‘an
integral sociological theory and presentation, which places all the major forms of
social community in relation to the economy’.1 The first milestone along this road,
reached in the spring of 1910 after a year’s work and ‘endless correspondence’, was
the drawing-up of a plan for the entire work, listing all the contributions, their
authors, and projected length.2 Another major preoccupation in 1909–10 was
planning and preparation for the launch of the German Sociological Society at its
inaugural meeting Frankfurt in October 1910 where, although Weber had not
been one of the originators, his role as an organizer and participant was more
prominent than that of anyone else.3 He did not cease to reflect on religion; but it is
symptomatic that his only significant religious interest during these years was in
Leo Tolstoy and Russian religion, a subject well outside the agenda of the PE. As a
result, when Tolstoy died in November 1910, Weber allowed an announcement to
appear that he would write an essay on ‘Tolstoy’s Ethics’, though the announce-
ment was as far as it went, and even this appeared only in Moscow.4 Such was the
alien context within which the two “anti-critical” essays were written in 1909–10:
‘Anti-Critical Remarks [Antikritisches] Regarding the “Spirit” of Capitalism’, pub-
lished in January 1910, and the ‘Anti-Critical Last Word Regarding the “Spirit of

1 Resp. Weber to Siebeck, 23.1, 30.12.13, Briefe.

2 Weber to Siebeck, 23.3.10; see their correspondence passim, 23–31.5.09, 2.3–4.6.10, Briefe.
3 Weber was on the Vorstand or executive of the Society from its first meeting in March 1909. At

the inaugural conference, at least two of the principal speakers (Troeltsch, Kantorowicz) were there
because of Weber. For his prolific oral contributions: GASS 431–83.
4 Edith Hanke, Prophet des Unmodernen (Tübingen, 1993), 171–2. For Weber’s consent to the

announcement: Georg Mehlis to Paul Siebeck, 21.11.10 (the day after Tolstoy’s death), Briefe II/6.333
n. 3. For his retreat and failure to write: Briefe: c.24.7.11 (Rickert), 26–7.9.11 (Camilla Jellinek),
12.11.11 (Helene Weber). Still, his interest in the subject was real enough: e.g. at Frankfurt, 21.10.10,
GASS 466–7.
176 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

Capitalism”’ published the following September, both written in reply to attacks by

the neo-Rankean historian Felix Rachfahl in the periodical press.
Now, because the PE has been the subject of controversy to an unprecedented
degree—this is an obvious function of its interdisciplinary range—it has always
been open to those loyal to the text to claim that close attention to the anti-critical
essays would clarify the meaning of the original.5 In the same spirit, these essays are
frequently reprinted today in conjunction with the PE as if they were essential to its
understanding;6 indeed, it has even been argued that it is only through these essays
that we can clarify the “problematic” of the PE.7 But this conventional (and not so
conventional) wisdom is mistaken. The anti-critical essays could not supply a magic
key to the understanding of the PE, and they have not stilled controversy, because
of the elementary facts of Weber’s intellectual biography: these essays are extrane-
ous to the history of the PE, since at the time they were written he had set the text
aside as an intellectual and publishing project. Here it should be borne in mind
that, amply conceived though it was, Rachfahl was not part of the target audience
for the PE because he was neither a theologian nor a social scientist. He was instead
what Weber was not: a historian in the ‘narrower’ sense of the term, without any
sense of interdisciplinarity, and as a matter of personal fact one of the narrowest of
these.8 Furthermore, focus on the intellectually trivial criticism of Rachfahl diverts
attention from the real reception of the PE during Weber’s lifetime, which was
being carried on at an entirely different level of significance. Besides the works of
Ernst Troeltsch between 1906 and 1912, or the “second wave” of Werner Som-
bart’s works on capitalism after 1909, we should also note the reception of the PE
by the liberal economist Lujo Brentano, and by second-order figures such as
Gerhard von Schulze-Gaevernitz, Moritz Bonn [i.81 n. 3]+ and Hermann Levy,9
as well as another major thinker of whom (in this context) Weber seems to have
been unaware, the theologian Karl Holl.10 All of these writers were intellectually
and culturally significant in a way that Rachfahl was not; none of them paid any
attention to the anti-critical essays of 1910; and of course Weber did not expect
them to do so. Weber’s own want of interest is further borne out by the essays’

5 Ephraim Fischoff, ‘The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism: The History of a

Controversy’, Social Research, 11 (1944), 53–77, esp. 54–68.

6 See the editions of the PE by Wells and Baehr (Harmondsworth, 2002), xxi–xxiv; Grossein

(Paris, 2003), xxxiii, xxxviii–xlii; Kaesler (Stuttgart, 2004), 22–4; MWG I/9. This is not to deny (of
course) that these texts should have their own editions, and one must be grateful for their multilateral
(Weber, Troeltsch+critics) assembly by Johannes Winckelmann in Kritiken und Antikritiken
(Gütersloh, 1978), as for the unilateral (Weber only) English translation, The Protestant Ethic
Debate, ed. D. J. Chalcraft and A. Harrington (Liverpool, 2001).
7 Wilhelm Hennis, Max Webers Fragestellung (Tübingen, 1986), 10–11.
8 ‘Kritische Studien I’ [1906], WL 216; cf. ‘Antikritisches’, 178, 181; ‘Schlusswort’, 558, 564 n. 8,

566 n. 10.
9 See my essays ‘From the “Spirit of Capital” to the “Spirit” of Capitalism: The Transition in

German Economic Thought between Lujo Brentano and Max Weber’, HEI 35 (2009), 62–92; ‘Max
Weber, Werner Sombart, and the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft’, ibid. 36 (2010), 71–101. On Levy:
below II.4 at n. 56.
10 See an essay ‘The Lutheran Reception of the “Protestant Ethic” ’ in my forthcoming collection

Max Weber in Context (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz).

 The “Anti-Critical” Essays 177

omission from the Collected Essays on the Sociology of Religion. At no time did he
consider including them during the conception and working-out of this project in
the years 1915–20, once his interest in the PE had been renewed. But while these
considerations are conclusive as to the marginal status of the anti-critical writings,
still they raise a question: why, if the PE was in a state of suspended animation, did
he bother to write these essays at all?
We can be in no doubt of Weber’s low view of these two essays. The first was ‘as
sterile’ as the ‘wholly sterile . . . criticism’ that provoked it. The second is described
in practically identical terms as one of those ‘sterile polemics’ for which the Archiv
lacked space and for which ‘exclusive blame’ attached to the “critic”.11 This sense of
extreme negativity is well conveyed by the titles of the 1910 essays: they are ‘anti-
critical’, and if they are anything more, they are intended as simple repetition, or in
Weber’s word, ‘Resumé ’.12 In case there should be any doubt of his views, Weber
closed the first essay with the remark that ‘Everything that was said here, appears
already in my essays [of 1904–6].—Everything (with wholly irrelevant exceptions)
that Rachfahl has said, he took from them and “garbled”. If there is anyone who does
not believe that after what has been said . . . I advise him once more to read my
statements [in the PE] impartially after reading Rachfahl’s criticism, and in those
statements . . . I have not a single word to alter.’13 This last remark is, of course,
important as a testimony to Weber’s loyalty to the original PE and to its religious
subject matter (in particular), and would reappear in the revised text of 1920 [i.17 n.
1]+; but still it was hardly necessary to write two entire essays to say so. Dismissal of the
anti-critical essays goes a step further when he remarks à propos the revised PE in 1919
that ‘from the inevitably rather fruitless polemic against [Rachfahl] I have incorpora-
ted nothing in this edition’ [i.17 n. 1]+. The only apparent novelty in the subject matter
of the anti-critical essays when set against Weber’s previously published work lay in the
exposure of materials relating to the sects, above all in regard to the Netherlands.14 But
none of this was new in 1910, since it derived from the phase of work in 1907 that had
produced the as yet unpublished ‘Protestant Sects’—and such is the implicit premiss of
Weber’s remark in 1919–20 that he had taken ‘nothing’ from the 1910 essays. All that
remained in the revised text of the PE, therefore, were ‘a (very few) supplementary
references’ [i.17 n. 1]+. I itemize: the report of a conversation with a businessman about
Pietism in the Wuppertal [i.28]; a letter about a Reformed family in Lutheran
Hamburg [i.28 n. 2]+; and slightly more substantial a set of references to the discussion
of the interrelation between Protestantism and Dutch commercial prosperity in Sir

11 Resp. ‘Antikritisches’, 202; ‘Schlusswort’, 599. The first two-thirds of the ‘Schlusswort’

(555–79), prior to the Resumé, is set in small font, to signify its subordinate status—but no modern
edition reproduces this feature. Cf. Weber to Gisela Michels, 25.12.09, Briefe, on ‘a heap of
uninteresting detailed work which is absolutely repellent to me’.
12 ‘Schlusswort’, 554 (Contents). The refusal to reproduce these titles in English translation is a

revealing comment on the ahistorical mindset of the sociologist editors of these texts: The PE Debate,
ed. Chalcraft and Harrington, chs 6, 8; The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism, ed. P. Baehr
(Penguin, 2002), 244, 282.
13 ‘Antikritisches’, 202. 14 See esp. ‘Antikritisches’, 184–8; ‘Schlusswort’, 566 n. 10.
178 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

William Petty’s Political Arithmetick (1690) [i.23 & n. 1]+. It was not a lot—200 words
or so—and certainly not a “follow-up” to the PE that was worth ‘fully 75%’ (or so it is
claimed) ‘of the length of the original essays’.15 But still these swingeing dismissals
simply entrench the relevance of our question: if there was nothing to alter in the
original text of the PE and almost no new matter in the anti-critical essays, why was it
necessary to answer criticism so ostentatiously in 1909–10, especially when Rachfahl
opened his critique with glowing testimony to the ‘ample applause’ and ‘undivided
approval’ that had greeted the first appearance of the PE ?16 Since Rachfahl was neither
a leading intellectual, nor a leading historian, even in the eyes of those most stringently
committed to the cause of empirical accuracy,17 to devote attention to him could only
lend him an undeserved prominence—and so it has proven in fact.
Insofar as Weber had a positive motivation in 1909–10, it lay in his respect for
specialized knowledge, which formed the conventional component in his otherwise
unorthodox conception of academic Wissenschaft (“science”). For while he was
adamant that Wissenschaft could not generate Kultur and values—it could not tell
one “how to live”18—he nonetheless insisted that the empirical and specialist
testing of interdisciplinary hypotheses such as his own was essential to the collective
enterprise of Wissenschaft, which was itself one of the core values by which Weber
had chosen to live.19 What this meant in practice was that he conformed to the
requirements of specialized Wissenschaft but under duress—he was never quite the
‘proper scholar’20—and even the most ardent champion of the anti-critical essays
will not deny the evidence of duress within them: that they are disfigured by bad
temper, leading to a great deal of prolixity and repetition.21 The representatives of
specialist knowledge on this occasion were two. One, much less important, was
Rachfahl; the other, and the person by whom Weber allowed himself to be guided
on this occasion, was Ernst Troeltsch, because, as we have seen, at this date Weber
had entrusted the further development of the PE to him, in his capacity as the
theological “specialist” par excellence. As a result, personal relations between the
two men were at their closest in the years 1907–12—the period of the composition
of the Soziallehren;22 while Troeltsch had the further advantage that he inhabited

15 Wilhelm Hennis, Max Webers Fragestellung, 13. In fact Hennis’s arithmetic was poor—or

over-eager—since he assumed that the PE was all text and no notes; 50 per cent would be a more
realistic proportion.
16 F. Rachfahl, ‘Kalvinismus und Kapitalismus’ [1909], in Kritiken und Antikritiken, 58.
17 Georg von Below felt obliged to apologize to Weber for his selection of Rachfahl as a colleague at

Freiburg in 1914—a significant admission from such a source: cf. Weber to von Below, 10.7.14, Briefe.
But then there was a good deal more to von Below than the cult of empirical accuracy alone: see ‘The
Lutheran Reception of the PE ’, }I, in Max Weber in Context.
18 ‘Science as a Vocation’ [1917/19], MWG I/17.93.
19 Ibid. 105.
20 Cf. Weber to Emmy Baumgarten, 18.2.92, Jugendbriefe, 339.
21 Weber himself noted the obvious contrast between the ‘relentless’ nature of his answer to

Rachfahl and Troeltsch’s ‘generous and accommodating’ manner: ‘Schlusswort’, 555.

22 Cf. Weber to Tönnies, 19.2.09, Briefe, saluting the worth of ‘a “liberal” . . . theologian’.
 The “Anti-Critical” Essays 179

the world of academic journalism and debate to a much greater degree than Weber,
which lent an extra weight to his opinions.23
Since Rachfahl’s original attack in September–October 1909 ran to some 30,000
words and took Weber as its principal target, it was perhaps to be expected that, in an
academic environment that exalted the individual and assertive “personality” (a vogue
word of the day),24 some reply, however modest, would be deemed necessary. Hence
Weber’s offer to reply in the journal where the attack was published, the Internationale
Wochenschrift für Wissenschaft, Kunst und Technik. However, the editor, Paul Hinne-
berg, called on Troeltsch to reply instead, even though he had been only a secondary
target for Rachfahl, for the good journalistic reason that Troeltsch was personally
known to Hinneberg, and now sat on the editorial board of the Internationale
Wochenschrift.25 With this rebuff it seems that Weber lost interest. Yet he then,
with great reluctance, agreed to take up the cudgels ‘at the instance of (disinterested)
friends’.26 This almost certainly means the interested and adept Ernst Troeltsch.
According to Paul Honigsheim, Weber’s Boswell on this occasion, it was Troeltsch
who insisted and told him, “You must reply”—by implication in the Archiv, since no
other outlet was available. Weber remained reluctant, above all, because he had little
new to say: “I could at most cite a few characteristic English authors from the
period—[there is] one [William Petty], to whom Hermann Levy has drawn my
attention . . . —and then present the reader with the alternative: whether he preferred
to believe these English ascetic Protestants or Rachfahl.” But Troeltsch was adamant:
“You can do [i.e. say] what you like . . . but in any event you must reply.”27 So it was
that Weber was drawn into writing the first reply. This (together with Troeltsch’s own
contribution) provoked another 20,000-word article series from Rachfahl, leading in
turn to Weber’s ‘Anticritical Last Word’. This second essay, still more abundantly
fuelled by bile than its predecessor, was as long again, though originally he had meant
to write only ‘half a printer’s sheet at most’ or eight pages, rather than forty plus.28
Felix Rachfahl (b. 1867) was an enthusiastic but intellectually limited cultural
assimilator who, most unusually within the Catholic community of Wilhelmine
Germany, accepted that to be born a Catholic was a deficiency that he must try to
overcome. This made him a peculiarly ardent conformist who, within his chosen
profession of history, espoused devout adherence to formulaic Rankean empiri-
cism. He had been one of the small fry in the shoal of the orthodox who rushed to

23 This is one of the lessons of the Troeltsch Kritische Gesamtausgabe: e.g. KGA 2, 4, ‘Rezensionen

und Kritiken’ 1894–1900, 1901–14.

24 Cf. ‘Science as a Vocation’ [1917/19], MWG I/17.84.
25 Troeltsch’s essay on ‘Protestant Christianity’ (1905–6) appeared in Hinneberg’s multi-volume

project Die Kultur der Gegenwart. The Internationale Wochenschrift first appeared in 1907. Troeltsch
had been a Mitarbeiter since April 1909: ‘Editorischer Bericht’, KGA 8.144.
26 ‘Schlusswort’, 555.
27 Paul Honigsheim, ‘Erinnerungen an Max Weber’, Max Weber zum Gedächtnis, 265.—This

account was published only many years later, yet it agrees with the account in ‘Schlusswort’ (see n. 26);
in its evocation of Troeltsch; and in the one detail that can be checked: Weber’s indebtedness to
Hermann Levy in regard to William Petty (cf. ‘Antikritisches’, 185 n. 13). Honigsheim records
receiving an offprint of ‘Antikritisches’ from Weber, which could easily have been a repository for
contemporary memoranda on its origins: loc. cit.
28 To Edgar Jaffé, 11.7.10, Briefe. Troeltsch did not make any further reply.
180 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

attack Karl Lamprecht in a famous historians’ quarrel of the later 1890s, and his
attacks on Weber announced themselves in similar vein as wishing ‘to test the
scholarly soundness [Stichhaltigkeit] of [“Weber’s theory”] from the standpoint of
the historian’.29 Now Weber was in no danger of suffering the kind of critical
mauling that Lamprecht had undergone.30 The aggressively academic presentation
of the PE with its ‘undergrowth of footnotes’ [XXI.5 n. 4]; Weber’s own vehement
hostility towards Lamprecht [XXI.44 n. 79a]; his cultivation of good relations with
Georg von Below in 1904–5, one of Lamprecht’s principal critics; the support of
Ernst Troeltsch, an extremely weighty representative of “advanced” yet respectable
Wissenschaft; and Troeltsch’s apparently uncontested presentation of “Weberian”
theses to the Conference of German Historians in 1906—all these things made
such an outcome practically unthinkable. This was why Rachfahl felt obliged to
commence his account with an admission of Weber’s strength. Nonetheless, Rach-
fahl’s line of attack and the extremely unusual—hence vulnerable—nature of Weber’s
interdisciplinary procedure in the PE, with its constant oblique appeal to ‘the
perspectives which interest us here’ at the expense of conventional empiricism
[XX.12], make it plain why Troeltsch should be important to him at this juncture.
As a result, besides the simple (and as Weber would say, sterile) empirical defence of
propositions from the original text, the anti-critical essays wage a continual guerilla
warfare around the question of specialist knowledge. Rachfahl might be a “guild”
historian, the ‘historical “specialist”’ or ‘man in the know [Kenner]’, but he was also
guilty of a blinkered ‘departmental zeal’ and could make elementary mistakes that even
an ‘outsider’ such as Weber would not.31 He was indeed a ‘professor’, but he was also
‘professorial’ with that ‘well-known flavour of . . . petty, pedantic, verbal quibbling
and know-all complacency’ that were the essence of the “professorial”.32 Rachfahl’s
appeal to the criterion of ‘scholarly soundness’ was not mistaken in Weber’s eyes—
hence his apparently unlikely statement in 1919–20 that Rachfahl was ‘otherwise a
scholar whom even I esteem’. But (Weber insisted) Rachfahl was wrong according to
his own empirical standards: ‘He had entered a sphere which he had not really
mastered’ [i.17 n. 1]+33—which is indeed an apt comment on Rachfahl’s Catholic

29 ‘Kalvinismus und Kapitalismus’ [1909], in Kritiken und Antikritiken, 58; cf. 107.—In regard to

Lamprecht, see e.g. his articles ‘Deutsche Geschichte vom wissenschaftlichen Standpunkt’, Preussische
Jahrbücher, 83 (1896); ‘Über die Theorie einer kollektivistischen Geschichtswissenschaft’, Conrads
Jahrbücher für Nationalökonomie und Statistik, 13 (1897), 659–89; ‘Kalvinismus und Kapitalismus’,
Kritiken und Antikritiken, 116 & n. 39. Rachfahl’s political conformism is a subject for another place,
but his public veneration for the Kaiser before 1918 followed by an equally opportune cooperation
with Reinhard Frank in 1919 on the subject of Kann Kaiser Wilhelm II. ausgeliefert werden? (Berlin,
1919) is of a piece with his conventional academic loyalties.
30 Roger Chickering, Karl Lamprecht: A German Academic Life (New Jersey, 1993), Part II.
31 ‘Antikritisches’, 178–9, 181, 191; ‘Schlusswort’, 558, 564 n. 8 at 565, 566 n. 10 at 567.
32 ‘Schlusswort’, 555–6; cf. ‘Antikritisches’, 202. This is a early example of Weber’s generic vilification

of professors, which culminated in his abuse of them as literati in 1916–18: see my ‘Max Weber and the
literati ’, in Kay Waechter (ed.), Grenzüberschreitende Diskurse (Wiesbaden, 2010), 243–78.
33 This repeats Weber to von Below, 10.7.14, Briefe. Cf. Weber to Sombart, 2.12.13, Briefe, where

he finds Sombart’s critical rip-off of the PE in Der Bourgeois quite as lacking in insight into his work as
Rachfahl’s critique, ‘but I don’t confuse him with you: he has “knowledge”, you do not’. On the other
side of the coin, Sombart had brains and originality which Rachfahl did not.
 The “Anti-Critical” Essays 181

origins (though Weber draws no attention to these) and on his antipathy, whether
as a secularizer or as a more or less lapsed Catholic, to historical explanation driven by
Protestant religiosity.34
The conclusion to a defence couched in these terms was the resort to properly
qualified specialists, to ‘intensive cooperation with specialist theologians’,35 which,
of course, meant Troeltsch. (The fact that neither Troeltsch nor his theologian
contemporaries were sure that he was just a specialist does not alter the way in
which Weber chose to present him; nor his assured, and eminently conventional
career path, which in 1914–15 would lead him to the very pinnacle of the academic
hierarchy—a chair in Berlin.) Weber admitted in 1910, just as he had done in 1904
[XX.53], that his interest in the connections between ‘certain religious psycho-
logical sequences’ and ‘their consequences for bourgeois life’ was not the same as
the primarily religious enquiries of the theologians.
But this purely “sociological” work (such as, amongst the theologians, Troeltsch above all is
pursuing) must also be carried out. And this is certainly best done by the [theological]
specialists themselves, for whom we outsiders can only point out certain formulations of
problems with which we meet here and there in our path and with our angle of vision, and
which may also be of interest to them, whether or not their attitude towards our attempts is
one of criticism or agreement. To do this was my hope and it is from that side, and not from
the occasional dilettantish interventions of quibblers such as R[achfahl], that I expect fruitful
and instructive criticism.36
Of course, this is no more than a reiteration of what Weber had been saying
between 1904 and 1907—again, there is no novelty here—and of his retreat from
the PE as a project. And since Troeltsch’s writing of the Soziallehren was now far
advanced (much of it had already appeared in the Archiv under Weber’s editorial
patronage), and to a conceptual agenda that Weber found entirely satisfactory,
there was little risk attached to the allegedly open-minded ‘hope’ of scrutiny he
expressed in 1910. The extent of his detachment from the PE by this date is laid
bare when the second and final answer to Rachfahl closes with a ‘positive resumé’ of
the arguments of the PE. This (Weber explains) is ‘solely for those who have not yet
read over my essays accurately. For other people this is superfluous, but in the
nature of things they are a vanishing minority.’37 It was an implicit declaration that
he now had no intention of reissuing the text. In lieu of a reissue, the most he was
prepared to do was to provide a twenty-page resumé for those who had no access to
the original, which had long since sold out.38 When he entitled his second answer
to Rachfahl a ‘Last Word’, this was not just the desire of the polemicist to have the
last word in debate—though it was this as well—but a closure of his own. It was the
‘last word’ he wished to say about the PE: not for ever—as usual Weber was playing
his cards close to his chest—but for the indefinite future.

34 See, e.g. ‘Kalvinismus und Kapitalismus’, in Kritiken und Antikritiken, 116: ‘Exaggeration of the

influence of religious factors and doctrines—that is the characteristic feature of the troeltsch–weber
thesis.’
35 ‘Schlusswort’, 596. 36 Ibid. 596 n. 28. 37 Ibid. 555.
38 Ibid. 579–99; cf. Paul Siebeck to Weber, 17.7.06, cit. MWG II/5.119 n. 3.
 3
Recalled to Life: From the ‘Protestant
Ethic’ to ‘Economy and Society’
and the World Religions

At this point, the sociologist will no doubt be tempted to breathe a great sigh of
relief and exclaim ‘The Protestant Ethic is dead—long live Economy and Society!’1
Certainly this has been the instinctive reaction of the vast majority of Weber’s
predominantly secular, social scientific readers in the later twentieth century, and
for understandable reasons. On the face of it, there was little attraction for them in
a work whose primary focus was religious. In 1960 Reinhard Bendix, a pioneer of
the erudite, historical–sociological reading of Weber, would state that ‘In his essay
on the Protestant ethic, Weber did not go substantially beyond the analysis of
theological doctrines and pastoral writings’—a verdict as notable for its ignorance
of Weber’s modern secular purposes as for its representative status.2 Bendix agreed
that it was undeniably his ‘most famous as well as most controversial book’, but still
it was a limited probe, which he then left behind; and if Weber himself had ‘moved
on’, modern readers could safely follow his example.3 Accordingly when in 1968
Guenther Roth, another deeply erudite Weberian and extremely sympathetic to the
value of historical explanation, offered what is (I believe) still the only extant
attempt at a comprehensive intellectual–historical genealogy for ‘Economy and
Society’, the PE did not feature. We read of Weber on medieval trading societies,
on ancient Rome, on the social constitution of the early Germanic peoples, and on
East Elbean agriculture; Weber at the Verein für Sozialpolitik and at the German
Sociological Society in 1910 and 1912—but there is no word on the PE.4
Meanwhile there is still no overall compositional history of the pre-war ‘Economy
and Society’ even today, however much ink has been spilt in detail, and we are

1 Gianfranco Poggi, ‘Historical Viability, Sociological Significance, and Personal Judgement’, in

G. Roth and H. Lehmann (eds), Weber’s Protestant Ethic (Cambridge, 1993), 304. I may not share
Prof. Poggi’s view, but I relish his candour.
2 Max Weber: An Intellectual Portrait (Berkeley, 1960), 63.
3 Ibid. 49, 83, resp.
4 Guenther Roth, ‘Introduction’, to Max Weber, Economy and Society (Berkeley, 1968), xxxv–lxvi.

(Prof. Roth’s 2013 supplement to this Introduction has not reopened questions of this kind.)
Wolfgang Schluchter has written a document-based, publishing history of Max Weber, both as
editor of the Grundriß der Sozialökonomik and as author of ‘Economy and Society’, in accordance
with the needs of MWG. But it bears no resemblance to the intellectual history outlined below:
‘Entstehungsgeschichte’, MWG I/24.1–92.
 Recalled to Life: 1910–1915 183

reduced to shapeless generality: ‘In the period from the end of 1909/beginning of
1910 Weber not only worked discontinuously at his chief contribution [“Economy
and Society”] for . . . the collective work originally called Handbuch der politischen
Ökonomie, then renamed Grundriss der Sozialökonomik on pragmatic grounds;
he also altered the disposition of his chief contribution several times during this
time . . .’5 (Even this apparently unobjectionable statement contains a significant
error: ‘Economy and Society’ was not Weber’s ‘chief contribution’ in 1910. Indeed,
if one was being absolutely strict, there was no article called ‘Economy and Society’
amongst the number of short articles Weber planned to write: it was a heading in
the Handbuch drafted by Weber, not a title for an author.)6
Now this is an extraordinary state of affairs when we consider that, by the
common consent of Max Weber and the vast majority of his readers, ‘Economy
and Society’ and the PE are his two most important texts, where ‘Economy and
Society’ is the master key to his entire intellectual output in the last seven years of
his life. But if they have no relation, or no examined relation, we are driven back to
the bleak perspective with which we opened: that, seen as an author, a thinker with
a body of ideas that, whatever the degree of their coherence, has a life and identity,
“Max Weber” does not exist. Of course, to make such a charge about the
scholarship of fifty years ago is in many ways unjust: authors such as Roth and
Wolfgang Mommsen7 were pioneers who were just beginning to reconstitute
salient components of that elusive encyclopaedist and interdisciplinarian “Max
Weber”. But today the need to re-create the whole man and his mental universe
is now overdue. Besides research into many of the individual components of
Weber’s œuvre, there has been a revolution in the textual basis of our knowledge,
which has proceeded with ever-increasing velocity since the Max Weber Gesam-
tausgabe commenced publication in the mid-1980s. Yet ignorance of the overall
course of his output in the years 1910–14, and of the central relation between the
PE and ‘Economy and Society’, has remained fundamentally unaltered.
Of course the views of the 1960s and the orthodoxy that has descended from it
are unsustainable; and one could not consign the PE to the grave without interring
‘Economy and Society’ in the same vault beside it. The simplest and most general
point to make is this: the PE is Weber’s first major statement regarding the ‘modern
Kultur’ of the Occident [XX.11, 53; XXI.107, 109]—or as we would say, Western
modernity—and of the central place of formal, technical and impersonal rationality
within it. It is not his only such statement nor even a complete one; but it is the
first; it is not superseded; and it is seminal. Almost everything in Weber’s subse-
quent œuvre, ‘Economy and Society’ above all, is a working-out from positions
established in 1904–5: that is, from the PE and the methodological essays that
surround and interpenetrate it. In terms of substantive statements about society and
Kultur, it is the PE that represents the crucial point of creative and intellectual
discontinuity in Weber’s life: this is his “breakthrough”, even if it was only

5 Wolfgang Schluchter, Die Entzauberung der Welt (Tübingen, 2009), 112.

6 ‘Stoffverteilungsplan’ [1910], Bk 1, III.4.
7 Max Weber und die deutsche Politik (Tübingen, 1959).
184 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

completed by the resolution of his ideas about capitalism when writing ‘Agriculture
in Antiquity’ in 1907–8. Any later movement in his thought, though no doubt
important to students of a canonical author, is secondary by comparison. Such, for
example, is the status of the switch in emphasis (it is no more), from identifying
modern Occidental Kultur as the pre-eminently rational product of a loosely stadial
scheme of historical development in 1904–5, relying on way-stations such as the
city economy, to viewing the same end point as the product of a linear process of
‘general rationalization’ starting with ancient Greece and the Jews of the Old
Testament (c.1912–14),8 whose cumulative fruit was the ‘specifically shaped
“rationalism” of Occidental Kultur’ [i.11].
The original plan for ‘Economy and Society’ (if we may speak of such a thing at
all), as drawn up by Weber in 1910, was very modest in scale with little hint of what
was to come. It was apparently a routine contribution to one of those collective
works of reference, the Grundriss der Sozialökonomik,9 in which German-language
scholarship led the world, by showing the extent to which Wissenschaft could be
realized as a corporate activity within a sympathetic cultural context. The original
commission was thus modest in length—it probably ran in total to about four
publishers “sheets” (sixty-four pages)—and only its three headings tell us some-
thing significant about the mind of the author:
a) Economy and law . . .
b) Economy and social groups (family and community association [Gemeindeverband ],
social ranks and classes, the state)
c) Economy and Kultur (critique of historical materialism)10
These headings illustrate the obvious formal contrast that sets the PE apart from
‘Economy and Society’: they are systematic and can in principle draw material from
any source, while the PE has a specific historical focus. On the other hand, the
overall subject of Weber’s interests is the same in each case: the Kultur of the
present-day Occident, an absolutely contemporary concern, but one that could be
understood only as the product of historical evolution, and the extent to which this
was in some open and catholic sense “economic”. Hence the close relation between
the two projects that is apparent from this first, embryonic conception.
Of the three headings, the first is the most straightforward and has been
sufficiently discussed above (I.7). While consideration of the law was excluded
from the PE in principle, the crucial importance of legally derived, formalistic

8 [Max Weber], ‘Vorwort’, GdSÖ Abt. I (Tübingen, 1914), vii; cf. Weber to Johannes Plenge,

11.8.13 Briefe [MWG II/8.305]; Historian, 224–6.

9 The final title derives from Paul Siebeck: to Max Weber, 15.4.14, Briefe II/8.625 n.1.

A considerable publishing history lies behind this, but I overlook that here.
10 ‘Stoffverteilungsplan’, Bk I, III.4, pr. Winckelmann, Hauptwerk, 151. In this facsimile the length of

articles in sheets is marked in by hand, and its omission from MWG I/24 is culpable. Although there are no
figures for any of Weber’s articles—presumably so that he could be flexible when computing the total
length of the whole—they give a clear indication of ordinary magnitude of the articles, which is about 3½–4
sheets per Arabic numeral heading. See further Weber to Siebeck, 31.7.09, saying that, with specified
exceptions, ‘The small articles include . . . all the articles of the first volume’, which is where ‘Economy and
Society’ was placed, as well as all of the articles allotted to him in other parts of the work: Briefe.
 Recalled to Life: 1910–1915 185

thinking was not, since it was basic to his conception of rationality. Any exclusion
was reluctant and problematic even in 1904, because for Weber the most familiar
part of the ‘law’ was private and commercial law, which in his view was the most
visible index of the operation of bourgeois and capitalist ‘interest’.11 In 1910 there
was no such constraint on considering this intimate connection, and if there is any
deviation from the particular structure of the PE here, there is none from the
underlying mindset of its author. The second heading (‘economy and social
groups’) resembles an agendum for further work set out at the end of the PE,
where Weber called for an investigation of the relationship between ascetic Prot-
estantism and ‘the mode of organization and the functions of social communities
from the conventicle right up to the state’ [XXI.109]. It was still closer to the
project he outlined to the German Sociological Society later in 1910 for a ‘Sociology
of associations [Vereinswesen]’, which draws on a similar classification of social
groups.12 This charts a spectrum from politically organized or recognized powers
through voluntary associations in general, as indicated by the slightly unusual term
Gemeindeverband or ‘community association’, through to the natural community
of the family. The family is absent from the listing in the PE, but in essence this is
the familiar Weberian dichotomy between compulsory institutions and meritocrat-
ic voluntary formations, which may be traced back to a religious origin in the
distinction between “churches” and “sects” that first appeared in the PE [XXI.64].
As ‘Economy and Society’ expanded, Weber would develop this heading a good
deal (under the categories of household, ethnic, market, political and national
communities, classes, ranks and parties),13 and the more diverse and expansive
category of the voluntary association would be set aside. We shall have to consider
why this might be and what the fate of this idea was;14 but still the original
derivation is clear. The third heading, on the relationship between ‘economy and
Kultur’, was in principle a rerun of the agenda of the PE. Religion is not specified
here, but given Weber’s religiously derived idea of Kultur, founded in ultimate
values, this only means the avoidance of explicitly religious materials; not of the
consequences of religiously derived conduct for modernity. So when he lectured
under an almost identical title in Vienna in 1918, ‘Economy and Society (Positive
critique of the materialist conception of history)’, this included a presentation of his
views on the sociology of religion,15 for as has been repeatedly noticed, the PE was
an essay on the formation of ‘modern Kultur’ [XXI.107]. No text for this article has
survived, but it seems clear (first) that it would have developed the criticism of
historical materialism and the vulgar Marxist theory of a material “base” being
simply reflected in an ideal “superstructure” [XX.18–19, 33; XXI.85 n. 33, 101
n. 69] previously made in the PE, and also the more sophisticated suggestion that,
regardless of the priority allotted to Kultur, Weber did not seek to introduce a

11 Below II.7.iii. 12 GASS 441–2.

13 MWG I/22–1.114–272. 14 Below II.8.iv–v.
15 Lebensbild, 617; cf. MWG I/22–4.723 & n. 43. Marianne Weber attended the second half of this

course (after Whitsun), and reports it as if it were all about religion—but then that was the part of the
course that would have interested her most.
186 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

spiritualistic construction of causation in history that was as ‘one-sided’ as the

materialism it sought to overcome [XXI.110]. However, it must be presumed that
the centrepiece of such an article would have been an exposition of the leading
peculiarity of modern Western Kultur: that this was a unique instance where the
principal unifying factor in the Kultur lay not in shared values with a religious
root—a situation that no longer existed—but in formally and economically rational
procedures. And this was a view first expounded in the PE.
So there were clear connections between all the components of the original,
compact conception of ‘Economy and Society’ and the PE. If we now move
forward from 1910 to 1914, when Weber prepared a quite new plan of contents,16
the size and status of ‘Economy and Society’ had been dramatically enhanced, and
the manuscript deposit is at its most voluminous—it runs to more than forty
publisher’s “sheets” instead of four17—then our scrutiny will reach a similar
conclusion, albeit the road is longer and more varied because the material is so
much larger and richer.
The primary, generic similarity between the PE and ‘Economy and Society’ is
that each is a kind of comprehensive statement about Weber’s intellectual universe
at a particular date, albeit one is more a microcosm and the other a macrocosm.
A more specific demonstration of their affinity lies in the fact that, as stated, the
principal conceptual categories of the three major sociologies in ‘Economy and
Society’ on religion (the typology of asceticism and mysticism), Herrschaft, and law
are all present in substantial form in the original PE. The PE is unlike the socio-
logies in that its use of these categories is integrated within a single historical
argument. Nonetheless all the categories are marked out there, to say nothing of
Weber’s closely related interest in the ‘Protestant casuists’ or proto-Weberian
categorizers such as Richard Baxter who made up the bulk of his primary source
material [XXI.86 n. 35].18 Of course, the terrain of ‘Economy and Society’,
extending across its various pre- and post-war drafts, cannot be reduced to these
three sociologies alone.19 Nonetheless, these are the central subject-specific socio-
logies that make up the core of the whole, and together they constitute c.80 per cent
of the pre-war drafts, which are far more complete (albeit still significantly
incomplete—they were perhaps two-thirds of an intended whole)20 than the
fragment Weber produced de novo in 1919–20. Furthermore, Weber’s discussions

16 This is laid out in essence in Weber to Siebeck, 30.12.13, Briefe, and published in June 1914, as

part of the ‘Einteilung des Gesamtwerkes’, Book I, Abt. III, in Grundriss der Sozialökonomik
(Tübingen, 1914), Abt. I, x–xi. Facsimile reproduction in (e.g.) MWG II/8.820–1 is much
preferable to the presentation in MWG I/24.148–9.
17 Forty sheets is the estimate of W. Mommsen and Hans Kippenberg: MWG I/22–1.26 n. 45,

I/22–2.87 resp. The figure is exaggerated by including the text of ‘The City’, which was certainly not
part of ‘Economy and Society’; but this is more than offset by the incomplete state of the pre-1914 text.
Weber’s own estimate was ‘c.30 sheets’, no doubt coloured by an authorial interest in underestimating
length: to Siebeck, 16.1.14, Briefe.
18 Cf. Historian, 39–40.
19 The principal pre-war texts standing outside these sociologies have been considered above

at n. 13.
20 This was Weber’s estimate in September 1917: Edith Hanke, ‘Editorischer Bericht’, MWG

I/22–4.747; cf. Briefe, II/7.722.

 Recalled to Life: 1910–1915 187

of the structure of ‘Economy and Society’ in correspondence and in the text show
that he himself highlighted these three units. So consideration of the relationship of
the PE to them is undoubtedly the most substantial test of its connections to
‘Economy and Society’ taken as a whole.
As before, the case of law is the most straightforward. Here the line between the
plan of 1910 and the pre-war texts on the sociology of law is at its clearest. There are
two, and these reflect quite precisely the two headings specified in 1910: ‘Economy
and law (1. Relationship in principle, 2. Epochs in the historical evolution of the
current position)’. No.1 is carried over into the 1914 contents plan under an almost
identical title,21 and no. 2 is an apposite description of the text commonly known
as the Sociology of Law with its broadly evolutionary framework. So it is reasonable
to assume that 1910 was their point of origin, even if they were subject to a
characteristic sequence of Weberian revision down to 1914.22 It is an additional
curiosity that in Weber’s 1914 plan of contents, the place of law should be so
modest, and also that, in a famous letter expounding the virtues of ‘Economy and
Society’ to Siebeck in December 1913, written with that plan in mind, law is
simply omitted.23 This raises the possibility that he envisaged reducing the size of
the Sociology of Law to cope with the enormous and unplanned incursion made by
the Sociology of Religion into ‘Economy and Society’ during 1913.24 However this
may be, it is clear that the category of legal formalism, the rationalizing evolution of
which supplies the basis for the Sociology of Law, takes us back, as always, to
Weber’s early legal education (c.1884–94) and to Roman law above all. Hence, for
example, the remark in this Sociology that it was ‘the purely formal’ qualities of
Roman law that were ‘the most important for world history’, where ‘world history’
in the form of the modern reception of Roman law can be traced right up to
Weber’s own day and to his own particular areas of interest in the early 1890s:
‘commercial law and the law of credit’ (Wechselrecht).25 The link between the
formalism of Roman law and the fundamental methodological and conceptual
innovations that were pioneered or applied in the PE remains unchanged.

21 ‘Einteilung des Gesamtwerkes’: ‘Economy and law, their connection in principle’. MWG,

following Weber’s own manuscript, has given this the title ‘The Economy and the [Social] Orders’:
MWG I/22–3.191. However, the latter title is far too general a description and does not correspond to
the content of the text, which is that given by the 1910 and 1914 plans. Thus it treats the economy and
only one “order”, the legal order. I suggest that the manuscript title is in fact a super-title, since it is
essentially the same as the overall title for ‘Economy and Society’ in the 1914 Contents plan: ‘The
Economy and the Social Orders and Powers’. The section on ‘Economy and Law . . . ’ then follows
immediately after this super-title. MWG is aware that there is a problem but understandably if
regrettably accepts the manuscript title without question: ibid. 141, 178.
22 Siegfried Hermes, ‘Editorischer Bericht’, 175–89, esp. 187–8.
23 30.12.13, Briefe; cf. ‘Einteilung des Gesamtwerkes’. The fact that the ‘Contents overview’ that

Weber promised for January emerges into documentary light only in March as the ‘Einteilung’ does
not mean (pace Wolfgang Schluchter, ‘Entstehungsgeschichte’, MWG I/24.74) that there is any
mystery about his reference here, since his letter follows the scheme of the ‘Einteilung’ so closely.
24 MWG I/22–3 ignores any canonically impious query of this kind.
25 Sociology of Law, MWG I/22–3.498, 590 resp. Compare the titles of Weber’s lecture courses in

1892–4: MWG III/1.801.

188 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

The pre-war Sociology of Herrschaft (or rule) may also be traced back to the 1910
plan. The plan heading regarding ‘Economy and social groups (family and com-
munity associations, social ranks and classes, the state)’ can point in several
directions. One, as we have seen, was towards voluntary associations; but another,
evidently, is the state, and the idea of the state as one of a variety of social groups or
associations within which rule could be exercised lies at the root of Weber’s
thinking on Herrschaft.26 Nonetheless, there was a considerable shift between
1910 and 1914. The text we have today was first revealed in a letter to the publisher
Paul Siebeck in January 1913, which is also the earliest documentary notice we
have pointing to the unique status of ‘Economy and Society’ within the variety of
Weber’s planned contributions to the Grundriss der Sozialökonomik. (In 1910 there
had been no less than eleven of these.) It was at this point, regardless of any process
of filiation, that the 1910 plan was buried.27 Weber had unilaterally decided that
the scope and weight of ‘Economy and Society’ would be radically upgraded, taking
as his pretext the breakdown of one of the other contributors to the Grundriss, Karl
Bücher. In lieu (he suggested),
I will see whether I can now send you my major contribution (Economy and Society—incl.
state and law) in the immediate future or [not] . . . Incidentally it will, I hope be one of the
better or best things that I have written. In reality it presents the outline of a complete
sociological doctrine of the state and has cost me some hard sweat . . . 28
So ‘Economy and Society’ was now to be organized around the ‘sociological doctrine
of the state’, where ‘state’ was not a real category but a comprehensible layman’s
shorthand for Weber’s sophisticated socio-political conception of Herrschaft. This
was now the centrepiece of an entry on ‘Economy and Society’ that had suddenly
and without warning become a ‘major contribution’. The letter also shows that a
text on this subject is already in existence (and modern scrutiny confirms this).29
Just when Weber started writing in so ambitious a fashion on this subject is largely
buried in darkness—it is yet another example of his secrecy. Herrschaft was an
undoubted feature of the empirical inquiry into associational life he proposed to the
German Sociological Society in 1910, but the likely point of origin for his own
theoretical and socio-political analysis seems to lie in the autumn of 1911, when we
find him explaining to Camilla Jellinek why he could not offer to produce a new
edition of her late husband’s magnum opus, Allgemeine Staatslehre. Besides current
commitments ‘in 2 directions’, as editor and contributor for the future Grundriss
der Sozialökonomik, he noted there was ‘now in addition a new work, which would
and should make intensive claims on me for (at least!! ) c.2–3 months’—and the last
quarter of 1911 is an unnoticed period when Weber was very productive.30 This is
speculative. What is not speculative is the fact that the treatment of Herrschaft was

26 Cf. WuG [1919–20], 128.

27 I agree with Wolfgang Mommsen, ‘Einleitung’, MWG I/22–1.22, whom I prefer to Wolfgang
Schluchter, ‘Entstehungsgeschichte’, MWG I/24.71. A historians’ conspiracy!
28 To Paul Siebeck, 23.1.13, Briefe.
29 See the ‘Einleitung’ and ‘Editorische Berichte’ by Edith Hanke in MWG I/22–4.
30 To Camilla Jellinek, 26–27.9.11; cf. Max to Helene Weber, 12.11.11, Briefe; Marianne to Helene

Weber, 28.12.11, cit. Edith Hanke, ‘Einleitung’, MWG I/22–4.62 & n. 1. See below II.8 at n.66.
 Recalled to Life: 1910–1915 189

the resolution to a problem with which Weber had been wrestling since writing the
PE. It was the fruit of a switch from conceiving of an uncertainly defined capitalism
and putative form of Herrschaft as his principal modern point of reference to its
replacement by a strictly defined, rational, bureaucratic rule in 1907–8.31 So, while
this is the only case where the categories of the PE are definitely superseded in
‘Economy and Society’, it is also true that the origin of the Sociology of Herrschaft
can be traced back to the PE. Note further that all the three classical types of Herrschaft
that Weber expounds after 1910 (legal–rational, charismatic, traditional) are present
in embryo in the PE. But this is so large a subject that it requires separate
treatment (II.7).
Last but far from least, there was religion. Religion stood outside the 1910 plan,
but here too the agenda of the PE effected a kind of forcible entry as Weber recast
‘Economy and Society’ in the course of 1913. The revolution in its status may have
begun with Herrschaft, but it did not end there. In the case of the Sociology of
Religion, unlike that of Herrschaft, the prior starting point is known: this was the
‘Economic Ethics of the World Religions’, a series of historical studies generically
similar to the PE and designed to serve as a supplement to it. So in order to
understand the genesis of the Sociology of Religion, and hence of ‘Economy and
Society’, we must devote prior consideration to the history of this project in the
years 1912–15, especially because this too is a history that has not been worked
out.32 However, we need hardly speak of a digression here, for not only were the
‘Economic Ethics’ the “other” major project of the last decade of Weber’s life
alongside ‘Economy and Society’, but they mark the point at which the PE, having
gone into hibernation in 1907–8, was recalled to life. As can be seen from Weber’s
first mention of this project to Paul Siebeck (which was not until 1915),33 it was
always his intention to publish the studies of the world religions together with the
PE as a single entity, and it was only the accident of war in 1914 that meant these
studies were first published individually in the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft, where
‘knowledge’ of the PE had to be ‘presupposed’.34
As noted earlier,35 our knowledge of the origins of the ‘Economic Ethics’ is
meagre: partly because of Marianne Weber’s ignorance, but also because Weber
refrained from telling Siebeck about it prior to the outbreak of war—a clear sign
that ‘Economy and Society’ and the Grundriss der Sozialökonomik were his (and
their) chief priority. But still there is just enough information to reconstruct the
genetic sequence of Weber’s work on religion at this time. The idea behind the

31 Above II.1.
32 The editors of the ‘Economic Ethics’ in MWG necessarily focus on the individual texts, and
devote only cursory attention to their placement within the complex overall evolution of the years
1911–14: Helwig Schmid-Glinzer, ‘Editorischer Bericht’ [1989], MWG I/19.31–4; Hans Kippenberg,
‘Editorischer Bericht’ [2001], MWG I/22–1.85–90. For a comprehensive view, they rely on the work
of Wolfgang Schluchter: esp. Religion und Lebensführung (Frankfurt, 1988). I offer a critical judgement
on this pioneering work below: II.5.ii.
33 To Paul Siebeck, 22.6.15, Briefe.
34 ‘Einleitung’, AfSS 41 (1915), 2.
35 Above I.1. Weber’s only known reference to the ‘Economic Ethics’ in pre-war correspondence

occurs in a letter to Werner Sombart (2.12.13), though it is clear from this that he did intend to
publish at some point.
190 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

‘Economic Ethics’ project had nothing to do with ‘Economy and Society’, as is clear
from its governing format: it was not organized around sociological types or
categories, but offered a series of historical studies of individual ‘world religions’.
This collection of historical units was a miscellany. Thus the term ‘world religions’
had no conceptual significance so far as Weber was concerned, and was only
defined empirically and historically, as ‘those five religious, or religiously condi-
tioned, systems for the regulation of life, which have known how to gather around
them great quantities [Mengen] of adherents: the religious ethics of Confucianism,
Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity and Islam.’36 (Elsewhere he refers simply
to ‘the . . . big religions’).37 Not only this, but the initial hesitation in this remark
reflects Weber’s doubts as to whether Confucianism was a religion at all.38 Mean-
while Judaism was a distinct object of study. It was not a world religion, regardless
of the title under which it appears (the only accurate title for the group as a whole
was ‘religions of Kultur’);39 nor, unlike the Asian religions, did it serve any detached
comparative function. Instead it was part of the group of ‘great theistic religions of the
Near East and Occident’ alongside Christianity and Islam;40 and it was present
because it was essential to understanding the early formation of Christianity.41
Now this project was not simply an exotic, historical entertainment, although in
wartime Weber’s need for displacement activity may have lent it some colouring of
this kind. If it had a single rationale, it was to work outwards from the established
basis supplied by the PE: to extend its horizons backwards in time (Judaism) and
outwards in space (to Asia), in directions congenial to Weber, because he was
already interested in them. Thus the original idea behind the ‘Economic Ethics’ was
quite modest in scope, and it did not (contrary to a widespread modern view)
constitute an intellectual revolution. Rather it was the last of a series of middle-
order projects that Weber ran independently of his work on the new edition of
Schönberg’s Handbuch in the years 1910–12, before ‘Economy and Society’
became all-consuming. For example, the projected enquiry into the press

36 AfSS 41 (1915), 1–2. (Note the unblinking equation here between ‘religions’, ‘systems for the

regulation of life’, and ‘religious ethics’.) The quantitative definition of a world religion could also take
in geographical extent: this was why Buddhism was a ‘world religion’ but Jainism was not: MWG
I/20.307. ‘World religion’ was in common usage by Weber’s day, and in the same relatively crude,
quantitative sense. For examples from authors he knew and read: F. Nietzsche, Morgenröte, }70 (1880),
Die fröhliche Wissenschaft (18872) }347, in Werke, ed. Karl Schlechta, i. 1058, ii. 213; E. Troeltsch,
‘Religion und Kirche’, PJb 81 (1895), 223–6; Eduard Meyer, Geschichte des Altertums (Stuttgart,
19072), i. 153, 155.—Hans Kippenberg, ‘Einleitung’, MWG I/22–2.54–62 (and many other essays),
suggests that C. P. Tiele, Professor of the History of Religions at Leiden from 1877, was of central
relevance to Weber in this context. However, the suggestion really reflects Kippenberg’s interest in
Tiele. The two men share a research field—Near Eastern religions of the pre-Christian era excluding
Judaism—but it is not Weber’s.
37 Sociology of Law, MWG I/22–3.490.
38 e.g. AfSS 41 (1915), 70–1.
39 Cf. Weber to Sombart, 2.12.13; to Siebeck, 11.9.19, Briefe; ‘Vorbemerkung’ [i.12].
40 Sociology of Religion [c.1913], MWG I/22–2.297.
41 AfSS 41 (1915), 2; ‘Ancient Judaism’ [1916–18], MWG I/21.242–4. Note too that the

organization of ‘Confucianism’ and ‘Hinduism and Buddhism’ runs according to a common scheme
(social foundations; orthodoxy; heterodoxy), while that of ‘Ancient Judaism’ is sui generis and
chronological.
 Recalled to Life: 1910–1915 191

(c.1909–11), his work for the German Sociological Society (with which he became
disenchanted in October 1912),42 and—the immediate precursor—his examin-
ation of the rational component in the history of music in the early summer of
1912. Can we say anything more precise about the origins of the ‘Economic
Ethics’? One answer is that they can clearly be found in the PE in 1905, because
Weber was always a universal–historical thinker.43 Another is that, without ever
straying from the stringently Occidental focus of the PE, he was nonetheless a
religious thinker in a general sense. He might reject what he took to be the
fundamental religious premiss—the idea that there was an ultimate “meaning” to
the world, such that, taken as a whole and across its entire history, it might be
construed as a rational cosmos rather than a mere chaos of infinite happening
(Geschehen)44—but still he attached deep significance to the fact that belief in the
existence of universal, religious meaning had been normal in all epochs prior to his
own. Weberian social science, which centred on the attempt to find meaning and
rational order in the partial and local contexts supplied by the actions of individuals
in society, might be a denial of a universal cosmic meaning, but in Weber’s own
mind it was evidently a disenchanted continuation of the former religious quest.45
This “religious” tendency does not explain his return to reflection on religion after
1912 in any precise sense; but speaking generally, such a return was intellectually
central to him and predictable.
The first reliable sign that Weber was at work on the ‘Economc Ethics’ occurs in
September 1912, when he asked young Oskar Siebeck for a copy of a recent book
by Edvard Lehmann, Der Buddhismus als indische Sekte, als Weltreligion (1911).
The request was accompanied by a lapidary justification: ‘I need it for an article.’46
The following December we find Weber corresponding with Hermann Graf
Keyserling on the subject of the PE:
You write to me in a very friendly way of your interest in my essays on ascetic Protestantism
which were left incomplete at the time. If they have any merit, they can perhaps claim to
have moved one elementary question to the centre, from which any examination of the
sociological significance of a religiosity ought to proceed: as to the pledges underlying the
“certitudo salutis”. It is not the “content” of a revelation, whatever it may be, but (1) in what
way it legitimates itself to the individual as something “divine” (and not “satanic”); (2) and
above all: by what signs he becomes aware that he has come to share in salvation [des Heils]—
this is ultimately what concerns the individual in a “salvation religion” (Erlösungsreligion)
. . . Compared to this, the positive, “commanding” content of the revelation is mostly quite

42 He left the executive committee of the Society at this date, and exited entirely in January 1914:

Weber to Hermann Beck, 22.10.12, 17.1.14, Briefe.

43 Below II.5.v.
44 See e.g. »Objektivität« [1904], WL 180, 184; ‘Zwischenbetrachtung’, AfSS 41 (1915), 414–20.
45 Below II.6.iv.
46 28.9.12, Briefe; cf. ‘Hinduism and Buddhism’ [1915–16], MWG I/20.328 n. 167, for citation of

this book.—It is sometimes suggested that Weber began this project at an earlier date, based on
Marianne Weber’s assertion that Weber ‘resumed his religious-sociological studies (around about
1911)’, but her vagueness is nothing more than a confession of ignorance: Lebensbild, 346.
192 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic
secondary in its practical significance. Above all, the question “to what end” [wozu] someone
is saved recedes, relative to the negative side of the matter: the question “from what” [wovon]
he would like to be saved.47
This is one of those precious accidents of documentary survival that cast a beam of
light into a dark place. Besides informing us of his utter want of interest in religious
revelation and the afterlife, Weber is doing nothing less than reproduce a central
category from his studies of the world religions—which come to a logical peak in
ethical or salvation religion—and also a significant argument of detail from his
treatment of Buddhism. Both in the letter and in the published text of ‘Hinduism
and Buddhism’ (1915–16), he takes as his starting point a theme apparently
specific to the PE and to Protestantism: the ‘certitudo salutis’, the certainty or
assurance of salvation. Certainty, however, had always been measured psychologic-
ally rather than theologically or dogmatically, and so he can make a seamless
transition from the assurance of salvation to the (for him) equally psychological
category of ‘salvation’ in general as offered by one of the salvation religions. (He
would make exactly the same move in the revised text of the PE) [i.103 n. 2]+.48
The specific “salvation religion” he has in mind here, and the only important
example outside the Near Eastern religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam), is
Buddhism, as can be seen from ‘Hinduism and Buddhism’, where the content of
the letter is reproduced. Buddhism (we are told) was, ‘in regard to the “how?”, the
“from what?” [wovon], as well as the “to what?” [wozu] of salvation, the most radical
form of salvation religion that could be conceived. Salvation is exclusively the
personal deed of the individual. There is no assistance from either a god or a
saviour.’49 In other words, in the Buddhist case there was no supra-worldly god and
no heaven: ‘it was not salvation to eternal life that was desired but an eternal easeful
death.’ Salvation was a journey to nowhere except dissolution in the Buddhist
nirvana. Rather, it was all about salvation or release (Erlösung) from somewhere: ‘it
was ephemeral life as such, the simply meaningless restlessness of all formed

47 12.12.12, Briefe.
48 For the certitudo salutis in ‘Hinduism and Buddhism’ [1915–16]: MWG I/20.284, 303, 327,
334, 353, 355.—There is a distinction between the German words Heil and Erlösung, where the first
properly means ‘salvation’, which is something the (Judaeo-Christian) deity offers. The second signifies
‘release’ or ‘redemption’ from earthly (sin and) suffering, and this is what the human individual secures
by proper religious conduct: see O. Kirn: ‘Erlösung’, PRE v. 460–9, esp. 460; ‘Heil’, vii. 552–4,
esp. 552. Clearly the first is Weber’s wozu and the second his wovon. Given this distinction, one might
suppose that the imprecise English translation of both Heil and Erlösung as ‘salvation’, and of the
category of Erlösungsreligionen as ‘salvation religions’, would be misleading. But, while English does not
permit an exact rendition of the German originals, no major error is committed. Even for Lutheran
theologians the terms Erlösung and Heil were hardly distinct (Kirn, ‘Heil’, vii. 553), and Weber
intermingles them, their compounds, and terms such as soteriology quite promiscuously, even in the
Buddhist case, where there is no Heil in the strict sense: e.g. ‘Hinduism and Buddhism’, MWG
I/20.326–8. A quintessential expression of this promiscuity is given in the text quotation, where the
chief psychological benefit of a religion of Erlösung is the certitudo salutis, the assurance of salvation
(Heil); cf. PE [i.103 n. 2]+. Note further that the original reason for Weber’s use of the term
Erlösungsreligionen is that it is not confined to Christianity (cf. Kirn, ‘Erlösung’, v. 460), and focuses
interest on the human individual rather than the deity. However, reference in English to ‘salvation
religions’ in no way obscures this. So I retain ‘salvation religions’ as a translation, but gloss Erlösung
where the idea of ‘release’ from suffering comes to the fore.
49 ‘Hinduism and Buddhism’ [1915–16], MWG I/20.330.
 Recalled to Life: 1910–1915 193

existence, from which salvation was sought’, although this general premiss
underlay all mainstream Indian religiosity and philosophy.50 Weberian Buddhism
like Weberian Calvinism, where again there was ‘no god’ to assist the believer
[XXI.11], was a thoroughly terrestrial religiosity. Meanwhile Weber’s noticeably
gratuitous protestation to Keyserling in 1912 that ‘I am no longer in a position to
discuss this [subject], and shall not easily come back to it’, was a typical example of
him playing his cards close to his chest. The intellectual scheme of the ‘Economic
Ethics’ had been worked out by this date and a return to, and completion of, the PE
in this sense was exactly what he had in mind, albeit not until ‘Economy and
Society’ was safely delivered. Note finally that—as we shall see—the original size of
the project was much smaller than we might suppose today, while the essential
categories behind it can be traced back to 1904–5 at least, so there need be no
surprise that it should have come on so far in a matter of months. Once it was
complete, Weber was prepared to share his ideas. Hence the series of private
lectures on the subject offering surveys of the individual religions given at an
unspecified date in the first half of 1913 to friends such as Georg Lukács who
had a significant interest in contemporary religiosity.51
The ‘Economic Ethics’ must have been complete by January 1913, because at that
date Weber turned his full attention to ‘Economy and Society’. It was now that he
drafted a general introduction to the whole project—it appears in the 1914 contents
plan as ‘Categories of social order’—a version of which was published as a trailer in
1913 under the related title of ‘Some Categories of a Sociology of Verstehen (or
Understanding)’, and which, later supplemented by a brief opening section on
method, examined the most basic types of social formation (such as Gemeinschaft,
personally bonded ‘community’, and Gesellschaft, impersonally organized ‘society’).52
At the same time he announced, as we have seen, that ‘Economy and Society’ was now
a ‘major contribution’, ‘the best systematic work that I have ever written’.53 This was
a quantum leap, which meant that from now on (subject to the contingent

50 Ibid. 331, 332, resp.; cf. 237 on Indian Kultur generally. Subsequently Weber would refer to

wovon and wozu as the two sides from which any doctrine of salvation should be considered: Sociology
of Religion [c.1913], MWG I/22–2.301; ‘Einleitung’, AfSS 41 (1915), 15. But the initial idea was
provoked by Buddhism.
51 Cf. Lukács to Weber [mid-December 1915], Georg Lukács Briefwechsel 1902–1917, ed. Éva

Karádi and Éva Fekete (Stuttgart, 1982); Lukács left Heidelberg at the end of July 1913, which
suggests some sort of time limit: Lukács to Paul Ernst [June 1913], ibid. 326.
52 ‘Ueber einige Kategorien der verstehenden Soziologie’, Logos, IV (1913), 253–94; pp. 253–65

are on method. Translation of Verstehen as ‘interpretation’ is not permissible: see my review of Max
Weber. Collected Methodological Writings, trans. H. H. Bruun (London, 2012), in Contemporary
Sociology, 41 (2012), 772.—A large and largely superfluous literature has arisen regarding the dating
and status of this essay, which I shall not go into here. In regard to dating I follow the obvious reading
of Weber’s letter to Rickert, 5.9.13, Briefe: i.e. that the principal, sociological component (}}.IV–VII)
was written by the beginning of 1913. To this a brief introductory section on method (}}.I–III) was
added in September. Neglected evidence for the dating of the latter is that the principal component
here (}.II on sociology’s ‘relationship to “psychology” ’) was triggered by Karl Jaspers, Allgemeine
Psychopathologie (Berlin, 1913), which Weber read in early July: to Jaspers [after 11.7.13], Briefe.
Among a number of connections note the references to ‘ “psychological” Verstehen’, as distinct from a
sociology of Verstehen: WL 429, 433–4. Cf. Jaspers, Allgemeine Psychopathologie, 145–54, and Weber’s
description of Jaspers as the ‘ “verstehender” psychologist’: to Hellpach, 11.7.13, Briefe.
53 Weber to Siebeck, 23.1, 8.2.13, Briefe.
194 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

interruption of world war) this project would dominate his life.54 All the same he
described his new magnum opus only as ‘Economy and Society—incl. state and
law’. In other words, it included versions of only two of the three major sociologies
that we now have: those on Herrschaft and law, but not that on religion. The
absence of religious content or illustration from the essay on the ‘Categories’, apart
from its references to the PE, is also noticeable. The idea that there might be a
Sociology of Religion within ‘Economy and Society’ to match those of law and
Herrschaft only came later. The first clear reference to it appears around July 1913
(though unprompted allusions in correspondence might suggest he was at work on
this in May);55 by late November the text was ‘about 3/4 typed up’;56 and after
Christmas, he chose to inform Siebeck that ‘Economy and Society’ now included
‘Religion (embracing all the great religions of the earth: a sociology of doctrines of
salvation and religious ethics . . . )’ to be set alongside ‘a comprehensive sociological
doctrine of the state and Herrschaft’, though law has now faded from view as a
major component.57
So the Sociology of Religion is unusual amongst the components of the pre-war
‘Economy and Society’ in that it was composed quite swiftly in a single time period.
Unlike the Sociologies of Law and Herrschaft, it does not display continuous
evolution and accumulation of textual strata over a number of years. The one likely
exception to this is }7 on the relationship between ‘Social Ranks [Stände], Eco-
nomic Classes [Klassen] and Religion’, which is marked out as an oddity, and
implicitly an example of accumulation, by its disproportionate length.58 In origin it
goes back to the desire frequently stated in the PE in 1905 to ‘go into the question
of the class conditioning of religious movements separately, on a later occasion’
[XXI.101 n. 69; cf. 69 n. 136, 78 n. 14]; and a first draft could derive from Weber’s
work on and around the PE in 1907. But overall the Sociology of Religion is a
relatively tight and clean text, which in no way deserves the relative neglect it has
suffered relative to the ‘Economic Ethics of the World Religions’—indeed the evident
reason for the prosperity of the latter is only that, under this title and in isolation
from the PE, Christianity is absent. Still we should notice two features in the text

54 The only deviations from relentless concentration on ‘Economy and Society’ between January

1913 and August 1914, are (1) in July 1913, when Weber added the short methodological section to
the essay on “Categories” to make it a more complete pilot statement: Weber to Rickert [after 3.7],
5.9.13, Briefe. But this is the exception that proves the rule. (2) The swift composition in August of his
submission on the question of “value freedom” for the Verein für Sozialpolitik: to Franz Boese, 5,
14.8.13, ibid.
55 To Rickert [after 3.7.13], Briefe. For unprompted allusions: egg. to Marianne Weber, Karl

Jaspers, 5, 19.5.13, ibid.

56 To Rickert, n.d. [end November] 1913, Briefe. MWG suggests that Weber alludes to a specific

section of text (}10), and not the whole: I/22–2.87, cf. Briefe, II/8.411 n. 11. This is over-subtle. The
phrase used here (‘my (empirical) casuistry of contemplation and active religiosity’), is by no means
inappropriate as an overall title; the figure of 3/4 makes sense for a large-scale work, but would be
absurdly over-precise in regard to a section of a text; again, in a previous letter to Rickert [after 3.7.13],
Weber had undoubtedly alluded to the work as a whole.
57 To Siebeck, 30.12.13.
58 MWG I/22–2.218–90. Its extreme length is analogous to the (heavily stratified) }2 of the

Sociology of Law.
 Recalled to Life: 1910–1915 195

that are not simply streamlined and straightforward. One is that a long and
substantial section on priestly hierocracy and its sectarian antithesis appears in
the Sociology of Herrschaft and not that of religion.59 Yet clearly this was also a
religious subject. It might be suggested that this arrangement arose only because
the Sociology of Herrschaft was composed first, with no expectation that it
would be accompanied by a sociology of religion; but this is not so. While
Weber later suggested that more attention might perhaps be given to the sects in
a redrafted post-war Sociology of Religion,60 still the placement of the post-war
treatment of ‘Political power and hierocratic power’ was unaltered in principle:
that is, it is marked out as a component in the post-war Staatssoziologie
(Sociology of the State), a post-war novelty, but still an adjunct to the Sociology
of Herrschaft.61 It is a salutary reminder of how important the frontier zone
between religion and politics was for Weber—it was a subject that had to be
discussed whether or not a sociology of religion was included—and of the fact
that it could not be disentangled from the secular world. Thus the same point
would be made in ‘Politics as a Vocation’ in 1919 (II.5.i). Note secondly that
the final section (}12) of the pre-war text is an anomaly, because it is organized
historically, around blocks of text dealing with individual world religions, rather
than sociologically or thematically. Although incomplete, it is in fact a snapshot
of Weber’s recently delivered talks on what we now call the ‘World Religions’
but which in 1913–14, and in the title to this section, he called the ‘Religions of
Kultur’.62 But if, on the one hand, it contains a good deal that is apparently
exotic, which is not in the published studies of the ‘World Religions’, particu-
larly on Islam and Judaism, still the telos of this section—and the conclusion to
the text as a whole—lies in a treatment of ‘Capitalism’ and early Christianity;
and this, far from being a deviation or variation, is an explicit return to the
categories and argument of the PE: God and Mammon, the Beruf or calling, and
predestination.63 Indeed the obvious reason for the incompleteness of the text at
this point is that in his haste at the end of 1913 Weber simply could not be
bothered to write out a final section on Christianity that would largely recap-
itulate the message of the PE.64

59 MWG I/22–4.579–679. For the dating of this text prior to the Sociology of Religion:

‘Editorischer Bericht’, ibid. 564–71.

60 WuG 30, 146.
61 MWG III/7.66–7. On the Staatssoziologie, see II.7.iv.
62 The section heading, MWG I/22–2.414, ‘Die Kulturreligionen und die “Welt” ’ is almost

certainly Weber’s (cf. ‘Editorischer Bericht’, ibid. 105–9). ‘Kulturreligionen’ reappears in Weber’s
contents table for the Grundriss der Sozialökonomik published in June 1914 (‘Einteilung des
Gesamtwerkes’), and the heading there, ‘Kulturreligionen und Wirtschaftsgesinnung’, is a possible
description for }12. See also above at n.39.
63 MWG I/22–2.441 (quotation); see also 445 (Mammon), 441–2, 447 (Beruf ); 444

(predestination).
64 MWG I/22–2.414–47. }12 is also incomplete at its beginning, which opens with the words ‘The

third religion which is in a certain sense “adapted to the world” . . . is Judaism’ (MWG I/22–2.414).
The subsequent text (441) reveals that there were two previous sections on Confucianism and
Hinduism that were once part of the manuscript. Presumably Weber removed them during his
wartime work on the ‘Economic Ethics’ and failed to replace them.
196 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

The overall result was that, while the original project of the ‘Economic Ethics’
would continue to lead a separate existence, it had nonetheless been coordinated
with ‘Economy and Society’ and its conceptual content ingested via the Sociology
of Religion. Whatever the brief text was that, by the terms of the 1910 plan, Weber
had written under the title ‘Economy and Kultur’, it is clear there would have been
no major Sociology of Religion within ‘Economy and Society’ without the imme-
diately precedent composition of the ‘Economic Ethics’. In this way the magnum
opus of ‘Economy and Society’ had been substantially assimilated to the continuous
stream of Weber’s explicitly religious studies going back to the PE. Max Weber, a
secular author writing for a secular readership in “social economics”, could not
analyse the Kultur and social behaviour of his own day, however ‘alien to god’ it
might be,65 without a substantial treatment of the thought structures generated
under the heading of ‘religion’.
The ties between the two projects would be drawn still tighter in 1915. When
the wartime context made it convenient to promote the ‘Economic Ethics’ ahead of
‘Economy and Society’, Weber deliberately imported “sociological”—‘schematic
and theoretical’66—elements into the historical text of the ‘Economic Ethics’, so as
to smooth the path for the future publication of the magnum opus, which he knew
would make great demands on its readers.67 This was a mirror image of his
procedure in }12 of the Sociology of Religion, where he had imported a historical
element into a sociological text. Thus the two best-known components of ‘the
Economic Ethics’ are not historical—they do not treat individual historical cases—
but thematic: the ‘Introduction’ and ‘Zwischenbetrachtung’ (or ‘Interim Reflec-
tions’), which were both written in the summer of 1915, quite apart from the
original, 1912 lectures.68 In contrast to the stately historical and narrative opening
of ‘Confucianism’, which in 1915 still reproduced the original lecture format—
‘China . . . was a land of cities and had been since what are for us prehistorical
times’69—the newly inserted sections are strenuously sociological and thematic:
they give not one but two, partially repetitive, summaries of some of Weber’s
central findings in the Sociology of Religion on such matters as theodicy; asceticism
and mysticism as opposite types of religious behaviour; and the relationship
between types of religiosity and social strata. And so as not to let a good opportunity
go under-exploited, Weber also inserted a potted summary of the Sociology of
Herrschaft at the end of the ‘Introduction’ on the pretext of terminological clarifi-
cation.70
These inserted sections are not irrelevant to the individual studies of China and
India—Weber’s typical and generalizing concerns and categories run through the
historical texts quite as much as the sociological ones—but still there is no direct
connection. For example, the extended discussion of theodicy in the ‘Introduction’

65 ‘Science as a Vocation’, MWG I/17.106.

66 ‘Zwischenbetrachtung’, AfSS 41 (1915), 387.
67 The 1913 publication of the essay on sociological ‘Categories’ is a prior example of the same

strategy.
68 See the Appendix. 69 ‘Confucianism’, AfSS 41 (1915), 30.
70 AfSS 41 (1915), 28–30.
 Recalled to Life: 1910–1915 197

has nothing at all to do with ‘Confucianism’, which immediately succeeds it, for
this was a problem that arose only in the context of a “salvation religion”, which
Confucianism was not.71 Nor, despite cosmetic gestures to ‘Indian religiosity’ at its
beginning and end,72 is the ‘Zwischenbetrachtung’, which is placed after the treat-
ment of ‘Confucianism’ and before the opening of ‘Hinduism and Buddhism’, in
any way necessary to an understanding of the latter, or set in any direct relation to
it. On the contrary, its opening looks back quite explicitly ‘to the remarks made
in the Introduction, in order to give them a somewhat different turn’.73 In other
words, it recurs to the generalizing concerns of the Introduction, without being
simply repetitive (as we would expect of two texts written in sequence). Its principal
subject is the development of a general, sociological thesis: that the rationalizing
development of ethically based religions—which are also the salvation religions—
necessarily brings them into conflict with the autonomously rationalizing secular
‘world’ and its various ‘orders’ or areas of activity, and this (as is well known) is a
restatement of }11 of the Sociology of Religion. Now the subject is certainly
important to Weber personally, but it has no specific relevance to Indian religion:
its real concern lies with ethical and “salvation” religiosity as a whole. So the
‘Zwischenbetrachtung’, as its title implies, was simply something stuck ‘in between’
(‘zwischen’) the studies of China and India, and Weber was agnostic as to whether it
should be placed with Confucianism or Hinduism in his Collected Essays.74 It is in
fact a large-scale example of a practice that we know to be habitual to him: making
later insertions into the middle of pre-existing texts, sometimes of enormous length.
And just as the ‘Zwischenbetrachtung’ looks back to the ‘Introduction’, so the text of
‘Hinduism and Buddhism’ opens by looking back to ‘Confucianism’, quite oblivi-
ous to the existence of any inserted ‘Interim Reflections’: ‘India is and was, in
contrast to China, a land of villages . . .’75
The insertion of the ‘Introduction’ and the ‘Zwischenbetrachtung’ brought the
circularity and interconnection between the ‘Economic Ethics’ and ‘Economy and
Society’ to its apex. This idea is made explicit in Weber’s introductory description
of the ‘Economic Ethics’ in 1915, when he says that, in addition to their immediate

71 Cf. ‘Einleitung’, AfSS 41 (1915), 5–14, with ‘Confucianism’, ibid. 68–87 passim.
72 Ibid. 387; cf. 419–21. The closure is a repetitive treatment of theodicy which, as Weber
acknowledges (420), goes back to what was said in the ‘Introduction’. It is not necessary to the
argument of the ‘Zwischenbetrachtung’, but serves as a device that brings the account back to the
specifically Indian and Buddhist theme of karma. The only other references to Indian religiosity are
technical and specific: in two footnotes (403 n. 10, 411 n. 12) and a single sentence of text (‘djivanmukti’,
404). Their learned quality and additive formatting suggest that these were supplements entered at the
proof stage: that is, they stem from the time when Weber had started work on the next phase of the
‘Economic Ethics’ project: ‘Hinduism and Buddhism’. This overlapped the period of proof revision for
Confucianism III–IV and the ‘Zwischenbetrachtung’, which was not complete until December 1915: to
Siebeck Verlag, 13.12.15, Briefe. By contrast, the reference in the ‘Einleitung’ to ‘the Buddhist and Jainist
bhikku’ (mendicant monk) is more general and substantial, reflecting Weber’s longstanding interest in
Oriental monasticism going back to the PE: AfSS 41 (1915), 23.—For the view that ‘Hinduism and
Buddhism’ ‘begins’ with the ‘Zwischenbetrachtung’, Schluchter, Religion und Lebensführung, ii. 62.
However, the construction of GARS i, undoubtedly sanctioned by Weber, does not support this: to
Siebeck, 30.5.20 Briefe.
73 AfSS 41 (1915), 390; cf. 388 for another reference of this kind.
74 To Siebeck, 30.5.20, Briefe. 75 MWG I/20.49.
198 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

historical and expository purpose as a set of lectures, ‘These essays were intended
. . . to interpret and to complete the section on the sociology of religion [in
“Economy and Society”] (and indeed at many points to be interpreted through
it).’76 The subtitle he appended to the ‘Economic Ethics’ in 1915, ‘Sketches in the
Sociology of Religion’, although in any strict sense a contradiction in terms, tells
much the same story: of some sociological (conceptual and typological) content
appearing within a lighter, historical format.77 This logic also helps explain why
Weber was relatively agnostic as to whether the ‘Economic Ethics’ should be
published before ‘Economy and Society’ (his idea from 1915 on), or simultaneous-
ly (as he said in 1915),78 or else afterwards (his original assumption).79
Evidently the two elements in this great composite of religious writing (the
Sociology of Religion and the ‘Economic Ethics’) were distinct in their original
conception—one was historical, the other sociological and thematic, while the
database of the Sociology of Religion was marginally more expansive than that of
the ‘Economic Ethics’, since it took in ‘all the great religions’ and not just the five
world religions.80 Nonetheless, from the moment the Sociology of Religion came
into existence in late 1913, Weber would always have them both in his mind, and
the same core categories run through both. It is true that, owing to the accident of
death, any pre-war deficiency or incompleteness in the Sociology of Religion was
left uncorrected. By contrast, the ‘Economic Ethics’ had already been published
with the inclusion of brief and convenient synopses of the Sociology, and here is
another reason why the Sociology of Religion has been largely relegated to obscurity
and an inferior status,81 whereas the synopses are well known. Hence the appar-
ently self-evident modern dictum that ‘Weber presented the result of his studies in
the sociology and history of religion in the Vorbemerkung (“Author’s Introduc-
tion”), “Introduction” and “Intermediate Reflections” [Zwischenbetrachtung]’.82
But the Sociology of Religion cannot be omitted from this list, and we should
not confuse the accidents of posthumous publication and reception with what
Weber actually thought, and any attempt to prise the two Siamese twins apart, or to

76 ‘Einleitung’ Af SS 41 (1915), 1 n. 1. See the similar statement in Weber to Siebeck, 22.6.15,

Briefe.
77 In 1920 this became ‘Comparative Essays [Versuche] in the Sociology of Religion’, GARS i. 237,

but the idea remains much the same.

78 To Siebeck, 22.6.15, Briefe. 79 To Werner Sombart, 2.12.13, Briefe.
80 To Siebeck, 30.12.13, Briefe.
81 See the mournful opening to Hans Kippenberg’s ‘Summary’: ‘Einleitung’, MWG I/22–2.72.
82 W. Schluchter, ‘The Paradox of Rationalization’ in W. Schluchter and Guenther Roth, Max

Weber’s Vision of History (Berkeley, 1979), 64. Cf. Gottfried Küenzlen, Die Religionssoziologie Max
Webers (Berlin, 1980) which, despite its title, ignores the Sociology of Religion almost entirely.—The
strategy of promoting the ‘Introduction’ and ‘Zwischenbetrachtung’ at the expense of the Sociology of
Religion was laid down for English speakers by Gerth and Mills, From Max Weber (New York, 1946),
chs 11, 13, and followed in Germany by Johannes Winckelmann, Max Weber: Soziologie,
Weltgeschichtliche Analysen, Politik (Stuttgart, 1956), 398–483. See subsequently Dirk Kaesler, Max
Weber: Schriften 1894–1922 (Stuttgart, 2002), 573–653; and Sam Whimster, The Essential Weber
(London, 2004), chs 3, 16. Today, when Weber is continually republished, the only cheap modern
edition of the Sociology of Religion in any European language is Isabelle Kalinowski, Max Weber:
Sociologie de la Religion (Paris, 2006).
 Recalled to Life: 1910–1915 199

play off one against the other, must be resisted. There is (for example) no evidence
for the claim ‘that the more Weber expanded his material sociology of religion [the
Economic Ethics], the more he was able to shorten the conceptual one [the
Sociology of Religion]’, as if these were reciprocal processes, and the ‘Economic
Ethics’ was somehow superior.83 Still more misguided is the attempt to de-centre
‘Economy and Society’ (including the Sociology of Religion) from its position as
Weber’s ‘principal sociological work’, using the work on the world religions as an
alternative.84 Setting aside the hiatus created by war in 1914–17, ‘Economy and
Society’ was always Weber’s chief priority from 1913 onwards, and without
question the summit of the œuvre that he lived to conceive.
If we now ask (finally) why Weber should have returned to the PE and the study
of religion in 1912, there is a clear answer, which will appear still clearer by the light
of the previous narrative. It is “Ernst Troeltsch”. It was at the beginning of 1912
that Troeltsch published his great work on the Social Teachings of the Christian
Churches,85 with its lavish reproduction of Weberian categories such as asceticism
and mysticism, and the sectarian idea. Now of itself this gave Weber no more
incentive to develop the PE than he had had in 1905 or 1907, when Troeltsch first
embarked on the Social Teachings. As we have seen, he had always looked to
Troeltsch to fulfil some of this programme, even in 1905 [XXI.3 n. 3], and in
the result Troeltsch had repaid him quite as fully as he could have wished. For
example, Troeltsch had given ample coverage to the deeper historical origins of
Christian asceticism (‘the medieval origins of inner-worldly asceticism’) and ‘its
connection to humanistic rationalism’ [XXI.110]. If his conception of asceticism
and ascetic Protestantism was very different from Weber’s—the idea that asceticism
was a principal progenitor of a modern impersonal rationality is entirely absent;
only mysticism is relevant in a modern context—still he gave abundant prominence
to these subjects, and his final judgement that asceticism was a ‘world historical
power’ that was now ‘exhausted’ was literally no different from Weber’s view
that asceticism had given way to utilitarianism in the eighteenth century [XXI.75
n. 3, 104].86 Above all, Troeltsch had accepted the sects as one of the three
fundamental ‘sociological’ forms of Christian organization and religious expression
throughout history (alongside institutional churches and the individual religiosity
of the mystic). But while this was very gratifying—Troeltsch could now, without
too much distortion of the truth, be deployed as an authoritative vindicator of the
PE [i.17 n. 1]+ [i.207 n. 1]—still it was only of negative significance. The positive

83 Schluchter, Religion und Lebensführung, ii. 578. The distinction here between ‘material’ and

‘conceptual sociology’ is a modern invention, unknown to Weber.

84 Cf. Schluchter, ibid. ii. 589 and Friedrich Tenbruck, ‘Das Werk Max Webers’, KZSS 27 (1975),

663–702.
85 The Preface is dated 1 November 1911, Soziallehren, ix.
86 Soziallehren, 960, 984, resp. Generally Troeltsch treats ascetic Protestantism here as something

politically radical and Anglo-American, whereas in 1905 he had viewed asceticism as a component of
the traditional Christian repudiation of the natural world: ‘Protestantisches Christentum’, 398–423
passim. But in neither case was there any significant connection to modernity as Troeltsch conceived it.
200 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

factor was that, now Troeltsch had finished, Weber’s self-denying suspension of
intellectual enquiry into the historical significance of religion for modern Kultur
was lifted; and Max Weber, a thinker passionately interested in religious subjects,
with a secular view of modernity entirely different from Ernst Troeltsch’s religious
one, could return to the field. Here is the elementary reason why, after the lapse of
just a few months, he did so return (in the studies of the world religions), and
equally why in 1913 he was describing the Sociology of Religion as an equivalent to
‘what Tröltsch has done, but now for all religions’.87
However, while the publication of Troeltsch’s book offered him a chance to
resume his own religious work, it had not left him much ‘space’ to work on
Christianity (something he had anticipated in 1907 and again in 1910).88 So
Weber was clear that no purpose would be served by rewriting the PE itself, as
he explained in 1919 [i.206 n. 2]+:
Instead of a direct continuation along the lines of the further programme [of work] . . . as
originally intended [in 1905], I decided, partly on accidental grounds, in particular the
appearance of Ernst Troeltsch’s Social Teachings of the Christian Churches (which settled
much that I would have had to discuss in a way that I, as a non-theologian, could not
have done), but partly also in order to remove these disquisitions from their state of isolation
and to place them within the total evolution of Kultur—I decided first of all to set down
the results of comparative studies of the interrelations of religion and society within
universal history.
This was the ‘Economic Ethics of the World Religions’. By this route Weber finally
solved the problem of the completion or ‘continuation’ of the PE that had lingered
over the text since 1905. There would be no full-scale development of the sectarian
idea to match the exposition of ‘the vocational Idea’ [XXI.1–110], such as he had
once envisaged. Given Troeltsch’s support and alternative exposition of socio-
religious history, the original PE text now required only modest revision in
detail—a confirmation of the position he had adopted in 1907. Still there would
be a supplement to the text, but of an entirely different kind: this was the
‘Economic Ethics’. Nonetheless, the PE remained the pre-existing centre around
which these comparative studies revolved. It was the anchor of the project first
drafted in 1912, just as it would be for the Collected Essays on the Sociology of Religion
when they commenced publication in 1920. The late suggestion in 1919 that
Weber might after all write a whole volume offering a complete history of Occi-
dental Christianity is apparently a modification of this position, as if perhaps the PE
could bear rewriting after all; but his refusal to duplicate Troeltsch in this way
throughout the years 1907–19 is one of several signs that this late and fleeting
suggestion needs to be received with caution.89

87 To Siebeck, 30.12.13, Briefe. 88 ‘Schlusswort’, 595–6.

89 Below II.5.iii.
 Recalled to Life: 1910–1915 201

APPENDIX. THE DATING OF THE ‘INTRODUCTION’,

‘SUMMARY. CONFUCIANISM AND PURITANISM’,
AND ‘ZWISCHENBETRACHTUNG’ WITHIN
THE ‘ECONOMIC ETHICS OF THE
WORLD RELIGIONS’.
The orthodox position is that laid down by Prof. Schluchter and followed by MWG: that the
whole of the first, 1915 instalment of the ‘Economic Ethics’ should be considered as a single
group, dating from before the war: Religion und Lebensführung (Frankfurt, 1988), ii. 561–2.
I suggest, on the contrary, that the ‘Introduction’ and ‘Zwischenbetrachtung’ were com-
posed between June and October 1915, and are separate from the body of the text on
‘Confucianism’ that these two pieces frame. (That ‘Confucianism’ was in principle a pre-war
text, from 1912–13, is undisputed. In 1915 Weber spoke only of its stylistic revision,
though I shall return to the detail of this at (8) below: AfSS 41 (1915), 1 n. 1; cf. Weber to
Siebeck, 14.7.15, Briefe.) This dating derives in part from the consideration of the overall
sequence of his work between 1912 and 1914 offered in the main text, but is also confirmed
by examination of the wartime evidence, above all the correspondence.90 Note the following:
(1) Weber’s earliest listing of the ‘preliminary studies’ for the ‘Economic Ethics’, which
had been lying in Heidelberg prior to the outbreak of war, makes no mention of the
‘Introduction’ and ‘Zwischenbetrachtung’: to Siebeck, 22.6.15. Subsequently he reported
himself at work shaping the ‘ “Introduction” ’ to my articles’, making a clear distinction
between the former, a novel addendum, and the pre-existing ‘articles’: to Siebeck, 14.7.15.
A similar distinction underlies the statement in the ‘Introduction’ that ‘The following
presentations appear unaltered, just as they were written down two years ago . . . ’, where
‘The following presentations’ refers to the articles on Confucianism, not to the ‘Introduc-
tion’ itself: AfSS 41 (1915), 1 n. 1, contra Schluchter, Religion und Lebensführing, ii. 570.
(2) There was certainly sufficient time available in 1915 for new composition on known
themes where no new reading was required. The ‘Introduction’ only reached Siebeck more
than three weeks after Weber had first announced his willingness to publish (a decision that
itself allows time for prior reflection and writing): to Siebeck, 1, 14.7.15. By comparison,
stylistic revision of ‘Confucianism’ took a mere two weeks (to Siebeck, 29.7.15), though the
text was more than three times as long, and even so such revision represented an expansion
in length by 40–50 per cent, from 4–5 to 6–7 publishers “sheets” (to Siebeck 22.6,
14.7.15).
(3) With the exception of two brief and unsuccessful trips to Brussels looking for war
work (11–14, 19–22 August), Weber spent the whole period from June to 17 November in
Heidelberg. His trips to Brussels are the first clear sign that he was looking for an alternative
to war work for the military hospital commission, which he knew was going to be wound up
(cf. Max to Marianne Weber, 17.8.15). However, he failed to find work, and the period
down to mid-November was largely a free space, with no recorded intellectual work apart
from that for the ‘Economic Ethics’.
(4) We cannot say precisely when the ‘Zwischenbetrachtung’ was written, since there is
no reference to it in correspondence. What can be said, however, is that it was not sent in on
29 July 1915. On this day Weber sent in ‘the last pages of the 1st Part’ of the ‘Economic
Ethics’, which ended with ‘essay IV’ on Confucianism (AfSS 41.372–86): to Siebeck,

90 All citations here are from Briefe.

202 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic
29.7.15. In other words, at this date Weber himself was unaware of the existence of any
supplementary text. The ‘Zwischenbetrachtung’, which appears in continuous sequence
after ‘essay IV’ on Confucianism (AfSS 41.387–421) was thus an unanticipated novelty.
The inference must be that Weber originally thought in terms of only one thematic
‘Introduction’ to his work—as who would not? However, I suggest the free time after 29
July allowed the thought of a second preparatory statement to arise in his mind, moved
most obviously by the sense that the first ‘Introduction’ left much unsaid. He may also
have been provoked to write the ‘Zwischenbetrachtung’ as a complement to essay IV of
‘Confucianism’, which performs the unique and somewhat anomalous comparison be-
tween ‘Confucianism and Puritanism’ created by the unique and anomalous status of
Confucianism as a “religion” standing outside the scheme of ethical and salvation religion:
AfSS 41.372–86. The ‘Zwischenbetrachtung’ then serves to return the reader to this
mainstream agenda. In any case the latter is a second introduction, hence the somewhat
repetitive character of the two essays, and its date of composition must lie between August
and October 1915. The correspondence suggests that it is only by the end of October that
Weber’s text takes on stable dimensions (to Siebeck, 30.10.15), while the relevant number
of the Archiv containing this essay was not issued until 23 December. Note too that
Weber speaks of having done ‘4 months’ Hinduism’—the second phase in the ‘Economic
Ethics’ project—by mid-February 1916 (to Marianne Weber, 17.2.16), which similarly
suggests that work on the opening phase was complete only in mid-October. The
inference must be that the ‘Zwischenbetrachtung’ was a late or even last-minute submis-
sion to the Archiv in October—this was the kind of liberty that Weber, as an editor, could
allow himself. Such late submission would explain why there is no reference to it in
correspondence, and why awkward questions were raised about the very large costs of
Weber’s proof corrections on this occasion. Here, as Weber noted, ‘simple insertions [into
the text] should not be treated as proof corrections’. So something larger than this was
involved: to Siebeck, 12.11.15.
(5) Whatever date in 1915 we choose, reference to the Great War in the ‘Zwischenbe-
trachtung’ is clear, and this part of the text could not have been composed earlier: AfSS 41
(1915), 397–9.
(6) It is agreed that the ‘Introduction’ and ‘Zwischenbetrachtung’ derive from the
Sociology of Religion and not from other parts of the ‘Economic Ethics’: e.g. Friedrich
Tenbruck, ‘Das Werk Max Webers’, KZSS 27 (1975), 663–702, here 676. In particular, the
specific indebtedness, hence chronological sequence, between }11 of the Sociology of
Religion and the ‘Zwischenbetrachtung’ is readily accepted: Schluchter, Religion und
Lebensführing, ii. 63, 586. But (as Prof. Schluchter and MWG understand), a pre-war
dating for the ‘Zwischenbetrachtung’ requires that }11 be written separately from, and
prior to, the text as a whole, since the Sociology of Religion can be firmly dated to the second
half of 1913, and there is no significant peacetime interval or cause for the composition of a
further text on religion thereafter. Yet to suppose for reasons of extraneous scholarly
convenience that this one section of text was composed at an earlier date is an absurdly
contorted hypothesis, and however hard we look there is no good evidence for it. The
hesitant remarks on this subject in MWG I/22–2.90 make no substantial case of this kind.
(7) It would be a mistake to suppose that the interval between 1913 and 1915 made any
great difference to Weber’s thinking in this area, and in this sense the question of dating is
secondary. But still these two essays should be recognized for what they are: imported,
summary statements written under wartime conditions in order to introduce his postponed
 Recalled to Life: 1910–1915 203
work on religious sociology. As such, they are slightly less refined than the original from
which they derive. I give three examples:91
(a) In the ‘Introduction’ Weber refers to the questionnaire put out to workers by Adolf
Levenstein, including a question regarding religious belief. Weber misdates this to 1906,
when in reality it was in continuous use between 1907 and 1911, showing that when he
was writing, he had no recourse to Levenstein’s book: ‘Einleitung’, AfSS 41 (1915), 10;
cf. Levenstein, Die Arbeiterfrage (Munich, 1912), 4. The previous reference to this
circular in the Sociology of Religion, written in 1913 when Weber did have book access,
is accurate: MWG I/22–2.292.
(b) The ‘Zwischenbetrachtung’ overlooks the distinction laid down in the Sociology of
Religion in 1913 between an unworldly asceticism based on (combative) ‘rejection of the
world’ (Weltablehnung) and unworldly mysticism that relies on (yielding, passive) ‘flight
from the world’ (Weltflucht) (MWG I/22–2.324), an idea that goes back to the PE in
1905 [XXI.28]. This distinction is largely adhered to in the rest of the Sociology of
Religion, with one exception (414). By contrast the ‘Zwischenbetrachtung’ consistently
refers to both these strains of asceticism and mysticism as ‘in flight from the world’
(weltflüchtig): AfSS 41 (1915), 389–90, 395. Similarly, its sub-title, ‘Stages . . . in the
religious rejection of the world’ now covers all religious behaviour and not just asceticism.
(c) The ‘Zwischenbetrachtung’ quotes from the Sociology of Religion regarding the
“fortunate closed-mindedness” of Puritans regarding questions about ultimate ethical
meaning of the world: AfSS 41 (1915), 390; cf. MWG I/22–2.328. We can see it is a
quotation, because Weber marks it out as such; however, he does not tell us what his
source is, and the meaning of the quoted statement is opaque without a knowledge of the
original text.—It is hard to see how such minor degradations could take place except on
the hypothesis that the ‘Zwischenbetrachtung’ is a later text, composed after some
interval in time, and under less favourable circumstances.
(8) The dating of the ‘Summary. Confucianism and Puritanism’ , the fourth and conclud-
ing instalment of ‘Confucianism’ as published in 1915 (AfSS 41.372–86), is a separate case.
There is no documentary evidence to show that it originates in 1915, but the balance of
probabilities favours this date. Note first that the ending of the third essay clearly looks
forward to the treatment of ‘Buddhism’: ‘In the first instance we shall have to examine it on
its home soil’, in India (371). The addition of the fourth and final section would also help
explain why, despite Weber’s protestation that ‘Confucianism’ had been revised only
stylistically, his estimate of the length of the piece altered within three weeks from ‘4–5’
publishers’ “sheets” (i.e. 64–80 pages of print) to ‘6–7 sheets’ (96–112 pages): to Siebeck,
22.6, 15.7.15, Briefe. (The final length was 108 pages, which suggests that Weber knew
exactly what he was talking about, and since he had been editing and publishing in the
Archiv for more than ten years, this is hardly surprising.) A relevant negative point is this:
there is no learned content in the text, and especially no learned Chinese content, which
would have been inconsistent with the limited time and book-resource at Weber’s disposal
in the summer of 1915, when he was still in the employment of the military hospitals
service. So all the quotations are from obvious Western sources: Goethe’s Faust (AfSS
41.375); Thomas Carlyle, a citation that goes back to Weber’s St Louis Address of 1904
(377); the PE (382); and the extract from John Wesley sent to Weber in 1913 by
W. J. Ashley (382); cf. [i.196–7]+. Note finally that the comparison between Confucianism
and Puritanism is formally unique within the ‘Economic Ethics’. At no other point does he

91 For a fourth case, see below II.5, n.27.

204 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic
move away from the treatment of the world religions as historical individuals into socio-
logical and comparative study except in the other writings from 1915: the ‘Introduction’
and ‘Zwischenbetrachtung’. (The nearest exception lies in the remarks on the ‘General
Character of Asiatic Religiosity’ at the conclusion of ‘Hinduism and Buddhism’ in 1916,
where ‘Asiatic’ is a halfway house between the particular and the general, and the piece is as
much a literary closure as a significant general statement: MWG I/20.526–44.) However, as
I have suggested at (4) above, there is a discernible logic linking the ‘Summary’ and the
‘Zwischenbetrachtung’ as sequential pieces of work. The first situates ‘Confucianism’, an
oddity amongst the world religions in that it was not an ethical and salvation religion, in
relation to the “home” focus supplied by Puritanism or ascetic Protestantism; the second
then returns to the general, and for Weber central, theme of ethical and salvation religiosity,
as originally broached in the ‘Introduction’.
 4
War and Peace: 1914–1920

The revival of the PE was completed by the accident of the World War. Once more
Paul Siebeck would play some part in this, and in 1917 Weber even spoke of
dedicating the book collection of the ‘articles on the Sociology of Relig.’ to him.1
Siebeck was understandably anxious to keep his publishing house afloat during the
hard times of war, and in Max Weber he had an author who, on the evidence of the
PE, combined intellectual prestige and sales potential. Siebeck also knew that
Weber was a hoarder of manuscripts that, however imperfect in the author’s eyes,
were eminently publishable. So in the first months of the war he badgered Weber
with a variety of indiscriminate suggestions. Once more, he considered a simple
reprint of the original PE in book form—an idea Weber seems not to have dignified
with a response. Alternatively, he proposed that Weber’s “sociology”—in other
words, ‘Economy and Society’—might be printed ‘in its present manuscript state’.2
Now, as we have seen, ‘Economy and Society’ was at the top of Weber’s agenda
before August 1914, when he supposed that the companion essays on ‘the religions
of Kultur’ (the ‘Economic Ethics’) would appear ‘after the appearance of “Economy
and Society”, so far as they would still be necessary’.3 However, the outbreak of war
was received by Weber as a complete ‘breach’ or caesura for his intellectual work, a
breach ‘so strong that it precludes taking up once more chains of thought from the
preceding [pre-war] period, or at least makes this disproportionately difficult’.4
Of course, the obvious reason for thinking so was because he had volunteered for
military service; but the deeper truth is that the pre-war ‘Economy and Society’ had
become a burgeoning leviathan that he struggled to control and was now glad to
set aside.
Weber had worked on the project with feverish intensity since January 1913, but
suffered a relapse in June and July 1914. In late July he responded to even the
lightest pressure by Siebeck in terms that were unpardonable, but for the fact that a
European war was now known to be imminent, a prospect that, though it is not
mentioned here, sent him into a frenzy of passionate outrage and despair:

1 To Siebeck, 20.2.17 Briefe. Weber had, however, forgotten this when he conceived the actual,

published dedication to the first volume of GARS in June 1920: Lebensbild, 710–11.
2 Siebeck to Weber, 28.12.14, 18.2.15, cit. J. Winckelmann, Max Webers Hinterlassenes Hauptwerk

(Tübingen, 1986), 42; Briefe, II/9.21 n. 2 resp.

3 To Werner Sombart, 2.12.13, Briefe; original emphasis.
4 ‘Einleitung’, AfSS 41 (1915), 1 n. 1.
206 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic
I took over this work [the Grundriss]—the sorrow of my life, which took me away from
things that I could readily have settled—out of kindness towards you and [Karl] Bücher,
quite unsuspectingly . . . I am the “maid of all work”. For three years now I have been working
only on this basis and only to this end . . . If besides my health and my good humour I lose my
good name in this affair—and that could happen! these are the trickiest and most contested
matters in our discipline [social economics] and in sociology!—then indeed I would never
forgive you. And that will happen, if I am pressurized.5
Seven months later his response to Siebeck’s renewed proposal to publish ‘Econ-
omy and Society’ was more polite, but equally decided: ‘My dear friend,—I must
ask you once more to have some perspective regarding the situation of an author.
How can it even be thought that now I could be readying a single line of my
“Sociology” for the press, proof-reading etc.’ Any work on the Grundriss der
Sozialökonomik was ‘An impossibility!’6 To add to his sense of difficulty, he had
decided that ‘Economy and Society’ was by no means near completion, as it had
appeared in the spring of 1914, since it would have to be entirely recast in ‘more
compressed and “systematic” form’7—the forbidding form that confronts us in the
post-war text. But this then created a vacant space that the ‘Economic Ethics’ and
the PE could fill. They now rose to the top of Weber’s academic agenda, preceding
‘Economy and Society’, though of course war work in government (if he could
get it) was his foremost concern. This reordering of priorities then established a
momentum that would carry over even beyond the point in 1917 at which he
began to contemplate an imminent peace.
Weber’s entry into the military hospital service at the beginning of the war is a
striking reminder of his yearning for useful practical activity in the early 1890s, and
of his ever-present scepticism about the worth of the ‘ivory-tower scholar’ (Stuben-
gelehrte).8 It is also one of the moments in his life when we today will say that he
demonstrated true personal greatness—far beyond any reasonable expectation of
what even a good man would do in such a historical context. For this was the point
at which he publicly set himself apart from the class of intellectuals or literati, who
preferred to serve their country not in uniform and in silence, but with their pens
and ‘nationalistic furore’.9 He did not contribute one word to the torrent of
chauvinist war literature produced by “intellectuals” throughout Western Europe
in 1914–15, a group that in Germany included such decent and yet naively
“unpolitical” men as Friedrich Meinecke, Ernst Troeltsch, Georg Simmel, and

5 To Siebeck, 27.7.14, Briefe.—The day before (Sunday, 26th) was the last of the Webers’ Sunday

jours, when their circle of friends gathered and listened as ‘the demonic man with lowering gaze spoke
words pronouncing the doom of Germany and Austria’: Edgar Salin, Um Stefan George (Munich,
19542), 120–1; cf. Karl Lowenstein, ‘Personal Recollections of Max Weber’ [1964], in Max Weber’s
Political Ideas in the Perspective of Our Time (Massachusetts, 1966), 95–6. Wolfgang Mommsen’s
omission of this episode and his claim that ‘Max Weber shared the national euphoria of the late
summer of 1914 with glad heart’ is a low moment in a great book: Max Weber und die deutsche Politik
(Tübingen, 20043), 206.
6 To Siebeck, 21.2.15, Briefe; cf. to same [c.9].5.16, MWG II/9.411.
7 To Siebeck, 22.6.15, Briefe.
8 Cf. ‘Die deutschen Landarbeiter’ [1894], Freiburg inaugural [1895], MWG I/4.326, 571.
9 Weber to Sombart, 30.7.15, Briefe.
 War and Peace: 1914–1920 207

(the faux sophisticatif ) Thomas Mann. Yet even Weber could not pretend that he
was entirely fulfilled by service on behalf of the military hospitals, especially after
the hectic period spent creating the system was past, and he began to find it wearing
by its very “mindlessness”.10 So in June 1915, at the same time that he was
beginning to look for more productive war work in and around government,11
he made the proposal that would result in the Collected Essays on the Sociology of
Religion of 1920. This would prove to be his principal “war work”, whether
measured by time spent or literary volume, even if (as we have seen) it was an
idea that went back to 1912–13:
I would be ready to give the Archiv a series of essays on the “Economic Ethics of the World
Religions”, which have been lying here [in Heidelberg] since the beginning of the war, and
need only stylistic revision—preliminary studies for, and commentaries on, the systematic
Sociology of Religion in the “G[rundriss] d[er] S[ozial]Ö[konomik]”. They must appear just
as they are—almost entirely without notes, since I cannot do a single stroke of work on them.
They comprise Confucianism (China), Hinduism and Buddhism (India), Judaism, Islam,
Christianity. I flatter myself that these essays, which effect a general execution of the method
of the essay “Protest. Ethic and Spirit of Capitalism”, will produce a good sale of the relevant
numbers [of the journal] at least at the time [of issue]. Later, if you are prepared to do so,
they can appear separately [in book form] together with that essay; but not now. For in their
present form they are only fit to be periodical essays. . . .
The essays are fairly extensive. Say 4 essays each of 4–5 sheets [64–80 pages]. It will help
the G[rundriss] if they are printed soon, or at least some of them. For the presentation in the
G[rundriss] must be more compressed and “systematic”.12
Over the summer and autumn he sent in the ‘Introduction’, ‘Confucianism’ and
the ‘Zwischenbetrachtung’ in accordance with this scheme. But in the meanwhile
Weber’s minimalist ideas of what he might achieve in wartime were rapidly
evolving. In mid-July he told Siebeck that ‘The essays can appear as a volume
(together with the “Spirit of Capitalism”) . . . either immediately after the conclu-
sion of the whole [article series] or else before the conclusion i.e. alongside the
summary concluding statement [in the article series].’13 This registered an important
shift in his views. In June Weber had supposed that there would be a major
difference between the article and the book publications: the first were periodical
articles only; the latter aspired to a higher status, and the obvious mark of this was
the attachment of a full scholarly apparatus. For this reason they would come
‘Later’. Now he was suggesting that there need be no such time interval; that book
publication might coincide with the conclusion of the article series in the Archiv.
But this could happen only if the difference between the article and book formats
was overridden: in other words if, when they first appeared, the essays on the
‘Economic Ethics’ were already high-status pieces with a scholarly apparatus. In
short, Weber was already envisaging the approach that he would adopt after the
submission of ‘Confucianism’ and his formal exit from the military hospital service

10 Marianne to Helene Weber, 1.10.15, pr. MWG I/17.4 n. 15.

11 Cf. Weber to Jaffé, [24–30.]6.15, Briefe.
12 To Siebeck, 22.6.15, Briefe. 13 14.7.15, Briefe.
208 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

on 30 September 1915. Thereafter the essays he would submit to the Archiv were in
finished, scholarly form, so that post-war book publication could be as expeditious as
possible. Hence a clear difference between the original version of ‘Confucianism’—
where in essence the materials of 1912–13 still formed the basis of what was
published—and the far more elaborate treatments of ‘Hinduism and Buddhism’
and ‘Ancient Judaism’. Whereas ‘Confucianism’ would need a major revision after
the war to bring it up to what Weber deemed an adequate scholarly standard for
inclusion in the Collected Essays, the latter were finished texts, which needed only
slight later adjustment.14 This was an attempt to speed up post-war publication, so
that Weber would then be free to devote himself to ‘Economy and Society’, but only
at the cost of retarding his progress in wartime. Because of the interdisciplinary
Weber’s exaggerated deference to what he regarded as standards adequate for spe-
cialist consumption [i.13–14], these essays became extremely long and full, and were
delivered much more slowly than a puzzled Paul Siebeck had been led to expect.15
After all, if ‘Confucianism’ had been delivered within a month of the original
proposal, one might suppose that the whole series would be complete in just a few
months more. However ‘Hinduism and Buddhism’ occupied ten months (to July
1916),16 and ‘Ancient Judaism’ twenty (down to March 1918);17 and where ‘Con-
fucianism’ took up just over 100 pages in its original form, Hinduism and Buddhism
ran to nearly 400, and Judaism actually to 400, while ‘Confucianism and Taoism’
when reworked in 1919–20 to an appropriate scholarly standard came out at 260.18
Not only this, but the treatment of Judaism became so long that only a fragment—
‘Ancient Judaism’—was ever published, while the fourth of the original essays, on
Islam, never saw the light of the day.
The explanation for this profusion and delay was not simply an exaggerated
regard for specialist Wissenschaft. As we have seen, Siebeck needed copy, since
wartime supplied one of those unusual publishing contexts where length is prefer-
able to brevity. Weber also found a satisfying displacement activity in these studies
to offset the rigour and horror of war—a time when ‘one [had] something like a
frozen and petrified heart in one’s body’, and death had become ‘an “everyday” fact’
for a childless, middle-aged man far from the front who was nonetheless absolutely
committed to the sympathetic understanding of grim reality.19 (This was not value-
free, but it was still Verstehen.) Hence his comment in regard to ‘Judaism’ that, ‘I

14 See Weber to Siebeck: before 5.12.18, 11.9.19, Briefe. His letter of 30.5.20, which might be read

in a contrary sense, may be put down to his desire to meet Siebeck’s need for copy, so as to make the
essays ‘outwardly thicker’.
15 Cf. Weber to Siebeck, 30.10, 8.11.15, [c.22.2.16], Briefe. Weber offset the fact of delay by

making disingenuous references to the need to shorten his work. This was indeed true, but only
because the initial conception of the essays was now so much more voluminous and ambitious—
something he omitted to point out.
16 The last instalment was sent in on 22 July 1916: to Siebeck, Briefe.
17 See n. 35 below.
18 The typesetting of Archiv articles was reused for that in GARS. Thus in the case of absolutely

identical texts, a page of one was a page in the other, which correspondence also confirms: e.g. Weber
to Siebeck, 5.12.18, pr. MWG I/21.222. For Confucianism, cf. AfSS 41 (1915), 30–87, 335–86, with
GARS i.276–536.
19 Resp. to Mina Tobler, 19.7.17, to Else Jaffé, 30.10.17, Briefe.
 War and Peace: 1914–1920 209

am only happy when I am once more amidst matters which are wholly remote,
which transport one away from the present. For everything that is connected with
[the present] is somehow darkly coloured, and pulls at the iron ring which one
feels is laid around one’s chest, head and neck.’20 However, the force of such
statements—which are occasional, and made only privately—should not be exag-
gerated. They are indeed a valuable corrective to an inflated estimate of the
importance of political activity to Weber during the World War,21 when the
overriding truth is that he was (as he had been ever since c.1895) a thinker first
and foremost, not a politician. Nonetheless, it would be wrong to go to the other
extreme, and to suppose that he ever lost sight of the patriotic duty of political work
in wartime. In fact his position was carefully balanced. On the one hand, he was
largely unsuccessful in finding public employment—no doubt the best openings
were to be had in the opening months of the war when he was doing hospital
service, although the difficulty of employing someone like Weber as any kind of
subordinate is evident.22 On the other, he devoted considerable energy to com-
mitted political writing in 1917–18. As he noted in 1917, ‘Being [previously]
preoccupied with purely academic work, I felt no need to make any kind of political
utterance during the war’; but once the national–political truce of August 1914, the
Burgfrieden, began to break down in early 1917, speaking out politically on
elementary matters of principle became a ‘duty of decency’.23 Yet these writings
are not simply political. They are both political statements and a way-station in the
evolution of his ideas. This was the second principal strand in Weber’s “war work”,
and here again it was of a peculiar kind, taking almost no interest in the conduct of
the war (which was not a matter for public debate), but focusing instead on the
future—of both the German nation state and Western social thought.
So Weber’s return to the mindset of peacetime, and to ‘Economy and Society’,
was long prepared. Already by June 1916 it was clear that he would not secure any
permanent government employment. Now in the first instance this meant simply
that he gave himself up to his studies of ‘Indians’ and Jews.24 However, with the
passage of time the seeming infinity of the war began to soften even Weber’s rigid
sense of wartime priorities, and a significant straw in the wind may be detected in
February 1917. Before this date his only references to ‘Economy and Society’ had
been sharply dismissive, brushing off Siebeck’s attempts to promote the project
during wartime; but now he began to look forward to working on it: ‘If only the

20 To Mina Tobler, 23.11.17, Briefe.; cf. same to same, 28.8.17.

21 Pace Wolfgang Mommsen’s Max Weber und die deutschen Politik (Tübingen [1959] 20043), who
developed an interpretation first mapped out by Marianne Weber, Lebensbild, chs 16–18. Mommsen
was aware of Weber’s tendency to withdraw from politics, but still he relied on the idea that politics was
his “secret love”—an ambiguous remark, which he interpreted in far too summary and convenient a
fashion: p. 335; cf. Weber to Mina Tobler [27.5.17], Briefe. Taking Weber’s political commitment as
self-evident, Mommsen masks the insufficiency of what he actually did in this respect, and ignores the
more significant intellectual career that ran alongside this.
22 Alfred Weber followed Max into the army but still managed to secure a governmental position

in 1916.
23 To Frankfurter Zeitung, 7.6.17; cf. Weber to Naumann, 3.2.17, on the Burgfrieden: Briefe.
24 e.g. to Mina Tobler, 7, 11.8.16, Briefe.
210 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

war would end, so that I could get back to my volume in the Grundriss! Just now
this is simply impossible for me inwardly, and so I prefer to go on with these articles
on relig[ious] sociology. But I yearn for the other.’25 In fact, as we shall see below
(II.7), the developing flux in domestic politics in 1917, and the further develop-
ment of the theory of Herrschaft (a central component of ‘Economy and Society’),
went hand in hand. In May an external event then opened up another seam of
forward planning, when the faculty of Political Economy at Munich proposed him
as their first choice to succeed Lujo Brentano in his professorial chair. At this date
the Munich government was never going to sanction the appointment of anyone
‘so far to the left’ as Weber,26 but the news drew from him the acknowledgement
that he and Marianne faced impending financial difficulty as a result of the wartime
inflation and its effect on their rentier income. He would need salaried employment
at some point in the near future and for the first time he began to contemplate a
return to university teaching in peacetime—most obviously and most comfortably
at Heidelberg.27 But wherever he ended up, there was one respect in which a return
to teaching would differ from his experience in the 1890s. The only kind of post
Weber now considered occupying was a chair that made at least some room for
sociology. Specifically, an interdisciplinary Weberian sociology, which would es-
cape both the specialist, disciplinary constraint he had found so intolerable before,
as well as ‘the dilettante performances of brilliant philosophers’ (an allusion to
Georg Simmel), who had insufficient regard for the necessary reliance of interdis-
ciplinary work on specialist foundations.28
In a polity where professors in state universities served many of the discursive and
opinion-forming functions of a parliamentary system, the Munich proposal was
public news, and this was the probable trigger for the interest displayed in Weber by
the University of Vienna from July 1917.29 Now the idea of permanent employ-
ment in Vienna was unthinkable to someone such as Weber, who was committed
to German-national politics, and whose religious Kultur, however unusual, derived
from Protestantism.30 Nonetheless, he liked Vienna, he had good connections with
the Viennese economists,31 and so a compromise arose: he would teach there for
one semester, from April to July 1918, with a light teaching load. For both sides it
was a test: for Weber to see whether his health would break down as it had done
twenty years before; for the University authorities, to see whether he would then
sign up on a permanent basis. In this way peace came early to Weber. Previously he
had assumed he would have to take up some form of teaching appointment for the
winter semester beginning in October 1918: this was the approximate point
beyond which (he supposed) the war could no longer continue, because it could

25 To Paul Siebeck, 20.2.17, Briefe.

26 Cf. the memorandum of the Munich Kultusministerium, November 1918, cit. Briefe, II/
9.688 n. 2.
27 To Mina Tobler [27.5.17], Briefe. 28 To Paul Siebeck, 8.11.19, ibid.
29 The relevant archival materials have not survived: Briefe, II/9.722 n. 2.
30 See e.g. Weber to L. M. Hartmann (a good friend), where he describes the Viennese proposal

as ‘surprising’: Briefe, 17.9.17. For a retrospective assessment: to Bernhard Guttmann, 15.8.18, ibid.
31 Historian, 276–8.
 War and Peace: 1914–1920 211

now serve no meaningful political purpose.32 By the new arrangement the onset of
university teaching moved forward by six months, and with it came some of the
intellectual conditions of peace. Weber’s lecture subject would be his “sociology”
or, as it appeared on the lecture list, ‘Economy and Society (Positive Critique of the
Materialist Conception of History)’,33 and with this he returned to the intellectual
agenda that had been set aside in August 1914. The idea was fixed in his mind from
the moment the appointment was agreed in October 1917. As he told Siebeck, the
text on which he would base the lectures was ‘my book for the Grundriss’.34 In
parallel with this resumption of a peacetime agenda, his wartime diversion, the
polishing and elaboration of the ‘Economic Ethics of the World Religions’, was
brusquely wound up prior to his departure for Vienna in April 1918, and the study
of Judaism terminated in midstream.35
So when Weber returned from Vienna at the end of July 1918, he had two
principal projects to consider. First and foremost was a radical reworking of
‘Economy and Society’, since he had long ago decided that the sprawling mass of
the pre-1914 drafts ‘had to be reshaped quite fundamentally’.36 This was a pointer
to the radical change in its formal organization, which far outweighs any substan-
tive change in the material. The smooth and accessible prose text of the pre-war
drafts is abandoned in favour of what Weber called ‘didactic’ form, densely
numerated and sectioned, as a sign that even an interdisciplinary sociology should
advertise its aggressively “scientific” (wissenschaftlich) pretensions.37 His secondary
task was to complete the revision of the PE and, where necessary, the studies of the
‘World Religions’ for book publication. However, the latter was not immediately
pressing. No book could be published until the final instalments of ‘Ancient
Judaism’ had appeared in the Archiv, and, owing to paper shortage and other
wartime dislocation, these would not in fact come out until December 1918,
June 1919, and January 1920.38 Furthermore, once the Viennese intermezzo was
over in July 1918, Weber’s return to Germany signified a return to German politics
and the unfinished war, and the foretaste of intellectual peacetime had to be set
aside. Thus the late summer of 1918 was a period in limbo, and he did little. He
needed to recover from the fatigue of lecturing in Vienna, and was at most able to

32 e.g. Weber to L. M. Hartmann, 8.9.17, Briefe. For the draft offer of a teaching contract in

Heidelberg dated 12.11.17: ibid. I/9.811 n. 8. Writing to Mina Tobler on 19.7.17, he predicted that
the war would go on for at least ‘5/4’ of a year: ibid. In Berlin in January 1918 he heard that Walther
Rathenau was talking of another three years’ war, but this was ‘nonsense’, there would be a revolution
first. So he continued to ‘bet 2:1 on peace in the autumn’: to Franz Eulenburg, 17.1.18, Briefe.
Weber’s calculations of future outcomes are enormously impressive, both in fact and because of the
sophisticated grasp of probability theory that underlay them.
33 Cf. MWG I/22–4.723 & n. 43. 34 26.11.17, Briefe.
35 No letter marks the submission of the final tranche of ‘Ancient Judaism’ to the press, but this

must have been before Weber’s departure for Vienna in April 1918. Subsequent references to this work
relate only to the (formal) need to correct it for GARS, or the fact that there would be no continuation
of the fragment submitted (however odd this might look): to Siebeck, before 5.12.18, 11.9.19; to Emil
Lederer, 1.12.19, Briefe; cf. Historian, 119 n. 1.
36 To Siebeck, 27.10.19, Briefe.
37 To same, 8.11.19, ibid. 38 Dates of issue: AfSS 46, nos 1–3.
212 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

do a certain amount of ‘receptive work’—reading books—‘but nothing else’.39

However, a brutal clarity supervened in October 1918 with Germany’s military and
political collapse. In the eight months that followed (down to his return from
Versailles at the end of May 1919), Weber’s life was taken over by domestic and
foreign politics and he had practically no time for academic work.40 In the history
of his ideas, the only significant developments during this period are negative and
external ones. However, even as the tidal wave of political events engulfed him, he
made it abundantly clear as early as January 1919 that his renewed political activity
was temporary, and implied no new career trajectory (as it would for many left-
leaning academics at this time).41
The most solid evidence of his academic commitment was his acceptance in
March of a university post at Munich with a reduced teaching and lecturing load
(to cater for his uncertain health) and a reduced salary to match.42 The previous
summer, in the wake of his Viennese experiences, the financial need to return to
lecturing had not seemed urgent, and he had not followed up the idea of taking
employment for the winter semester of 1918–19. Now the sense of need was
greater, although acceptance of the Munich post seems to have been provoked as
much by anticipation of what Weber regarded as the justified socialist expropriation
of rentier incomes such as his own following the German Revolution of 1918–19 as
by the parallel impact of currency inflation.43 All the same, his experience of lecturing
at Vienna even under the most favourable conditions convinced him that ‘nothing,
absolutely nothing [had] changed when compared to 20 years ago’—which does

39 To Mina Tobler, 25.8.18, Briefe. It is possible some of these books related to ‘Confucianism’.

This would explain a statement to Siebeck, prior to its actual preparation for the GARS, that some
revision had already taken place: 11.9.19, Briefe. However, the suggestion (‘Editorischer Bericht’,
MWG I/19.41–3) that Weber worked on this subject in Vienna cannot be upheld. He had an
intellectual encounter with a single individual, Arthur v. Rosthorn, but this is not the same as
working on a text: to Marianne Weber, 17.6.18, to v. Rosthorn, 16.7.18, Briefe.
40 An isolated letter to Siebeck ‘before 5 Dec. 1918’ talks of setting to work revising the essays on

the world religions. It is hard to credit Weber writing in such a fashion at this date, but this is probably
explained by the need to respond politely to Siebeck’s appeal to give employment to personnel
returning from the war: Briefe.
41 Note Weber’s withdrawal from all DDP Reichstag candidate lists on 5 January (MWG I/16.156);

his entry into negotiations with Munich after 23 January, leading to his letter to the Frankfurter
Zeitung of 9 February announcing that when he took up his new university post he would ‘retire from
all active politics for ever’: Briefe.
42 The initial ‘call’ (job offer) is dated 23.1.19, based on a decision ratified by the Eisner

government on 18.1.19: Briefe, II/9.687 n. 2; II/10.424; Guenther Roth, ‘Edgar Jaffé and Else von
Richthofen: A Biographical Essay’, Part II }16. A still better offer was made by Bonn on 2 February,
but by then Weber felt that he was committed to Munich: to C. H. Becker, 6.2.19, Briefe. The
presence of Else Jaffé in Wolfratshausen near Munich was certainly important in tipping the balance as
between Munich and Bonn: e.g. Marianne to Helene Weber, 17.2.19, pr. Bärbel Meurer, Marianne
Weber, 403. However, Else’s existence explains nothing about why Weber needed to take the
unsavoury course of resuming university employment. Nor should the political motives for going to
Munich—to defend the nation state at a ‘very exposed’ point against Bavarian separatism, radicalism
and Catholicism—be overlooked: to Hermann Oncken, 25.3.19, Briefe.
43 On the expropriation of rentiers: to Alwine Müller, 10.10.18, Briefe; cf. PE [XXI.56 n. 113a, 82

n. 24]; for his views about employment the previous summer: to Marianne Weber, 12.7.18, Briefe.
The impact of inflation on the Webers’ Oerlinghausen income does not become really marked until
early 1920: to Clara Mommsen, 9.2.20, Briefe.
 War and Peace: 1914–1920 213

not suggest (as Marianne Weber piously supposed) that Weber was ‘granted a
second youth’ at this time, while her further statement that lecturing now became
‘effortless’ is nonsense.44 Max’s real attitude was typically unillusioned: ‘If it’s
necessary for the money, then I will happily lead the half-animal existence of the
university lecturer, for then it must be so. But for “ideal” aims and perspectives—
no!’45 The remit of the new appointment also raised problems. The political
climate in the wake of the Revolution would be a good deal more favourable to
novelties such as sociology, but still this did not produce an overnight conversion in
all minds. At Munich Weber would become Professor of the Science of Society,
Economic History and Economics, suggesting a compromise between the title of
the post previously held by Brentano, with its focus on historically based econom-
ics, and his own desire to lecture on “sociology”, even if Weber’s general belief in
the importance of historical method is clear. Thus one of the consequences of the
professorial job description was that he was obliged to lecture on the thoroughly
traditional subject of economic history, one with clear affinities to his lectures in the
1890s, which he did not relish.46 On the other hand, this seems to have been the
only such traditional course he was offering, and the Munich post was by no means
a return to the full teaching load of the 1890s. Instead, Weber was feather-bedded
at Munich—a remarkable tribute to his intellectual prestige—even if, as in the tale
of the princess and the pea, he experienced feather-bedding as a kind of rough-
house, so that in 1920 he could consider working in a newspaper or publishing
house rather than continuing with ‘this lecturing drivel, which never satisfies me
inwardly’.47
Intellectual life was resumed with a show of determination in June 1919 when
Weber was released from government duty at the Versailles Peace Conference. On
the 10th he wrote to Siebeck from Heidelberg telling him to expect both the
‘beginning’ of “Economy and Society” and texts for the book edition of the Essays
on the Sociology of Religion within six weeks.48 However, this was a statement of
intent made on the eve of his move to Munich, and no more. When he arrived,
lecturing duties, as so often before, drained much of his energy. (There was an
extra, midsummer semester for returning servicemen.) A little way into the term, he
was still hoping to do a limited amount of his own work, but now the tone has
perceptibly changed. As he reported to Marianne on 28 June: ‘“Work” goes on in a
very moderate way: 1–2 hours a day. I am shattered beyond all expectation; my
head is in a bad way. But I will get going, and gradual “acclimatization” is probably
the only way to do so. I am now taking up the “Protestant Ethic”, to prepare it for

44 Lebensbild, 675, 683. 45 To Marianne Weber [16.6.18], Briefe.

46 In negotiations with Munich Weber accepted that, if he must give any compulsory lecture
course, then Economic History was one he could do; but it was not where his interests lay: to Franz
Matt, 5.2.19; cf. MWG II/10.424. Hence a series of later complaints: to Mina Tobler, 27.8, 25.10,
5.11.19, 15.1.20, Briefe.
47 To same, 24.4.20, Briefe. At the same time, knowing that he was not pulling his weight, he

suggested downgrading his post to that of an extraordinary chair: to Bayerisches Staatsministerium für
Unterricht, 13.11.19, ibid.
48 Briefe.
214 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

the press. Then the “Economic Ethics”. After that the Sociology [Economy and
Society], whose introduction is the same as the lecture course. Let’s see what
happens! I am now quite simply a man of the pen; not of the lectern.’49 In our
history this is a small milestone: the first clear mention of Weber at work on the PE
since 1907. However, the implicit premiss of this correspondence, with its litany of
complaint—‘Outside lectures I can achieve almost nothing’—offset by admissions
of the ‘most absolute idleness’,50 is his conception of textual revision as a strictly
limited task, just as he had supposed it was in 1907.
Certainly the amount of work Weber was able to devote to the PE in Munich
that summer was distinctly modest. The first call on his time was his lectures, which
were not just run-of-the-mill student lectures but on ‘The Most General Categories
of Social Science’—that is, the first chapter of the new ‘Economy and Society’,
which he now brought to completion.51 In addition, he took time out to appear as a
character witness on behalf of Ernst Toller and Otto Neurath, who were on trial for
their part in the Munich revolutions of the spring; his mother came to visit; and in
August Marianne stayed fully three weeks.52 Nor should we suppose that he did a
great deal more in the two weeks that followed her departure. With both Marianne
and Alfred Weber absent, he was able to experience ‘the summit of life . . . an
ecstasy and dream of sweet love, tender emotion [and] deep surrender’ with Else
Jaffé.53 Thus his report to Marianne on the day she left (22 August) was not quite
the whole truth: ‘Now it’s back to Alberti etc., and the review of the “Ethic”.’54 On
the other hand, love and Erotik were firmly set by Weber within a conceptual
framework (e.g. XXI.79 n.17), and in 1919–20 Else confirmed rather than dis-
turbed this. We learn from this remark that he was writing, or had lately written,
the long note (or miniature essay) demonstrating the irrelevance of the Renaissance
polymath [i.38 n. 1]+—and hence Renaissance humanism generally [cf. XXI.109]—
to the argument of the PE. So if he was proceeding sequentially, he was 15 or perhaps
20 per cent of the way through revising the text. Yet he had almost certainly
completed the primary (pre-proof) revision of the PE by the time he left Munich
two weeks later on 5 September. Having returned home to Heidelberg for the very
last time on the evening of Friday 5th, Weber started academic work bright and early
at 5 a.m. the following Monday (prefaced by a short hymn to Else). On Tuesday we
learn that he was in the midst of rewriting the ‘Protestant Sects’, and by Thursday he
could write to Siebeck that the revised manuscript of the PE was in the post.55

49 To Marianne Weber, 28.6.19, ibid.

50 Resp. to Marianne Weber, 1, 23.7.19, ibid.
51 For this reason he could send the text to Siebeck on 25.9.19, despite leaving it untouched during

his September vacation in Heidelberg: Briefe.

52 He attended the Toller trial on 16 July; Neurath’s 23 July (cf. MWG I/16.485–95); Helene

Weber visited 22–24 July; Marianne stayed 1–22 August. The semester ended 31 August.
53 6.9.19, Briefe. 54 22.8.19, Briefe.
55 In order: to Else Jaffé, 8, 10.9.19; to Siebeck, 11.9.19 Briefe. Either Weber finished revising the

PE in Munich or there was just one day’s work left to do on it. I suggest the former, because (a) Weber
had a surprisingly tidy mind in matters of detailed time-tabling and would have wanted to finish his
task before moving; (b) he could hardly have started rewriting (or fair-copying) the PS at high speed
without a day’s preparation.
 War and Peace: 1914–1920 215

Whatever the minor uncertainties of this narrative reconstruction, it is indisput-

able that the sum total of the work done on the PE in 1919 was very slight. This
confirms what we know from scrutiny of the text and its history. The entirety of the
modifications made to the PE across the whole period since 1907 is small, and what
was done in 1919 much smaller still. The only significant additions to the text lie
in the realm of broad generality. For example, the remarks on the distinction
between the ubiquitous, financial, and politically driven capitalism of the “adven-
turer”, and the rational, industrial capitalism unique to the Occident [i.42–3]+,
which appear on the page as an echo, but in compositional sequence precede the
identical sentiments of the ‘Vorbemerkung’ [i.4–12]; or the series of reflections on
‘the removal of magic [Entzauberung] from the world’ [i.94–5; cf. 114, 155–6,
158]+. By contrast, the great majority of learned and specific emendations derive
from 1907, or in any case before 1914. The only significant post-war alterations of
this type come from Weber’s editorial reading of a single instalment of a single
article by Hermann Levy for the Archiv, itself engaged in dialogue with Weber,
which were entered at the proof stage, during a fortnight’s break from lecturing at
Christmas 1919.56 But this is a borrowed garnish, no more, and in marked contrast
to 1904–5, there is no evidence to suggest that Weber undertook any extensive
proof revision to the PE now.57 A third post-war component lies in anti-critical
commentary. Besides the note on Alberti directed against Sombart (though the idea
for this must go back to 1913) [i.38 n. 1]+,58 this means rebuttal of Brentano’s
critique of the PE published in 1916. But although the latter produces a consid-
erable accumulation of references, they are all short; almost exclusively polemical;
and of no great interest outside the history of the text’s reception or the intellectual
relationship between Weber and Brentano.59 The broader point (as we have seen) is
that from 1907 on the revision of the text had always been conceived in essentially
limited terms, an assumption entrenched by the “validation” of Ernst Troeltsch.

56 Hermann Levy, ‘Studien über das englische Volk II’, AfSS 46/3 (1920), 636–90; cf. [i.81 n. 3,

(187 n. 1, Ashley), 194 n. 4; (195 n. 2, Unwin), 196 n. 2 (202 n. 2 Smiles, Temple)]+. We know these
insertions were made before January 1920 because Weber had yet not seen Levy’s article in print. Thus
he makes no page references to it except for an incorrect one ‘605f ’ [i.194 n. 4]+, based on the false
assumption that it would follow directly after the final instalment of his own ‘Ancient Judaism’ (AfSS
46.541–604). Apart from Lujo Brentano’s commentary on the PE (discussed in the text), the only
other post-1914 works noted in the PE are by Georg von Below (a lecture almost certainly sent to
Weber in 1916) [i.205 n. 2]+; Karl Borinski (a recent lecture by a new Munich colleague) [i.205 n. 1]+;
and Georg Brodnitz, Englische Wirtschaftsgeschichte (Jena, 1918) [i.56 n. 1]+, a book brought to
Weber’s attention in preparing his lecture course on ‘Universal Social and Economic History’ rather
than by work on the PE: MWG III/6.97, etc. None of these works gives rise to anything more than the
briefest of mentions [c].
57 It is not mentioned in correspondence. In terms of both composition and proof revision, the

radically rewritten ‘Confucianism’ and the newly written ‘Economy and Society’ dominate Weber’s
attention after September 1919.
58 That this was written in 1919 is suggested by a reference to the moment of composition in the

text, ‘Regrettably at the time of writing I do not have Mancini’s edition before me . . . ’, as by the fact
that the note is largely about Alberti’s text, and says surprisingly little about Sombart. However, the
idea that a note of this kind was needed at this point undoubtedly goes back to the publication of
Sombart’s Der Bourgeois (1913). See similarly [i.56 n. 1]+.
59 See my ‘From the “Spirit of Capital” to the “Spirit” of Capitalism: The Transition in German

Economic Thought between Lujo Brentano and Max Weber’, HEI 35 (2009), 62–92.
216 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

This was 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 [i.17 n. 1; cf. 206 n. 1]+; and why in 1919 the PE would be described,
as we have seen, as one of a pair of ‘older essays’ alongside the ‘Protestant Sects’
[i.12]. The various changes made between 1907 and 1919 should, of course, be
carefully considered, since they contain much significant matter. Nonetheless, the
PE is in essentials the product of a great creative moment in 1902–5, or else of a
wider phase of activity down to 1907–8, and this is its true place in the intellectual
history of Max Weber. It is the compressed starting point from which the works of
his later maturity spring.
Having finished with the PE, Weber was equally summary in his handling of the
‘Vorbemerkung’ and the ‘Protestant Sects’. In the letter informing Siebeck of the
completion of the PE (Thursday, 11 September), he stated that the manuscript of
the essay on the Protestant sects would follow within a week.60 However, as noted,
he had already started work on this at the beginning of the week; and so the very
next day (Friday) he was able to send to Siebeck the ‘entirely newly rewritten
treatment [sic] of the sects’, supplemented by an announcement that ‘the (short)
Introduction’—the Vorbemerkung—would follow ‘very soon’.61 Now it is plain
that some, perhaps all, of the ‘Protestant Sects’ was physically written out afresh at
this time, and Weber was quite proud of his achievement in doing so. As he wrote
to Else Jaffé in the midweek, ‘Yesterday my work really got “into gear”. 12 pages
newly written on the essay “Sects and the Spirit of Capitalism” (that’s really a lot for
me).’62 Nonetheless, the idea that the essay on the Sects was a new piece of work
from 1919, which could be drafted from scratch in four days, is plainly unsustain-
able. In fact it can be understood only in the context of a previous history running
all the way back to 1906–7, and here is its essential point of origin. This was why he
could describe it, clumsily but accurately, as ‘entirely newly rewritten’ or, more
succinctly, as an ‘older essay’ alongside the PE. This is not to deny that adjustments
were made to the text at this time, just as they were to that of the PE. But as in the
case of the PE, they are quantitatively minor—they do not alter the original
structure of the piece or its erudite foundations—even if, like any of the marginal
alterations made by a canonical author, they merit our attention.63
The following Monday (15 September) Weber could report to Else Jaffé with a
degree of complacency that ‘Today, once again, an (entirely newly written) article
for the “Collected Essays” has gone off to the publisher.’ This was the ‘Vorbemer-
kung’ to the Collected Essays.64 Again, we see just how fast Weber was working at

60 To Siebeck, 11.9.19, Briefe. 61 Briefe.

62 Weber to Else Jaffé [10.9.19], Briefe. 63 Below II.8 nn. 92, 143.
64 MWG suggests, following a note by Werner Siebeck, that Weber is referring to the essay on the

‘Protestant Sects’: II/10.774 n. 3. This is a mistake: first by Werner Siebeck, who was much less well
briefed about Weber than his father, and then by MWG. It is quite clear that the essay sent in on
Monday is not the same as that sent in on Friday, and Weber’s emphasised ‘wieder’ draws attention to
this. Furthermore, the new essay is described as ‘entirely newly written’ unlike the PS, which in
Weber’s mind was always ‘rewritten’ from its origins in ‘Churches and Sects’: hence Redaktion (to
Siebeck, 11.9.19, Briefe), Umarbeitung, (Selbstanzeige), MWG I/19.28 etc.
 War and Peace: 1914–1920 217

this time, although the reasons for speed in the case of a new composition were
different from those facilitating revision of the PE and PS. Given the text’s brevity,
generality, and lack of apparatus (where the first draft of c.4000 words was still
shorter than the final text),65 it is by no means improbable that he should have been
able to write it from scratch in two or three days. Still, the ‘Vorbemerkung’ was like
the PE and PS in that its primary subject—a summary statement regarding the
“second” or external “side” to capitalism—was one he had long since clarified in his
mind, when writing ‘Agriculture in Antiquity’ in 1907–8.66 When it was sent in,
the Occidental headstone to the Collected Essays on the Sociology of Religion was in
principle complete. Now what is the end of our narrative was of no special moment
to Weber. He had (first) to get on with the eminently practical matter of moving
house from Heidelberg to Munich, and did no more academic work during his
final days in Ziegelhäuser Landstraße 17. Then, when he got back to Munich
(25 September), he took a certain pride in sending the opening chapter of the brand
new ‘Economy and Society’ to Siebeck.67 Yet for Paul Siebeck there was a certain
sense of closure. Once he had received the text of the ‘Vorbemerkung’, he knew
that book publication was both feasible and imminent, and wrote to Weber asking
for a ‘personal statement’ (Selbstanzeige) that he could use as an advertisement for
the Collected Essays.68 Weber duly obliged with 178 words scribbled on a piece of
borrowed office paper, sent in just before his return to Munich.69 It is a text to
which we shall return (II.5); but given Weber’s views on the insignificance of
intellectual personality, it would be unwise to suppose that advertisement was a
form he particularly esteemed or would rely upon to convey a central intellectual
statement.

65 The long passage beginning ‘Definieren’ [i.4.27] down to ‘In diesem Sinne’ [i.6.11] is clearly an

insertion, deriving from WuG, ch.II, and its fascination with detailed definition. The note [i.8 n. 1] on
the Bank of England is another addition, provoked by reading done for the lecture course on ‘Sozial-
und Wirtschaftsgeschichte’ in the winter semester 1919–20: MWG III/6.380.
66 See II.1, 7. 67 Weber to Siebeck, 25.9.19, Briefe.
68 Siebeck to Weber, 18, 19.9.19, cit. MWG I/19.45.
69 Facsimile in MWG I/19.29; cf. 45.
 5
Religiosity and Modernity (I)

Having considered the external history of the PE, we shall now—as in Part I—turn
to the history of ideas in its purer sense: that is, to consider some principal themes
that descend from the PE, and that form central filaments running through Max
Weber’s thought in the fifteen years down to his untimely death. Bearing in mind
that much of the thinking discussed in Part I remained unchanged and needs
no restatement, above all regarding rationality, we shall focus on three subjects
introduced by the PE, where there is a considerable history to be traced after 1905:
religion (II.5–6); capitalism and Herrschaft (II.7); and the social formations Weber
associated with religion—the sect and the bourgeois community of the city (II.8).

I . RELIGION, POLITICS, WISSENSCHAFT

First, religion. Few people today would instinctively describe Weber as a “religious
thinker”; but while he was evidently not a religious believer, the place he allotted to
the religious component within human conduct was uniquely important. He knew
himself to be a religiously “unmusical” man, living in an age that was ‘alien to god’
and ‘without prophets’;1 but still he felt himself to inhabit a universe where these
things had once been intimate and normal, a rational and meaningful ‘cosmos’,
which had been formed along guiding lines (Bahnen) laid down by religious
thought and action.2 Historically, religion was the only life sphere that aspired to
universality. Ethical and salvation religions were ‘universal’ or ‘universalist’ by
definition; they claimed to govern ‘the whole person’ (the base unit of all Weberian
thought):3 hence ‘the conduct of life as a whole’—for this is the force of the
theologically derived and incessantly repeated term, Lebensführung. All the other
life spheres or ‘life orders’ [XX.32], ranging from politics to economics to art
to sexuality, could affect or determine only a particular segment of conduct.
This might well make them more relevant to a fragmented modern world, with

1 [CS 581]; ‘Science as a Vocation’ [1917/19], MWG I/17.106.

2 Cf. ‘Einleitung’ [1919–20], MWG I/19.101 (Bahnen).—For the classically educated Weber,
‘cosmos’ automatically signified an ordered universe, the opposite of ‘chaos’. So ‘cosmos’ is always
implicitly rational, even where the predicate ‘rational’ does not appear, although in the case of a
salvation religion its rationality is primarily substantial and meaningful, not formal and technical.
3 e.g. ‘Einleitung’, AfSS 41 (1915), 13. For the elementary formula of the ‘universalist religion’, e.g.

Sociology of Religion [c.1913], MWG I/22–2.391; ‘Zwischenbetrachtung’, AfSS 41 (1915), 396–7,

406 etc.
 Religiosity and Modernity (I) 219

its avowed plurality of values; but whether regarded formally and conceptually, or
by the light of history and the historical conditions that had determined the make-
up of modern Kultur, religiosity was the primary variable, around which a flotilla
of secondary agencies revolved.4 In this sense religion was the true centre of all
Weberian thought, and the rough and ready indices of a written œuvre and
reception history dominated by his religious writings do not mislead.
Politics is an outstanding case of a sphere that, in Weber’s eyes, could properly be
understood only within this greater religious context.5 In a deep historical perspec-
tive the comprehensively political Occidental polis had been confronted by a
Pauline Christianity displaying the utmost ‘indifference to the world’ [XXI.83]:
that is, it was significantly indebted to Oriental ‘apoliticism’ yet not constrained
by it.6 So Christianity had always been radically opposed to the “world” and its
principal incarnation, politics, which in its charismatic phases it determined to
remodel in its own image. In this respect the significant history of Christianity is a
history of anti-politics. The most extended discussion of this antithesis appears in
the late lecture ‘Politics as a Vocation’ (1919), the final section of which constitutes
a succinct religio-political treatise.7 Regardless of the fact that its impact on present-
day conduct was now greater than that of the churches, politics could be under-
stood only as an ‘order’ of activity that was local and particular, not universal.
Political action took place ‘within the conduct of life as a whole’;8 it was not,
as religion claimed to be, the governor of conduct as a whole. If the defining
characteristic of salvation religion was to generate a universal, ethical scheme,
politics represented an opposite pole, being rooted in the physical defence of
an arbitrarily defined land mass and its inhabitants.9 Conceptually speaking, one
could hardly descend to a lower or more primitive level. In such a context,
imitation of the religious idea of an ‘ethic of conviction’ (Gesinnungsethik) that
was “not of this world”10 was out of place, and the syndicalist, Bolshevik, or other
revolutionary socialist who justified political actions on the basis of loyalty to a
creed regardless of the costs was a pseudo-religious charlatan. The only true
practitioner of the conviction ethic in politics, the ‘genuine leader’, was a religious

4 Classical statements in Sociology of Religion [c.1913], MWG I/22–2.367–414;

‘Zwischenbetrachtung’, AfSS 41 (1915), 387–421.
5 The argument presented here has no precedent in previous commentary on Weber’s political

thought: egg. Wolfgang Mommsen, Max Weber und die deutsche Politik (Tübingen, 20043); Andreas
Anter, Max Webers Theorie des modernen Staats (Berlin, 1995).
6 ‘Agrarverhältnisse’3 [1907–8], MWG I/6.597; cf. Sociology of Herrschaft [c.1911–14], MWG

I/22–4.636–7.
7 MWG I/17.230–52. In volume terms this is not much more than a quarter of the text, but

conceptually it is one of two halves, as is clear from Weber’s Stichwortmanuskript: ibid. 139–45,
147–55.
8 ‘Politics as a Vocation’ [1919], MWG I/17.157, emphasis added; reiterated 230.
9 e.g. ‘Politische Gemeinschaften’ [c.1911–12], MWG I/22–1.204–6.
10 [Der Sinn der »Wertfreiheit«, 1913], in H. H. Nau (ed.), Der Werturteilsstreit (Marburg, 1996),

170; cf. ‘Politics as a Vocation’, MWG I/17.237, 239. The former is the only usage of Gesinnungsethik
in a secular context prior to the better known (but identical) usages in ‘Politics as a Vocation’ (1919). It
evidently derives from Weber’s original use of the term in the Sociology of Religion, also from 1913:
MWG I/22–2, index s.v.
220 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

figure: the ‘prophet of revolution’.11 For while there could be no genuine invasion
of the religious sphere by politicians and ideologues, in exceptional, charismatic
cases, such as the Puritans and Quakers in mid-seventeenth century England,
religion could invade the political sphere in order to set limits to it, leading
to revolutionary, anti-political and (specifically) ‘anti-authoritarian’ consequences
such as the creation of universal human rights founded in natural law [XXI.93].12
Weber rehearsed the point in 1909–10:
that influence [‘of religious factors’] is also of a quite different, and more fundamental
significance in the political sphere, than those of our historians suppose who look to
“politicians only”, and who, amongst “great powers” understand only those big battalions,
with whom of course the good Lord tends to side on the battlefield. Yet so many “powers” of
this kind have been unable to put out of action (for example) the single sentence of the Bible
“One should obey God rather than man”—provided it governed the faith of men of
decision, even if they were only small minorities, as the Puritans were in almost all cases.13
By an analogous logic Weber supposed that it was only due to the presence of a
religious impulse that modern capitalism could become a ‘process of revolution’ in
human conduct as a whole, regardless of all the other causal agencies at work
[XX.27, 29].
This did not mean that ordinary politics, though founded on a basis of physical
force, was an ethical vacuum or “organized immorality” (as commentators routinely
suppose).14 Weber’s emphasis on force as a defining characteristic was not a
cynically realistic anticipation of daily life in a doomed Weimar Republic and
thereafter (something he did not foresee). Rather he wished to mark out the original
difference between religion and politics, setting a limit to the political ambition that
in the modern world could be a ‘direct competitor to religious ethics’.15 Far from
anticipating totalitarianism, Weber was implicitly laying the foundations for resist-
ance to the pseudo-religious pretentions of the totalitarian state, and his category
distinction between religion and politics was one that Carl Schmitt, commonly
seen as a model of proto-Fascist theorizing in the 1920s, sought to overturn.16 For
Weber, however, it was accompanied by a sophisticated casuistry that posited the
existence of a secondary or local ethic, proper to the political sphere: this was ‘the
ethic of responsibility’ that rejected any ‘absolute’ or ‘religious ethic’ in politics with
its licence to radical action, and insisted instead on the need to take account of the

11 Cf. ‘Politics as a Vocation’, MWG I/17.246.

12 Sociology of Law [c.1910–14], MWG I/22–3.596; ‘Politics as a Vocation’, MWG I/17.244.—A
separate, more humdrum scenario, which Weber omits in ‘Politics as a Vocation’, was that where the
priestly leaders of hierocratic churches descend into the political sphere. Here hierocratic (but not
religious) power (Macht), force (Gewalt), and Herrschaft are exactly on a level with political power,
force, and Herrschaft: MWG I/22–4.579–679.
13 ‘Antikritisches’, 196 n. 28.
14 e.g. Anter, Max Webers Theorie des modernen Staats, 150–1. This view goes back to the radically

disenchanted climate of post-1919 Germany: Friedrich Meinecke, ‘Drei Generationen deutscher

Gelehrtenpolitik’, HZ 125 (1922), 270–83.
15 ‘Zwischenbetrachtung’, AfSS 41 (1915), 398.
16 Schmitt, Der Begriff des Politischen [1932] (Berlin, 19632), }1.
 Religiosity and Modernity (I) 221

‘consequences’ of one’s actions within the specific, conceptually arbitrary context

supplied by the political association.17
Weber had always had a diminished view of politics relative to religion. His
Freiburg Inaugural lecture (1895), with its fixation on ‘power interests’ and terri-
torial ‘elbow-room’, is only the most familiar statement of this kind, and its echoes
will also be found in the PE when it refers to ‘the developing modern state power
[Staatsgewalt]’ [XX.32].18 Once he devoted himself to the academic calling and to
Wissenschaft, as he learned to do between 1895 and 1902, the status hierarchy
between politics and religion would lie at the root of his academic output, and the
famous claim by Wolfgang Mommsen that ‘politics . . . occupied a central position
in [Weber’s] life and life’s work’ cannot be sustained at any point thereafter.19
When, in the Great War, Weber returned to writing about politics in an explicitly
committed manner—a unique suspension of wissenschaftlich (yet not of ‘academic’)
priority,20 which occurred only because he could find no wartime employment—
he nonetheless accompanied it with a parallel stream of work: writing and reflecting
on the world religions. From the perspective of ‘universal history’ [i.10], compari-
son of the formative impact of the ‘world religions’ possessing universal ethical
pretensions was meaningful and significant, whereas the idea of a comparable
analysis of world political systems simply did not occur, regardless of the existence
of polities on the scale of the Chinese and Roman empires, in which Weber was
much interested. On occasion he may appear to suggest that there was a distinct-
ively rational Occidental state, but what interested him here was a distinctively
Occidental rationality and its components, such as rational law and bureaucracy,
which were susceptible of comparative analysis [i.3–4].21 But still there was no such
thing as a distinctively Occidental state qua state, since ‘All political structures are
structures rooted in physical force’.22 Thus the sociology of Herrschaft, unlike
those of law and religion, is not structured along Occidental and comparative
lines—something Otto Hintze, who envisioned precisely this comparison, did
not fail to point out.23
In his own day the most important of all the life spheres for Weber was neither
politics nor religion but academic science or Wissenschaft, for this was his avowed
vocation and principal value-commitment by 1902.24 But while in principle and in
historical origin [i.1–2] it was independent of religion, and permitted an under-
standing of history and modernity that was denied to religion, it too could properly
be understood only in relation to religion. It was like religion (and radically

17 ‘Politics as Vocation’, MWG I/17.236–7, 242.

18 MWG I/5.560, 565. See also Max to Alfred Weber, 25.3.84, cit. I.6 at n. 33.
19 Max Weber und die deutsche Politik (Tübingen, 1959), 1.
20 For this distinction, below II.7.iv.
21 The same analysis applies to any of Weber’s “political” writings: e.g. ‘Politics as a Vocation’,

MWG I/17.162, 167, 185–6, 188.

22 [Der politische Verband; die Nation c.1911–12], MWG I/22–1.222.
23 ‘Max Webers Soziologie’ [1926], Gesammelte Abhandlungen (Göttingen, 1962–72), ii. 135–47,

here 147.
24 ‘Knies und das Irrationalitätsproblem’ [1903–6], WL 60–1; ‘Science as a Vocation’, MWG

I/17.105.
222 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

divorced from politics) in that it was universal in its range, and Weber’s joint
enquiries into the impact of religion on Western Kultur and the methodological
bases of Wissenschaft in the first years of his liberation from academic specialization
(1902–7) were by no means a random conjunction. Yet its modern search for
detachment and “objectivity” revealed that Wissenschaft too was much diminished
relative to religion. Its concerns might be universal, but if it was pursued as it should
be, in “value-free” form, then it could make no direct claim to influence conduct
(however powerful the indirect force of its contribution to rationalization over
millennia might be). Unlike religion, it could not and should not give answers to
the questions ‘What should we do? How should we live?’25 Taken overall, its
immediate appearance was that of the aetiolated modern residue of the historic
religious capacity to construe the world as meaningful—and this was something
Weber felt keenly. Wissenschaft was the one part of the modern rationalized world
to which he was unconditionally loyal, and yet this relationship could never be
more than one of cool, reserved, sobriety.
In this and the next chapter, therefore, we shall expound Weber’s thought at its
religious centre. First, however, it is necessary to demonstrate something intuitively
obvious that is currently disavowed by the scholarly consensus: that there is 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’), where the first is
something like an inner kernel and the second an outer carapace. In making this
connection we shall see that Weber aged 40 in 1904 was at the peak of his powers,
and the idea that he got noticeably wiser or cleverer thereafter is a mirage. As he
himself noted, neither intellectual understanding nor a more complete human
maturity had anything to do with ‘whether you are old or young in years’.26
Only then can we move on to a more direct assessment of his thought regarding
the place of religiosity within human conduct as a whole, since a full understanding
of his views requires consideration of both components of his religious œuvre, the
earlier and the later, in conjunction. Trying to understand Weber’s religious
thinking without reference to the PE, his principal statement on modern Chris-
tianity and secularity, is an obvious absurdity; but still the full magnitude of what
was being attempted in the PE becomes clear only by reading it in the reflected light
cast by his later work. By this light it appears that, while the most evident reading of
the PE proceeds from a religious starting point to a secular outcome, that is, from
asceticism to rationalism and capitalism (I.7–8), it also maps out the transition to
modernity in exclusively religious terms. The PE, complemented by the later
religious writings, offers a religious history: a history of Occidental Christianity’s
engagement with the temporal “world” (saeculum), and so (one might say) a process
of “secularization”, that greatly expands our understanding of the ‘modern Kultur’
lying at the heart of his enquiries. Once the nature of this history has been

25 ‘Science as a Vocation’ [1917/19], MWG I/17.93; cf. 105.

26 ‘Politics as Vocation’ [1919], ibid. 250; cf. 249.
 Religiosity and Modernity (I) 223

established, I suggest that our instinctively reticent estimate of Max Weber as a

“religious thinker” will have to be adjusted considerably.

I I. THE QUESTION OF CONTINUITY

That there was a fundamental continuity between the PE and the texts on religion
Weber wrote from 1912 onwards can hardly be doubted. When he began to
publish the ‘Economic Ethics of the World Religions’ in 1915 in the Archiv für
Sozialwissenschaft, he omitted treatment of Christianity, apart from the prospect of
a brief concluding statement, since he supposed it had been sufficiently covered by
‘the essays that appeared earlier in this Archiv’—the PE—‘knowledge of which
must be taken for granted’.27 As we have seen, the later studies were never
conceived as anything other than a supplement to the PE, and this conception
was realized with the Collected Essays in the Sociology of Religion, which placed the PE
at the head of the series of world religions. The avowed subject of enquiry in
the Indian and Chinese cases is once more the relationship between religion
and capitalism or rather the ‘absence of capitalist historical development (in the
Occidental sense)’—the ‘economic ethics’ of the title are a shorthand for this—while
the identity of form and genre between the PE and its successors is also transparent.28
Thus the primary organization of the material is historical (genetic, developmental,
and individual) rather than sociological (thematic, typological, and conceptual). Of
course, the history presented in the ‘Economic Ethics’, like that in the PE, was of an
odd kind. As in the PE, its selection from the ‘historical realities’ focused on types and
concepts that were ‘important in our contexts’29—that is, contexts or frameworks
(Zusammenhänge) generated by Max Weber, the present-day investigator—and, no
doubt sensitized by the historian Rachfahl’s critique, he worked quite hard to explain
himself on this score. He decided this was ‘not a historical work’ (he might have
added “in the narrow sense”), yet neither was it ‘historically “false”’. But still the
elementary point was that he wished ‘to observe the most important of the great
religions individually’, that is, as ‘historical individuals’—a replica of the procedure
adopted in the ‘purely historical’ PE [XX.53; XXI.109].30 Such is the simple meaning
behind his comment to Paul Siebeck, when he first revealed the ‘World Religions’
project to him in 1915: that these studies would ‘bring about the general execution of
the method in the essay, “Protest. Ethic and Spirit of Capitalism”’.31

27 ‘Einleitung’, AfSS 41 (1915), 2. Weber’s volume reference here to the PE is incorrect—a further

indication that this essay was written in the less comfortable circumstances of wartime: above II.3
Appendix.
28 ‘Hinduism and Buddhism’ [1915–16], MWG I/20.54; cf. ‘Einleitung’, AfSS 41 (1915), 26;

‘Confucianism’, ibid. 56. As noted above (II.3), Judaism was not a ‘world religion’ but a genetic
precursor to Christianity, and so modern capitalism could not be a telos. Even so, there is a discussion of
economic ethics and related phenomena at the conclusion to Part I (MWG I/21.591–606), and further
brief consideration in the unresolved and incomplete Part II (701–4), which show some allegiance to
the original frame of reference.
29 ‘Einleitung’, AfSS 41 (1915), 26. 30 Ibid. 25–6, 28.
31 To Paul Siebeck, 22.6.15, Briefe.
224 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

Now it never occurred to any contemporary that there was anything other than
simple and substantial continuity at work here.32 Nonetheless, by a striking oddity
of reception history, the secular historical sociologists who between c.1960 and
1990 practically created the modern understanding of Weber as a significant
historicist thinker—in particular Wolfgang Schluchter (b. 1938),33 though a web
of personal connection and intellectual sympathies links him to Reinhard Bendix
and Guenther Roth as well as Dieter Henrich and Jürgen Habermas34—have
stretched this apparently straightforward idea to breaking point. Without actually
denying that there was a literal continuity, the idea of Weber’s evolution adopted
here is of a distinctive kind: it becomes a series of steps forward, whereby the initial
starting point (the PE) is practically left behind, and its significance diminished
almost to nullity. Of the two great intellectual ‘breakthroughs’ in Weber’s life, the
first (we are told) lay not in the PE, but in the methodological writings of 1903–6,
and the second in the ‘Economic Ethics’. (The omission of ‘Economy and Society’
from this scheme is quite as remarkable as that of the PE.) The nature of his
‘discovery’ in the latter case was the idea ‘that not only the economy, but the whole
of modern Occidental Kultur was penetrated by a distinctive rationalism.’35 Yet to
say that Weber had to wait until 1912 to make this discovery is surely mistaken.
Indeed the outstanding oddity of such a remark is that it is a very plausible
summary of the principal substantive thrust of the original PE of 1904–5—if it
could be reduced to a single proposition in this way. Thus the text of the PE is
explicitly focused on Kultur and ‘modern Kultur’ in its entirety [XXI.107, 109],
and this undoubtedly means Occidental Kultur. Again, the idea that there was a
multiplicity of possible forms of “rationalism”, within which the variety outlined in

32 e.g. Ernst Troeltsch, passim; Otto Hintze, ‘Max Webers Religionssoziologie’ [1922], Gesammelte

Abhandlungen (Göttingen, 1962–72), ii. 126–34; Joachim Wach, ‘Max Weber als Religionssoziologe’,
Kultur- und Universalgeschichte: Walter Goetz zu seinem 60. Geburtstage (Leipzig, 1927), 376–94. See
also ‘The Lutheran Reception of Max Weber’s “Protestant Ethic” ’, in my forthcoming essay collection
Max Weber in Context (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz), for the case of Karl Holl.
33 In this section I shall often have to conduct a debate with Prof. Schluchter ‘below the line’, but

given his centrality to Weberian reception and tradition, this is the least avoidable of intellectual
encounters. Nor should this obscure the extent to which I stand in his debt or shadow. Note
particularly his book Die Entwicklung des okzidentalen Rationalismus (Tübingen, 1979), translated by
Guenther Roth as The Rise of Western Rationalism: Max Weber’s Developmental History (Berkeley,
1981). This is evidently the work of a contemporary sociologist, not a historian. Yet it is the nearest
thing we have had to a panorama of Weber’s thought and output as a whole that is not descriptive or
simply pedagogic. As such it is a precursor to the portrait offered here.
34 Schluchter’s work displays affinities with Bendix, Max Weber: An Intellectual Portrait (New York,

1960), but has undoubtedly superseded it. However, neither Roth, Henrich, nor Habermas is
implicated in Schluchter’s detailed construction of the place of the PE in Weber’s intellectual
history. Indeed the centrality Habermas allots to the PE is almost a denial of it, regardless of
significant debts in detail: Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns [1981] (Frankfurt, 19874), i.
205–366. Conversely, another prominent commentator, Friedrich Tenbruck (1919–94), stood apart
from and was sharply criticized by Schluchter, but nonetheless upheld the relegation of the PE and the
elevation of the ‘Economic Ethics’ in lieu: Das Werk Max Webers: Gesammelte Aufsätze zu Max Weber,
ed. H. Homann (Tübingen, 1999).
35 Schluchter, Religion und Lebensführung (Frankfurt, 1988), i. 102.
 Religiosity and Modernity (I) 225

the PE was but one, is equally explicitly laid down [XX.35].36 Here then we shall
maintain a quite different idea of continuity, which was also Weber’s own: that of
accumulation around an established foundation. When in 1912 he returned to
thinking about the nature of religion, and religiously motivated behaviour, he in no
way abandoned or superseded the PE; he simply worked outwards from it, as the
central focus of the whole.37
Consider, for example, the term ‘ethic’. The ‘Economic Ethics’ referred to in the
title of 1912 were linear descendants of the ‘Protestant Ethic’ of 1904–5, and
the only adjustments are linguistic and slight. Outside the Occident there was no
modern capitalism, so in treating the world religions of the Orient Weber feels no
need to make a fine distinction between a religiously rooted ‘ethic’ and a derivative
capitalist “spirit”. This was especially so when, even in the original PE, he would
occasionally refer to a capitalist “ethic” or even ‘ethic’,38 and when both ‘ethic’ and
‘spirit’ signified efficient prescriptions for conduct rather than old-fashioned,
personal moralism, even if the modern, capitalist prescriptions were more obviously
‘non-ethical’39 in that they did not derive from a religious root but were based
instead on ‘a mechanical foundation’ [XXI.108]. He does not disdain occasional
reference to ‘the “spirit” of the entire system’ in the Hindu case, but this in no way
derogates from the title, or headline usage of ‘economic ethic’, which was now
sufficient in itself.40 The one significant linguistic innovation here is the introduc-
tion of the term ‘ethos’, which features quite prominently in the revised “1920” text
of the PE. However, the new usage derives not from study of the world religions but
from Weber’s wartime writings on capitalism in 1917–18,41 while his intentions in
deploying the term are strictly conservative of his original meaning. ‘Ethos’ is
attractive to him because it is a less morally loaded word than ‘ethic’, which further
closes the gap between a Protestant ‘ethic’ and capitalist ‘spirit’ (though it also—in
the PE—takes in the Jewish ‘economic ethos’). Even so, it is only a supplement to

36 Prof. Schluchter is well aware of this text: ibid. i. 89. It is one of many signs that what is at issue

here is not the right or wrong reading of texts, but the fact—which Schluchter has never concealed—
that he has an intellectual identity and universe of his own, distinct from Weber’s. Stricto sensu he is not
a Weberian but a neo-Weberian.
37 I may perhaps claim Hartmann Tyrell as a half-ally here. Since 1990 Prof. Tyrell has written a

substantial series of essays on Weber’s sociology of religion that have the great merit of taking religion
seriously, perhaps because of his Catholic origin? In this instance, without denying the Schluchterian
thesis of Weber’s intellectual progression, he is much more open in acknowledging elementary
continuity forwards from the PE: ‘Einführende Bemerkungen zu Max Webers “Die Wirtschaftsethik
der Weltreligionen” ’, in R. Achenbach and M. Arneth (eds), »Gerechtigkeit und Recht zu üben«,
Festschrift für Eckart Otto (Wiesbaden, 2009), 439–57.
38 [XX.16, 17, 29; XXI.71]; [XX.26 n. 1], resp.
39 e.g. Sociology of Herrschaft [c.1911–14], MWG I/22–4.635.
40 ‘Hinduism and Buddhism’ [1915–16], MWG I/20.194; cf.199; Sociology of Religion [c.1913],

MWG I/22–2.173. This usage does not in fact correspond strictly to the PE, since it cuts across the
religious–economic divide. A more precise echo of the PE occurs in the Sociology of Religion when it
states that ‘The caste ethic gave a religious aura to the “spirit” of Handwerk’ (MWG I/22–2.173), but at
no time was the distinction between ‘ethic’ and “spirit” rigorously enforced.
41 See esp. Wahlrecht und Demokratie in Deutschland (1917), MWG I/15.356–7. The only

significant pre-war usage of ‘ethos’ occurs in the so-called Sociology of Music (1912), but this is a
quite separate case.
226 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

the original “spirit”/ethic distinction, and does not cancel it.42 But these are
linguistic minutiae and no more. The conception of a religiously conditioned
ethic in 1915 is identical to that established for the ascetic Protestant ethic in
1905, and down to the last detail: ‘It is not the ethical theory of theological
compendia that will be examined, which can only serve as a cognitive tool, albeit
an important one under certain circumstances; but rather the practical stimuli to
conduct, rooted in the religions’ psychological and pragmatic framework’ [cf.
XXI.3].43 The ‘Economic Ethics’ also retain the distinction between ‘ethic’ and
‘organizational forms’, which replicates that in the PE between capitalist “spirit”
and ‘form’ [e.g. XX.25–8], this being simply a more precise description of what
Weber meant when he referred to the “two sides” of his analyses.44
However, while Weber’s thinking may not have changed, the light cast by the
later religious writings enables us to see the full extent and significance of his
conception of an ‘ethic’. The statement of principle at the opening of the Sociology
of Religion (1913) makes it clear that the ‘Protestant ethic’ is not just an isolated
historical case but one that lies at the centre of a nexus of ideas: ‘what is important
for us above all is the development of a systematized, specifically religious
“ethic”’.45 There are forms of religiosity that are not ethical, but Weber’s principal
frame of reference is ethical religiosity in toto: ‘all the ethically rationalized religions
in the world’.46 It is true that in the eyes of a moralist his understanding of ‘ethic’
must appear devalued—it signifies any efficient, inwardly binding prescription for
conduct (Handeln), rather than a conventional, Christian or Kantian catalogue of
right and wrong47—but still a ‘specifically religious “ethic”’ or ‘ethic of moral
conviction’ (Gesinnungsethik)48 remains a uniquely potent driver of conduct in
Weber’s eyes, because it derives from a religious and universal basis: that of ‘rational
ethical religiosity’ or just plain ‘ethical religion’,49 founded in ‘ethical prophecy’ and
the ‘supra-worldly, personal, ethical god’.50 So the central concern of all Weberian

42 See most obviously the insertion at [i.181]+, where ‘ethos’ embraces capitalists, Jews and Puritans

in succession. For the replacement of a capitalist or secular ‘ethic’ in 1904–5 by ‘ethos’ in 1919–20:
cf. [XX.28, XXI.105] and [i.52, 191]+.
43 ‘Einleitung’, AfSS 41 (1915), 2. The qualification in this quotation is itself introduced out of

respect for the PE, where Weber had to accept that theological ‘theory’, most obviously predestination,
could sometimes have practical ethical consequences for conduct (Handeln).
44 Cf. ‘Hinduism and Buddhism’ [1915–16], MWG I/20.195.
45 Sociology of Religion [c.1913], MWG I/22–2.159; cf. 160, 167, 175, 177, 187, etc. Hartmann

Tyrell criticizes Weber for not distinguishing between ‘ethics as such’ and ‘religious ethics’: ‘ “Das
Religiöse” in Max Webers Religionssoziologie’, Saeculum, 43 (1992), 181; cf. 205. However, Weber is
not to blame if he did not share Prof. Tyrell’s assumption that idealist philosophy with its linked
metaphysics and ethics constitutes a significant, distinct category. For Weber all socially meaningful
ethics are religious or religiously derived, while philosophy, and any ethical scheme it might generate,
was the insubstantial product of intellectualism: e.g. [XX.35], [XXI.53]; ‘Zwischenbetrachtung’, AfSS
41 (1915), 414.
46 ‘Zwischenbetrachtung’, AfSS 41 (1915), 393.
47 Cf. WuG [1919–20], 18–19.
48 e.g. Sociology of Religion [c.1913], MWG I/22–2.217, 354, 367, 369, 376.
49 Ibid. 386; cf. 214–15, 311, 354; ‘Zwischenbetrachtung’, AfSS 41 (1915), 393.
50 Sociology of Religion [c.1913], MWG I/22–2.189–94. Because it is personal, the ‘supra-worldly,

personal god’ is ethical by definition, and so, in the majority of Weber’s innumerable references to this
idea, he does not bother to say so.
 Religiosity and Modernity (I) 227

thinking about religion and religiosity is the historical evolution that produced
rational ethical religion and its subsequent modernist mutation. This is in turn
synonymous with salvation religion—hence the compound ‘ethical salvation
religion’—since salvation, the positive certitudo salutis (psychological assurance of
salvation) that is also a negative ‘release’ from suffering (Erlösung), is the principal
psychological reward produced by the fulfilment of religio-ethical prescriptions.51
But a properly ethical, salvation religion has existed nowhere outside the Occident.
In Asia there is only one religion—“early” (that is, uncorrupted) Buddhism—
which might yield a religious ethic in the formal sense: that of a logically complete
conception of the world, which yields prescriptions for conduct. However, Bud-
dhism is a mystical religiosity which, being mystical, is necessarily static and inactive,
and finds its completion in the annihilation of the individual self (atman).52 As such
it carries no “ethical” implication in the Weberian sense, because it carries no
implication for active conduct. At most it offers ‘the ethic of inaction’ leading to a
purely contemplative state, and so (for example) the Buddha can be classified only as
an ‘exemplary prophet’, not as an ‘ethical’ one on the Jewish model.53 Outside
Buddhism, the absence of any religious ethic is straightforward, and there are at
most debased ‘economic ethics’. Thus the ‘economic ethic’ of Hinduism (which is
not an ethical religion) is socio-economic traditionalism or inaction, while Confu-
cianism is not strictly a religion at all but the ‘sole correct philosophy of the state’, and
if this strict logic is enforced actually has no ‘economic ethic’.54
In short, historically significant ethical religiosity is confined to Occidental
Christianity, in particular its ascetic forms, and the consistency of focus as between
the studies of the world religions and the PE is clearly marked out thereby. The
post-1912 texts show us that the PE lies at the heart of a comprehensively framed
scheme; but though they illuminate Weber’s use of the term ‘ethical’, they are only
casting light for us on what was already in Weber’s mind when he wrote the PE in
1904–5. What we find, above all, is that he took the idea of the ‘ethic’ very seriously
indeed—at least as seriously as theologians such as Kuenen and Wellhausen, who
preceded him in speaking about ‘ethical “monotheism”’ in a Judaeo-Christian
context55—while the maximal claims he made for the ‘ethical’ impact of religious
ideas, as measured for example, by the systematization of the conduct of life
(Lebensführung) towards rational ends, were fully as great in 1904–5 as they were
in 1912–15 and vice versa. The PE and the Sociology of Religion (c.1913) are
equally saturated with this idea, because for Weber the single most significant

51 For the synonym, e.g. Sociology of Religion [c.1913], MWG I/22–2.226, 231, 435, but by and

large it is simply taken for granted. On release from suffering: e.g. ‘Zwischenbetrachtung’, AfSS 41
(1915), 391.
52 ‘Hinduism and Buddhism’ [1915–16], MWG I/20.326–54.
53 Resp. ibid. 350; Sociology of Religion [c.1913], MWG I/22–2.189. Cf. 160 on the absence of a

‘specifically religious ethic’; 332–40.

54 Resp. ‘Hinduism and Buddhism’ [1915–16], MWG I/20.531; ‘Confucianism and Taoism’

[1919–20], MWG I/19. 374. There was traditionalism in Confucian China, but it was an ‘extreme
administrative and politico-economic traditionalism’, not a religious one: I/19.224.
55 Cf. Historian, 152 & n. 118. For Weber on ‘monotheism’ and ‘ethical monotheism’, e.g.

Sociology of Religion [c.1913], MWG I/22–2.290–1.

228 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

impact of religion or religiosity was its “ethical” impact on everyday social conduct.
It is customary for modern commentators on the PE to back-peddle and depreciate
its ‘very limited ’ claims, in the face of a barrage of empirical and economic–
historical criticism;56 but while Weber did not suppose that ascetic Protestantism
was a direct cause of the industrial or (as he knew it) ‘technical revolution’ in late
eighteenth-century Britain [XXI.104],57 the claims he made for the impact of the
‘Protestant ethic’ on the lives of ordinary people in the twentieth century and
beyond, were far, far higher than is commonly understood today.

I I I . AN ARGUMENT FROM QUANTITY

Descending from this exalted plane of argument, we should also consider the
physical continuity and discontinuity between the PE and the ‘Economic Ethics’.
As we have seen, in the final outcome the essays on the world religions published
with the PE in Collected Essays on the Sociology of Religion in 1920 were very large
indeed. Each was significantly larger than the PE, and in the cases of ‘Hinduism and
Buddhism’ and ‘Ancient Judaism’, twice as large and more.58 On this basis one
could infer that the ‘Economic Ethics’ was in some sense a different and indeed
greater project than the PE. Now this may sound like a naive and simplistic form of
argument, yet quantity is one of the roots of the qualitative distinction that has been
advanced between the two. Thus we are told that ‘It was only through the study of
Christianity’—the proposal for a separate volume-length treatment of Christianity
contained in Weber’s 1919 Advertisement or prospectus for the Collected Essays—
‘that he would have been in a position to elevate the “Protestant Ethic”, so to speak,
up to the level of the “Economic Ethics of the World Religions”, and make it into an
integral component of this series.’59 However, the idea that the PE was not ‘up to the
level’ of the ‘Economic Ethics’, either quantitatively or qualitatively, is false. As
originally conceived, the studies for the ‘Economic Ethics’ bear almost no resem-
blance to the result that has come down to us. Weber’s initial proposal to Paul
Siebeck was for ‘4 essays at 4–5 [publishers’] sheets each’, or 64–80 pages. In other
words, he intended to present a set of compact synopses, where three religions—or
more accurately, historical units ‘Confucianism (China), Hinduism and Buddhism
(India), Judaism’—were treated at about half the length of the PE, with a final essay

56 Klaus Lichtblau and Johannes Weiß (eds.), Max Weber, Die protestantische Ethik und der »Geist«

des Kapitalismus (Bodenheim, 1993), ‘Einleitung’, VIII; cf. Gordon Marshall: ‘we are scarcely better
placed now than were combatants at the outset to offer informed arbitration’ on the merits of ‘Weber’s
account of the economic consequences of ascetic Protestantism’: In Search of the Spirit of Capitalism
(London, 1982), 169.
57 Grundriss [1898], MWG III/1.104. Weber would not have been averse to the schoolboy

description of the Industrial Revolution as a ‘wave of gadgets’, but he would not have seconded
attempts to transform this idea into a profound explanation of long-term Occidental change cf. Joel
Mokyr, The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress (New York, 1990).
58 As published in GARS the PE takes up 189 pages; Confucianism 260; Hinduism and Buddhism

378, and Ancient Judaism 442, with the last incomplete: above II.4.
59 Schluchter, Religion und Lebensführung, ii. 562; cf. ii. 584. The Advertisement is printed in

facsimile in MWG I/19.28.

 Religiosity and Modernity (I) 229

taking in both Islam and a short concluding statement regarding Christianity.60

Something of this original format is still visible in the first published version of
‘Confucianism’ (1915). Here, uniquely, Weber limited himself to “stylistic” revi-
sion of the text, which as a consequence was expanded by “only” 40–50 per cent, to
‘c.6–7 sheets’, or c.100 pages.61 So the original intention was to republish the PE as
the dominant item within a single volume, supplemented by shorter studies of the
other world religions and Judaism. In this way the crucial link between the PE and
the later studies, which was so important to Weber—he only scrutinized the world
religions ‘in order to locate points of comparison with . . . Occidental development’
[i.12–13]—would have been functional and efficient, while the treatment of
Judaism would have added the kind of statement on the early formation of
Christianity that the original PE, with its persistent invocation of Judaism and
the Old Testament [XX.45; XXI.90–1, 101 n. 69], clearly required.
Regrettably the loss of perspective produced by the war and post-war elephant-
iasis of these studies (a process that for the unsentimental Weber was accompanied
by the destruction of any pre-war manuscripts) was radical. Some idea of just how
radical will be apparent to the few persons who now read ‘Confucianism’ in its
original short form, for here they encounter something like the true Weberian text:
“true” because it is designed for the lay or interdisciplinary reader, just as Weber
himself was a ‘non-specialist’ author [i.13]. Of course, he did not intend to subvert
this principle, when he more than doubled the length of ‘Confucianism’ in
1919–20, having previously quadrupled those of ‘Hinduism and Buddhism’ and
‘Ancient Judaism’. But this was the undoubted effect, for who but a specialist
would read a substantial volume on any of these subjects? It was an unintended
product of the non-specialist’s desire to make his interdisciplinary hypotheses more
credible and worthy of review by the specialists.62 The conceptual structures of the
originals do not entirely disappear but they are overshadowed by Weber’s over-
conscientious “erudition” and have become buried in a series of ‘thick books’ such
as he himself despised [XXI.110 n. 86].63
An outstanding victim in this sense is ‘Hinduism and Buddhism’ (1915–16),
where one has to strain to remind oneself that, conceptually, early Buddhism is the
undoubted apex of the study of Indian religiosity, and of all religiosity outside

60 To Paul Siebeck, 22.6.15, Briefe. The subject matter of the four essays is described as follows:

‘Confucianism (China), Hinduism and Buddhism (India), Judaism, Islam, Christianity’: this can be
broken down into four units when we recall his remark at this time that there need be no more than a
‘brief ’ concluding statement on Christianity: ‘Einleitung’, AfSS 41 (1915), 2. Weber’s failure to
produce a study of Islam in the years 1915–20 was not entirely accidental. In his historicist
perspective Christianity was the primary descendant of Judaism, and Islam merely a side-branch. Its
very closeness to Judaeo-Christian tradition made Islam of less interest in a comparative light, and this
relative lack of interest is reflected both in the order in which he treated the “world religions” and in the
absence of any lament or complaint on his part over the failure to complete his original scheme.
61 To Siebeck, 14.7.15, Briefe; cf. ‘Confucianism’, AfSS 41 (1915), 30–87, 335–86. It is, however,

likely that Weber added the whole of the final section comparing Confucianism and Puritanism at this
time (ibid. 372–86): see II.3 Appendix.
62 Cf. GARS i.237 n. 1; MWG I/19.128 n. 1 at 132.
63 Circular to Contributors to the Handbuch, 8.12.13, Briefe, II/8.426.
230 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

Judaeo-Christian tradition. To be sure, we are told ‘that Hinduism was simply

something other than a “religion” in our sense of the word’, unlike Buddhism and
Jainism with their universal ethics; that Buddhism was (as we saw) ‘the most radical
form of salvation religion that could be conceived’; and the only one that ever
became the officially governing confession in India, however briefly.64 Yet, despite
occasional reminders of this kind, in 1915–16 Weber allowed himself to be sucked
into the historical and empirical study of Indian religiosity, and there is an obvious
falling-away from the purity of the Occidental model, epitomized by the PE, where
the conceptual and historical approaches are perfectly integrated. Buddhism’s status
as the unique, conceptual “completion” of Indian soteriology became obscured by a
lengthy prior presentation of the degree to which, in empirical fact, Buddhist ideas
about salvation had been anticipated by Brahman or lay speculation, and by a
subsequent account of the way in which it was rooted out in its Indian homeland in
favour of a Hindu ‘restoration’. When to this is added the admitted socio-economic
importance of the Hindu caste system, we reach the situation where modern
readers have assumed that Hinduism is the principal and almost sole subject.65
Yet in the Sociology of Religion, the conceptual prominence of Buddhism is clear.
When it discusses prophecy, the category of ‘exemplary prophecy’ is created
primarily to take account of Buddha.66 Again, we are told here that Buddhism
(unlike Hinduism, which was incapable of any universal ethical construction of
the world) was ‘the salvation religiosity that was specific to East Asia’, where the
category of salvation and ethical religiosity is the elementary unit of analysis for all
modern religiosity prior to ascetic Protestantism.67 And in regard to the central
“ethical” problematic of theodicy (the contradiction between an all-powerful ethical
god and the empirical facts of social injustice), Buddhism is one of only three
‘rational “pure” types’ of intellectual solution. It alone represents the ‘full working-
out of the idea through to its ultimate consequences’—where for Weber logical
consistency (Konsequenz) was an intellectual power in its own right.68 Meanwhile

64 MWG I/20.78, 330, resp.; cf. 369.

65 Ibid. 369; cf. 241–306. Talcott Parsons ignored Buddhism almost entirely since he assumed that
it merely carried Hinduism (‘the Brahminic philosophy’) ‘to still more radical conclusions’: The
Structure of Social Action (New York, 1937), 552–63, qn 563. For Reinhard Bendix, Weber’s
‘analysis of . . . India focused primarily on the long-term domination by . . . the Brahmin priests’, and
so ‘Hinduism and Buddhism’ became simply ‘Hinduism’: Max Weber. An Intellectual Portrait
[1960–2] (Berkeley, 1977), 264–5; cf. 267, 273, 277. Wolfgang Schluchter refers to ‘Weber’s study
of Hinduism’, and (like Parsons) supposes that ‘The heterodox [movements such as Buddhism] only
radicalized matters with which the orthodox [Hindus, Brahmans] had been concerned all along’:
Religion und Lebensführung, ii. 118. This is far from implausible as a de-contextualized reading of the
text, but it ignores Weber’s underlying conceptual agenda. Hence the mistaken assumption that
Brahmanism was a ‘salvation religion’ (ibid. ii. 67), which implicitly denies the central feature that
made Buddhism qualitatively distinct: the intellectual and logical completeness, which made it capable
of offering integral prescriptions for conduct that could lead to salvation or release.
66 MWG I/22–2.189.
67 MWG I/22–2.333. A text where Hinduism appears to be classed amongst the ‘salvation religions’

proves on examination to be an accidental consequence of textual rewriting and insertion: Sociology of

Herrschaft [c.1913], MWG I/22–4.595/694.—The Jains might have qualified under this heading but
they were too small to count as a world religion cf. PE [i.103 n. 2]+.
68 MWG I/22–2.292, 300, resp. On Konsequenz: ‘Zwischenbetrachtung’, AfSS 41 (1915), 387–8;

cf. [XXI.9, 11, 36, 39, 46, 74]. This trait is well picked up by Schluchter, Religion und Lebensführung,
ii. 72–3.
 Religiosity and Modernity (I) 231

literary elephantiasis in the case of ‘Ancient Judaism’ (1916–18) was so great that
the text was left radically incomplete. Thus while no one could mistake the general
placement of ‘Ancient Judaism’ within Weber’s idea of Judaeo-Christian tradition,
the surviving texts (‘Ancient Judaism’ and the PE ) are disconnected: he never did
get to write about the formative “Talmudic” period, when nascent Pauline Chris-
tianity extracted the universal ethical impulse of Judaism whilst shedding the ritual
husk, thereby commencing the uniquely rational and ethical trajectory of Occi-
dental Christianity.69 It is as if Weber had stopped short when writing the PE at the
end of Part I of the text, with the principal action still to come; and however
ostentatious he might be in advertising the incompleteness of the PE, its textual
inadequacy was as nothing to that of his treatments of the world religions, which
were either over-complete or incomplete to an extreme degree.
The central point, however, relates not to the deficiencies of the individual
studies, but to the failure of the ‘Economics Ethics’ project as a whole—if success
or failure be measured by reader response. Weber had come perilously close to
being what he was not: a specialist historian ‘in the narrower sense’ of the word.70
This approximation to specialized historical empiricism has had the predictable
result that today the studies of the world religions are read in their individual
components—each of which has become a volume in its own right71—by the
specialist ‘Sinologist, the Indologist, the student of Judaism’ [cf. i.13]; but they are
not read as a collectivity by Weberians, as part of the integrated study of religion in
history and modernity. This is not to deny that, as a three-dimensional, conceptual
construction of Indian history, ‘Hinduism and Buddhism’ (for example) is a
spectacular feat that dwarfs its more empirically correct successors, and in the
hundred years since it was published no one has ever ventured upon a comparably
ambitious synthesis;72 but still it has been lost to the true Weberian audience,
interested in a general understanding of religiosity, with Occidental religion and its

69 The brief coverage of Judaism in }12 of the Sociology of Religion is far more comprehensive in

scope: MWG I/22–2.414–32; cf. 442–7. Because of the deficiency of ‘Ancient Judaism’, the 1919
Advertisement for Collected Essays on the Sociology of Religion proposed to supplement the already
published essays with a third [recte fourth] volume, which would ‘contain a portrayal of early
Christianity [and] Talmudic Judaism’ inter alia: MWG I/19.28. The manuscript fragment on ‘The
Pharisees’, first published by Marianne Weber in 1921, would have been a component in such a
portrait, but it is certainly not the portrait itself. S. Paul is not even mentioned until its final pages:
MWG I/21.777–846, here 841–6. See Historian, ch. 5.
70 ‘Kritische Studien . . . I.’ [1906], WL 216. This succumbing to academic temptation finds a

parallel in the final volumes of Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality (1980–4): see my ‘Citizen or
Subject? Michel Foucault in the History of Ideas’, HEI 24 (1998), 113–59, }III.
71 Note, however, that the first volume of the Collected Essays, supervised by Weber, prints the

studies of Occidental Protestantism and China together. This reflects the authentic Weberian view, a
Canute-like tenacity in the face of inflation of length. But no subsequent presentation of the texts, in
any language, has followed this format. The single volume–single religion scheme of MWG is now
orthodox.
72 Compare Wendy Doniger’s well-regarded book The Hindus: An Alternative History (Oxford,

2010), which is confined to Hindus only, and displays far less interest in Indian social and economic
history.
232 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

relationship to contemporary Kultur as the heuristic focus.73 So it was that by

contingent, wartime, literary overproduction Weber himself broke the link be-
tween the PE and the world religions—not intentionally but effectively all the
same. His intentions, whereby the PE is the centre of the analysis and is then
followed by the comparative studies of the ‘world religions’, are crystal clear from
the layout of the Collected Essays on the Sociology of Religion. But, since the Collected
Essays are not read as an integral whole—and Collected Essays, not ‘Economic
Ethics’, is the only correct description of Weber’s project, however bathetic the
title—his wish ‘to remove these disquisitions’, meaning the PE, ‘from their state
of isolation and to place them within the total evolution of Kultur’ has been
left unfulfilled [i.206 n. 1]+. Other factors have been at work, of course. Readers
such as Ernst Troeltsch and Otto Hintze who could match Weber’s historical
breadth and depth, who could see the distinction between the history of the world
religions as pursued by specialists and ‘comparative sociological studies’ that were
not ‘superficial dilettantism’,74 were always a rarity and are today practically
extinct. Meanwhile it has become axiomatic that Weber’s religious “unmusicality”
and detachment from naive Eurocentrism are starting points that must be radical-
ized; hence that European Christianity cannot be a conceptual centre, even in a
“value-free” Weberian sense. But still the modern consensus that the PE may be
considered apart from the studies of the world religions and vice versa is primarily
to be attributed to Weber’s wartime overproduction, and the destruction of the
older, more accessible texts on the world religions that accompanied it.
He was not unaware of what he had done. He too wondered whether the
disproportion between the length of the PE and the ‘Economic Ethics’ as it
emerged after 1915 might not prejudice the status of the PE in the minds of
those readers (as common in the academy as anywhere else) who were seduced by
literary quantity. It is also true that since 1915 he had always been anxious to give
Siebeck as much copy as he could, in the belief that this was meeting a wartime and
immediately post-war need. Hence the suggestion that appears in the publishers’
Advertisement he drafted in September 1919: that the Collected Essays might close
with ‘a final volume [which] will treat of Occidental Christianity’, in addition to the
PE.75 Now such a volume would have restored quantitative parity between the
West and the rest; but it could only have been a quantitative exercise, a deployment

73 Consider the essay collections assembled by Wolfgang Schluchter on Ancient Judaism (1981),

Confucianism and Taoism (1983), Hinduism and Buddhism (1984), and Occidental Christianity
(1988), where the vast majority of the contributors are students not primarily of Max Weber, but of the
individual world religions. There is meanwhile no volume on the Sociology of Religion. Similarly, the
editors who present the ‘Economic Ethics’ for MWG, Prof. Schmid-Glinzer and Prof. Otto, were
selected primarily as specialists in Confucianism, Judaism, etc., and their acquired Weberian learning
(which is indeed formidable in Prof. Otto’s case) necessarily builds on these foundations: MWG
I/19–21. See also Hartmann Tyrell: ‘Einführende Bemerkungen zu Max Webers “Die
Wirtschaftsethik der Weltreligionen” ’, in R. Achenbach and M. Arneth (eds), »Gerechtigkeit und
Recht zu üben« (Wiesbaden, 2009), 439–57, here 442–5.
74 Hintze, ‘Max Webers Religionssoziologie’ [1922], Gesammelte Abhandlungen (Göttingen,

1962–72), ii. 128, 134.

75 Facsimile in MWG I/19.28. Frequently referred to in German as ‘Selbstanzeige’, personal notice:

ibid., 45.
 Religiosity and Modernity (I) 233

of new (or not so new) materials, not of new ideas.76 And since 1919 was the first
and only mention of this project (though by no means the first of Weber’s
unfulfilled promises about future publication), on behalf of an essay collection
that (as the Advertisement also announces) would open with ‘the much discussed
essay on »The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism«’, to attribute to it
anything more than a speculative significance, or to imply that the conceptual
framework of the PE had been superseded in any way, would be unjustified.77 Thus
in one of the rare cases in the revised PE where in 1919 Weber looks forward to ‘a
review of the medieval religious ethic’ that would have appeared in the putative
final volume [i.78]+, we find that the idea of such a historical retrospect had already
been anticipated in a note in 1904 [XX.50 n. 1].78 Weber also looks ahead to the
“final volume” in the 1919 ‘Vorbemerkung’—and this rather than a book trade
journal was the proper forum for making any significant intellectual statement—
but his comment at this point is a brief and practically invisible remark to the effect
that the ‘Occidental development’ in religion ‘requires further analysis’ [i.13]. Now
this remark is quite consistent with the Advertisement, but it does not suggest for a
moment that any major intellectual movement has taken place. The fragment on
‘early Christianity’ at the end of the Sociology of Religion points to the same
conclusion, in that it is entirely consonant with the remarks on Jesus and Paul in
the PE in 1904 [XX.45–6]. In 1913 as in 1904 Weber notices Jesus’ remarks on the
“mammon of unrighteousness” and his concern with daily bread at the expense of
longer-term horizons, all of which points to a religiosity based on love and
fraternity, ‘the simple command of love of God and of one’s neighbour’, as a
stage prior to ascetic Protestantism and in this sense pre-modern.79 Once again, he
finds that Paul is the originator of the pre-Reformation idea of the calling [cf.
XX.46–7]; and he highlights the most famous Biblical “anticipation” of Calvinist
predestination: ‘few are chosen’.80 The later account certainly devotes more space to

76 The best single guide to the historical data that would have appeared in a volume on Occidental

Christianity comes from the treatment of hierocracy in Sociology of Herrschaft, MWG

I/22–4.579–679.
77 This Advertisement is crucial to Prof. Schluchter’s case for demoting and dismissing the PE.

Hence the assertion that ‘The circle’ of Weber’s investigations into the history and sociology of religion
‘is only closed by the [proposed] study of Occidental Christianity’: Religion und Lebensführung, ii. 587;
cf. ii. 579, where the notice is printed in full. Now its discovery by MWG was indeed an important
documentary find, and Schluchter had every right to make much of it. Nonetheless, to suppose that a
short Advertisement in a book-trade journal could revise an entire strand of Weber’s intellectual history
is unlikely, to say the least. Note too that for Schluchter the intellectual ‘breakthrough’ that rendered
the PE obsolete to a significant degree occurred with the ‘Economic Ethics’ in 1912–13 (ibid. i. 102).
But if this was so, it was remarkably indolent of Weber not to give any signal of the fact until an
obscure Advertisement written seven years later; and the claim ‘That in fact Weber worked with
astonishing consistency for almost ten years in accordance with the problematic announced in the
Advertisement’ (ibid. ii. 580) is a remarkable denial of ordinary chronology. In fact, when viewed
through Schluchter’s lens, there was an extraordinary inconsistency in Weber’s behaviour, since
throughout the decade 1910–20 he remained unshakably loyal to the PE; he decided to republish it;
and he did so—none of which is reconcilable with Schluchter’s construction of the Advertisement.
78 This original note was deleted, because it and the new insertion were equivalents.
79 Sociology of Religion [c.1913], MWG I/22–2.442–7, here 447. On mammon and daily bread:

445–6.
80 Ibid. 444; cf. Matthew 22.14.
234 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

primitive Christianity than could be accommodated in the PE, while the import-
ant, and apparently new category of the intellectual has surfaced; but there has not
been an iota of conceptual deviation.81

IV. TWO “SIDES”

Turning aside from size and quantity, what of the qualitative differences between
the PE and the later religious writings? In a famous passage in the 1919 ’Vorbe-
merkung’ to the Collected Essays Weber states that, as ‘older’ or ‘earlier’ essays, the
PE and the ‘Protestant Sects’ traced ‘only one side of the causal relationship’
between religiosity and modern economic behaviour, that is, the impact of ‘specific,
substantive elements of religious belief ’. By contrast, ‘the later essays on the
“Economic Ethics of the World Religions” attempt to trace both causal relations’:
in addition to considering religious belief, they surveyed ‘the connections of the
most important religions of Kultur to the economy and social strata of the worlds
around them’ [i.12]. Now to Germans seeking to promote Weber in the years after
c.1960, an era when Marxist and materialist method enjoyed an undoubted
intellectual hegemony, this “second”, social side to the causal relationship was
extremely important. Indeed, implicitly it was far more important than the
“first”, religious side, although this is more apparent from the deafening silence
on the subject of religion, above all Christian religion, rather than any explicit
statement. Two-sidedness (it was held) showed that Weber was not a naive idealist.
On the contrary, he could embrace all that the Marxists were propounding within a
more sophisticated and comprehensive model: ‘a conceptual and theoretical frame-
work which lay beyond the alternatives of materialism and idealism.’82 But viewed
in this light, and in this staunchly secular context, the PE—a text that was evidently
about religion, Christianity, and seventeenth-century Christianity (in descending
order)—appeared simply too exposed to defend; and so, except insofar as it could be
read as a text about capitalism, it was devalued and sidelined. Hence the judgements
that Weber’s religious enquiries could not be ‘concluded’ by the PE alone; and that
the ‘Economic Ethics’ with their “two-sided” approach were necessarily something
more than ‘a mere continuation and development of the “Protestant Ethic”’.83
Yet the premiss behind this reasoning is flawed and the conclusion false. Weber
was certainly not a naive idealist, but he did still allot an ultimate priority to ideal
factors, always bearing in mind that what many would see as simple materialism is

81 Schluchter, Religion und Lebensführung, ii. 203–10, ignores this text, and is not interested in

problems of intellectual or Werkgeschichte at this point.

82 Ibid. i. 73; cf. Edith Hanke, Gangolf Hübinger, and Wolfgang Schwentker, ‘The Genesis of the

Max Weber Gesamtausgabe . . .’, MWS 12 (2012), 59–94, esp. 60–5. Cf. Wolfgang Mommsen,
‘Kapitalismus und Sozialismus: Die Auseinandersetzung mit Karl Marx’, where the role of religious
belief, though never formally denied, is eroded almost to vanishing point: Max Weber: Gesellschaft,
Politik und Geschichte (Frankfurt, 1974), 144–81, esp. 151–2, 161 (on religious convictions). Also:
Jürgen Habermas, Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns (Frankfurt, 19874), i. 271, 299.
83 Schluchter, Religion und Lebensführung, ii. 572, 562, resp.
 Religiosity and Modernity (I) 235

for him a cast of mind: ‘material Kultur’ [XX.53–4], a set of values that allocated
value to material things, or ‘the economic way of looking at things’.84 Hence the
‘transcendental presupposition’ set down in 1904 that all humans were ‘beings with
Kultur’; or the famous dictum from 1919–20 that it was quasi-Platonic ‘Ideas’
(Ideen) and not material ‘interests’ that determined the turning points in the ‘tracks’
of world history.85 Not only was Weber’s conception of the two sides far from
evenly balanced, but the very idea that there should be a “two-sided” approach was
not something he discovered in 1912. It had been announced in the PE in 1905
[XXI.110; cf. 101 n. 69],86 just as the simplest general conception of the “two
sides”, the distinction between external, social and institutional ‘form’ (on one
side), and the internal, ethical commitments or “spirit” of individuals (on the
other), is also clearly marked out [e.g. XX.18–29]—and this in turn is no more
than a development of the form/substance distinction that had lain at the heart of
Weberian thought since its origins (I.7). Hence Weber’s description of the essays
on the world religions that we have noted: that they were designed to ‘bring about
the general execution of the method in the essay “Protest. Ethic and Spirit of
Capitalism”’, a clear affirmation of continuity of intellectual procedure. So if,
nonetheless, he had confined himself exclusively to “one side” of the causal chain
in 1904–5, that is, to the examination of individual, religious and psychological
processes without any regard for their external forms, he would have been extremely
foolish, since he would have been stating historical conclusions that he knew in
advance might be invalidated the moment he turned to the “second” side.
But of course it was not so. Consider the second “side” in the particular sense
that a Marxist conditioned readership was wont to do: that of the social and class
context of religion. Lest we forget, the opening section of the PE, entitled ‘Religious
confession and social stratification’, is a sustained meditation on this very question,
taking into consideration social contexts in both contemporary Baden and the
Reformation [XX.1–11]. Amongst a plethora of suggestions, it leads Weber to the
conclusion from which he never deviated that ‘at the time of the [first] diffusion of
the Reformation in any one country, [Calvinism] was not closely tied to a distinct,
single class (something which is generally true of all Protestant denominations)’
[XX.8; cf. XXI.101 n. 69]. Or more succinctly: ‘the youth of such “Ideas” is
altogether more thorny than the [Marxist] theoreticians of the “superstructure”
admit’ [XX.19; cf.26 n. 1].87 The famous, “late” (1919–20) image of religious
Ideas acting like ‘switchmen’ at a junction in the tracks of history, before giving way
to the secondary operation of material ‘interest’ within a now given framework,88
is nothing more than a recapitulation in general terms of this argument, where
socially indiscriminate ascetic Protestantism is seen to make a decisive and

84 Freiburg Inaugural [1895], MWG I/4.561; »Objektivität« [1904], WL 164, 165, 169; cf. PE

[XX.18 Anschauungsweise; 44 Denkweise; 45 Vorstellungsweise].

85 Resp. »Objektivität« WL 180; ‘Zwischenbetrachtung’ [1919–20], MWG I/19.101.
86 Also »Objektivität«, WL 153.
87 Emphasis added. See similarly WuG [1919–20], 147–8, where ‘charisma’ is described as a

‘typically originative phenomenon’.

88 ‘Zwischenbetrachtung’ [1919–20], MWG I/19.101.
236 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

revolutionary historical intervention in the seventeenth century, to be succeeded by

a shift into the narrower, more defined tracks of utilitarianism and material and
class interest in the eighteenth [XXI.75 n. 3, etc.]. So it was right that consideration
of social contexts should come second to the individual and psychological focus
prioritized in the PE: they were secondary both in principle and in historical time.
Even so the belief that Weber had not considered the affinities between social class
and religious affiliation in 1904–5 can be maintained only by turning a blind eye to
large parts of the text. Besides the opening section note, most obviously, the
repeated references to ‘the economically rising “bourgeois” classes’ as the great
defenders of ‘Puritan tyranny’ [XX.3; cf. 26], or ‘the petty bourgeoisie . . . who
became the carriers of ethical development of Calvinism’ [XXI.93 n. 52].
Coming forward to the ‘Economic Ethics’, there is no evidence that Weber
reached different conclusions because of a more developed “two-sided” approach to
his material. The ‘Introduction’, written in 1915, does indeed pay close attention to
the relationship between social strata and religious affiliation, but not because this
reveals any inadequacy in the PE. Quite the reverse: Weber adheres to his two-sided
but lop-sided approach. A robust critique of Marxist failings in reading off the
character of a religiosity as a “reflection” of a particular social stratum is followed by
an emphatic reassertion of the rectitude of the procedure in the PE: ‘However far-
reaching the social influences produced by economic and political conditioning
might be on a religious ethic in individual cases, still this ethic was primarily shaped
by religious sources’,89 and similar assertions regarding the autonomy or primacy of
religious ideas appear at regular intervals in the texts of this period.90
More specific “class” analysis points to the same conclusion. The most important
novelty in Weberian social analysis after 1905 is the emergence of the stratum of
intellectuals, a group that does not feature in the PE, but that dominates and
concludes the treatment of ‘Social Rank, Class and Religion’ in the Sociology of
Religion.91 It is a category of considerable interest, given its general emergence in
Western. European discourse at this time; but it is also a group of an unusual kind,
when measured by the Marxist and material standards that remain to a large extent
our common sense today. As Weber explains when introducing it,
the [inner] need for salvation and ethical religiosity has yet another source besides the social
situation of the negatively privileged and the rationalism of the bourgeoisie conditioned by
its practical situation in life: [this is] intellectualism taken purely as such, in particular the
metaphysical need of the mind, which is compelled to reflect on ethical and religious
questions not out of material want but through an inner necessity of its own, to be able
to grasp the world as a meaningful cosmos and to take up a stance in relation to it.92

89 ‘Einleitung’, AfSS 41 (1915), 4, reiterated 21; cf. Weber to Graf Keyserling, 12.12.12, Briefe, on

his want of interest in the impact of ‘small nuances, which are very often of a purely social provenance’
on religious behaviour.
90 Sociology of Religion [c.1913], MWG I/22–2.243, 265; Sociology of Herrschaft [c.1911–14],

MWG I/22–4.622, 624, 655–7; ‘Hinduism and Buddhism’ [1915–16], MWG I/20.241, 527–8;
‘Ancient Judaism’ [1916–18], MWG I/21.801, etc.
91 Sociology of Religion, }7, MWG I/22–2.266–90. 92 Ibid. 265.
 Religiosity and Modernity (I) 237

Evidently this is an outstanding case of a group that is driven by what Weber calls
‘ideal’ rather than ‘material interests’, and there is no succour here for the view that
a later, more “two-sided” analysis of social phenomena signifies enhanced weight
being attached to either material interest or a Marxist classification of social groups.
However, a more authentic Weberian idea of “two-sidedness”—group identity in
association with (in this case, ideal) interest—is clearly represented, and this idea of
two-sidedness may be further developed. Thus the sources of Weber’s thinking
here appear to be twofold. On the one hand, his identification of intellectuals with
the pursuit of universal meaning, their common location in a religious context, and
his jaundiced view of both ‘intellectualism’ and the majority of ‘intellectuals’, all
suggest an ‘ideal’ meaning for these terms connected to Albrecht Ritschl’s pejorative
construction of ‘intellectualism’ in German theology, as the over-refined, cerebral
or philosophic devaluation of authentic religiosity.93 On the other hand, ‘intellec-
tuals’ also find a secular and social origin in Weber’s analyses of sub-groups within
the Russian intelligentsia (Intelligenz) in 1905–6 where he identifies two primary
streams: the ‘proletaroid’ or ‘proletarian intelligentsia’, and the ‘bourgeois’ and
‘privileged’ one.94 (However, in neither case is there any sign of a connection to the
much better-known derivation of the idea from Émile Durkheim and the emergent
Dreyfusard discourse of ‘intellectuals’ in contemporary France.)95 This dual aspect
is maintained in the Sociology of Religion, where Weber again superimposes the
novel and apparently “ideal” category of intellectuals onto social sub-groups. Thus
the historically normal case (and exclusively so in East Asia) is that of the ‘elite’
(vornehm) intellectual, a ‘philosophical kind of intellectualism, embodied by (on
average) classes which are provided for social and economically’—they don’t have
to work for a living—‘above all, apolitical nobles or rentiers, officials, holders of
church, monastic, university or other kinds of benefice’.96 This is the Ritschlian or
pejorative case where intellectual reflection is largely apologetic and makes no
historical impact. But standing alongside it is a second sub-group, which has proven
to be active and formative, although only in exceptional cases, in Jewish, Christian
and Occidental history: that of ‘proletaroid intellectualism’ (a terminology that
evidently follows the Russian one), which also appears as ‘pariah’, ‘plebeian’,
‘journeyman’ and ‘petty bourgeois intellectualism’.97 So the single “class” of
intellectuals can imply quite different types of historical impact and social origin:
there is social argument but no social determination here. Similarly, the implica-
tions of this class for specific types of religious conduct, as measured by the typology

93 e.g. Ritschl, Geschichte des Pietismus (Bonn, 1880–6), i. 92; Adolf Harnack, Das Wesen des

Christentums (Leipzig, 19002), 132, 142, 147, 149, etc. Weber’s only secular reference to intellectuals
before 1914 is in relation to theorists of nationalism. Interestingly, here, too, an apparently purely
“ideal” construction of the term in terms of meaning appears alongside use of the term as part of a social
group classification: MWG I/22–1.245, 247.
94 ‘Zur Lage der bürgerlichen Demokratie’ [1906], MWG I/10.105–6, 109, 122, 182, 268, 277.
95 Émile Durkheim, ‘L’Individualisme et les intellectuels’, Revue bleue, 4th ser., 10 (1898), 7–13;

Christophe Charle, Naissance des ‘intellectuels’: 1880–1900 (Paris, 1990); Les Intellectuels en Europe au
XIXe Siècle (Paris, 20012); Dietz Bering, Die Intellektuellen : Geschichte eines Schimpfwortes (Stuttgart,
1978); Die Epoche der Intellektuellen 1898–2001 (Stuttgart, 2010).
96 Sociology of Religion [c.1913], MWG I/22–2.274. 97 Ibid. 274–87.
238 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

of mystical and ascetic behaviour, are at best weak or indeterminate. Weber does
once suggest that the elite category implies ‘in general the disposition’ towards a
passive ‘mysticism of “illumination”’ or gnosis;98 but he never makes the comple-
mentary case that proletaroid intellectuals are intrinsically active and ascetic
(though this might seem to be an obvious inference)—a reflection of his core
assumption that ultimately the realm of Wissenschaft is in principle separate from
that of religion.99
The construction of ‘intellectuals’ is far from simple; but it is clear that any
“advance” in Weber’s ‘social’ thought between 1905 and 1912–13 was not along
the lines of tempering an excessive focus on ideal factors by reference to social
contexts as ordinarily understood.100 Besides this type of continuity, there is a more
literal one. Although ‘intellectuals’ are nowhere mentioned in the PE, the idea (as is
almost always the case) is implicit in 1905. Contextually, we may recall that
Weber’s absorption of Ritschlian theology and its categories goes back to the
early 1890s at least. Another origin for his thinking is evident from his preference
for petty bourgeois intellectualism as the principal descriptor for the proletaroid or
mass intellectualism that, unlike elite intellectualism, was so crucial for Occidental
historical evolution. However, the petty bourgeoisie had already been identified as a
principal social constituency of ascetic Protestantism in 1905—and it was ‘the petty
bourgeois Puritans’ of seventeenth-century England who were identified as a prime
example of such intellectualism in 1913.101 A more precise connection between the
PE and the later category emerges from what is said in 1904–5 about New England
“Graduates” (Weber uses the English term). He states that ‘the New England
colonies were created by preachers and “Graduates” in association with petty
bourgeois, artisans and yeomen for religious reasons’, and again that ‘Perhaps
there has never been a country so rich in “graduates” as New England in the
first generation of its existence’, where ‘the religious valuation of knowledge’ was of
particular significance [XX.18, XXI.94]. So here is a numerous, petty bourgeois
class of intellectuals in everything but name, exercising a decisive influence in

98 Ibid. 271.
99 I pass over Weber’s pre- and post-war classifications of classes and Stände (groups defined by
rank and social esteem) in ‘Economy and Society’. ‘Intellectuals’ are absent from the first of these,
which may be explained by the fact that this is not a dispassionate taxonomy of social groups in
principle (as it is often taken to be) but an analysis of groups affecting ‘the distribution of power’ within a
political (hence non-religious) context: ‘Klassen, Stände und Parteien’, MWG I/22–1.252–72, here
252. The post-war classification includes ‘non-propertied intelligentsia [Intelligenz]’ and the class of
those ‘privileged through education’, which might correspond to Weber’s ‘proletaroid’ and ‘elite’
intellectuals respectively: ‘Stände und Klassen’ WuG [1919–20] 177–80, here 179. If so, this tells us
that Weber regarded intellectuals as an open ‘social class’ and not a Stand (where they do not appear),
though he also says these two categories are closely adjacent (180). In sum, this hermetic text does not
advance our understanding much, while faulty typography adds to the difficulties in construing it.
100 For Weber’s propensity to see almost all social contexts as capable of cultural construction, see

further the case of the bourgeoisie: below II.8.v.

101 Sociology of Religion, MWG I/22–2.274. (As noted above, the origins of this section of the

Sociology of Religion may in fact go back to 1907, but this makes no difference to the argument made
here: see II.3 at n.58.) For the conventional view that the PE has nothing to say on this subject, e.g.
Gangolf Hübinger, ‘Intellektuelle, Intellektualismus’, in H. Kippenberg and M. Riesebrodt (eds), Max
Webers »Religionssystematik« (Tübingen, 2001), 297–313, here 304–7.
 Religiosity and Modernity (I) 239

favour of Puritanism or ascetic Protestantism at the switch or point of departure

supplied by a new settlement.
In fact, the metaphor of the “two sides” is unsatisfactory, because as a metaphor
it is so elastic, and its shades of meaning so varied. We have been focusing on social
class, but although Weber was well aware of Marx and the vulgar Marxist theorists
of the “superstructure” and responded to them [XX.18–19, 33], his own frame of
reference was simply not Marxist. It rested instead on the radical distinction
between all that comes from within the individual, “from the inside out”,
“ethic”, “spirit”, value-commitment, ideal and material interest, and everything
that stands outside. Not just social class but politics, bureaucracy, urban and feudal
contexts, law: in short, everything that Weber classified as ‘sociological founda-
tions’.102 This also means that the sides are separable in historical time: there is an
interval between the medieval city economy—the obvious organizational ‘form’
preceding the ‘Protestant ethic’—and that ethic’s workings in the seventeenth
century; or between the seventeenth-century religious Idea and its nineteenth-
century realization in the form of capitalist enterprise. On the other hand (and
here we see the full elasticity of metaphor), Weber can also deduce two sides from a
single root. When he allowed that the PE was “one-sided”, this surely included
reference to the idea of the Beruf, the titular subject and implicit conceptual
foundation of Part II of the text. Yet “one-sidedness” hardly does this idea justice.
The term Beruf embraces two distinct meanings, it is both religious ‘calling’ and
economic ‘profession’, and offers a classical example of Weber’s deduction of social
forms from a rigidly individualistic premiss. It is both an individualistic derivation
from Lutheran theology [XX.35–50], the niche of personal specialization in which
Weber felt himself to be immured in the later 1890s, and the basis of social
organization. Thus, for the Calvinist, ‘fulfilling the tasks of one’s calling . . . took
on a peculiarly concrete-impersonal character, that of service towards the rational
formation of the social cosmos which surrounds us’ [XXI.17]. So far from being
conceived in one-sidedly ideal or individual terms, the Beruf is also a variant on the
Smithian, Marxist or Durkheimian division of labour in society [cf. XX.42–3;
XXI.16, 82–3].
All the same there was a religious primacy at work here. What is distinctive about
Weber’s thinking is that the rational social cosmos, though for much of its history
the product of a “normal” rationalizing process of specialization (the multiplication
of Berufe), has nonetheless taken on a religious supercharge at a crucial moment
via a mass of its individual members. Owing in significant measure to the incursion
of individualistic ascetic Protestantism [XXI.12 & n. 16], the individualism of
the Cobdenite and world capitalist market of the nineteenth-century had replaced
early modern social organization by inherited social rank and status (Stand ).
Consider, by contrast, India, where organization by caste was also a form of social

102 “From the inside out”: e.g. ‘Knies und das Irrationalitätsproblem’ [1905–6], ‘Ueber einige

Kategorien’ [1913], WL 98, 430. ‘Sociological foundations’: e.g. ‘Confucianism’, AfSS 41 (1915),
30–56; [1919–20] MWG I/19.128–284. Nature and geography are a further important, external
element, but they are not sociological.
240 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

organization by occupation and Beruf: it too was a ‘social system’ organized around
a ‘vocational ethic’.103 But here any individualistic impetus coming from Buddhism
and Jainism, when they sought to overcome the inherited and prescribed social
ranks created by caste, had been far too weak to bring about significant change, and
was definitively quashed by the Hindu ‘restoration’.104 Meanwhile in China the
chances for such a radical change simply did not exist, owing to the absence of a
salvation religion. A religious providence connected to ‘the specific fate of the
individual man’ rather than the collectivity, and an ethic working “from the inside
out” of a mass of individuals, did not exist; there was no true Weberian ‘ethic’, only
a collective ‘social’ or ‘economic ethic’. Individual choice of Beruf was indeed
formally free, but this was meaningless in such a context.105 So in all cases religion
(or its absence) was formative for society, whether in the reduced Western sense,
where ‘society’ signified no more than an ‘organization’ defined minimally by the
market [e.g. XX.25, 28, 54], ‘the very harshest form of lovelessness and want of
fraternity’;106 or in the more developed, organic and communitarian sense preva-
lent elsewhere. If one asks how and why the “two-sided” Occidental social and
occupational structure has taken a unique world-historical direction in regard to its
material Kultur, the answer is (as usual) lop-sidedly religious and ideal.
Consider finally how Weber’s conception of the “sides” is mapped out in the
1919 ‘Vorbemerkung’. He can afford to draw attention to the one-sidedness of the
PE [i.12], because he has now, albeit in cursory form, remedied the deficiency. The
bulk of this essay is quite precisely a sketch of the “side” that was missing from the
original PE, where such a supplement was an obvious necessity if the latter was to
be republished. Thus it offers something like a classical statement of the full range
of phenomena that stand outside the individual: Wissenschaft, specialized bureau-
cracy, rationally prescribed law, the rational–capitalist organization of (formally)
free labour, the separation of the household from the enterprise, the concepts of the
“bourgeoisie” and class (as distinct from the clan or kinship group), bourgeois
enterprise-capitalism and so on [i.1–12].107 Yet this produces no discontinuity
relative to the original PE. The PE had clearly gestured towards ‘our institutions in
politics, private law and commerce’, even as it passed them by [XX.31]; and, once
Weber had resolved his doubts about capitalism in 1907–8, it was a relatively easy
matter to bolt on the missing “side” in the ‘Vorbemerkung’ without prejudice to an

103 Resp. ‘Hinduism and Buddhism’, MWG I/20.49 (title); Sociology of Religion [c.1913], MWG

I/22–2.397. This explains an important textual revision in the PE. In 1905 the title of Part II is ‘The
Vocational Idea [Berufsidee] of Ascetic Protestantism’, where reference to a quasi-Platonic ‘Idea’
suggests that there could be only one of its kind; in 1920 this is changed to a less exalted ‘vocational
ethic . . . ’, which allows for possible alternatives, such as the Hindu. It does not, however, mean that
the importance of the original conception is devalued.
104 ‘Hinduism and Buddhism’ [1915–16], MWG I/20.460–74.
105 ‘Confucianism’, AfSS 41 (1915), 352, 355, 357–8, 360; cf. 54.
106 ‘Zwischenbetrachtung’, AfSS 41 (1915), 402.
107 See also the late lecture series ‘Outline of Universal Social and Economic History’ (1919–20).

Here is another “two-sided” restatement of the argument of the PE that, though remarkable chiefly for
its blandness, in no way contradicts the original: MWG III/6.
 Religiosity and Modernity (I) 241

original text that, like the ‘Vorbemerkung’, was centrally focused on the ‘overall
development of rationalism’ in Occidental Kultur [XX.34] [cf. i.11].

V. AN EXPANSION OF HORIZONS?

Perhaps the most plausible suggestion of discrepancy and discontinuity between the
PE and the ‘Economic Ethics’ is the simplest: that it was ‘Chiefly in the years 1910
to 1914’ that Weber experienced an ‘enormous expansion in the horizon of his
interests’; that it was at this date he first began to take an interest in universal
history; and that the ‘Economic Ethics’ mark the point at which he ‘definitively
went beyond the limits of . . . Mediterranean-Occidental Kultur’.108 But, while it is
undoubtedly true that the data and texture of Weber’s work on Confucianism,
Hinduism, or Buddhism read very differently from his treatment of ascetic Prot-
estantism in Northern Europe, the idea that he did not think, and had not thought,
according to the broadest horizons since early youth is quite unfounded.
Breadth of horizon can be taken in many ways, but we should remember (first)
that while the central chronological focus of the PE is the seventeenth century
[XXI.36], it was written by someone who instinctively conceived of historical
development as occurring across the whole period of recorded history. (Times
have changed so much that we have forgotten that this was what the word ‘History’
meant.) Hence the dictum from Thomas Carlyle that Weber was so pleased to
discover and rework at St Louis in September 1904, as an expression of how the
historically aware person should think: ‘Thousands of years have passed before thou
couldst enter life, and thousands of years to come [a]wait in silence what thou wilt
do with this thy life’—a saying that frequently resurfaced in later life, not least in the
‘Economic Ethics’.109 The principal reflection of such a magnified perspective in the
original PE comes in the persistent references to the Judaism of the Old Testament
and of what Weber calls the ‘Talmudic’ period [XX.45; XXI.90, 91 n. 40, 101
n. 69]. For these references are nothing less than the kernel of the identical views
that would have been expressed in the essay on ‘Ancient Judaism’ (1916–18) had it
been completed.110
However, the centrepiece of the view that there was a ‘breakthrough’ or new
phase in Weber’s thinking after 1910 lies in the alleged expansion of his spatial as
well as temporal horizons: the proposition that it was only then that he conceived of

108 Schluchter, Grundlegungen der Soziologie (Tübingen, 2006), i. 290–1; Religion und Lebensführung,

i. 104. Cf. Friedrich H. Tenbruck, ‘Max Weber und Eduard Meyer’, in W. Mommsen and
W. Schwentker (eds), Max Weber und seine Zeitgenossen (Göttingen, 1988), 337–79, esp. 357–66;
Hartmann Tyrell, ‘Einführende Bemerkungen zu Max Webers “Die Wirtschaftsethik der
Weltreligionen” ’, in R. Achenbach and M. Arneth (eds), »Gerechtigkeit und Recht zu üben« (Gen 18,19)
(Wiesbaden, 2009), 439–57, here 448.
109 ‘The Rural Community’ [1904], HEI 31 (2005), 346; cf.‘Confucianism’, AfSS 41 (1915), 377;

Historian, 137–8. A perspective embracing both past and prospective millennia is a common feature of
the Freiburg Inaugural [1895]: MWG I/4.559, 568, 574, and the ‘General Economics’ lectures
[1894–8]: e.g. MWG III/1.122, 145, 204, 619.
110 Historian, ch. 5.
242 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

the Occident within a universal and comparative context. Hence that the unique-
ness of the Occident could be—not established but—entrenched by comparison
with non-Occidental Kulturen.111 The first reason to be sceptical about this
suggestion is that it derives from someone who, most unusually in Weber’s circle,
was not historically or classically educated: Marianne Weber.112 Without in any
way belittling the depth and quality of Weber’s achievement in writing about
Buddhism and Confucianism, a conventionally educated person would have
known that the universal–historical perspectives underlying them were widely
diffused at this date. Hence there was no special merit in the perspective itself.
Note further that the term ‘Occident’—Weber’s central reference point—was
Latin in derivation and one that he (unlike Marianne) would have picked up at
school. Thereafter he became a Roman lawyer, who wrote at length about Roman
history and society, while the idea of contrast and comparison across the whole of
the known world, which is the alleged kernel of the universal perspectives of the
“later” Weber, was a conventional trope of ancient history. So it is that his early
classical studies take up the ‘contrast’ between the ‘individualism’ of the ‘Occident’
and the ‘group’ and ‘caste’ forms of Asia as their starting point113—and here is the
crucial intellectual “breakthrough” occurring some fifteen years ahead of schedule.
It is true that when in the 1890s Weber thinks of the ‘Orient’ or Asia he is, as a
classicist, chiefly thinking of Persia and Babylon.114 Yet these areas remained a
significant component of his work on the world religions,115 while the continuity
from Babylon to Islam was an obvious starting point for enquiry into the latter.116
And even so, China, Japan, Polynesia and pre-Columbian America are included
in the 1890s lectures.117 Not only had the central principle of comparison and
contrast with the Occident been established, but so too had the feature that
distinguished Weber from his fellow classicists and those working in modern
subjects: use of the Latin term ‘Occident’ in both an ancient and a modern context,
thereby denoting an evolutionary–historical continuity from antiquity through to
the present. Even in the 1890s, we encounter the characteristic usage that is familiar
from Weber’s later writings, when he speaks of ‘modern Occidental Kultur’ and

111 For a symbolic statement, Wolfgang Schluchter, Die Entwicklung des okzidentalen Rationalismus

(Tübingen, 1979); for a more recent and technical one, Christoph Braun and Ludwig Finscher,
‘Einleitung’, MWG I/14.81–97.
112 Lebensbild, 349; cf. Schluchter, Religion und Lebensführung, ii. 562. Note, however, that

Marianne also said that the PE was ‘the first in a series of far-reaching universal–historical
investigations’, and that it was Weber’s ‘first religious–sociological text’: Lebensbild, 340, 350—
remarks commonly overlooked by those who borrow from her.
113 ‘Agrarverhältnisse im Altertum’1 [1897], MWG I/6.146–8. The documentary point is made by

Helwig Schmidt-Glintzer, ‘Einleitung’, MWG I/19.12 (1989), but interpretatively he defers to Prof.
Schluchter.
114 ‘Agrarverhältnisse im Altertum’2 [1898], MWG I/6.157–69.
115 [Selbstanzeige, 1919], MWG I/19.28; cf. ‘Ancient Judaism’, AfSS 44 (1917–18), 52 n. *.
116 See, e.g., ‘Agrarverhältnisse’2 [1898], MWG I/6.167, 169, reiterated more or less exactly in

1907–8: ibid. 398, 590. The frame of reference of Eduard Meyer supplies an obvious point of
comparison here. His conception of the world religions included Buddhism and Islam, a hint of
Hinduism (Brahmanism), but not Confucianism: Geschichte des Altertums, 1.i Einleitung: Elemente der
Anthropologie (Stuttgart and Berlin, 19072), 147, 155, 199.
117 ‘Allgemeine . . . Nationalökonomie’ [1894–8], MWG III/1.99, 386, 415.
 Religiosity and Modernity (I) 243

‘the modern Occidental type of man’, whereas for his contemporaries Abendland
(the West), West, or Westeuropa were the conventional labels.118
Given its avowed subject and restricted essay format, one can hardly expect
extensive discussion of Oriental subjects, or Oriental/Occidental contrasts, in the
PE—and yet they are present all the same, provided we treat an exceptionally
compact text with the care and attention it deserves.119 Consider, for example,
Weber’s citation of ‘dervish-like passion’ in warfare as the extreme opposite to the
‘sober self-control’ of Cromwell’s “Ironsides” [XXI.29 n. 58]. Now this could easily
be dismissed as showing simply that Weber read the newspapers—that he was
aware of British military campaigning in Egypt and the Sudan since the mid-1880s,
which had brought them into contact with dervishes. But while he surely did read
the papers and was well aware of British imperialism in Africa [XX.44 n. 2],
dervishes are also Islamic ascetics, and as such they feature prominently in the
surviving fragments of his thinking about Islam as a world religion after 1912.
(Weber decides they are not ‘ascetic’ in his sense of the term, but rather ‘mystic’.)120
Furthermore, when he refers to the Mahdi and Mahdism, it occurs not in the
context of a discussion of British imperial politics but in the Sociology of Religion
(c.1913). He is interested in the psychological impact of religiosity on warfare,
which is also central to his overall conception of Islam—and so it is that the
collocation of Cromwell and dervishes or ‘Mahdist sects’ occurs for a second
time.121 In short, the allusion to dervishes in the PE is not casual or accidental,
but anticipates the comparative framework of the world religions.
Consider, again, the way Weber highlights ‘the greed of the Chinese mandarin’
[XX.19] in contrast to “ethic” epitomized by Benjamin Franklin in the Occident.
This is simply the first appearance of an idea that will recur repeatedly in ‘Economy
and Society’ and the ‘Economic Ethics of the World Religions’: in China, ‘as always
in a patrimonial state, it was the official [i.e. mandarin] who had the best chances of
wealth accumulation’.122 True, it is only in the 1920 reworking of ‘Confucianism’
that we learn of the specific incident that underlies these statements: this is the story
of the customs farmer in Canton who in every third year creamed off the entire tax
revenue for himself, as reproduced in Isidor Singer’s 1888 lecture On Social
Relations in East Asia. But still the PE reference shows that Weber had read Singer

118 Grundriss [1898], MWG III/1.122; cf. ‘Der Gang der wirschaftlichen Entwicklung’ [1898],

MWG I/4.851.—Weber does occasionally use the alternative terms, but they carry no conceptual
force.
119 Note too copious reference to Oriental/Occidental contrast, and to India and China in religious

and related contexts, in the manuscript ‘Hausverband, Sippe und Nachbarschaft’. This was probably
written to assist Marianne Weber when writing Ehefrau und Mutter in der Rechtsentwicklung (1907)
and has been dated by MWG to September 1906, though the editors rightly remark on its connections
back to the lectures on ‘General Economics’ (1894–8): MWG I/22–1.286–326 passim.
120 Sociology of Religion [c.1913], MWG I/22–2.339; cf. ‘Zwischenbetrachtung’, AfSS 41 (1915),

389. Nonetheless, he is prepared to accept that religious conviction might make them more reliable
artisans than an irreligious equivalent, and cannot rule out the possibility ‘that Islamic mercantile
religiosity is to a strikingly high degree dervish religiosity’: MWG I/22–2.237; cf. 437.
121 Ibid. 394; cf. 365.
122 ‘Confucianism’ AfSS 41 (1915), 49; cf. Sociology of Herrschaft [c.1911–14], MWG

I/22–4.425.
244 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

by 1904.123 Still more notable is what he has to say about ‘the various religions of
the earth’ in 1905 [XXI.25 n. 48]:
But this irrationality [of religious experience, Erlebnis] . . . is no obstacle to the fact that
practically it is of the utmost importance, just what type of thought system it is which, so to
speak, appropriates for itself what is immediately religiously “experienced”, and guides it
onto its own tracks. For it is in consequence of this, that most of those differences in drawing
ethical consequences such as exist between the various religions of the earth and which are
practically so important, are arranged.
Here is yet another anticipation of the famous “late” remark from 1919–20 noted
above, suggesting the crucial importance of Ideas (Ideen)—or thought systems—at
turning points in world history: they act like switchmen who determine the ‘tracks’
that future development will take.124 But perhaps the acme of the universal–
historical suggestions in the original PE lies in the proposition that ‘Already in
the middle ages Christian asceticism in its highest forms displayed an entirely
rational character. The world-historical significance of the conduct of life under
Occidental, as opposed to Oriental, monasticism is based on this’ [XXI.28]. This
leaves us in no doubt that in 1905 Weber had identified asceticism as a type of
religious conduct that had to be situated in all its varieties within a world-historical
context.125 Further, that he had a clear, and indeed detailed conception of an
Oriental monasticism—Buddhism once more—which stood in radical contrast to
Occidental monasticism in that it was neither ascetic, nor rational, but dissipated
itself instead in ‘planless flight from the world [Weltflucht]’ [XXI.28].126 So it is no
coincidence that the language of the PE regarding ‘flight from the world’ here finds
a precise echo in the Sociology of Religion in 1913:
Such contemplative flight from the world, as is characteristic of early Buddhism and, to a
certain extent, almost all Asiatic and [Far] Eastern forms of salvation [Jainism], looks similar
to the ascetic Weltanschauung, but is to be strictly distinguished from it nonetheless . . . [The
ascetic] feels himself to be a fighter for God, regardless of who the enemy and the
instruments of combat might be, and flight from the world is itself psychologically no
flight, but an ever new victory over ever new temptations, with which he has to struggle,
actively and repeatedly. The ascetic who rejects the world has at least the negative inner
connection to the “world”, which is presupposed by struggle. For this reason it is more
fruitful to speak in his case of “rejection of the world” [Weltablehnung], and not of “flight
from the world [Weltflucht]”, which is rather what marks out the contemplative mystic.127

123 ‘Confucianism and Taoism’ [1919–20], MWG I/19.257 n. 1.

124 ‘Einleitung’, MWG I/19.101.
125 Weber situates Protestant asceticism within a world context a second time later on [XXI.62 n.
123]: ‘the innumerable traits of affinity between asceticism within Occidental monasticism and the
ascetic conduct of life within Protestantism . . . are ultimately based on the fact that, of course, any
asceticism resting on the basis of Biblical Christianity must necessarily have certain important features
in common; furthermore, that in general any asceticism from whatever religious confession requires
certain proven means to achieve the “mortification” of the flesh.’
126 Weber also associates Oriental monasticism here with ‘virtuoso-like self-torment’. We cannot

say for certain that this is an anticipation of the category of the ‘virtuoso’ that emerged from 1912
onwards; but it is more probable than not. Below II.8.iv.
127 MWG I/22–2.323–4. The text of MWG prints ‘vorderasiatischen’ or ‘Near Eastern’. This must

be a mistake, whether it is Weber’s slip of the pen or a printing error, since ‘Near Eastern’ meant
 Religiosity and Modernity (I) 245

Reference to Buddhist ‘flight from the world’ shows that even in 1905 Weber had
identified Buddhism not simply as an example of mysticism (which in a loose sense
was far from novel), but as the alternative “pole” within his sharply conceived and
original typology of religious behaviour, in contrast to “innerworldly” asceticism
[XXI.30, etc.]. The speculation must be that this conception of a distinctively
rational monastic asceticism in the Occident and its Buddhist antithesis was some-
thing he was able to hone when he was reading ‘all kinds of things about the history,
constitution and economy of monasteries’ in Rome in the winter of 1901–2, while a
remote prompt in this direction may go back to his reading of Schopenhauer in his
penultimate year at the Gymnasium (1880–1).128 In any case the idea was his by
1905; the agreement between the PE and the texts of 1912–13 is transparent; and the
conclusion is almost irresistible that the comparison between Occidental and Orien-
tal monasticism was a principal origin of his interest in the world religions. The
contrast between capitalism in the Occident (however defined) and its absence
elsewhere was really too obvious to be worth serious investigation in its own
right—and in this light it is worth noting how Weber’s work on the world religions
is significantly more focused on the past than when he reflects on the Occident.
There is no Indian or Chinese modernity. Hardly less noteworthy is Weber’s
identification of Buddhism in 1906 as the only ‘religion of salvation’ outside
Judaeo-Christian tradition, in clear agreement with the classification adopted in the
‘Economic Ethics of the World Religions’.129
The PE (as I may frequently state) is an exceptionally compressed text, and close
reading is mandatory. Quite brief remarks, sometimes only a phrase, can indicate a
substantial intellectual hinterland, and so it is here. Meanwhile the view that it took
a prodigiously absorbent and capacious mind such as Weber’s until his late forties
to become aware of the study of comparative religion, a study that had been going
on with ever increasing vigour since the eighteenth century and that was a
commonplace in his own day—most obviously in the work of the comparative
“History of Religions School”130—must, like Oscar Wilde’s Bunbury, be consigned
to the realm of exploded fictions. Weber’s range of reference (as distinct from the
way he reflected on its materials) was not so different from that of his contempor-
aries. The one point at which his specification of the ‘world religions’ clearly

Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, none of which was primarily, let alone exclusively, contemplative.
The point regarding Weltflucht is made again, if not as elegantly, in ‘Hinduism and Buddhism’
[1915–16], MWG I/20.352.
128 Marianne to Helene Weber [29.1.02], Lebensbild, 267; cf. 48 on the reading of Schopenhauer,

which presumably means Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung. The differences between Weber’s and
Schopenhauer’s usages of Buddhism, asceticism and mysticism (or what Schopenhauer calls quietism)
are enormous: for Schopenhauer Buddhism is like New Testament Christianity, and they are both
unlike Reformation Protestantism, in that they tend to promote the correct doctrine of the pessimistic
and ascetic overcoming of the self, which Schopenhauer was recommending to a deluded modern
world. So the most that can be said is that Schopenhauer presented the young Weber with a
comparative religious framework embracing the world religions (excluding Confucianism) and
derived ethical implications therefrom; but nothing more specific or substantive.
129 ‘Hausverband, Sippe und Nachbarschaft’ [1906], MWG I/22–1.325. See n. 119 above.
130 See e.g., Martin Rade, ‘Religionsgeschichte und Religionsgeschichtliche Schule’ [1913], RGG

iv. 2183–200; cf. Hans Kippenberg, Die Entdeckung der Religionsgeschichte: Religionswissenschaft und
Moderne (Munich, 1997).
246 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

exceeded theirs was in his acceptance of Confucianism as a subject of analysis.131

This was usually ignored, partly because, unlike the religions of India, it had no
connection to the Near East and Judaeo-Christian tradition, and partly because by
Occidental standards it was hardly a religion at all, since it had no transcendental or
theological dimension. It is a testimony to Weber’s secularity and focus on ethical
conduct per se, regardless of its religious root, that he should have thought differ-
ently; but still his views were not entirely removed from the conventional wisdom,
since he too wondered whether Confucianism could reasonably be described as
‘religious’.132 In any case, however original Weber might have been, we cannot
divorce him from his intellectual and cultural context: this is the most elementary
explanation for the awareness of the world religions that informs the PE in 1904–5.

131 Compare the near identical specification of the ‘world religions’ by two eminent and

representative figures: the ancient historian Eduard Meyer (n. 116 above) and the theologian Ernst
Troeltsch ‘Religion und Kirche’, PJb 81 (1895), 215–49, here 224; Die Absolutheit des Christentums
(Tübingen, 1902), 56–7, 75–7, 106–8.
132 ‘Einleitung’, AfSS 41 (1915), 3; cf. 27; ‘Confucianism’, ibid. 68–71.
 6
Religiosity and Modernity (II)

Having upheld (or restored) the essential continuity and connection between the
PE (1904–5), the ‘Economic Ethics of the World Religions’ (1912–20), and the
Sociology of Religion (c.1913), we can now tackle the principal question at 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?

I . GENERAL OBSERVATIONS; ASCETICISM

AND MYSTICISM

The simplest answer to these questions again derives from a comparison between
religion and politics. For Weber these were the only areas of life that generated
original schemes of value in public life: they were ‘the old, general [allgemein] types of
human ideals’.1 They were the two types of ideal that had been pursued always and
everywhere throughout history (even if historical ubiquity did not mean that
political ideals were qualitatively universal [universal, universell ], a status reserved
for religion). This was why the claims of politics to govern human conduct
represented the one ‘direct competitor’ to those of religious ethics, in contrast to
the formalistic and heteronymous spheres of law and economics, which lacked any
original power of this kind.2 So analogies between social explanation in religion and
politics can run quite deep. For example, as we saw, it was not ‘the “content” of a
revelation’, ‘but . . . in what way it legitimates itself to the individual as something
“divine” (and not “satanic”)’, which was ‘ultimately that which concerns the
individual in a “salvation religion”’.3 In other words, the need to secure legitimate

1 Freiburg Inaugural [1895], MWG I/4.563. One possible addition here would be the

promulgation of rational Wissenschaft as a public ideal. The germs of such thinking can be found in
the ‘Economic Ethics of the World Religions’, particularly in the Indian case (MWG I/20.235–6,
256–62, 470, 528–31), where Weber confronts the presence of Wissen (gnosis) without Wissenschaft.
However, the point is not developed. He seems to have assumed that, in principle, commitment to
Wissenschaft was hegemonic across the Occident, even amongst the professorial literati; thus separate
examination of its foundations was not necessary. However, developing political threats to university
Wissenschaft in the 1920s and the rise of the “sociology of knowledge” might perhaps have caused him
to develop his thinking here.
2 ‘Zwischenbetrachtung’, AfSS 41 (1915), 398; cf. ‘Roschers historische Methode’ [1903], WL 30,

37 on heteronomy.
3 To Graf Keyserling, 12.12.12, Briefe.
248 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

acceptance by the mass of the individuals is the same in both religion and the
structures of rule or Herrschaft. Now in fact Weber does not normally discuss the
legitimacy of religions, let alone related phenomena such as heresy, because he
largely takes it for granted (reflecting the obvious disparity between the turnover of
religions and political regimes). But still the bases on which religions are founded,
and the social or mass-psychological functions they serve, are a central concern: the
reception of religious Ideas by the mass of ordinary (“everyday”) people is as
important to him as the claims made upon them by political rulers (if not more
so), and in this sense the two are analogous. One reflection of this is that the central
modern types in Weber’s sociology of Herrschaft, charisma obviously, but also the
idea of the hierocratic church as a pioneering form of bureaucratic Herrschaft,4 can
be derived from his thinking about religion. (However, traditionalism cannot—
presumably on the ground that it has no positive ethical foundation. Here is a mark
of Weber’s esteem for the salvation religions and Christianity in particular.) A more
general point is this: the methodology and formal organization of a Weberian
sociology of religion could be no different from that of the sociology of Herrschaft
or any Weberian sociology. It should of course be founded on ideal-type constructs,
highlighting certain forms of behaviour, which would most fruitfully organize the
infinity of recorded historical experience from a modern perspective. Yet, when
measured by the pragmatic criteria of simplicity and accessibility, Weber “failed” or
“fell short” in his sociology of religion: he did not produce a simple type-scheme in
religion comparable to ‘the three pure types of Herrschaft’5—the scheme that he
produced in 1915 as an elementary introduction to his socio-political thought. The
Sociology of Religion (1913) may be an undervalued text; but a principal reason for
that under-valuation is that it lacks the monumental simplicity implicit in the
Sociology of Herrschaft, whether in its pre- or post-war forms.
Weber’s readers have reacted in various ways to the want of formal simplicity in
his religious thought. As noted above, they have commonly downgraded the
Sociology of Religion in favour of the more tangible and historical ‘Economic
Ethics’, supplemented only by the convenient sociological synopses in the ‘Intro-
duction’ and ‘Zwischenbetrachtung’ (which are grouped with the ‘Economic
Ethics’).6 Alternatively (or simultaneously) they have re-routed his discussion of

4 Sociology of Herrschaft [c.1911–14], MWG I/22–4.579–679.

5 The title of Weber’s short essay c.1917: MWG I/22–4.726–42; cf. ‘Einleitung’, AfSS 41 (1915),
28–30. For an early judgement of the relative failure of the Sociology of Religion: Joachim Wach, ‘Max
Weber als Religionssoziologe’, Kultur- und Universalgeschichte: Walter Goetz zu seinem 60. Geburtstage
(Leipzig, 1927), 376–94, e.g. 378, 394. Wach’s was a very individual voice, but he was closer to Weber
than the majority of orthodox Lutherans, who were simply uninterested in religious sociology,
especially once the historicist generation of Troeltsch and Harnack gave way to that of Karl Barth.
6 The originator of this approach was Reinhard Bendix, Max Weber: An Intellectual Portrait (New

York, 1960), whose work was then developed by Wolfgang Schluchter. Bendix’ substantial Part II on
Weber’s religious writings was devoted entirely to the ‘Economic Ethics’, a priority that reflected his
secular, yet consciously Jewish identity—a combination produced by the impact of Hitler on a pre-
Hitlerian, assimilationist foundation. His fragment of autobiography From Berlin to Berkeley: German–
Jewish Identities (New Brunswick, 1986) is eloquent in this respect, but regrettably stops short of his
decision in the late 1950s to begin work on Weber. All that can be said is that, despite exposure at quite
an early stage to “Weberians” such as Edward Shils and Benjamin Nelson (pp. 212, 226), Weber was
 Religiosity and Modernity (II) 249

religiosity by making it essentially a discussion of ethics minus religion (as distinct

from the authentically Weberian idea of ‘religion as ethics’), so that ultimately
Weber is reclassified as a neo-Kantian—a modern idealist—and the discussion of
anything so embarrassingly antiquated as the theology of predestination can be
dispensed with. At the same time this set a firm limit to the troubling idea of
Weberian “value-freedom”, which by its implicit scepticism was unacceptable in
both post-1945 and post-1968 Germany.7 The third and simplest option was to
take up the slogan of Entzauberung—for which the more correct, if laborious,
translation is ‘the process of the removal of magic’ or alternatively (since it was a
consciously social scientific neologism) ‘demagification’.8 By this route, religion
could be repackaged under the secular heading of anthropology, and the entirety of
Weber’s thought be reduced to a single teleology: a synonym for the unitary process
of ‘general rationalization’ within Occidental history but also, implicitly, for the
monistic teleologies beloved of later twentieth-century sociology, such as modern-
ization.9 Now academics are as susceptible as anyone else to following the path of
least resistance, and this is at least one moral underlying the extraordinary diffusion
of the idea of Entzauberung and its more lyrical but imprecise English translation
‘disenchantment’ since 1945: why bother with even three pure types of social
behaviour and organization, when all could be reduced to one simple evolutionary
scheme? (However, ‘disenchantment’, the breaking of the magic spell by a single act
or movement, as in ‘The programme of the Enlightenment was the disenchant-
ment of the world’,10 is certainly false to Weber’s meaning, which assumes a
continuous evolution over millennia, even if Entzauberung in the dictionary may
be construed either way.) The fact that it was also infinitely elastic—this is almost a
necessary attribute of any monistic scheme of thought—or that its attachment to
Weber could be thinned to vanishing point, can hardly have impaired its

by no means a natural subject of enquiry for him, the fruit of some “original” interest (pp. 282, 294).
This is reflected in the detached nature of the Portrait, which was originally received as an expository
and descriptive statement. Note, however, Bendix’s subsequent protest that exposition did not exclude
interpretation: ‘Introduction’ to the 1962 edition (Berkeley, 1977), xlv, l–li.
7 This is a central theme in Wolfgang Schluchter’s work between Wertfreiheit und

Verantwortungspolitik (Tübingen, 1971) and Religion und Lebensführung (1988), i. 165–363. See also
Dieter Henrich, Die Einheit der Wissenschaftslehre Max Webers (Tübingen, 1952), 44–5, 105–31; Jürgen
Habermas, Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns (Frankfurt, 1981), i. 221, 262–3, 455; Hubert Treiber
‘Nach-Denken in der Auseinandersetzung mit Max Weber: zum »Persönlichkeitskonzept« bei Wolfgang
Schluchter’, in A. Bienfait and G. Wagner (eds), Verantwortliches Handeln in gesellschaftlichen Ordnungen
(Frankfurt, 1998), 69–120 [c].
8 Full credit to the young Talcott Parsons here, who was not infected by post-1945 ennui: The

Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (London, 1930), 221 n. 19, incl. Translator’s Note.
9 e.g. Friedrich Tenbruck, ‘Das Werk Max Webers’, KZSS 27 (1975), 663–702. Prof. Schluchter

swiftly revealed the inadequacy of Tenbruck’s empirical foundations (Religion und Lebensführung, ii.
557–96); hence a wise reluctance to make over-free use of the idea of Entzauberung: ‘Die Entzauberung
der Welt’, in Die Entzauberung der Welt (Tübingen, 2009), 1–17. Nonetheless he too is a monist, who
unites Weber’s work under the heading of Occidental rationalism: Die Entwicklung des okzidentalen
Rationalismus (Tübingen, 1979/Frankfurt, 1998).
10 M. Horkheimer and T. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947): e.g. Horkheimer, Gesammelte

Schriften, 5 (Frankfurt, 1987), 25. There is no mention of Weber’s name here, since he was persona non
grata, but his presence in the minds of the authors is undoubted.
250 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

attractions. Of course: Weber did occasionally refer to ‘the process of Entzauberung

carried on over millennia’ and to a synonymous ‘general rationalization’;11 the latter
is also the conceptual framework underlying the discussion of capitalism in the
‘Vorbemerkung’ of 1919, though it is instantly offset by insistence on the immense
plurality of the possible “rationalizations” of life [i.11–12]. It will be clear from this
that the former were headline or summary descriptions only, which need to be
unpacked; and however we look at it, his thinking about religion and religiosity
cannot simply be equated with, or subsumed within, the decline of magic. In short,
neither this nor the other strategies for sidelining his religious thought can be
received as anything other than sidelining or evasion—and so we must begin again.
That beginning lies with the PE in 1904–5. Because of its compact, essayistic
format, it is not always as transparent as we might like, but the principal foundations
of the Weberian sociology of religion are all established here. Specifically this means
the classification of “ethical” religious conduct (Handeln) according to the typology
of asceticism and mysticism; next, the outlines of a set of processes of rationalization
that, as regards religion, resulted in what Weber sometimes called “secularization”,
although the breakdown of religious universality might be a better description; and
finally a set of reflections about religion and society: on the social formations created
by religiosity (such as sects) as well as on the broad social contexts that harmonized
with a rationalizing Occidental Christianity (in particular, the urban bourgeoisie).12
So, instead of one typology with three pure types (as in the case of Herrschaft), the
Weberian analysis of religiosity contains three principal typologies or conceptual
matrices, each with its own component elements. In addition there is an irreducible
and indispensable historical individual that embodies something of all these matri-
ces: ascetic Protestantism, as set out in the PE. Altogether this tells us something
crude but significant: that for Max Weber religion and religiosity constituted a
much larger subject than politics, the obvious comparison—roughly three times as
big. The complexity and want of final simplicity in his attempts to conceptualize
religious behaviour does not signify intellectual failure; rather it is a reflection of the
universal and comprehensive status Weber allotted to religiosity, which rendered it
both his largest but also most unwieldy subject.
The basic typology within which Weber classified the central category of
“ethical” religiosity was the polarity between asceticism and mysticism. In marking
out a spectrum between rational (ascetic) behaviour and (mystical) escape from it,
these religious types correspond to legal–rational and charismatic Herrschaft, and to
the most elementary Weberian categorization of conduct in general. As we saw
(I.8), the ascetic–mystic polarity derived from pre-existing categories of Lutheran
theology, and is clearly present in the PE, both in the sense that these are the only
types of religious behaviour that are discussed, and because the polarity is pre-
sumed, even if it is not formally specified. We have already noticed Weber’s
universal frame of religious reference in 1905 and how (for example) he could

11 Resp. ‘Science as a Vocation’ [1917/19], MWG I/17.87; ‘Vorwort’, GdSÖ, Abt. I (Tübingen,

1914), vii.
12 Below II.8.
 Religiosity and Modernity (II) 251

identify Buddhism as a form of mysticism in ‘flight from the world’ [XXI.28]. It

follows that when he makes a comment of the kind, ‘in the Puritan, as in any ascetic
ethic . . . ’ [XXI.14 n. 21], he means what he says: asceticism is a universal type that
goes beyond the seventeenth-century case, however important. Again, the assertion
‘that mystical contemplation and rational, vocational asceticism do not exclude one
another’ [XXI.21 n. 33; cf. 30 n. 59] is a statement about types; one of the long
series of Weberian protests that the sharp conceptual distinctions between types do
not preclude their mixture in empirical reality.13
Asceticism is not only rational—as we saw, establishing ‘the rational character of
asceticism’ was the lynchpin of the historical argument of the PE [XXI.3 n. 3]—but
is a form of meaningful ‘conduct’ or ‘action’ (Handeln), the commodity that lies at
the heart of the PE as of all Weberian sociology.14 Hence the later usage of ‘active
ethical’ as a synonym for ‘ascetic’.15 Mysticism by contrast was ‘marked out by its
passive character . . . and by an inwardness based purely on mood’: it led not to
action but to inaction. The cerebral, calculating element in rational action was
excluded, and in any case, ‘the disposition to mysticism [was] an individual
charisma’ only, without social implication.16 So where asceticism was equated
with ethical activity, the corresponding equivalent for mysticism was ‘contempla-
tion’, and when ‘contemplation’ appears in isolation, as it often does, it should be
read as ‘mystical contemplation’.17 In the mind of the mystic, individual agency
was discarded because of ‘the feeling of a real entry by the divine into the believing
soul’: this was the ‘“Unio mystica” with the deity’ [XXI.21–2]. This Christian idea
finds an analogue in the Buddhist belief that annihilation of the self was a necessary
condition for the attainment of nirvana.18 So mysticism stood opposite not only to
asceticism but also to the isolated but personally responsible ‘single individual’
beloved of classical, late nineteenth-century liberalism [XXI.11] [cf. PS i. 234–6]—
and here is a solidly secular context (as we might expect) running alongside the
theological agenda underlying Weber’s interest in this question. In 1919 he would
review the passage in the original PE setting out the principled distinction between
asceticism and mysticism in Calvinism and Lutheranism [XX.21–2], and he found
it good: ‘Profound differences in the psychological states [Zuständlichkeiten] that are
decisive for salvation are being expressed here, differences which are generally valid
for the classification of all practical religiosity’ [i.108]+. The years that had elapsed
since 1904–5 had made no difference to his views.

13 The view that mysticism was only ‘residually defined’ in the PE, hence that there was no ascetic–

mystic typology and no Weberian religious sociology before 1912, may not seem unreasonable as a
construction of the text taken in isolation. However, it betrays ignorance of the contemporary
theological context, which teaches us to read the text more carefully and quite differently:
Schluchter, Religion und Lebensführung, ii. 81; cf. 83; Volkhard Krech, Wissenschaft und Religion
(Tübingen, 2002), 276.
14 e.g. [XXI.22, 26, 38, 55, 69, 76, 107]. The term is repeatedly emphasized.
15 Sociology of Religion [c.1913], MWG I/22–2.320; cf. 316.
16 Ibid. 307.
17 [XX.43 n. 2, 50; XXI.21 n. 33, 22, 30 n. 59, 40 n. 76, 78, 81]; cf. ‘Zwischenbetrachtung’, AfSS

41 (1915), 374, 387, 395, ‘Askese und Kontemplation’, etc.

18 ‘Hinduism and Buddhism’ [1915–16], MWG I/20.331–2, 335–9.
252 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

Having said this, it is also true that the detailed treatment of mysticism in the PE
is complex. This is not because the typology is weak, but because the historical
evidence cuts across it. (Weber’s conduct of historical investigations according to
the perspectives that were ‘interesting’ to him [XX.12] may have given him great
latitude in the handling of empirical evidence, but it was by no means a free-for-all.)
One of the few substantial evasions in the PE is its failure to come clean about the
theology of the Täufer—that it was in principle mystical—for fear of subverting the
composite construction of ‘ascetic Protestantism’, of which the Täufer were an
undoubted component.19 There is a chink of light in Part I, in the remark that the
views of the medieval German mystic Johannes Tauler ‘frequently remind us partly
of the Pietist and partly of the Quaker psychology of belief ’ [XX.50], where Tauler
himself was held to represent an unusual strain of “innerworldly” mysticism ‘not
related to the ecstatic or semi-erotic (Bernardine)’ kind that was more normal.20 But
the discussion of the Täufer in Part II makes no mention of mysticism, and we are
confronted instead by euphemism: the ‘ethic’ of the Täufer ‘rests on a foundation
which is in principle heterogeneous when set against Reformed doctrine’ [XXI.63].
(Weber was more candid in correspondence when he stated that Quakerism was
the ‘sharpest opponent’ of Calvinism.)21 This statement is itself indefinite: it could
mean that a central component of ‘ascetic Protestantism’ was not ascetic, but
mystical; or else that the basis of the Täufer ethic lay not in theology at all but in
the sectarian idea; or (most likely) both of these. Certainly that theology was
mystical or ‘pneumatic’ (another euphemism) [XXI.65–6]. Conduct did not
begin, as it did for the rational ascetic, with the sovereign individual operating in
a state of ‘unprecedented inner isolation’ where ‘no god’ could help him [XXI.11],
but from the contrary starting point: ‘the power of the holy spirit at work in the
daily life of the believer, speaking directly to every individual who would listen to it’
[XXI.66]. This spirit is indwelling, hence the central doctrine of the “inner light” it
casts, which in turn means that the Täufer are ‘illuminated’ from within [XXI.67],
where ‘illumination’ (Erleuchtung), as we learn from the Sociology of Religion, is
another mystical and contemplative trait.22 And yet Weber is adamant that the
Täufer would later come to operate rationally within the world, regardless of their
theological starting point. Such is the specific reality underlying the comment noted
above, ‘that mystical contemplation and rational, vocational asceticism do not exclude
one another’, although only the most theologically adept reader (such as Ernst
Troeltsch) could have been expected to follow Weber’s meaning in saying this.23

19 However, their separate identity would have been more clearly developed had Weber added, as

originally intended, a third Part to the PE on ‘the sectarian Idea’, to add to Part II on ‘the vocational
Idea’.
20 To Lili Schäfer, 20.9.10, Briefe. Here Weber identifies the qualities of Taulerian mysticism in the

poet Rilke.
21 Weber to Karl Voßler, 5.5.08, Briefe, II/5.562.
22 MWG I/22–2.271, 312–14, 323, 327, 438–9, 441.
23 In ‘Protestantisches Christentum’ (1905), his first and most immediate response to the PE,

Troeltsch states that the Quakers are both ascetic and mystic: the doctrine of the inner light is mystical,
but in their repudiation of politics and their inner-worldly business activity, they ‘carry out the ascetic
ethic with the most extreme rigour’: p. 419. For a Lutheran theologian (unlike Weber) such a mixture
 Religiosity and Modernity (II) 253

The conflation of asceticism and mysticism within ascetic Protestantism was a

point of difficulty to which Weber would return repeatedly later: ‘For neither men
nor religions are like books, worked out to the last detail. They are historical
constructs, not logically or even psychologically pure ones . . . “Consistency” was
the exception here and not the rule.’24 Thus it is the Täufer who underlie a
singularly murky addition to the PE in 1919 pointing out that, regardless of the
normal Weberian presumption, ‘mysticism can just as well work distinctly, if
indirectly, in favour of the rational conduct of life’ [i.107–8]+.25 Perhaps the most
helpful attempt at retrospective clarification appears in ‘Confucianism’, though
even so Weber avoids citing ‘ascetic Protestantism’ as his subject here and sticks
with ‘Puritanism’:
It is no wholly unambiguous concept . . . [But] In a broader sense one can understand by it
ethically rigorous, Christian-ascetic lay communities in general, hence with the inclusion of
the Täufer, Mennonite and Quaker communities that started out from pneumatic-mystic
origins, [as well as] the ascetic-Pietist and the Methodist ones.26
Returning to the 1905 text, we can see that Weber does indeed portray a transition
whereby, having started from pneumatic–mystic origins, it is ‘the early Täufer’ who
are closest to the mystical “acosmism of love”, but thereafter ‘the merging of the
Täufer into the normal vocational life of the world’ leads to their ‘accommodation
to vocational work’ [XXI.54 n. 109, 69], and so to the Calvinist model. All the
same, when in 1905 he speaks of the ‘asceticism’ of the Täufer, this primarily refers
to the discipline enforced by their sectarian milieu, discussion of which lies formally
outside the PE [XXI.71–2]. So while Täufer (Quaker) honesty in business practices
was an undoubted rationalizing good, nonetheless, Weber assumed that Calvinism
was of much greater importance ‘in . . . unleashing the energies of private economic
acquisition’, just as the significance of the Täufer for the ‘vocational Idea’—the
primary terrain of the rationalizing individual as distinct from the sect—is marked
down as ‘very limited’ [XXI.71; 62 n. 123].27 The whole is a reminder of how
relatively unimportant theology was in Weber’s construction of the Täufer—
though this is the avowed subject matter of Part II of the PE—and how central
was his emphasis on the sectarian and communitarian idea in their case. Note further
that the most visible and high-profile trait that unites ascetic and (originally) mystic
Protestants is their capacity to drive elite or virtuoso religiosity to ‘revolutionary

was not intrinsically problematic even if Troeltsch, obliquely influenced by Weber, accepted that
mysticism and asceticism did mean different things: mysticism was a positive religious state; whereas
asceticism or anti-naturalism had become obsolete in the post-1700 world: p. 419. In the Soziallehren
(1912) the Quakers appear under the heading of ‘Mysticism and Spiritualism’, but still allowance is
made for the fact that ‘There could be no continued adherence to [their] original alienation from the
world; rather, they became increasingly tied to the Reformed vocational ethic with its ascetic attitude to
life’ (p. 913). This is a near flawless reading of the PE at this point [XXI.69].
24 ‘Einleitung’, AfSS 41 (1915), 25. 25 Emphasis added.
26 AfSS 41 (1915), 375, emphasis added. The remark was unchanged in 1919–20: MWG I/19.464.
27 This nicety, such that only their sectarian qualities are judged as worthy of the ‘ascetic’ predicate,

is overridden in 1920: [i.158]+. It is one of several small mistakes or moments of forgetfulness in the
revised text.
254 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

consequences’:28 the radical, religiously inspired anti-politics of the Täufer at Münster

in 1535–6 [XXI.69] is hardly less important to Weber than the more successful revolt
of the Puritans under Cromwell in mid-seventeenth-century England, just as their
combined political legacy to modernity is fully equal to the economic one (II.8).
Regardless of any empirical complexity, the centrality of the ascetic/mystic
typology of religious behaviour to Weber’s thought was undisturbed by the passage
of time (as I have noted). Insofar as the world religions were capable of generating
universal “ethics” of conduct, then they too necessarily fell somewhere between ‘the
polar concepts’ of “asceticism” and “mysticism”.29 The systematic exposition of this
polarity in the Sociology of Religion is the kernel of the long section (}10) that
treats the impact of salvation religiosity on ‘the conduct of life’ (Lebensführung).30
It climaxes in one of Weber’s sustained comparisons between the differing histories
of the Orient and Occident which, taking in monotheism (the supra-worldly,
omnipotent god), Roman law and the Catholic Church on the way, upholds the
thesis that ‘The historically decisive difference between predominantly Eastern and
Asiatic, as against predominantly Occidental types of salvation religiosity, is that the
former results essentially in [mystical] contemplation, the latter in asceticism.’31
Ever since 1909 readers of the PE have wondered what Weber was doing inserting
asceticism in so prominent a fashion into the history of the Protestant Reformation:
‘That is the question: what is asceticism?’32 But however unlikely it may seem as
part of a conventional historical narrative of the sixteenth and seventeenth centur-
ies, founded on the concepts of the period rather than an intrusion from 1905, once
we read a statement like this, we can be in no doubt of its conceptual centrality in
Weber’s mind.
However, while ethical (ascetic and mystical) religiosity constitutes the vast
majority of religious behaviour, it is by no means the entirety of his thinking.
Here we should recall the lapidary opening of the Sociology of Religion, which
states that ‘It is impossible to place a definition of what religion “is” at the head of a
discussion such as the following, but it could possibly stand at its close.’33 Yet
unlike the analogous remark of the PE about capitalism, there is really no doubt in
Weber’s mind here, and no such definition will appear. The obvious reason for this
is the radical historicity that underlies all his work. While it is convenient to mark
out a distinction between his sociological and historical writings—the one classi-
fying and thematizing its material on a trans-historical basis, the other treating that
material “purely historically”—in fact his developed sociologies all have a significant
historical component. Sociological types and historical phases overlap: for example,
traditional or pre-modern Herrschaft broadly precedes the modern bureaucratic
type, even if charisma spans all epochs. It is because the idea of “religion” is so
mutable, historically and conceptually, that there can be no stable ‘“essence” of

28 ‘Zwischenbetrachtung’, AfSS 41 (1915), 403; cf. Sociology of Religion [c.1913], MWG

I/22–2.330–1.
29 ‘Zwischenbetrachtung’, AfSS 41 (1915), 389; cf. ‘Einleitung’, ibid. 25.
30 MWG I/22–2.305. 31 Ibid. 332; cf. 332–40.
32 Felix Rachfahl, ‘Kalvinismus und Kapitalismus’ [1909], art. III, pr. Kritiken und Antikritiken, 88.
33 MWG I/22–2.121.
 Religiosity and Modernity (II) 255

religion’, as was supposed by Adolf Harnack in his famous lecture series, The Essence
of Christianity (Das Wesen des Christentums, 1900). Instead “religion” is defined in
terms of the religious “meanings” and ethics created by innumerable individuals
across a series of historical phases,34 which causes Weber to make free use of the
modish, psychologizing vocabulary of ‘religiosity’,35 marking his preference for
conceiving of religious thought and behaviour as something infinitely plastic and
malleable, and not simply locked into a set of closed units or ‘religions’. Thus
the few references to ‘religion’ in the PE occur only in the context of a specific,
historical religion, Christianity.36 Similarly, the one point in his later writings at
which ‘religion’ remains a common and appropriate usage is that of the ‘world’ or
‘salvation religions’, another set of historically defined bodies. Weber was not quite
so avant garde as to rebrand the sociology of religion as the sociology of religiosity,
but this was a concession to the need to keep his headlines simple; nothing more.
In the fully worked-out Weberian sociology of religion there are not two but
three distinct type-phases. First, a primitive one where religious behaviour might
perhaps be described as emerging from an original magical state. Next, the type or
phase of the ‘ethically rationalized religions’ that were also ‘universal’ or ‘universal-
ist’: ‘the true or real “salvation” religions’ with their ‘rational systematization of the
conduct of life’,37 which gave rise to ascetic or mystical behaviour. Lastly there was
a stage of development that had appeared only in the modern Occident, where the
‘religious root’ or ‘foundation’ deriving from ethical religion (Christianity) had
died out [XXI.104, 106, 107]. The last two of these are clearly encompassed by
the original PE, whereas it had nothing to say about religious primitivism, and the
totemic term Entzauberung (a coinage from 1913) does not appear there. All the
same, the idea that there was a magical significance attaching to the sacrament of
the eucharist, not only in Catholic transubstantiation but in Lutheran consubstan-
tiation, is clearly marked out in the 1905 text [XXI.21 n. 33, 37 n. 74, 66]. When
Weber made a series of prominent insertions of Entzauberung into the text in 1919,
it was precisely this magical–sacramental aspect he highlighted [i.94, 114, 156,
158]+, one of which serves as an equivalent and replacement for an original 1905
reference to magic [XXI.66] [i.155–6]+. So here again, there is no solid ground for
the view that there was a radical departure in Weber’s thinking in or after 1912.38
But though his mind did not change, the fuller elaboration of his ideas allows us to

34 Loc.cit.
35 Cf. Georg Simmel, ‘Zur Soziologie der Religion’ [1898], GSG 5.266–86, here 266–72; Ernst
Troeltsch, ‘Protestantisches Christentum’ [1906], 388: ‘[Wissenschaft] faßt die Religion als
Religiosität’. However, neither author uses the couplet religion/religiosity in the way Weber does.
For Simmel, religiosity is the inherent psychological disposition that lies at the root of all religion; for
Troeltsch, religiosity is a disintegrative category that is only to be accepted as part of an overall modern
problematic, prior to the ultimate (re)foundation of ‘religion’ in conventional, integral terms.
36 Consider the three meagre references that appear “above the line” in 1904–5: [XX.11, 30;

XXI.44].
37 ‘Zwischenbetrachtung’, AfSS 41 (1915), 393, 391, resp.
38 For a compact statement of conventional wisdom: Stefan Breuer, ‘Magie, Zauber, Entzauberung’,

in H. Kippenberg and M. Riesebrodt (eds), Max Webers »Religionssystematik« (Tübingen, 2001), 119–30,
here 119–20.
256 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

locate ascetic Protestantism more precisely within an overall schema of religious

behaviour and its historical evolution.
Of course, some components within this scheme can be traced back to conven-
tional origins. In a world heavily populated by idealist, Kantian and post-Kantian
thinkers, it would have been extraordinary indeed if there had been no discussion of
‘ethical’ and ‘universal’ religions—Abraham Kuenen and Julius Wellhausen are
famous early examples, well known to Weber39—whilst in the generation after
Nietzsche a sophisticated debate about the nature and meaning of religious secu-
larization was well under way. Again, while the prominence Weber gave to ‘salvation
religions’ (Erlösungsreligionen) was significantly enhanced, still this category had
been in evidence previously, as writers worked outwards from the Christian idea
of salvation in their study of the comparative “history of religions”, a field firmly
established in the 1890s.40 But whatever the nature of Weber’s borrowings, they
were all remade to suit his own purposes. As noted above, his understanding of
the “ethical” quality in religion had nothing to do with conventional personal
morality or a normative scheme of Kantian ethics. This is why he could see a
direct and substantial continuity between the ‘Protestant ethic’ and a subsequent
modern capitalist “spirit”, “ethic” [XX.16; XXI.71] or ‘ethos’ that was ‘neither
ethical, nor anti-ethical, but simply non-ethical’: it was an ‘ethic’ for the modern,
impersonal era.41 Again, his conception of salvation religion was original, partly

39 J. Wellhausen, ‘Israel’, Encyclopaedia Britannica, 9th Edition, vol. xiii (Edinburgh, 1881),

396–431, here 411a–b; cf. Historian, 152. Another writer highlighting these terms who is known to
be important to Weber is Eduard Meyer: Geschichte des Altertums: Einleitung. Elemente der
Anthropologie (Stuttgart, 1907), i. 140, 153 (titles).
40 The obvious candidate here (so far as Weber is concerned) is Ernst Troeltsch, Die Absolutheit des

Christentums (Tübingen, 1902), 75–7, 80; cf. 90. Still the idea that Erlösungsreligionen were a marginal
category amongst theologians is supported by the fact that the liberal handbook Religion in Geschichte und
Gegenwart offered no separate entry on this subject in 1912, but referred instead to a brief sub-section
(just over one column) in the article ‘Erscheinungswelt der Religion (Phänomenologie der Religion)’:
vol. ii (Tübingen, 1912), 488, 544–5. The short post-war monograph by Joachim Wach, Der
Erlösungsgedanke und seine Deutung (Leipzig, 1922), seems to have been an analytical highpoint.—
Following Weber I attach little importance to the contribution of philosophers here, as distinct from
that of theologians. Hans Kippenberg’s assertion that Weber took over ‘essential features’ of Hermann
Siebeck’s concept of Erlösungsreligion (a singular philosophical type not a plurality of historical cases) is
unsupported by evidence of Weber having read Siebeck or by the content of the relevant texts:
‘Einleitung’, MWG I/22–2.66 (inter alia), following Gottfried Küenzlen, Die Religionssoziologie Max
Webers (Berlin, 1980), 67–9, 72. For Siebeck, a neo-Kantian, Erlösung meant the ascent from pre-Kantian
to Kantian ethics. Specifically, it was ‘salvation or release from the world’, where the ‘world’ signified
materialism, eudaemonism, and utilitarianism, so as to ascend into a higher, Kantian universe: ‘a realm of
the highest spiritual and intellectual goods and values above the mesh of the world’, Lehrbuch der
Religionsphilosophie (Freiburg, 1893), 109. This was entirely different from the Weberian conception of
salvation, which hinged on rendering social injustice and suffering meaningful, and therefore tolerable via
theological doctrine (Buddhist, Zoroastrian, or Calvinist): what he called the ‘theodicy of suffering’,
‘Einleitung’, AfSS 41 (1915), 8. For Siebeck, an older (b. 1842) and much more traditional thinker than
Weber, neither evil nor suffering was reduced by religion or Kantian enlightenment (even if the
‘personality’ found satisfaction in transcending them by the exercise of moral autonomy). On the
contrary, they had to exist, for without them no adequate conception of ethical good was possible:
Lehrbuch, 436–41. For the modest status of Siebeck’s work, as compared, for example, to that of Rudolf
Eucken, even amongst those who stood closest to him intellectually: August Messer, ‘Zum 70. Geburtstag
Hermann Siebecks’, Kant-Studien 18 (1913), iii; W. Moog, ‘Hermann Siebeck{’, ibid. 25 (1920), 301.
41 Sociology of Herrschaft [c.1911–14], MWG I/22–4.635.
 Religiosity and Modernity (II) 257

because his conception of salvation or release designed to escape ‘the injustice and
imperfection of the social order’ added a dimension lacking from the narrowly
individualist mindset of any philosophical and theological precursors; and partly
because it was a sub-set of his distinctive, (post-)ethical framework: ‘The concept
of “salvation”’ only made sense ‘in the ethical sense of the word’.42 As such it had few
of the connotations it held for Christian thinkers, and the once Christian category of
the certitudo salutis had become a purely psychological and “non-denominational”
stimulus available even to Buddhists (II.3). Equally importantly, his conceptions of
present-day “secularization” and religiosity were entirely his own, being quite distinct
from the analyses of those contemporaries with whom he had the closest personal
connections: that is, Ernst Troeltsch and Georg Simmel, whose little book on
Religion (1906) Weber read with care but which he viewed from the same ‘over-
whelmingly antagonistic standpoint’ that he did the rest of Simmel’s work.43 More
generally we should note that his intellectual originality was not merely veiled under
the fig leaf of borrowed and reworked terms, but flagrant and overt: above all, in
regard to the idea of “value-free”, formally defined rationality, which is the driver of
the whole scheme.

I I . ANTI-MAGIC

Let us consider these various types and phases more closely—beginning with magic
or, more accurately, anti-magic. Having upheld the elementary continuity of
Weber’s thought back to the PE, it still remains to explain why he should elevate
Entzauberung, the removal of magic, to a prominent place in his religious typology
c.1913. Here it should be remembered that, although he was very much an
evolutionary–historical thinker, his conception of historical evolution was relent-
lessly anchored in its present-day telos. Conversely (as another present-minded man,
Karl Jaspers, recognized), there was for him ‘no general, temporal, original state’.44
Historical evolution was to be analysed through type concepts that were the
arbitrary creation of the present-day analyst, who was in turn a product of his
own, modern Kultur,45 and it would be a misconception to suppose that Weber
had any interest in the burgeoning field of secular enquiry into the early history of
religion for its own sake. He makes it clear in the 1919 ‘Vorbemerkung’ that

42 Sociology of Religion [c.1913], MWG I/22–2.292, 435, resp. Consequently the ‘doctrine of

salvation’ (Erlösungslehre) was really the central feature of the ‘religion of salvation’, and the former term
is almost as common as the latter: ibid. 525.
43 Weber, ‘Georg Simmel als Soziologe und Theoretiker der Geldwirtschaft’ [1908], pr. Simmel

Newsletter, 1 (1991), 9.—Die Religion (Frankfurt a.M., 1906) was vol. 2 in the series Die Gesellschaft,
ed. Martin Buber. Weber’s copy of the book, which was sent to him by Simmel, is today in the Max
Weber Arbeitsstelle in Munich, along with marginalia, side- and underlinings, and I am deeply grateful
to Edith Hanke of MWG for sending me scans of the text. Also in the Arbeitsstelle is Weber’s copy of
Simmel’s essay collection Philosophische Kultur (Leipzig, 1911), again sent to him by Simmel. The
marginalia here show that Weber paid close attention to the section on the Philosophy of Religion,
which includes the important essay ‘Das Problem der religiösen Lage’ (1910).
44 Max Weber: Deutsches Wesen (Oldenburg, 1932), 48.
45 »Objektivität« [1904], e.g. WL 180–2.
258 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

‘ethnographic’ (for which the English speaker should also read ‘anthropological’)
‘research has not been drawn on to anything like the extent that might naturally,
given its current standing, be considered unavoidable’ in preparing the ‘Economic
Ethics’ [i.14–15].46 Thus the idea that one should look to early ethnography or
anthropology, or authors such as James Frazer and Ralph Marett, to supply an
intellectual context for magic as a starting point in the Weberian teleology and
typology of religion is mistaken.47
A more likely “source” in this regard was the ancient historian Eduard Meyer;
specifically, his treatment of the ‘Evolution of Mind and Spirit’ in the revised
‘Introduction’ to his Ancient History entitled Elements of Anthropology (by which he
meant the study of ‘the universal forms of human life and historical development
[Entwicklung]’).48 Besides a shared enthusiasm for ancient history, Meyer resem-
bled Weber in that he sought to combine respect for uniqueness and historicity
with attempts to identify recurrent and typical elements amidst the infinity of
unique data, something that Weber recognized by making him the starting point
for a stringent, yet respectful, methodological critique in 1906.49 Elements of
Anthropology appeared in December 1907 when Weber was writing his major
work of ancient history, ‘Agriculture in Antiquity’, and he read it then. Now we
should not suppose that this had a major impact. Weber was long familiar with
Meyer’s work, and he deliberately excluded any consideration of this latest state-
ment from ‘Agriculture in Antiquity’.50 Indeed the rigidity and simplicity of

46 See similarly Paul Honigsheim, ‘Erinnerungen an Max Weber’, in Max Weber zum Gedächtnis

(Opladen, 19852), 216. Weber also dismisses ‘anthropology’ [i.15], by which he means enquiry into
human history of a specifically biological and racist kind.
47 Such is the premiss of Hans Kippenberg’s ‘Introduction’ to the Sociology of Religion in MWG,

but this reflects his intellectual profile, not Weber’s: MWG I/22–3.1–74; see, e.g., 46–8 on Fraser,
Marett, and magic. See also Hartmann Tyrell, ‘ “Das Religiöse” in Max Webers Religionssoziologie’,
Saeculum, 43 (1992), 172–230, here 180, 184, 192 on Frazer. In the text Weber mentions the
Frazerian concept of “sympathetic” magic once (ibid. 132) and it is possible (but no more) that he
alludes to Marett (ibid. 122), but these are minutiae only.
48 Geschichte des Altertums: Einleitung. Elemente der Anthropologie (Stuttgart, 1907), ‘Die geistige

Entwicklung’, i. 85–181; quotation i. 3. Friedrich Tenbruck deserves the credit for first pointing out
Meyer’s relevance in this context, and a near equivalent debit for converting an insight of detail into a
comprehensive explanation of Weber’s later career, which persuaded no one: ‘Evidently the
»Anthropology« supplied the problematic for Weber’s Sociology of Religion, the essential themes of
which can be found prefigured there, and in the same [intellectual] sequence. One must even reckon
with the idea that here was the cause behind both Weber’s universal–historical comparative enquiries
[the Economic Ethics of the World Religions] as well as his systematic Sociology of Religion’: ‘Max
Weber und Eduard Meyer’, in W. Mommsen and W. Schwentker (eds), Max Weber und seine
Zeitgenossen (Göttingen, 1988), 337–79, here 365. But however implausible these grandiose claims
may be, ignoring Meyer in MWG I/22–2 was culpable.
49 ‘Kritische Studien’ [1906], WL 215–90.
50 Weber’s copy with some underlining and a few marginalia is in the Max Weber Arbeitsstelle in

Munich. In ‘Agrarverhältnisse im Altertum’ he states that it appeared only after his own work was in
the press: MWG I/6.726. This is incorrect. Weber did not finish writing ‘Agrarverhältnisse’ until
February 1908, by which date he had had three months to read Meyer, had he wished (to Marie Baum,
4.2.08, Briefe). Nonetheless, it was a politic way of saying that he wanted to map out his own ideas first,
and would consider what Meyer had to say thereafter, which he then dismissed as of no consequence.
However, Weber’s acquaintance with Meyer’s work goes back to 1895 at least (MWG I/6.84–8), and
probably to 1884, when the first publication of Geschichte des Altertums commenced, so he had a pretty
clear idea of what to expect by 1908.
 Religiosity and Modernity (II) 259

Meyer’s thinking about recurrent phenomena in history reminded him of the

‘juristic scholasticism’ of Rudolf Stammler (a harsh assessment!).51 But it is at least
possible that Weber borrowed from the Elements the suggestion that ‘magic’ was a
useful summary description for primitive religion, since Meyer placed a religious
world of ‘magical being’ (Das Zauberwesen) at the centre of his description of
primitive religion.52 Of course, none of the contemporary analysts of early religion
denied the presence of magical practices and conceptions, but nature and natural
religion were more obvious summary terms.53 All the same, the most that Weber
can have borrowed was a term or label—this is almost an iron law governing his
specific, personal borrowings—since the two men’s substantive conceptions of
magic were radically different. For Meyer the principal difference between primi-
tive and ‘developed’ man, between magic and a historically advanced religion
appealing to an ‘ethical postulate’, was that the former made too hasty, short-term
use of fundamental categories such as body and soul, cause and effect. Hence belief
in a magical world of spirits analogous to the human soul, producing through their
actions causal outcomes that were (in a more enlightened perspective) most
unlikely. Nonetheless, the fundamental categories were the same in each case and
of timeless validity. So religion was in principle continuous with magic, being no
more than ‘regulated views developed out of mythical thought and magical being’;54
and if Meyer had used the word ‘rational’, which he did not, then for him magic
would have been in principle just as rational as an ethical religion such as Chris-
tianity. For Weber, by contrast, the defining feature of “magic” (if such a thing
existed at all) was that it formed a conceptual antithesis to rational conduct, and the
rationalized ethical religions were founded on the basis of the progressive exclusion
or radical transformation of magical properties, not their refinement.
The idea that magic and rational conduct were antitheses will, I think, appear
unexceptionable, a truism even, but its full implications have hardly been realized.
First and foremost, if magic was the conceptual antithesis of rationality, then it was
not a new idea at all, but simply a projection outwards from Weberian ‘rationalism’:
a mirror image or negative of ideas first laid down in the PE in 1904–5.55

51 ‘Agrarverhältnisse im Altertum’3 [1907–8], MWG I/6.726. However, the section of Meyer’s

Elemente that most concerned Weber in 1908 was Part I on ‘The Evolution of State and Society’, not
Part II on religion.
52 Geschichte des Altertums (Stuttgart, 19072), i. 91–121.
53 A well-known example is C. P. Tiele, Outlines of the History of Religion (London, 1877).
54 Geschichte des Altertums, i. 90–1; cf. i. 140 on the ‘ethical postulate’. One could easily revise

Tenbruck (n. 48) and write a whole essay on the intellectual relationship between Weber and Meyer;
but while there would be a number of individual points of agreement—for example, Meyer’s ‘ethical
postulate’ undoubtedly embraces the idea of theodicy that is central to Weber—they would be
outweighed by the more profound differences stemming from different cultural formation. Note
most simply that Meyer (b. 1855) was roughly a decade older than Weber and had reached cultural
maturity before the “anarchy of values” set in.
55 Friedrich Tenbruck was typical of his generation in trying to deny that what he rightly called one

of Weber’s ‘greatest discoveries’, the idea that rationality or rationalism could take many forms, was
present in the PE [XX.35]. This led him to posit the bizarre idea that Weber first discovered the process
of Entzauberung and only afterwards that of rationalization, processes that he insisted were distinct,
since the first related to all world religions and the latter to the Occident only: ‘Das Werk Max
Webers’, KZSS 27 (1975), 663–702, here 669. There was a rich harvest for Ockham’s razor here.
260 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

Furthermore, whenever Weber appears to be talking about ‘magic’, he is really

talking about its opposite. What interests him is not ‘magic’ or Eduard Meyer’s
world of ‘magical being’, but a negative: the process whereby magic is removed,
Entzauberung, and this, as he tells us, is nothing other than a synonym for
rationalization in a religious context:
To measure the stage of rationalization that a religion represents, there are above all two
criteria, which furthermore are inwardly connected in many ways. First, the degree to which
it has stripped away magic. Then the degree of systematic unity into which it has brought the
relationship of God and the world and, accordingly, into its own ethical relation with the
world.56
Because of its association with rationalizing thought, many well-known uses of the
term Entzauberung appear in writings we would not classify as “religious”, such as
the essay on sociological ‘Categories’ (1913), or the lecture on ‘Science as a
Vocation’ (1917/19), whereas it does not appear at all in the religious writings
from 1912–13: the Sociology of Religion and the first three essays on ‘Confucian-
ism’.57 Within the latter, the amount of substantive description or evocation
Weber offers of magical phenomena is almost nil. For example, he once, for reasons
of descriptive convenience, refers to Confucianism as a ‘magical religion’,58 which
might suggest that a significant part of his portrait of it would be about magical
practices. But in fact it is neither a religion nor magical. It is a politico-ethical
doctrine, a superstructure that leaves undisturbed the magical beliefs of the Chinese
peasant mass, and his actual description of Confucianism in its “ethical” capacity is
hardly about magic at all. Instead the account is dominated (as we might expect) by
his chief concern, the need to situate Confucianism in comparison to the ethical,
salvation religions. Thus we learn that it has no ‘doctrine of salvation’, no ‘ration-
alized ethic’, and the attitude of the bureaucracy to a next world that might rival its
own authority on earth is ‘absolutely agnostic [and] essentially negative’.59 Behav-
iourally its implications are equally blank: it produces neither asceticism nor
mystical contemplation, nor even the more primitive, ephemeral state of ecstasy;
and it offers no conception of the idea that an individual can be religiously qualified
by personal merit, so permitting access to a “state of grace”. The only word we hear
about magic is that, outside the state control of public worship that is the essence of
Confucianism, the bureaucracy allow ‘the domestic worship of the spirits of
ancestors’ to continue; likewise ‘the private–professional practice of the magic

56 ‘Confucianism’, AfSS 41 (1915), 372. For further examples of this commonplace association see

the next note. For the unusual view that Entzauberung relates only to what is magical, and hence
‘can . . . in no way stand for the “totality” of religious evolution’: Hartmann Tyrell,: ‘ “Das Religiöse” in
Max Webers Religionssoziologie’, Saeculum, 43 (1992), 222.
57 ‘Ueber einige Kategorien’ [1913], WL 433; ‘Science as a Vocation’ [1917/19], MWG I/17.87,

100–1, 109. On the dating of texts: II.3, Appendix.

58 Cf. Sociology of Religion [c.1913], MWG I/22–2.215. When Weber says that Confucianism has

an ‘irrational anchorage’ in ‘magic’, this refers to the everyday, lay religiosity upon which the prescribed
state ritual of Confucianism sits like a superstructure, not to Confucianism itself: ‘Confucianism’, AfSS
41 (1915), 377.
59 Ibid. 68, 70; see 68–71 passim.
 Religiosity and Modernity (II) 261

priesthood, handed down from the past and indispensable for the private man’,
which in turn involves the existence of ‘manifold gods of cultivation, occasion and
function’, a pantheon that is by definition ‘irrational’ in its foundations, and not
susceptible of rationalization in the form of a single, all-powerful, supra-worldly
god.60 Furthermore, although it cannot be proven, since no pre-1914 text survives,
the origins of Weber’s preoccupation with Entzauberung probably lie, not with the
magical contexts around Confucianism or Hinduism, but with his studies of
‘Ancient Judaism’, precisely because of its unique and radical concern to root out
magic, in accordance with its equally distinctive and rigorous promotion of a single,
all-powerful, supra-worldly and ethical god by means of ethical prophecy.61 This
would also be in accord with Weber’s notorious insistence that he always worked
outwards from his own, Occidental agenda, and not from any interest in remote or
exotic sources for their own sake.
‘Confucianism’ (albeit stylistically revised in 1915) most probably represents
Weber’s first surviving thoughts on this subject from 1912; but the more developed
discussion in the Sociology of Religion from 1913 rests on identical premisses.
Confronted by a long opening section entitled ‘The Origin of Religions’,62 a reader
such as Eduard Meyer or James Frazer might suppose that there would be a good
deal about magic and magical practice, just as there had been in their accounts.
After all, an ordinary construction of Entzauberung would suggest a process of
movement away from a starting point in pure ‘magic’. But this would be mistaken.
Weber is not interested in magic but in the origin of rationalizing, ethical religions:
‘what is important for us above all, [is] the development of a systematized,
specifically religious “ethic”’ (159),63 where ordinarily the terms ‘religious or
magical’ are mutually exclusive (121–2).64 At no point does he enter into a
discussion of what magic is, unlike Meyer or the anthropologists, and the reader
must rely on the most telegraphic and oblique hints to deduce its meaning. For
example, religious life begins with ‘conduct not necessarily based on [the categories
of] ends and means’—the foundation of rational conduct65—‘but still according to
the rules of experience’ (121). A fuller description of this thinking appears when
Weber describes the later emergence of the abstract idea of the “soul”: what is
‘specific to this entire evolution [of ideas] . . . is that now it is not only the things

60 Ibid. 69, 71.

61 Johannes Winckelmann, ‘Die Herkunft von Max Webers “Entzauberungs”-Konzeption’, KZSS
32 (1980), 12–53, here 20–5. Another way-station in Weber’s thinking about magic, or anti-magic, is
supplied by the Sociology of Law. Here the presence of a magical context to early law is frequently
present, leading to the evolutionary–historical postulate of ‘the retreat of the significance of magic’:
MWG I/22–3.454 (a remark that may, however, come from an insertion into the text c.1912). This is
hardly different from Entzauberung.
62 Since this text was ‘typed up’, it is reasonable to assume that in almost all cases the titles were

original: Weber to Rickert, n.d. [end November 1913], Briefe; cf. ‘Editorischer Bericht’, MWG
I/22–2.105–9.
63 Page references in () in this and the next two paragraphs are to the Sociology of Religion [c.1913],

MWG I/22–2.
64 Emphasis added. Cf. ‘Einleitung’, AfSS 41 (1915), 14; ‘Vorbemerkung’ [1919–20] on ‘the

powers of magic and religion’, which are similarly distinct [i.12].

65 e.g. »Objektivität« [1904], WL 149.
262 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

and events which are there and happen that play a role in life, but in addition those
which “signify” something, because they “signify” something. In this way magic,
which was a direct working of forces, becomes a set of symbols [Symbolik]’ (127).66
So the elementary state is one of simple objects and processes, ‘things and events
which are there and happen’: in contrast to Meyer’s thinking, they are devoid of any
supplementary mental or intellectual categories, which could create “significance”.
In this state, there is no conception of anything beyond the things and events of this
world, not even of the spirits and demons that are commonly associated (as by
Weber himself) with magic (e.g.148). As he says elsewhere, ‘everything was concrete
magic’ and the working of ‘specific powers’, and for ‘magic’ we might just as well
read an absolutely naive empiricism.67 So the earliest stages in the ‘origin of
religions’ and the removal of a “magical” or formally unrationalized state are such
things as ‘conceptual analysis, hence . . . mental abstraction’ (137; cf. 123); likewise
the ‘specialization’, ‘fixed characterization’, and ‘spheres of competence’ (134),
which are required to generate polytheistic systems. Again, we are told that ‘The
first and foundational impact of a “religious” set of ideas on the conduct of life
[Lebensführung] and the economy is one of general stereotyping’ (131)—a process
that, however crude or mentally inert, is an example of conceptual constancy in
opposition to what is unique, “concrete”, and as such random. Being general it is
also systematizing, and so represents a first step towards the goal exalted in the PE of
the unitary conduct of life, where all one’s actions are rationally integrated in the
pursuit of a single, transcendent goal.
What Weber is doing is clear: he starts from a tabula rasa where no mental
operation of any generalizing or logical kind is present; and on this blank canvas
processes of intellectualization and rationalization are superimposed.68 But what, if
anything, should the starting point be called? It will be clear that any connection
between the Weberian schema of rationalization and magic is tangential at best.
The starting point of the Sociology of Religion in ‘conduct that is at least relatively
rational . . . according to the rules of experience’ (121) would hardly have been
recognized by any contemporary as magic, and Weber does not call it this. So while
he may imply that ‘magic’ is a reasonable description for the original pre-religious
state, he hardly says so outright, and there is nowhere a reliable description either of
the pre-ethical state, or of the qualities he attaches to magic. Thus he is quite happy
to describe religious behaviour prior to the ‘ascetic and spiritualistic–mystic’ phase
as a miscellany of ‘magical, orgiastic, ecstatic, and ritualist elements’ (411). As
noted, the headline label Entzauberung is absent in 1913,69 and an equally likely,

66 This description is almost exactly repeated at MWG I/22–2.273, where Weber is describing the

process of intellectualization.
67 Resp. ‘Einleitung’, AfSS 41 (1915), 16; Sociology of Herrschaft [c.1911–14], MWG I/22–4.513,

emphases added.
68 The ideas of intellectualization and rationalization are commonly linked by Weber in writings

from 1915 on, and they are equally pertinent in elucidating what he means by Entzauberung: e.g.
‘Zwischenbetrachtung’, AfSS 41 (1915), 407; ‘Science as a Vocation’ [1917/19], MWG I/17.86–7,
109.
69 The verb ‘entzaubert’ occurs once, but this makes little impression as such: loc. cit.
 Religiosity and Modernity (II) 263

possible label for the original state is that of naturalism: ‘the original naturalism’
that precedes the symbolism that is the first step on the rationalizing path (129; cf.
131). This is consistent with the behavioural description Weber gives of a world
of specific phenomena, devoid of abstraction, and it may perhaps explain his
fondness for the distinctive description of a magical world not as (in Eduard
Meyer’s case) ‘magical being’ but as a ‘magic garden’ (442), the product of an
‘absence of natural scientific knowledge’ (inter alia).70 In origin this idea goes back to
his long-established, quintessentially bourgeois prejudice against the peasantry—
not least the Lutheran peasantry of North Germany [XXI.89 & n. 44]—as the
classical seat of irrational, ‘vegetative’ behaviour of all kinds [CS 581], religious,
economic and sexual [XX.34; XXI.79 n. 17, 89 n. 44; CS 578], which in turn leads
us back to ‘magic’:
For the peasantry, tied to nature and dependent on the power of the elements as is their
whole economic existence, the idea of magic, magic that coerces the spirits at work above
and within the forces of nature or else the simple purchase of god’s goodwill, lies so near,
that only violent . . . transformations in their attitude to life can tear them from their
adhesion to this original and universal form of religiosity.71
However, ‘naturalism’ is an entity not a process, which is an obvious deficiency
when compared to Entzauberung, and he does not take up the label of ‘natural
religions’. More than this: he does not take up any label at all. Insofar as it is not
about process, Weberian history is always directed towards a modern end-point,
and not a remote historical starting point, and Weber’s historicism should never be
confused with primitivism.72
The elusive and elastic nature of ‘magic’ does not end here. In contrast to his
reticence in describing and labelling the beginnings of religious behaviour, Weber
invokes magic persistently throughout the subsequent evolutionary history of
religion. For example, stereotyping might be a first step along the rationalizing
path, but still it occurs at a very early stage in that evolution, and it is not rational
conduct based on the calculation of means relative to ends. The stereotype is a
substitute for calculation and derives its power from its hieratic fixity, so Weber
can speak of ‘magical stereotyping’ of the proven aesthetic forms of ‘magical
religiosity’ as ‘the first stage in the overcoming of naturalism’.73 More generally,
throughout the Sociology of Religion, he points to the survival of magical forms
down to and beyond the Reformation (e.g. 148). Above all, charisma and the
idea of grace that accompanies it are magical qualities (123, 168, 305), but these

70 ‘Confucianism and Taoism’ [1919–20], MWG I/19.451, original emphasis; cf. 407; ‘Hinduism

and Buddhism’ [1915–6], MWG I/20.436, 535.

71 ‘Einleitung’, AfSS 41 (1915), 18.
72 There is an apparent similarity here to the thinking of Marc Bloch and his attack on ‘the idol of

origins’: Apologie pour l’Histoire (Paris, 1949), 5–9. But while Bloch shared Weber’s interest in history
as a dynamic process and in the employment of social scientific categories in the service of historical
enquiry, he was a good deal more interested in understanding the past “for its own sake”. His principal
objection to ‘origins’ was that they were unknown and unknowable owing to deficiencies in source
material, rather than because he was present-centred, like Weber.
73 ‘Zwischenbetrachtung’, AfSS 41 (1915), 404.
264 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

qualities are precious to Weber in a modern context, because they are the last
vestige of “free” behaviour that has not fallen prey to the ‘steel housing’
[XXI.108] or ‘causal mechanism’74 of cumulative rationalization. (Note similarly
how Weber’s 1919 insertions into the PE regarding Entzauberung clearly assume
that ‘grace’ is a magical property [i.94, 114–15]+.) The associations of magic may
be peasant and primitive; but in the contexts of modern capitalism and political
leadership, they may also be liberating. So all we can consistently say is that they
are the obverse of rationality.
In sum: regardless of the abundant attention it has attracted in later reception as
an exotic phenomenon in its own right, Entzauberung was not a new idea in 1913,
but an extension of an old one, rationalization; further, Weber had no developed
idea of magic as such, except as the miscellany of non-rational behaviour. (In 1905
he had fleetingly associated the otherwise distinct categories of ‘mystical’ and
‘magical’ for this reason) [XXI.21 n. 33]. The term might be new, but it was
only a modest extension of the conceptual framework established in the PE in
1904–5, and the view that it was ‘a completely alien body in the [original] PE ’ that
opened up ‘entirely new dimensions of thought’ is mistaken.75 Had this really been
the case Weber would have been foolish to introduce the idea so prominently into
the revised PE [i.94, 114, 156, 158]+, and the fact that he did so is actually a
demonstration that he saw no inconsistency between his earlier and later thoughts.
Indeed the only oddity of the insertions is that, in contrast to the 1904–5 text, they
appear conventional and old-fashioned, when the principal example of magical and
irrational behaviour is Catholic sacramentalism. The first and most prominent
entries on this subject [i.94, 114]+ could easily be read as a Reformed Protestant
rant against Catholic transubstantiation and the confessional, and the weakness
of Lutherans in confronting these, rather than a measurement of deficient
rationality—a viewpoint that went all the way back to Zwingli and forward to
Max Weber Sr. However, Entzauberung is marginally more fruitful when applied to
Quakers and Täufer. It was the Quakers, still more than the Calvinists, who
‘brought about the most radical devaluation of all the sacraments’, by dispensing
with them altogether [i.155–6]+ [cf. CS 578]. But if this was rationalizing En-
tzauberung, it followed that Quakers and Täufer, whose original impulse was
mystical and not ascetic, had nonetheless been pursuing a rationalizing, hence
ascetic path. Indeed, Weber now concluded, they had no option but to do so:
‘The radical removal of magic from the world allowed for no other inner path apart
from that of inner-worldly asceticism’ [i.158]+. In short, argument based on the
removal of sacramental magic allowed Weber to group Quakers and Täufer with
the Calvinists ever more firmly under the ‘ascetic Protestant’ heading, despite their
problematic origins in mysticism.

74 Ibid. 412; cf. ‘Einleitung’, AfSS 41 (1915), 16.

75 Friedrich Tenbruck, ‘Das Werk Max Webers’, KZSS 27 (1975), 667.
 Religiosity and Modernity (II) 265

I II . ETHICAL AND SALVATION RELIGIONS—AND BEYOND

We come next to Weber’s second type: ethical and salvation religion. The imme-
diate assumption (for anyone not brought up in Schluchterian tradition) is that
here there will be a simple continuity between the PE and the developed typology
erected in 1912–15. After all, was not ascetic Protestantism a salvation religion, and
did it not give rise to an ‘ethic’? Hence the substantial continuity noted above: that
the forms of religious conduct discussed in the PE in 1904–5, ascetic Protestantism
above all, fall within the same ascetic/mystic polarity that is specified as the
appropriate framework for the ethically rationalized religions in 1912–15. But
while this is true, it is not the whole truth (and here may be another reason why
the category of ‘salvation religion’, though almost certainly available to Weber in
1905, does not appear in the PE ).76 Seventeenth-century ascetic Protestantism
might have some of the properties of an ethical and salvation religion, but still it did
not fall neatly into the type-categories elaborated in 1912–15. It is highly ration-
alized and produces a wholly integrated and systematized conduct of life. Yet, as
Weber tells us in 1915, it was ‘no longer a real “salvation-religion”’,77 but a
transitional form, whose significance was (as he had suggested in 1905) ‘historical’,
and hence unique to its Occidental context [XX.53; XXI.109]. Specifically, it
represents the transition to a secularized modernity where humanity is ‘remote
from god’ [XXI.11, 68]. So its ‘Protestant ethic’ was of a very unusual kind.
The type of the ethically rationalized, salvation religion is like its “magical”
precursor in one respect: it is a fairly thinly constructed extension of Weber’s
thinking in 1904–5. Although salvation religions notionally include ‘all the ethic-
ally rationalized religions of the world’,78 Weber’s historical model derives over-
whelmingly from one primary case or tradition, ‘the god of love’; or in other words
New Testament Christianity and its Lutheran descendant, the ‘normal Protestant-
ism’ of Helene and Marianne Weber.79 It is true that the category also includes the
case of Buddhism; but as we have seen, as a religion of mysticism it generated no
active ethic, and a social ethic based on love such as the Christian idea of “love of
one’s neighbor” was ‘entirely lacking’.80 So the historical–empirical base on which
the type is founded is hardly wider than that of Christian contemporaries, even if
the inclusion of Buddhism reminds us that Weber’s value-premiss is radically

76 Above I.8 at n. 25.

77 ‘Zwischenbetrachtung’, AfSS 41 (1915), 396. Hartmann Tyrell seeks to override this
fundamental point in order to portray Weber as more systematic, and more like a late-twentieth-
century sociologist of religion. Thus in his view ‘unbrotherliness’ only enters in for certain with modern
capitalism, not with Calvinism: ‘ “Das Religiöse” in Max Webers Religionssoziologie’, Saeculum, 43
(1992), 223; cf. 208. If this were true, there would be no significant connection between Calvinism
and capitalism and the argument of the PE would be void.
78 ‘Zwischenbetrachtung’, AfSS 41 (1915), 393.
79 ‘Politics as a Vocation’ [1919], MWG I/17.247, 244, resp.
80 ‘Hinduism and Buddhism’ [1915–16], MWG I/20.322. A fortiori, ‘love of one’s enemy’ was

‘necessarily completely alien’ to it: 334. Again, we should not conflate acosmism, which for Weber was
characteristic of all mysticism, with the ‘acosmism of love’, an idea he derived from Christian mysticism
[XXI.54 n. 109], which sat uneasily with his emphasis on the complete want of emotion in the
Buddhist case: MWG I/20.333, 365–7; cf. 322.
266 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

different from thinkers such as Ernst Troeltsch or the detached, assimilating, post-
Kantian Georg Simmel. For Troeltsch and Simmel, Christianity was not merely the
historical apex of religious development, but an ideal or (in Simmel’s case) logical
completion;81 for Weber the historical end-point was neither an apex nor an ideal,
but lay in a now secularized Occident, which (if he were to make an evaluation) he
experienced as profoundly ambivalent.
The essence of ethical religiosity lay in ‘a religious ethic of fraternity or brother-
liness [Brüderlichkeit]’.82 This was in principle ‘universal’ or ‘universalist’, since it
posited brotherhood between all the individual members of a religion, transcending
the natural ties of family and kinship group and the social constraints of caste or rank
(Stand ). Thus the foundation of all ‘religious ethics’ of this kind lay in ‘the two
simple motives which determine everyday conduct outside the ties of the family: just
retribution [Talion] against offenders’, which if it did not come from the secular
power would come from god, ‘and fraternal help in case of need for one’s neighbour,
who is a friend.’ From this it followed that ‘charity is a universal and primary
component of all ethical religiosity’.83 Furthermore: ‘The more the idea of salvation
[from suffering] was grasped rationally and as a matter of ethical conviction, the more
the inner and outer commands that derived from the reciprocitarian ethic within the
association of neighbours were enhanced. Outwardly [this went] as far as fraternal
communism of love; inwardly towards conviction in favour of caritas, the love of the
sufferer as such, love of one’s neighbour, love of man and finally, love of one’s
enemy.’84 It will be clear that this is not something Weber finds sympathetic: it is too
weak and sentimental, too personal, for the modern world. The injunction to
‘fraternity’ was something he had first commented on in the Christian–Social writings
of Friedrich Naumann in the 1890s, as a symptom of the latter’s emotionally weak
inability to cope with the impersonal and unfraternal world of modern capitalism.85
The idea returns in the PE in a glance at Luther’s loving, but similarly weak,
abhorrence of the ‘lovelessness’ of monastic asceticism [XX.42]. However, specific
reference to ‘fraternity’ in the PE is replaced by a near equivalent, the Lutheran idea of
Nächstenliebe, love of one’s neighbour or brotherly love, and the text presents
an ongoing meditation about the different senses in which the Puritan and Lutheran
conceptions of the calling fulfilled the Biblical command to love one’s neighbour.86
This was a genuine ‘service of love’ only in the ‘Lutheran version!’ [XXI.79 n. 16;
cf. XX.42–3]. For the Calvinist, by contrast, what it meant was ‘the duty of
self-love’ [XXI.84 n. 30]. This took on ‘a characteristically objective–impersonal

81 See, e.g., Troeltsch, Die Absolutheit des Christentums (Tübingen, 1902); Simmel, Die Religion

(Frankfurt a. M., 1906), 70–4 (GSG 10.107–11). For Simmel, Buddhism’s lack of a social dimension
was not just an empirical fact, as it was for Weber, but was logically related to its want of status as a
religion, since it acknowledged no transcendental power: ibid. 25–6 (GSG 10.62–3).
82 ‘Zwischenbetrachtung’, AfSS 41 (1915), 393.
83 Sociology of Religion [c.1913], MWG I/22–2.371, 373, resp.
84 ‘Zwischenbetrachtung’, AfSS 41 (1915), 393–4.
85 ‘Was heißt Christlich-Sozial?’ [1894], MWG I/4.352; cf. 356.
86 Leviticus 19.18, then Matthew 19.19, 22.39, etc.
 Religiosity and Modernity (II) 267

character, that of service towards the rational formation of the social cosmos’, which
had nothing to do with love in the ordinary sense of the term [XXI.17].
Weber also has Lutheranism in mind when he states that the salvation religions
engendered ‘at least relatively rational systematization of the conduct of life’,87 in
contrast to the more thoroughgoing rationalization of Puritanism. One aspect of
this is its association with a hierarchical, “organic” social ethic. Here, unlike the
more fully rationalized ascetic Protestant scheme, a person is not defined exclusively
by their individual performance within a profession or vocation (Beruf ), which
would lay them open to the disciplinary penalty of the market: being thrown out on
the street [XX.18]. Instead, profession is also linked to inherited social rank or
Stand, an imperfectly rational compromise with social and political conservatism,
which might produce ‘at least a relative constraint on sin and suffering’ but no
more,88 and the connection in Weber’s mind of Lutheranism, acting as “black
police”, to an ethically imperfect Wilhelmine conservatism is clear enough [XX.24
n. 1]. It is true that he could see the organic ethic at work outside his own time and
place, in a series of pre-modern societies such as Islamic warrior society and the
Hindu caste system, but these additional illustrations are insubstantial.89 Again, the
organic ethic could not be linked to Buddhism, the one authentic Indian salvation
religion because, unlike orthodox Hinduism, it did not recognize caste or social
rank distinctions.90 On the other hand, although such a link surely could have been
made in the case of Catholicism, it is not a feature that interests Weber (unlike
“progressive”, rationalizing traits such as monastic asceticism and Papal bureau-
cratic rationalism).91 So the associations of the organic idea (again) were really
home grown and Lutheran, and would be sharply accentuated during the war.
Thus in Suffrage and Democracy in Germany (1917) he made a violent assault on
what he perceived as attempts to return to this system by nostalgic conservative
proponents of social hierarchy:
In all the world there is nothing more objectively untruthful than the attempt to try to create
“organic” formations in the old rank-based sense [to serve] as electoral bodies in politics,
in an epoch of constant technical and commercial reworking of social strata, and developing
economic and social connections along purposive lines—and this is so even on purely
economic grounds.92
Seen purely politically, Lutheranism as the state church at the root of the Hohen-
zollern ‘Caesaro-papism’ that Weber detested [cf. CS 577–8] was the polar opposite
of an anti-political ascetic Protestantism—indeed it is highly likely that the latter
idea was conceived by Weber as an antithesis to Lutheranism’s politico-religious

87 ‘Zwischenbetrachtung’, AfSS 41 (1915), 391, emphasis added.

88 Ibid. 401, emphasis added; cf. 403.
89 Sociology of Religion [c.1913], MWG I/22–2.397–8.
90 On Buddhism and caste: ‘Hinduism and Buddhism’ [1915–16], MWG I/20.361–2. For the

Brahmin and Hindu foundations of an “organic” doctrine of society: ibid. 230–1, 236.
91 Allusion to the subject tends to be fleeting: ibid. 350, or else it is reclassified as ‘medieval’,

whereas Lutheranism is specified as such: Sociology of Religion [c.1913], MWG I/22–2.398–9.

92 ‘Wahlrecht und Demokratie in Deutschland’ [1917], MWG I/15.359.
268 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

fusion of church and state—but still through the relatively rational “organic” and
fraternal ethic he seeks to do it a kind of conceptual justice. That politics was not
the key to his understanding at this point is clear from the one potentially
significant addition to the agenda supplied by the Lutheran heritage of his mother.
This was Leo Tolstoy, a man quite uncompromised politically. The central feature
in Tolstoy’s identity (so far as Weber was concerned) was that he was another
exponent of a ‘radical ethic of fraternity’ and New Testament literalism, and as such
a substitute for Naumann as a critical target after 1905.93 The essay Weber
projected on Tolstoy in 1910 would surely have been an interesting development
of his ideas at this point, a ‘debate’ with Tolstoy, in the sense of the wartime essay
‘Between two laws’ (1916).94 But still it would have been no more than an
extension of pre-existing views and categories. However interesting he might be
personally, Tolstoy was not conceptually vital to Weber—how could be when
he was Russian and not Occidental?—as is evident from his failure to write the
projected essay, or from the late lecture ‘Politics as Vocation’ (1919), where he finds
it easy to continue his assault on ‘the ethic of the Sermon on the Mount’, and ‘the
absolute ethic of the gospel’ as guides to modern conduct without mentioning
Tolstoy’s name.95
By contrast, a fully rationalized ascetic Protestantism had “advanced” along the
tracks of historical evolution well beyond either Lutheranism or the relatively thin
category of the ethical and salvation religions. This was sufficiently clear from the
unflattering contrast drawn between ascetic Protestantism and Lutheranism in
the PE, and in the years after 1912 Weber returns to the ambivalent modernity
of the former in ever more explicit terms: it represented ‘the harshest form of
lovelessness and unbrotherliness’,96 something that, however unpleasant, was
appropriate given ‘the collapse in principle of the postulate of brotherhood in the
face of the loveless reality of the economic world’.97 Nothing radically new has been
said here, but by setting ascetic Protestantism within the general context of the
salvation religions, Weber’s overall perspectives become more intelligible. Ascetic

93 ‘Zwischenbetrachtung’, AfSS 41 (1915), 411; cf. ‘Zur Lage der bürgerlichen Demokratie’

[1906], MWG I/10.124; ‘Zwischen zwei Gesetzen’ [1916], MWG I/15.97. For the contrary claim,
for the original influence of Tolstoy, or Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, on Weber: Hartmann Tyrell,
‘Intellektuellenreligiosität, “Sinn”-Semantik, Brüderlichkeitsethik—Max Weber im Verhältnis zu
Tolstoi und Dostojewski’ in A. Sterbling and H. Zipprian (eds), Max Weber und Osteuropa
(Hamburg, 1997), 25–58. See the Appendix.
94 For ‘debate’: Paul Honigsheim, ‘Georg Jellinek’, KZSS 3 (1950–1), 395; cf. Honigsheim,

‘Erinnerungen an Max Weber’, in Max Weber zum Gedächtnis, 241; Edith Hanke, Prophet des
Unmodernen (Tübingen, 1993), 171–2; ‘Zwischen zwei Gesetzen’ [1916], MWG I/15.95–8. In fact
Weber’s reading of Tolstoy goes back to the early 1890s (Helene Weber to [Emily Benecke], 4.11.93,
cit. Roth, Familiengeschichte, 546–8), when he was also a point of reference for Naumann: see Roth op.
cit., 548 n. 10, and Hanke, op. cit., 170. However, Naumann is Weber’s undoubted target in the
1890s, whereas Tolstoy becomes prominent only after 1905—the obvious point of origin for his
“Russian” interests.
95 MWG I/17.234.—This reading of the Sermon on the Mount has nothing to do with the

subsequent tracing of an intellectual descent from the Sermon down to the Quakers, though Weber
might have taken more trouble to clarify the point: ibid. 244 following on from [XXI.54 n. 109].
96 ‘Zwischenbetrachtung’, AfSS 41 (1915), 402; cf. 396.
97 Sociology of Religion [c.1913], MWG I/22–2.385.
 Religiosity and Modernity (II) 269

Protestantism is not simply an obsolete seventeenth-century phenomenon that gives

way to a capitalist modernity, something that can be ignored while attention is
focused on the reassuringly secular and separate subject of capitalism. On the
contrary: the PE offers a modern religious history, because the transition to modernity
is as much about religiosity as it is about capitalism or rationality. Ascetic Protestant-
ism is the last, most rational, most modern form of religiosity, which is simultaneously
a point of entry into a modern, secular world that is ‘remote from god’. The final stage
of expiring salvation religiosity and incipient “secularization” is a single, seamless
process, embodied in a historical individual: ascetic Protestantism. Hence Weber’s
description: he does not say that it is ‘not’ a salvation religion but that it is ‘no longer’
one,98 just as the PE was a portrait of continuity: ‘the interconnections between the
modern economic ethos and the rational ethic of ascetic Protestantism’ [i.12].
Here we encounter the unique quality of a perspective where the “religious” and
“irreligious” worlds are fused within a historical continuity—a quality that is central
to explaining the text’s neglect today when we like to keep our boxes separate and ‘a
secular world-picture stands opposite the religious one’.99 Weber’s readers today are
either religious affiliates or they are not; but this apparently common-sense classi-
fication leaves little room for an author who, by his own admission, was ‘neither
anti-religious nor irreligious’ but who was equally emphatically not—or because of
his historical situation, no longer—a religious believer.100 The reception of the PE
by its contemporaries, all of whom were witnessing a paradigm shift in the status of
religion within educated society in Western Europe (unlike Britain), was a good
deal more open than ours today, and such an environment was sine qua non for its
public success in the years 1904–20. This, after all, was a work that could impact as
deeply on the louche and sceptical Werner Sombart as on the strenuous idealist
Ernst Troeltsch. Yet even then, amidst a sea of doubting souls and sophisticated
intellects, Weber was sui generis, and the only contemporary who picked up
something of the idea of a fundamental historical continuity from Christian
religiosity to secular modernity was that profoundly receptive—if also parasitic—
epigone Paul Honigsheim, who sketched the outline of a ‘Catholic ethic’ thesis in
mirror image of the PE.101

98 ‘Zwischenbetrachtung’, AfSS 41 (1915), 396. In another formulation, it stood apart from ‘all

actual [eigentlich] salvation-religions’: Sociology of Herrschaft [c.1911–14], MWG I/22–4.658.

99 W. Schluchter, ‘Die Zukunft der Religionen’, Religion und Lebensführung, ii. 506–34, here 519.

See also H. Kippenberg and M. Riesebrodt (eds), Max Webers »Religionssystematik« (Tübingen, 2001),
where secularization is omitted almost entirely: Martin Riesebrodt, ‘Religiöse Vergemeinschaftungen’,
116–17, is the exception that proves the rule. For more engaged interpretations from a religious
standpoint, see below n. 104.
100 Weber to Tönnies, 19.2.09, Briefe. However, the judgement of Otto Baumgarten in 1926 that

Weber was ‘neither irreligious nor even unChristian’ goes too far, and is more a testimony to Baumgarten’s
own pietas and family feeling: cit. F. W. Graf, ‘Die “kompetentesten” Gesprächspartner?’, in V. Krech and
H. Tyrell (eds), Religionssoziologie um 1900 (Würzburg, 1995), 211.
101 See the plan for the Vorgeschichte der französischen Aufklärung in Honigsheim, Die Staats- und

Sozial-Lehren der französchen Jansenisten im 17. Jahrhundert (Heidelberg, 1914), 220–6. Honigsheim
traced a path from medieval nominalism (his equivalent to Weberian monastic asceticism) through
Jansenism and Jesuit probabilism, to a Voltairean and worldly French Enlightenment, and thence to
belle époque France. Besides his failure to do more than sketch this picture in fragments and synopses,
270 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

Writing in 1904–7 Weber was open in talking about ‘secularization’ in what was
then a novel sense of the word: that is, a general process whereby a secular sphere
progressively invaded and conquered a religious one, a process that in the wider
culture led to the view that in some sense religion itself was being rooted out. Thus
he speaks of the ‘“secularization” of life’ [CS 559]; of ‘that characteristic process of
“secularization” to which phenomena born out of religious conceptions have
everywhere fallen victim’ [PS i.212]; of ‘the secularizing effect of property’ on
religious asceticism, and ‘the secularization of all the contents of life by Protestant-
ism’ [XXI.104; XX.6].102 But as a frequent use of “” indicates, this was a term
about which he had reservations, and it was abandoned in his religious writings
after 1912.103 While he was clear that the historical course taken by modern
Occidental Kultur in regard to religion was unique and remarkable, he could
have no truck with the view of secularization implied by vulgar use of the term:
that there had been a discontinuity in human conduct so radical that it implied the
extirpation of religion in a simple and absolute sense—a change so brutal that it
tended to sever the present from the past, thereby removing it from the realm of
credible historical explanation.104 In this his thinking was quite distinct from that
of Georg Simmel. Thus Simmel, though well aware of the fragility of the propos-
ition that a ‘few centuries of criticism’ might have ‘destroyed a [religious] yearning
which has governed mankind from the first dawn of history’, could still gauge the
depth of the modern religious predicament by advocating a ‘radical change of
direction’, ‘a rotation of the axis’, and ‘the wholly radical reconstruction of [men’s]
inner attitude’ as a necessary response.105
But if “secularization” was dropped, how was the Weberian transition to
modernity to be described? One response was the famous usage already noted,
when Weber refers to ‘We moderns, who are religiously “unmusical”’ [CS 581].

the defect of Honigsheim’s scheme lay in its pitifully thin conception of modernity as simply relaxed
and worldly.—There were, of course, secular, historicist readers of the PE who grasped it as a historical
statement, but this was without consequence and they were a vanishing breed: e.g. Otto Hintze, ‘Max
Webers Religionssoziologie’ [1922], in Gesammelte Abhandlungen (Göttingen, 1962–72), ii. 130.
102 The ‘secularizing effect of property’, i.e. materialism, is of course quite distinct from the long-

established idea of the secularization of (church) property.

103 Weber retains it only in an American context, where by definition it connotes only a very mild

religious retreat: ‘Schlusswort’ [1910], 585; Sociology of Herrschaft [c.1911–14], MWG I/22–4.673.
The fact that Weber eschews it in religious writings after 1912 is further support for the view that the
text of the PS, where the term does appear, was primarily composed in 1907.
104 Compare Hartmann Tyrell, who supposes that ‘today . . . an unprecedented process of

secularization—seen as a loss of religious substance throughout society—divides the capitalist,

bureaucratic, scientific, etc. bustle of modernity (“rooted in this world”) from that era of the utmost
religious arousal, in which religious salvation “was everything”. It is this discontinuity in Kultur that, in
Weber’s eyes, has rendered Puritan “sanctity”, the embodiment of the maximum relevance of the
religious factor in practical life, so alien, indeed “scarcely credible” in the eyes of “modern man” ’:
‘Worum geht es in der “Protestantischen Ethik” ’, Saeculum, 41 (1990), 130–77, here 169. The grain
of truth in this statement is that Weber allowed for the obsolescence of theology between the
seventeenth and twentieth centuries; but the idea that the PE describes a ‘discontinuity in Kultur’
between Puritanism and secularized modernity is a denial of its central argument. See similarly
Volkhard Krech, Wissenschaft und Religion (Tübingen, 2002), 234–40.
105 ‘Das Problem der religiösen Lage’ [1910], GSG 12.148–61, here 150, 161, 157, 150 resp.
 Religiosity and Modernity (II) 271

The fact of historical change is frankly accepted but softened and robbed of any
triumphalist or even essentialist note—as if the decline of religiosity was compar-
able to tone deafness in music, a loss of the ‘religious “ear”’ [CS 582].106 This was
the metaphorical equivalent of ‘no longer’, but still it was only a metaphor. Indeed
it was as much a comment on Weber’s musicality as on his religiosity—a man for
whom music was ‘truly a necessity of life’, in its emotional as much as in its rational
aspect—and it could not sustain his later theoretical writing.107 In fact there was no
outright solution to this verbal conundrum, but we may start with the heading he
used in 1915: ‘the religious rejection of the world’.108
Now as a title ‘rejection of the world’ explains nothing.109 It appears to echo the
Christian rejection of a fallen “world”, or the idealist equation of the world with
materiality and sensuality, and as a result there have always been some readers who
conflate the categories of Weber’s thinking here with those of conventional ethical
idealism, and its dismissal of the world.110 However, (as appears in the quotation
given below), he was well aware of conventional ideas of an ‘acute’ tension between
religion and the world. This was ‘self-evident’ from the terms themselves, but he
wished to go beyond mere truism. What was different in his conception was the
idea that there was a ‘lasting’, evolutionary–historical tension between the two, a
tension that changed and developed in extremely significant ways over time.
Furthermore, for Weber insofar as religion had broken down in the modern day,
this was a collapse of all universal ethics in the traditional, “personal” and morally
normative sense of the word ‘ethic’—which was a radical denial of the idealist and
neo-Kantian agenda. Yet even if he was unsuccessful in his attempts to frame a title
or headline (it is a curious inversion of the case with Entzauberung, where there is an
excellent headline and very little body of material beneath it), it was in 1913–15
nonetheless that he offered a general description of a scheme of ideas that had
previously been implicit only within the individual and historical account of ascetic
Protestantism given in 1904–5. This centred on the developing and ultimately
insuperable tensions between ethical religiosity and the “world”, where the latter
was conceived not as a single homogeneous or universal entity but as a plural set of
life ‘spheres’ or ‘orders’:
In a large and, from an evolutionary–historical perspective, particularly important fraction of
cases, prophetic and saviour-religions lived . . . in a relationship of tension towards the world
and its orders [Ordnungen], tension that was not only acute (which given the accepted
terminology [‘religion’ and the ‘world’] is self-evident), but lasting. Indeed it was all the more
so, the more they were real salvation religions. This [tension] arose from the meaning attached
to salvation [Erlösung] and the nature of prophetic teaching about salvation [Heilslehre], as soon

106 See also »Objektivität« [1904], WL 155; Historian, 243, 246–7. Above I.6.
107 Paul Honigsheim, ‘Erinnerungen an Max Weber’, in Max Weber zum Gedächtnis, 243. The idea
of religious ‘musicality’ appears just once in the writings of Weber’s last decade: ‘Science as a Vocation’
[1917/19], MWG I/17.106.
108 ‘Zwischenbetrachtung’, AfSS 41 (1915), 387 (title); cf. Sociology of Religion [c.1913], MWG

I/22–2.369: ‘The inner tension of the religious postulate against the realities of the world’.
109 Nor did rejection of the world (Weltablehnung) become a significant technical term for Weber.
110 Hence the association of Weber with Hermann Siebeck: above n. 40.
272 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic
as the latter developed a rational ethic — the more so, the more principled it was — which was
directed towards the inner religious goods of salvation [Heilsgüter], or, in the usual language, the
more the ethic was sublimated away from [external] ritualism towards the “religiosity of ethical
conviction” [Gesinnungsreligiosität]. And in fact the tension on this [ethical–religious] side was
all the greater, the more the rationalization and sublimation of the outward and inward
possession of “worldly” goods (taking “worldly” in the widest sense) proceeded on the other
[worldly] side. For the rationalization and conscious refining of men’s connections to the
various [life] spheres where one possesses outer and inner, religious and worldly goods, impelled
a growing consciousness that the individual spheres had internal laws of their own with their own
inner logic [Konsequenz], and in this way tensions arose between them, which had remained
hidden when [man’s] connection to the external world was in its original, unconstrained state.
It is a very general, and for the history of religions very important, consequence of the
development of the possession of goods (inner- and other-worldly) into something rational,
consciously striven after, and refined by knowledge [Wissen].111
This famous passage is quite dense, but still its meaning is clear enough. The
Weberian history of the world was made up of a series of rationalizing processes
proceeding (as he had stated in 1904) ‘according to the most varied ultimate
perspectives and in different directions’ [XX.35]. On one side, there was religious
rationalization, which led to the formation of ‘real salvation religions’ with ‘rational
ethics’. These religions and their ethics were universal or universalist in their claims.
Hence the religious “ethic of conviction”, which aimed at placing ‘the conduct of life
as a whole [Lebensführung] in a “meaningful” and total connection to the religious
goal of salvation.’112 Furthermore, while the ‘salvation goods’ offered by these
religions to believers were by no means exclusively or even primarily “other-
worldly”113—Weber was far too secular to suppose they were, while his emphasis
on the equation in principle between religious and worldly ‘goods’ is equally
striking—still the legitimating foundation of such totalizing ethical claims lay
outside the “world”: in the dominant Occidental and ascetic case, with the supra-
worldly, personal god, who inspired active religious conduct that aimed at ‘rational
mastery of the world’;114 or else in the Oriental and mystical case, with the idea that
salvation lay in flight from the world achieved by annihilation of the self. In this
sense the ethical religions stood apart from and against the “world”, and their
epitome, the historical peak of a universal, integral salvation religion in the
Occident, was the medieval Catholic Church.
Opposed to salvation religiosity was a set of rationalizations and sublimations
within the “world”. (Sublimation [Sublimierung] signifies conceptual elevation and
refinement—it has nothing to do with the Burkean sublime or Freudian sexual
sublimation—and is hardly separate from rationalization.) Unlike religious ration-
alization which was in principle universal, this was a set of partial or local processes

111 ‘Zwischenbetrachtung’, Af SS 41 (1915), 391–2. The changes Weber made to this passage when

he revised it in 1919–20 were negligible: MWG I/19.485.

112 From the comparable introductory passage to }11 of Sociology of Religion [c.1913], the

precursor to the ‘Zwischenbetrachtung’: MWG I/22–2.369.

113 Cf. ‘Einleitung’, AfSS 41 (1915), 12–13. 114 ‘Confucianism’, ibid. 385.
 Religiosity and Modernity (II) 273

operating within a number of life ‘orders’ or ‘spheres’: Weber specifies politics, the
economy, the realm of intellectual enquiry or Wissenschaft, art and sexuality. (Law is
omitted, I suggest, because modern law is conceived by Weber as not merely
heteronymous, like the economy, but as a purely formal activity. So none of the
sources of tension he identifies between religion and the “world” applies.) By their
parochial and local nature, they were far inferior to the salvation religions with their
exalted, universal claims; but their rationalization was real and obstinate nonethe-
less, as they developed ‘internal laws of their own with their own inner logic’—and it
was this quality that made them not merely ‘spheres’ of activity (an everyday
descriptive label) but rationalized and systematized ‘orders’. In this way “worldly”
rationalization proceeded along lines separate from those of “unworldly” but still
rationalizing religion; and so there developed ever greater tensions, both amongst
the worldly ‘orders’ and, more prominently, between the worldly ‘orders’ and
ethical religiosity until a point was reached where ‘The tension . . . was insuperable
for a genuine salvation religion.’115
However, unbrotherly ascetic Protestantism in the seventeenth century was ‘no
longer . . . a real salvation religion’116 committed to pure and personal ethics; nor
did it claim to be universal, but was instead an elite religion for the ‘aristocracy of
the Saints’ [XXI.46, 51]. So it was uniquely suited to function as the religiously-
framed transition between the prior epoch of universal ethical religiosity and a
disintegrated but still rationalizing modernity now centred round the separate life
‘orders’. (There can be no doubt that the specific conceptual structure of the
‘Zwischenbetrachtung’, that is, the polarity between religion and a modern
“world”, composed of a series of ‘life orders’, is present in the original PE, even if
the presence of the ‘orders’ there is assumed rather than explained.)117 Without
adopting a Hegelian scheme whereby the development of tensions between religion
and the “world” was a logical necessity proceeding uniformly across all the various
‘spheres’, Weber nonetheless sees himself as describing a set of historical processes
that were in fact proceeding broadly in the same direction, whereby the principal
spheres of worldly or secular human conduct liberated themselves from religious or
universal ethical constraint and regulation, and this was a primary meaning of
modernity. Whether the economic order represented by capitalism, ‘the economic
way of looking at things’ that was ‘on the advance in all areas’ of life,118 ‘the most
fateful force of our modern life’ [i.4], was more important than the others is a
question Weber never confronted; but he evidently did not consider that his
conception either of capitalism or of the plural ‘orders’ was incompatible with

115 ‘Zwischenbetrachtung’, ibid. 395. 116 Ibid. 396.

117 Pace Schluchter, Religion und Lebensführung, i. 89–90. The saturation of the PE with discourse
about the “world”—as, for example, in the case of “inner-worldly” asceticism—is evident, as has been
recognized by Stefan Breuer, ‘Weltablehnung’, in Max Webers »Religionssystematik« (Tübingen, 2001),
227–40, here 227–8. For the less well-known discourse of ‘life orders’, ‘life spheres’, and ‘orders of the
world’, e.g. [XX.17, 31, 32, 34, 37 n. 2 at 40; XXI.23]. Note too that all the ‘life spheres’ or ‘orders’
marked out in 1913–15 are identified in the original PE: the economy, politics, Wissenschaft [XXI.53
n. 108; cf. 94], sexuality [XXI.79.17], and the aesthetic and artistic sphere [XXI.94–7].
118 Freiburg Inaugural [1895], MWG I/4.561.
274 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

holistic talk of ‘general rationalization’. Similarly he would always refer to the

modern capitalist economy as a ‘cosmos’—that is, a rational and orderly
universe—descended from the ‘cosmos’ of the ethical religions,119 but with the
crucial difference that the ‘cosmos’ was now an externally imposed order, a
‘housing’ (Gehäuse) [XX.17], manifest only through its formally rational and
technical procedures, and not something the inhabitants of the housing could
possess as inwardly meaningful or rational in this sense. Thus it was accompanied
by the slow ‘dying out of [the] religious root’ [XXI.106], the original substantive
impulse to rationalization. This showed that ascetic Protestantism, and particularly
Calvinism, was susceptible to a kind of theological self-immolation, and whereas
down to the seventeenth century a ‘prophetic pneuma or spirit ran like a stormy fire
through great communities’, in Weber’s own day the religious spirit ‘puls[ed] only
within the smallest social circles, from one person to another, in pianissimo’.120
Nonetheless, the rationalizing, impersonal, legally formalist, ascetic Protestant ethic
continued intact.
Such is Weber’s understanding of the historical change affecting religion in the
modern Occident. It will be abundantly clear that, while some of the symptoms are
the same as those recognized by contemporaries—for example, the idea that the
integral category ‘life’ could also be conceived as a varied set of spheres of activ-
ity,121 or that the public power of organized religion had collapsed in the century
after 1789 owing to the novel, liberal belief that the state was a sufficient and
autonomous secular foundation that required no religious support122—this is
unlike any conventional portrayal of secularization. First, because Weber is not
describing a transition between generically different forms of human conduct such
as the “religious” and the “secular”; or the collapse of the transcendent ‘contents of
religious faith’; or a movement away from a supernatural dualism (the belief in
earth and heaven), towards a qualitatively new religiosity founded in naturalistic,
earth-bound monism.123 He outlines instead the particular, empirical outcome
produced by the working of continuous processes of rationalization that have been

119 For the ethical–religious ‘cosmos’, e.g. Sociology of Religion [c.1913], MWG I/22–2.193, 249,

299–300, 368; for continuing reference to the capitalist economy as a cosmos, ibid. 379;
‘Zwischenbetrachtung’, AfSS 41 (1915), 394.
120 ‘Science as a Vocation’ [1917/19], MWG I/17.110. Weber’s definition of the prophet (as the

‘carrier of a purely personal charisma who, driven by his mission, announces a religious doctrine or
divine command’) is in no way confined to Biblical times. George Fox was to him an obvious modern
case, just as ‘prophecy’ and ‘prophesying’ were an integral part of the religious life of ascetic
Protestantism: resp. Sociology of Religion [c.1913], MWG I/22–2.177, 188; PE [XXI.40 n. 76, 46
n. 83, 62 n. 123, 69].
121 Cf. Troeltsch, ‘Die Bedeutung des Protestantismus’, HZ 97 (1906), 29–56; Simmel, Die

Religion (Frankfurt a. M., 1906), 7–9 (GSG 10.41–3). However, while Simmel accepted that one
could conceive of the world variously, in religious, artistic, erotic and other terms, each one of these
categories or conceptions was absolute and complete in itself. For Weber the various life spheres were
avowedly partial units which did not make up a coherent whole.
122 Cf. Troeltsch, ‘Protestantisches Christentum’ (1905), 391.
123 See resp. Simmel, ‘Das Problem der religiösen Lage’ [1910], GSG 12.148; Troeltsch,

‘Protestantisches Christentum’ (1905), esp. }}A, D. For a modern equivalent, Wolfgang Schluchter,
Religion und Lebensführung, ii. 520; cf. 510 on the turn from a ‘theocentric’ to an ‘anthropocentric’
view of the world.
 Religiosity and Modernity (II) 275

operating throughout history. Secondly, as noted, the Occidental transition be-

tween the allegedly religious and secular phases is bridged by a single historical
individual that is formally religious: ascetic Protestantism. Even at the beginning of
the twentieth century, although the original moment of its revolutionary religious
impulse was long past, this moment was still the “switch-point” or crossroads that
to a significant extent continued to determine the “tracks” along which Weber’s
contemporary world was moving. There might have been a ‘shift’ or (in another
sense) ‘switch’ (Umschlag) from a seventeenth-century asceticism into a purely
worldly utilitarianism since 1700 [XXI.75 n. 3, etc.], but these remained connected
phenomena. The Calvinist ethic already had a distinctly ‘utilitarian character’, just
as utilitarianism was the ‘heir’ to seventeenth-century asceticism, once the religious
root had decayed [XXI.17, 104]. Overall, then, this was not a ‘tragic diagnosis’,
such as a Christian perspective might suggest.124 It might be ‘hard’ and ‘sober’, and
require ‘self-control’ (to borrow favourite items from the Weber lexicon), but it was
not ‘tragic’. Indeed simply to speak in such emotive terms was a contravention of the
Weberian prescription for “value-free” academic or wissenschaftlich discourse, where
the analyst ‘will do well to keep his small personal commentary to himself ’ [i.14].
The origin of this view takes us remorselessly back to Weber’s early life, because
the formation of his views on such central subjects was part of his original cultural
formation as an adult. The contrary suggestion, that his most important pro-
nouncements in this area were the late result of a progressively evolving academic
‘research programme’, displays a faith in the formative power of purely academic
imperatives that he could never have shared. However much the arguments of the
PE and the subsequent religious writings might be presented in purely academic
and wissenschaftlich terms, these were matters that were not purely academic but,
like all Wissenschaft, rested ultimately on value-commitments—to say nothing of
Weber’s lifelong suspicion of mere academicism or ‘intellectualism’, and his preference
for the stimulus supplied by a good cigar to promote the germination of ideas.125
As we saw (I.2), already in the 1890s he had fastened with great clarity on one of his
most important and truly original ideas: the power of impersonal forces in modern

124 Volkhard Krech, Wissenschaft und Religion (Tübingen, 2002), 238. When Weber speaks of the

‘tragedy’ or ‘tragic logic’ (Tragik) affecting all human action (including political action), this is
practically a matter of common sense: ‘that the final result of political conduct often—no, usually—
stands in a wholly inadequate, and often truly paradoxical relationship to its original meaning’: ‘Politics
as a Vocation’ [1919], MWG I/17.229; cf. Weber at Frankfurt [1910], GASS 445. But a predictable
failure fully to realize one’s intentions in the long term in no way devalues the original meaning behind
one’s actions, if they were predicated on ‘service to a cause’—the particular form of meaning still
available to modern man (230).
125 Cf. Schluchter, Religion und Lebensführung, Part I Title, etc. It is true that the PE closes in 1905

with what might anachronistically be described as a ‘research programme’ but which was in reality an
ethical-intellectual ‘task’ (Aufgabe): the task of completing the PE to Weber’s own satisfaction
[XXI.109]. However, completion of the ‘task’ did not signify change of viewpoint. On the contrary,
the task was ‘to demonstrate’ empirically a series of features whose conceptual outlines were already
mapped out in Weber’s mind. Thus the one point of real uncertainty, capitalism, where future enquiry
would adjust Weber’s views, is absent from this passage.—For Weber on cigars and intellectualism, e.g.
‘Science as a Vocation’ [1917/19], MWG I/17.83, 105; ‘Max Weber and the literati’, in Kay Waechter
(ed.), Grenzüberschreitende Diskurse (Wiesbaden, 2010), 243–78.
276 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

life. By this he meant not simply that the individual was confronted by social
powers greater than himself—this was a commonplace of the conventional soci-
ology Weber looked down upon126—but that a series of specifically modern
powers and structures had imposed new, “impersonal” modes of conduct on
ordinary people in society at variance with the conventional ethics of personal
warmth or fraternity: it was expected that in social life one should behave ‘without
hatred and so without love’ or (as it says in the PE in a salute to the English “stiff
upper lip”) with cool “reserve” [XXI.29 n. 58].127 In particular, this meant the
insufficiency of a traditional ethical religion such as Catholicism or Lutheranism
when confronted by the impersonal structures of rule over human behaviour
generated by modern capitalism. In the PE in 1904–5 he had then shown how
the “ethical” scheme of ascetic Protestantism had resolved this apparently insuper-
able problem. Here the individual was subject to an ‘inner release from the closest
ties’ that bound him to the outside world, including even those of family life, and
conduct ‘took on a peculiarly objective–impersonal character’ [XXI.14, 17]. This
was in contrast to ‘the naive life of the feelings’ and the emphasis on ‘the emotional
side of religion’ characteristic of an all too personal Lutheranism [XXI.11, 44]. In
the language of 1915 there had arisen a state of irreconcilable tension between ‘real’
or ‘actual [eigentlich] salvation religion’ with its roots in human warmth and feeling,
and the rationalizing and (in fact) secularizing ‘world’. To this problem there were
only two logical solutions. Either that of Buddhism and mystical flight from the
world—an option that was not historically available in the Occident, although it
exercised an undoubted fascination on a range of Weber’s contemporaries from
Ernst Troeltsch to Hermann Hesse, the author of Siddartha (1922).128 Or else that
of ‘the Puritan vocational ethic’, which occupied precisely the same place in
Weber’s thinking in 1915 that it did in 1904–5,
as a religiosity of virtuosi [only], this renounced the universalism of love, it rationally objectified
[versachlichte] all working [Wirken] in the world as something done in the service of God’s
will—wholly incomprehensible in its ultimate meaning and knowable only as something
positive—and as a test of one’s state of grace. With that it accepted the objectification of the
developed economic cosmos—a part of fallen human creation like the world as a whole—as
something willed by God and [a source of] material for the fulfilment of one’s duties. In the
final analysis this was a renunciation in principle of salvation as a goal attainable by men, and
for all men, in favour of an uncaused grace, which was always only particular [not universal].
In truth this standpoint of unbrotherliness was no longer a real “salvation religion”.129

126 Georg Simmel, Die Religion (Frankfurt a. M., 1906), 12, 22–3, 27, 38–9, 55, 61–2, offers a

catalogue of such superior powers that specifically do not require an alteration in human behaviour
conceived in timeless terms. For Weber’s notorious hostility to the hypostatization of a higher entity
or ‘organism’ called ‘society’, see e.g. my ‘Max Weber and Georg Jellinek’, Saeculum, 59 (2008),
319–20.
127 Sociology of Religion [c.1913], MWG I/22–2.401.
128 Troeltsch was no Buddhist, but his conception of a ‘naive absoluteness’ at the root of all religion

had clear affinities with mystical religiosity: Die Absolutheit des Christentums (Tübingen, 1902), 107.
129 ‘Zwischenbetrachtung’, AfSS 41 (1915), 396. ‘Positive’ here is used in its legal sense: whatever

God wills is authoritative, and an underlying rationale for the series of ‘positive’ enactments that occur
in this way is not to be sought.
 Religiosity and Modernity (II) 277

The correspondence with the PE in terms of ideas and vocabulary—the idea that
only a religion which was devoid of love or respect for human creation (Kreatur)
would be tough enough to assimilate a rational, objectified, depersonalized modern
cosmos—remains complete.130

I V . THE PROBLEM OF MEANING

Alongside the confrontation between a personal ethic and the impersonal powers of
modernity such as capitalism, bureaucracy and Wissenschaft, Weber identified a
second fundamental problem for religion in the modern Occident. A world broken
up into a variety of life spheres and orders was a fragmented world, which had
become devoid of the universal and integral meaning that, historically, ethical and
salvation religion had supplied. Thus ‘He declared he did not know the ultimate
meaning of existence’ just as he took ‘the ethical irrationality of the world’ and its
‘chaos of value criteria’ for granted.131 Indeed the PE suggests that ‘the fragmentary
character of divine revelation’ was ‘a Calvinist idea’ [XXI.53 n. 108]. Contempor-
aries, including those who were the most intellectually “advanced” or personally
sympathetic to Weber, were shocked by his cold-blooded, intellectually grounded
admission of this view, something very different in nature from the religious
warmth of the militant atheist. (Today, however, the force of Weber’s analysis is

130 The ‘Zwischenbetrachtung’ also betrays palpable echoes of the economic writings of the 1890s.

Compare ibid. 395 on the want of ‘personal connection . . . between the changing owner of a
debenture and the debtors of a mortgage bank, also changing and unknown to him’ with
‘Allgemeine . . . Nationalökonomie’ [1894–8], MWG III/1.623; ‘Entwickelungstendenzen’ [1894];
‘ “Römisches” und “deutsches” Recht’ [1895], MWG I/4.422, 530. Note too that the
‘Zwischenbetrachtung’, Weber’s second thought on this subject, is significantly closer to the PE than
his first sketch of the tensions between religion and the economic ‘order’ in }11 of the Sociology of
Religion in 1913. There Weber also went back to the 1890s, in that case to his lectures on the history
of commercial law in 1892–3, and sought to trace the developing tension between religion and the
economy by looking primarily at the history of usury: MWG I/22–2.376–84. However, this obscured
the assumption of the PE in 1904–5 that usury law is ultimately an irrelevance to the history
of capitalism, which was created primarily by changing forms of human behaviour, not by supplies
of money or bankers such as the Fugger [XX.14–5, 29, 44]. Nor did it provide a good illustration of
Weber’s thinking about rationalization, since the history of usury law culminating in a distinction
between the legitimate (commercial) and illegitimate levying of interest (at the expense of the poor)
hardly equates to an irrevocable breakdown between religion and the “world”.
131 Karl Jaspers, Max Weber: Rede bei der . . . Trauerfeier [1920] (Tübingen, 1926), 14; ‘Politics as a

Vocation’ [1919], MWG I/17.240; Freiburg Inaugural [1895], MWG I/4.563, resp. There has been a
striking absence of discussion of the “problem of meaning” throughout the history of Weberian
reception. Amongst early commentators who caught the proto-existentialist note in Weber, Albert
Salomon is a significant exception: ‘Max Weber’ [1926], in Werke I: Biographische Materialen und
Schriften 1921–1933 (Wiesbaden, 2008), 135–56, here 154. Karl Löwith by contrast simply supposed
that Weber ‘[could] not have rested content with a complete renunciation of “meaning” ’ and so skirted
round the question: ‘Max Weber und Karl Marx’, AfSS 67 (1932), 88; cf. 87. Amongst later writers,
neither Reinhard Bendix nor Wolfgang Schluchter devotes significant attention to the subject,
although Jürgen Habermas is an exception: Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns (Frankfurt,
19874), i. 332–45; cf. 462–8. Recent discussions have been brief and apparently unaware of the
central significance Weber attached to this question: Edith Hanke, ‘Erlösungsreligionen’, Max Webers
»Religionssystematik« (Tübingen, 2001), 217–21; Christopher Adair-Toteff, ‘ “Sinn der Welt”: Max
Weber and the Problem of Theodicy’, MWS 13 (2013), 87–107. See also the Appendix.
278 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

self-evident, and the acceptance that there is no such thing as universal and
universally valid meaning is a commonplace and even the object of humour.)132
Thus Else Jaffé would speak of the ‘divided Max’, the man who had left behind ‘life
broken in pieces’;133 for Karl Jaspers, despite protestations to the contrary, Weber
was a ‘fragmentarian’;134 Ernst Troeltsch repudiated his ‘impossible scepticism’,
while Siegfried Kracauer, likewise, described Weber’s position as that of ‘the sceptic
in principle’, ‘the intellectual desperado’.135 Yet these verdicts tell us more about
those who uttered them than about the original and highly personal ideas of their
alleged subject. Weber’s own conception of his place amidst a world devoid of
universal meaning and broken up into separate life spheres was different. The famous
conclusion to ‘Science as a Vocation’ (1917/19) may take the historical retreat of
ethical religiosity as its premiss, yet it is far from downbeat: ‘From this [premiss] we
wish to draw the lesson that nothing was done by yearning and waiting’—for the
new religion that was never going to come—‘and we want to do things differently:
we will go about our work and be equal to the “demands of the day”, both in human
and professional terms. What those demands are is plain and simple, if each one of us
can find and obey the daimon, who holds the threads of his life.’136 There might not
be a universal meaning, but still the individual could create his or her own meaning:
in the service of a personal “god” or daimon, a political ‘cause’ (Sache), or in the
academic and analytical creation of meaning. Values might be fragmented and
plural, but still (Weber supposed) they must be adhered to absolutely, as a ‘matter
of faith’, because service to a particular cause could ‘give meaning to [one’s] life’.137

132 The Max Weber of 1920 might not have laughed out loud at Douglas Adams’ farcical musings

on the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything (The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,
BBC Radio 4, 1978), but he would have understood their longer-term, historical significance.
133 Else Jaffé to Karl Jaspers, 16.6.26, Jaspers Nachlaß, Deutsches Literaturarchiv, Marbach

(communicated to me by Guenther Roth). This phrase succinctly indicates why Weber could have
nothing to do with the fashionable school of Lebensphilosophie, embracing both Wilhelm Dilthey and
Georg Simmel, which took an integral and undivided ‘life’ as its starting point: cf. Georg Lukács, Die
Zerstörung der Vernunft (Berlin, 1954), ch. 4.
134 Max Weber: Rede bei der . . . Trauerfeier [1920] (Tübingen, 1926), 15. Jaspers insisted that,

because he was a fragmentarian, Weber was also ‘indivisibly one’, but this solution was available only
to those who accepted the Jasperian philosophy of Existenz: Max Weber: Deutsches Wesen (Oldenburg,
1932), 9. Compare Löwith, ‘Max Weber und Karl Marx’, AfSS 67 (1932), 58, on Weber’s ‘fragmentary
life-work’; and Friedrich Meinecke on Weber’s works as ‘a sequence of mighty eruptions’: ‘Drei
Generationen deutscher Gelehrtenpolitik’, HZ 125 (1922), 248–83, here 272. Both had read Jaspers.
135 Resp. Ernst Troeltsch, ‘Die Revolution in die Wissenschaft’, Schmollers Jahrbuch, 45 (1921), 89;

Siegfried Kracauer, ‘Die Wartenden’ [13.2.22], repr. Das Ornament der Masse (Frankfurt, 1977), 113,
116. For Georg Simmel’s eccentric, but still conservative view, Probleme der Geschichtsphilosophie (1905)
c.3; n.121 above. No external phenomenon had meaning an sich, but it had always been in the power of
Geist to create it.
136 MWG I/17.111. This verdict is much to be preferred to Marianne Weber’s report that ‘When Weber

was once asked what was the meaning of his Wissenschaft for himself, he answered: “I want to see how much I
can withstand” ’ (Lebensbild, 690)—a phrase that has frequently been seized upon to prove Weber’s heroic
pessimism: e.g. Carlo Antoni, From History to Sociology [1940] (Detroit, 1959), 121. Yet as Marianne
recognised, Weber’s alleged answer was inscrutable, while her source, Karl Jaspers, was far from neutral: cf.
Jaspers to Hannah Arendt 16.11.66 pr. Hannah Arendt Karl Jaspers Briefwechsel 1926–1969 (Munich,
1985), 695. For Jaspers Wissenschaft could have no meaning except in the light of a higher, post-Kantian
philosophy such as his own. Hence in this posthumously reported dialogue Weber could have no satisfactory
answer (a common feature in Jaspers’ dialogues with other thinkers). However, Weber’s authentic views on
the meaning of Wissenschaft are clearly set out in ‘Science as a Vocation’. See below at n.179.
137 ‘Politics as a Vocation’ [1919], MWG I/17.230, 170, resp.
 Religiosity and Modernity (II) 279

The appeal to the daimon, one of the secondary order of deities or spirits in
classical Greek polytheism, offers a shorthand for the idea of a plurality of values,
but the idea is given more specific form in a splendid anecdote from c.1912–13,
handed down to us by Hans Staudinger. At this date the young but robustly
independent Staudinger (b. 1889) was preparing a Heidelberg dissertation on the
(coincidentally Weberian) subject of the significance of choirs as a form of com-
munity organization under the supervision of Alfred Weber. He also enjoyed a
personal connection to Max Weber through his father, and was unabashed in
confronting him with a leading question:
“Max Weber, what is your leading and supreme value?” He was astonished and replied that
few people had put to him such a direct question. [Then] he answered: “I have no leading
and supreme value.” “So how can you live?” I cried. He smiled and said: “Well, just imagine
to yourself that from the ceiling of my study there hang violins, fifes and drums, clarinets
and harps. First one instrument sounds, and then another. The violin plays, that is my
religious value. Then harps and clarinets ring out, and I sense my artistic value. Then the
trumpet sounds, that is my value of freedom. And at the sound of fifes and trumpets I feel
my patriotic value. The trombone awakens various community values, such as solidarity.
Sometimes there are dissonances. Only gifted people can make a melody in this way—
prophets, statesmen, artists, more or less charismatic people. I am a scholar, who arranges
items of knowledge so that they may be used. My instruments are placed on bookshelves,
but such instruments do not ‘sound’. And from them no living melody can be made.”138
This recollection has come down to us many years after the event, but its accuracy
would be difficult to impugn. (So much so that it may derive from a written record
made at the time.) The idea of the religious value as one that might be evoked by a
violin accords well with Weber’s known equation of religiosity with musicality, and
the overall conception of varied values distributed amongst different life spheres (or
‘orders’), is surely just. Staudinger’s father Franz was an eminent neo-Kantian, and
Hans understood the discourse of “value” very well. His anecdote shows us in vivid
terms that Weber did not conceive of value plurality and fragmentation in anything
like the bleak way contemporaries supposed. There is a note of resignation here
alongside ebullience and vivacity, yet it comes not from the fact of value fragmen-
tation or “secularization”, but from the general workings of rationalization—for
this is his situation when he places himself outside the ranks of the charismatically
gifted, the class of persons who were not constrained by rationalizing procedures.
(However, there are fundamental respects, such as his stringent reservations regard-
ing specialization, where Weber clearly identified himself with what he defined as

138 We owe this extract from Staudinger’s memoirs to Wilhelm Hennis, Max Webers Fragestellung

(Tübingen, 1986), 195–6 & n. 1. It was excluded from the posthumously edited text of Staudinger’s
memoirs, very probably at the instance of Hennis himself, who rejected the idea behind the anecdote,
though he accepted it as a genial provocation. External justification for the exclusion lies in the fact that
Staudinger believed, quite erroneously, that Weber changed his mind after July 1914, so that out-and-
out nationalism became his ‘leading and supreme value’, even if the idea of his value pluralism
remained vividly present: Wirtschaftspolitik im Weimarer Staat: Lebenserinnerungen . . . , Archiv für
Sozialgeschichte, Beiheft 10 (1982), 21; cf. 8–11, 42.
280 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

charismatic positions.)139 It is the extra-individual process of rationalization that

supplies the crucial offset to his reflections about individual values and polytheism:
the realm of the impersonal, technical, value-free and formally rational, the ‘steel
housing’, which is not fragmented but purely external. In such a context the free
selection of values or finding one’s daimon is not an act of arbitrary decisionism (as
critics have supposed) but an assertion of freedom within an overall context of
constraint which, even for the ordinary or “everyday” person, is an incipiently
charismatic or extra-rational act.140
Again we see how Weber’s views resembled those of the ascetic Protestant: they
might be ‘pessimistically tinged’, but they were not pessimistic [XXI.12]. Instead he
should be described as a realist: a realist whose candour and depth of insight were
matched by his commitment to confront the “demands of the day”—a favourite, if
reworked Goethean maxim that first appeared in the PE [XXI.24 n. 46].141 Perhaps
the outstanding expression of this perspective is Weber’s appropriation of Milton’s
Paradise Lost, also in the PE, where the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise is
an evident equivalent for the loss of religious faith (or musicality) by the beginning
of the twentieth century:
They turned and saw the eastern part
Of Paradise—so late their happy seat—
Seething with the frightful glow of flames . . .
They felt the tears slowly glistening down,
But soon they dried their cheeks;
Before them lay the great wide world,
Where they could choose their resting place,
The Providence of the Lord their guide.
For Weber this was a ‘supreme expression of grave . . . joy in the world, that is:
valuation of life as a task’ [XX.51–2]142—a verdict that expresses the ambivalent
relationship to the world of the “innerworldly” modern, who would undoubtedly
have preferred to be in possession of universal meaning and a universal ethic, and

139 Weber was almost certainly concealing any possible personal claims he might have had in this

respect when talking to Staudinger. His authentic standpoint was agnostic: ‘Every person, if he has a
charisma, has his own unique charisma. I have never asked, whether I have one’: to Else Jaffé, 26.2.20,
Briefe.
140 Jürgen Habermas’s famous accusation that Weber succumbed to Schmittian decisionism (e.g.

Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns, i. 358) was founded on a radical denial of Weber’s premisses:
i.e. he held that in principle the world could be rendered meaningful (whatever its deficiencies in fact),
because rationalization was not only an impersonal, cognitive and instrumental process, but could
occur in the moral and aesthetic spheres as well. On this basis, disagreement with Weber is
understandable, but it is more a statement of difference than criticism in any significant sense.
141 For other usages of this favourite maxim: ‘Hinduism and Buddhism’ [1915–16], MWG

I/20.295, 542–3; ‘Wahlrecht und Demokratie in Deutschland’ [1917], MWG I/15.390; ‘Parlament
und Regierung im neugeordneten Deutschland’ [1918], ibid. 462; ‘Politics as a Vocation’ [1919],
MWG I/17.251; cf. Lebensbild, 113. See too the related (and also reused) Biblical text: ‘do the works of
him who sent you, for as long as it is day’ [XXI.76].
142 I have retranslated the German translation of Milton that Weber used; this is not the original

text of Paradise Lost. Compare the identical sentiment at the close of the essay on “Objectivity” (in this
case drawn from Goethe): WL 214.
 Religiosity and Modernity (II) 281

yet announces an emphatic intention to confront and engage with that fallen and
fragmented world. There are a wealth of reasons why we cannot call Weber an
existentialist thinker, above all because he is a social thinker for whom the
individual is only a starting point; but equally we can see why Karl Jaspers, the
original philosopher of Existenz, should have admired him so much and taken Max
Weber the man as the epitome of his nascent philosophy.143 In the words of Albert
Salomon, another of the younger generation who knew Weber personally, ‘because
he was great, he had to be absolute at every moment’.144
The starting point for Weber’s wrestlings with problem of meaning lies with the
‘ethical postulate’ made by the universal religions of love and fraternity: ‘that the
world was a divinely ordered cosmos, hence that it had some form of ethically
meaningful orientation’.145 Love, fraternity and morality were sustained and ren-
dered meaningful in Judaeo-Christian tradition by a god who was ‘personal, supra-
worldly, ethical’ and by definition all-powerful.146 According to this universally
rational scheme, any ethical injustice or other infraction of meaning in this world,
such as the facts of human transience and death, would be recompensed in the next,
and so ‘the course of the world, at least insofar as it touched the interests of men,
was in some form a meaningful process.’147 In such a harmonious world order, there
was even a place for happiness, and the enjoyment of happiness was “legitimate”.148
However, this form of ethical rationalization ran historically parallel and logically
contrary to ‘the realities of life’ within the ‘orders’ of the secular world as they
developed their own forms of behaviour that, however rational in themselves,
upheld no universal, ethical standard. Hence the ultimate appeal to physical force
in the most bureaucratically rationalized and legitimate politics; hence the ‘love-
lessness’ that lay at the root of ‘the objectified economic cosmos’, even though such
an impersonal cosmos offered ‘the highest rational form of the material goods
provision that was indispensable for any innerworldly Kultur’; hence the ‘veiled and
sublimated brutality, anti-fraternal idiosyncrasy and illusory displacement of cor-
rect perspective [that] inevitably accompanied sexual love’, even though it was
conceptually sublimated as “eroticism”; and so on.149 Hence, too, the dismissal
of ‘human happiness’ as a plausible goal in public life, where Weber’s brusque

143 Max Weber. Rede bei der Trauerfeier (Tübingen, 1920). Cf. Joshua Derman, ‘Philosophy

beyond the Bounds of Reason: The Influence of Max Weber on the Development of Karl Jaspers’
Existenzphilosophie’, in D. Chalcraft (ed.), Max Weber Matters (Farnham, 2008), 55–71, here 63–5.
Those who had come under the influence of Heidegger were equally impressed: Siegfried Landshut,
‘Max Webers geistesgeschichtliche Bedeutung’, Neue Jahrbücher für Wissenschaft und Bildung 7 (1931),
507–16; Karl Löwith, ‘Max Weber und Karl Marx’, AfSS 67 (1932), 53–99.
144 ‘Max Weber’ [1926], repr. Albert Salomon, Werke, ed. Peter Gostmann et al. (Wiesbaden,

2008), I. 155.
145 ‘Zwischenbetrachtung’, AfSS 41 (1915), 412.
146 e.g. Sociology of Religion [c.1913], MWG I/22–2.190; cf. 291.
147 ‘Zwischenbetrachtung’, AfSS 41 (1915), 415.
148 ‘Einleitung’, ibid. 6.
149 ‘Zwischenbetrachtung’, ibid. 415, 417, resp. However different we might think the world of

sexuality is from those of politics or the economy, for Weber “eroticism” ‘was in its foundations and
significance caught up in the universal contexts of the rationalization and intellectualization of Kultur’:
ibid. 407.
282 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

repudiation of any such consolation had long been apparent [cf. XX.16].150 In the
long run, therefore, universal and meaningful ethical religiosity was bound to break
down—and it had done so.
This was also ‘the problem of theodicy’, the developing and ultimately insuper-
able inconsistency between worldly injustice and the compensation offered by an
all-powerful ethical god, a subject about which he said a good deal in 1913–15 and
after [i.101]+.151 Weber had no doubt that the world was an imperfect place; that
contrary to conventional Christian (Leibnizian) theodicy, the bad prospered while
the good did not; that there was ‘undeserved suffering, unpunished injustice and’—
worst of all—‘incorrigible stupidity’.152 He could see (for example) why German
workers in answer to a 1907 questionnaire might give ‘the “injustice” of the world
order in this life’ as an obvious reason for not believing in God.153 All the same,
‘protest against the injustice of the social order’ according to any abstract, moral

150 ‘Die deutschen Landarbeiter’ [1894], MWG I/4.339; cf. Freiburg Inaugural [1895], ibid.

558–60, 572.
151 Sociology of Religion [c.1913], MWG I/22–2.290–301; Einleitung’, AfSS 41 (1915), 6–11;

‘Zwischenbetrachtung’, ibid. 419–21. It is a mark of how limited was the social focus of even Weber’s
most enlightened and “sociological” contemporaries that the “problem of theodicy”—which was
ultimately a problem for society and Kultur as a whole—did not exist for them. For Ernst Troeltsch
the deepest modern religiosity was mystical and socially detached, while Georg Simmel supposed that
“for those whom God loves”, i.e. those who were religious by nature, “all things must work out for the
best”, since in this case the religious world was constituted from within the religious nature of the
individual: Die Religion (Frankfurt a. M., 1906), 16; cf. 69 (GSG 10.53; cf.106). This might be called
cultural construction—or putting one’s head in the sand.
152 ‘Politics as a Vocation’ [1919], MWG I/17.241; ‘Einleitung’, AfSS 41 (1915), 9;

‘Zwischenbetrachtung’, ibid. 415, resp.

153 ‘Einleitung’, AfSS 41 (1915), 10; cf. Sociology of Religion [c.1913], MWG I/22–2.292;

‘Allgemeine . . . Nationalökonomie’ [1894–8], MWG III/1.366, on ‘Gerechtigkeitssinn’. The circular

and report of its findings were the work of Adolf Levenstein, Die Arbeiterfrage, mit besonderer
Berücksichtigung der sozialpsychologischen Seite des modernen Großbetriebes und der psycho-physischen
Einwirkungen auf die Arbeiter (Munich, 1912), 326–53, although the number of responses that can be
read in a strictly Weberian sense, as distinct from the general complaint that the churches were on the
side of capital, is very small. Levenstein resembled Paul Göhre in his desire to lay bare the working class
in all its immediacy, and here is the origin of Weber’s interest in him. Unlike Göhre, he was an
autodidact, a populist Nietzschean, a Social Democrat, and a Jew (MWG I/11.388). He was also a
degree more at home amongst the industrial labour force than Göhre. His interest in worker
psychology and attitudes appeared similar to Weber’s, and his use of enquiry questionnaires was a
format Weber had grappled with in 1892–4 in regard to rural labour. Furthermore his first
publications appeared at an opportune moment, when Weber was working on ‘The Psychophysics
of Industrial Labour’, causing Weber to make personal contact with him in the winter of 1908–9.
Weber pronounced Levenstein’s raw material to be ‘a treasure trove’: ‘Zur Psychophysik . . . ’, MWG
I/11.280 n. 35a. However, his and Jaffé’s attempts to help Levenstein prepare some of it for
publication in more rigorous form in the Archiv broke down—he had neither their academic
inclination nor time to spare—and in late 1909 Weber wrote a review of Levenstein’s first
publications that, while making full allowance for his good intentions, was sharply critical of his
methodological naiveté and belletrist tendency: ‘Zur Methodik sozialpsychologischer Enquêten und
ihrer Bearbeitung’ [November 1909], MWG I/8.388–408; cf. Weber to Jaffé, 12.1.09, Briefe.
Nonetheless, Die Arbeiterfrage represented a kind of fulfilment of the 1909 project. Weber
maintained contact with Levenstein thereafter, and gave him a copy of his own privately printed
memorandum on the methodology of social-psychological investigation of 1908: Max to Marianne
Weber, 24.1.10, 13.4.11, Briefe; Adolf Levenstein, Die Arbeiterfrage (Munich, 1912), 3 n. *, citing
‘Erhebungen über Auslese und Anpassung der Arbeiterschaft der geschlossen Großindustrie’ [MWG
I/11.78–149].
 Religiosity and Modernity (II) 283

conception of justice was not practical, that is, responsible politics,154 and the
moral outrage of the ‘negatively privileged’ could explain neither why ethical
religiosity had originally risen up, nor why it was now in decay. Weber was not
a social elitist, but neither did he believe that history had been made by the poor
and weak. Hence his crisp dismissal of the Nietzschean theory of Ressentiment, of a
morally fuelled “slave uprising”, as a general explanation for the emergence of
schemes of transcendental ethical retribution and compensation: ‘the character of
the great religious–ethical systems was conditioned by far more particular social
conditions than the mere opposition between the ruling strata and the ruled.’155
He also rejected ‘anti-religious scepticism’ as an explanation for religious change
(though he might well agree with much of what was said): ‘in principle [it] had been
presented in just the same way in [Ptolemaic] Egypt, the Vedas, in post-exilic
Jewish literature as it was today’, and modern writers had added ‘almost no new
arguments’ to the ancient thesaurus.156 Modern religious breakdown could not
even be explained by the impact of the ‘rational cognition’ of Wissenschaft, above all
of natural and mathematical science, though this idea was a truism for conventional
analysts of secularization.157 Weber did not deny that it was in this sphere that the
tension between religiosity and the life ‘orders’ appeared ‘at its greatest and in its
most principled form’,158 and he accepted that Wissenschaft might well offer the
best description of the world that modern man inhabited so far as natural causality
was concerned. But still religion, by its universality and its claim to supply an
ethical “meaning” to the world, offered an understanding of the world that ‘by its
nature and meaning was wholly heterogeneous and disparate in comparison to the
performances of intellect’. For Wissenschaft, unlike religion, ‘seemed unable to give
any certain account of its own ultimate presuppositions’—a sign of its lack of a
comparably universal foundation in society and Kultur at large.159
No. The substantive foundation for the decline of a universal ethical religiosity
was precisely ethical: that is, the acknowledged collapse of universal value systems in
late nineteenth-century Kultur, the ‘anarchy of values’, the assumption with which
Weber grew up and which lies at the heart of his thought. This ethical fracture was

154 ‘Politics as a Vocation’ [1919], MWG I/17.238; cf. 245.

155 ‘Einleitung’, AfSS 41 (1915), 11; cf. Sociology of Religion [c.1913], MWG I/22–2.265. Weber
was, however, prepared to admit the qualified importance of Ressentiment in the Jewish case, because
the Jews were a pariah people, who nurtured an unparalleled thirst for supra-mundane revenge by way
of compensation: ibid. 257–62.
156 ‘Zwischenbetrachtung’, AfSS 41 (1915), 413; cf. Sociology of Religion [c.1913], MWG

I/22–2.356.
157 e.g. Georg Simmel, regardless of all qualifications, ‘Religiöse Grundgedanken und moderne

Wissenschaft. Eine Umfrage’ [1909], in Gesammelte Schriften zur Religionssoziologie, ed. H. J. Helle
(Berlin 1989), 84–6; Ernst Troeltsch, ‘Protestantisches Christentum’ [1905], 376. Just how important
natural science and materialism was for Troeltsch (the son of a doctor) can be seen from his belief that
the basis of any modern Christianity must lie in its reconciliation with nature, the abandonment of
supernatural dualism, and the creation of a new ‘natural system’: ibid. 391; cf. ‘Meine Bücher’, in
R. Schmidt (ed.), Die Philosophie der Gegenwart in Selbstdarstellungen, ii (Leipzig, 1923), 165–6.
158 ‘Zwischenbetrachtung’, AfSS 41 (1915), 412.
159 Ibid. 414, 417, resp. The second quotation is both an anticipation of ‘Science as a Vocation’

[1917/19], and a repetition of ‘Knies und das Irrationalitätsproblem’ [1903–5], WL 60–1.

284 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

synonymous with the plural, secular processes of rationalization. The emergent,

multiple, life or world ‘orders’ were also ‘value-orders’,160 and the true root of
modern meaninglessness lay in the inevitable clash of irreconcilable values and
value-systems. However, since (paradoxically) modern men’s adherence to values
and orders was both plural and absolute—the fact of plurality did not lead to
pluralism, to resignation or reduced commitment—this state might also be de-
scribed (as we saw) as a kind of this-worldly, de-magified ‘polytheism’ or daimo-
nia.161 Here again Weber steers clear of the language and thinking of secularization,
with its assumption that there had been a qualitative change from a godly to a
godless state, just as he personally (but privately) described himself not as ‘godless’
(gottlos), but as ‘alien’ or ‘remote from God’ (gottfremd, gottfern): ‘wholly and utterly
remote from God, one lives against God, wholly and utterly alone.’162
Weber’s classical synoptic statement on the breakdown of universal religious
meaning is that given in the ‘Zwischenbetrachtung’ of 1915.163 Yet it is far from
complete as it stands, and the full significance of this subject, which is surely the
most personally engaged and value-laden in his academic uvre, cannot be appre-
ciated without reference to his writings of a decade earlier. There is (for example) an
evident identity of view between his description of living ‘against God, wholly and
utterly alone [einsam]’, a statement made in April 1920, and the ‘inner isolation
[Vereinsamung]’ of the Calvinist in the PE, who is also in a situation of ‘utter
remoteness from God’ and whom ‘no god’ could help [XXI.11]. And while the
‘Zwischenbetrachtung’ undoubtedly supposes that the developing forms of reli-
gious and secular rationalization lead ultimately to modern breakdown, it has
nothing specific to say about the present day. For this we may also turn to the
PE where the tone is much less Job-like [XX.30]:
Such natures as are filled with the “capitalist spirit” today tend to be, if not directly hostile to
the church, then indifferent. The thought of the “pious boredom” of paradise has little
attraction to a nature rejoicing in action; to such people religion appears as a means of
diverting people from their work on this earth. If one were to ask them for their own account
of the meaning of their restless pursuit – a pursuit which can never be contented with what it
owns, and must therefore appear quite meaningless precisely because of its orientation of life
solely towards this world—then they would sometimes answer (if they had an answer at all):
“to provide for the children and grandchildren”; but more frequently and more accurately,

160 ‘Science as a Vocation’ [1917/19], MWG I/17.99; cf. ‘Zwischenbetrachtung’, Af SS 41 (1915), 394.
161 ‘Zwischen zwei Gesetzen’ [1916], MWG I/15.98; ‘Science as a Vocation’ [1917/19], MWG
I/17.99.
162 Weber to Else Jaffé, 24.4.20, Briefe, corrected by reference to Else Jaffé to Karl Jaspers, 16.6.26,

Jaspers Nachlaß, Deutsches Literaturarchiv, Marbach. See further PE [XXI.68] (Gottferne); for
gottfremd, ‘Zwischenbetrachtung’, 390, 403; ‘Science as a Vocation’ [1917/19], MWG I/17.92, 106.
His one use of the term gottlos in a modern Occidental context occurs in the Sociology of Religion, as
an extension of the ‘religionless’ modern equivalent of predestination at work in men’s conduct and
ethics: MWG I/22–2.367. Besides evident scepticism about the use of the term (‘so to speak’), this
extraordinary conception (cited below, at n.189) is hardly secularized in any ordinary sense, since
godlessness (sc. the want of a religious root) is offset by the continued presence of predestinarian
thinking.
163 Af SS 41 (1915), 415–19. There is no significant revision to this passage in 1919–20: MWG

I/19.515–19.
 Religiosity and Modernity (II) 285
since this first motive is obviously not peculiar to them but works just as powerfully with
“traditionalists”, it would be quite simply that for them business with its constant labour had
become “indispensable to life”. It is in fact the only true motivation, and at the same time it
expresses what is irrational about this conduct of life, where a man exists for his business and
not the other way round.
Weber is a good empiricist. He does not suppose that Carl David Weber (whom
he has in mind here) is a militant secularist; he is merely religiously indifferent,
like Max Weber Sr, and so many of the Wilhelmine bourgeoisie, and in this sense
the language of ‘secularization’ would (again) be exaggerated. But still this is the
identical problematic to that outlined in 1913–15. The claims of an ethical and
loving Lutheranism to supply an ethical meaning to the world have broken down
for a mind that in its conduct is now orientated ‘solely towards this world’ or else
‘the capitalist economic order’ within it [XX.17, 31], an order that is ultimately as
irrational in its foundation as Calvinist religion, because capital like the Calvinist
god is an impersonal power ruling over the individual person according to its logic
and not theirs.
But even the totality of Weber’s religious writings will not give us a complete
picture on this point. They must be supplemented by his methodological writings:
above all, the essay on “Objectivity” of 1904, written in the closest proximity to the
PE. It is a classical illustration of the proposition that none of his writings, even the
segment of his œuvre that is most commonly segregated from the rest, can be kept
in separate compartments. The methodological writings have at their core a
Wissenschaftslehre: a doctrine about the nature and status of Wissenschaft, which is
in turn a statement about meaning. This doctrine is ultimately descended from
early nineteenth-century German idealism, but (as with Weber’s rationalism and
liberalism) it is vastly more sceptical in its assumptions. (The accidental and
inauthentic choice of Wissenschaftslehre as the title for Marianne Weber’s collection
of Max’s work in this area had its justification after all.)164 Now although for Weber
Wissenschaft is independent of religion in principle, it remains intimately linked to
his thinking about religion, since both are preoccupied with the question of the
meaning of the world. Hence this statement in the essay on “Objectivity” of the
only explicit a priori commitment on which his thinking relies: ‘The transcendental
presupposition of every science of Kultur is . . . that we are persons of Kultur,
equipped with ability and the will to take up a conscious position in relation to
the world and endow it with meaning.’165 The desire to create meaning is built into
us all, whether we are the agents of history or its academic analysts, and this is a
‘transcendental presupposition’ because the question of meaning is ultimately a
question about religion or its denial.

164 For the chapter of accidents behind this title, which again reveals Marianne’s intellectual

uncertainty and dependency on all around here: Bärbel Meurer, Marianne Weber (Tübingen, 2010),
483. Weber himself envisaged a ‘volume of essays on methodology’, ‘a collection of methodological-logical
essays’ (to Paul Siebeck, 24.5.17, 8.11.19, Briefe), and never spoke about Wissenschaftslehre.
165 »Objektivität« [1904], WL 180.
286 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

All human conduct can and must be measured on the scale of its meaningfulness.
There may be a gap between the ‘empirical reality’ that confronts the agent and its
‘mental ordering’ by the analyst,166 but in principle analysis on this basis is sound,
because of the transcendental presupposition. The social science of Verstehen and
Deutung (the understanding and mental construction of observed human conduct)
advocated by Weber is no more nor less than an understanding of the greater or
lesser meaning to be found within the actions of the individual. The most
transparently meaningful conduct is also the most rational, that is, teleologically
or purposively rational, since (in another famous apophthegm), ‘All thinking
reflection [Besinnung] about the ultimate elements of meaningful [sinnvoll]
human conduct is in the first instance bound to the categories “end” and
“means”’.167 And yet, in 1904 as much as in 1913–15, Weber can see no meaning
to the world as a whole. What is commonly called its history is no more than a
‘stream of immeasurable happening [Geschehen]’ or (as the English say) one-damn-
thing-after-another. It is not formed and meaningful history (Geschichte), giving
evidence of a rational ‘cosmos’, but rather its opposite: ‘chaos’.168 Thus ‘we cannot
read off the meaning of world-happening from the results of research into it,
however perfectly executed; instead we must be in a position to create meaning
ourselves . . . ’—and the principal function of the Weberian ideal-type is that of the
conceptual assertion of personally or locally conceived meaning over chaos.169 The
universal meaning once imparted by religion might have become impossible, now
that the tradition of Christian attempts to create meaning had been superseded by
the ongoing processes of secular or worldly rationalization—this is why Weber was
always so scathing about attempts to refound religion in the last decade of his life
[i.14]170—but individual meaning remained, and so the academic analyst, whose
life is predicated on its existence and detection, was very close to a religious thinker.
Wissenschaft might be ‘the power specifically alien to god’171—here Weber accepts
something of the conventional secularizing opinion of the day—but still this was a
repulsion between like entities. Thus one of the central aims of the essay on
“Objectivity” was ‘to bring out the fact that there is often only a hair’s breadth
between Wissenschaft and religious belief ’.172 No doubt such a proposition came as
something of a surprise to the secularized, revisionist–socialist readers of the Archiv
für Sozialwissenschaft, but for Weber it was fundamental.
Further comment on this question is provided by the class of intellectuals, the
class that (as we saw) was defined by ‘an inner necessity of its own, to be able to
grasp the world as a meaningful cosmos’.173 The leading statement here is contained

166 The ‘mental ordering of empirical reality’ is the constantly repeated definition of social science

that pervades »Objektivität«, starting at WL 150.

167 Ibid. 149; ‘Knies und das Irrationalitätsproblem’, ibid. 54, resp.
168 Ibid. 184 (qn); 177, 197, 207, 214 (‘chaos’). 169 Ibid. 154.
170 See also Sociology of Religion [c.1913], MWG I/22–2.271, 289–90; ‘Einleitung’, AfSS 41

(1915), 14; ‘Science as a Vocation’ [1917/19], MWG I/17.108–9.

171 ‘Science as a Vocation’ [1917/19], MWG I/17.92.
172 »Objektivität« [1904], WL 212.
173 Sociology of Religion [c.1913], MWG I/22–2.265. Above II.5.iv.
 Religiosity and Modernity (II) 287

in the famous lecture on ‘Science as a Vocation’ which, as the reference to vocation

or Beruf in the title and its original (1917) date of delivery suggest, is deeply
marked by the religious frame of reference that Weber was concurrently expound-
ing in the ‘Economic Ethics of the World Religions’ (1915–18).174 Setting aside
the now faded eschatological hopes of the Social Democrats for the advent of the
socialist utopia, based on ‘the almost superstitious transfiguration of “Wissenschaft”’
as propounded by Marx and Engels,175 there remained two principal types of
modern intellectual, located primarily in the German universities, the seat of
Wissenschaft. On the one hand, there were those ‘literati’ who, in denial of the
‘iron facts’ of rationalization, purveyed a fake ‘professorial prophecy’, which aspired
to quasi-religious status; on the other, there were university teachers who, in
agreement with Weber, practised the apparently lesser function of ‘simple intellec-
tual honesty’.176 Honesty required the admission that Wissenschaft could not
replace the superseded ethical religions and explain ‘the meaning of the world’ or
that of the life of the individual.177 Yet once an individual had chosen ‘an ultimate
basic position in terms of Weltanschauung’, the teacher could help that individual to
‘draw up an account of the ultimate meaning of his own actions’. In so doing (Weber
suggested) the teacher might even be said to ‘stand in the service of “ethical”
powers: duty, clarity and the sense of responsibility’ (though as always his hesitation
in using the word “ethical” in a modern context stands out).178 So while Wissen-
schaft could never serve the same function as an ethical religion and was in principle
independent of it, still the religious and post-religious context of this famous
declaration is clear. The modern world as a whole might lack universal, religious
meaning, but the role of Wissenschaft in helping individuals work out the meaning
of their own actions—actions that commonly occurred in the form of mass
phenomena and so took on social form [cf. XX.20]—was ‘not so very little’.179
Yet however important these contemporary, methodologically framed state-
ments might be, the true working-out of the problem of meaning in the modern
Occident could only be understood historically, and here the PE is central. If there
was a fundamental problem of meaning in modern Kultur, there was also a kind of
solution or resolution to it, which had been at work since the seventeenth century.
We have seen how the Calvinist resolved the problem of developing modern
impersonality by becoming so locked up in an isolated relationship with a tran-
scendental God who cared nothing for him that previous Christian ideas about
fraternity or personal connection fell away. This same theology resolved the
problem of meaninglessness in similarly brutal yet ambiguous fashion. Acceptance

174 ‘Science as a Vocation’ was first delivered on 7 Nov. 1917: MWG I/17.49. Work on the

‘Economic Ethics’ continued down to April 1918, when Weber left Heidelberg for Vienna: cf. to Mina
Tobler, 4.4.18, Briefe.
175 Sociology of Religion [c.1913], MWG I/22–2.287.
176 Resp. [Das neue Deutschland, 1918], MWG I/16.381; ‘Science as a Vocation’ [1917/19],

MWG I/17.110; cf. 98. See also my ‘Max Weber and the literati’ in Kay Waechter (ed.),
Grenzüberschreitende Diskurse (Wiesbaden, 2010), 243–78.
177 ‘Science as a Vocation’ [1917/19], MWG I/17.105; cf. 93.
178 Ibid. 104. 179 Loc. cit.
288 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

that there was a god suggested that there was a religious meaning to the world, but
still the Calvinist God was deus absconditus, a hidden god [XXI.9 n. 9],180 and his
meaning was unknowable in principle [XXI.10]:
God is not there for the sake of man, but man for the sake of God, and all mere happening
[Geschehen] . . . acquires its meaning exclusively as an instrument to the end of God’s
glorification of his own majesty. To attach criteria of earthly [ethical] “justice” to his
sovereign decrees is meaningless, and an infraction of his majesty . . . and his decrees are
only intelligible to us and can only be known at all, insofar as he finds it good to inform us.
These fragments of eternal truth are all that we can hold onto; everything else—the meaning
of our individual fate—is surrounded by dark mystery, which it is impossible and presump-
tuous to fathom.
It would be easy to suppose that this was a terrible fate, which left the ascetic
Protestant seared by ‘salvation anxiety’, and the PE is often read in this way.181 But
‘salvation anxiety’ is an invention of commentators, and in fact Weber’s thinking
here, as in so much of what he says about modernity, is precisely balanced. He
himself had considerable doubts about his personal fitness to cope with the modern
condition: the idea of being subservient to a narrow, specialized calling worried him
deeply [XXI.107–8]. Again, when he spoke of the intellectual’s ‘inner compulsion,
to grasp the world as a meaningful cosmos’,182 we must suppose he had in mind his
own needs, and for all his energy and determination in facing up to the problem of
meaninglessness, a hard, sober, ascetic life was not a life devoted to the pursuit
of happiness [cf. XX.16]. Yet so far as the ordinary, non-intellectual adherent of
the modern rational, capitalist ethos was concerned—a man such as Carl David
Weber—the twentieth-century conclusion to the argument of the PE displays no
signs of anxiety: ‘What the religiously vital epoch of the seventeenth century
bequeathed to its utilitarian heir was, above all, an immensely good—we may
safely say a pharisaically good—conscience regarding the acquisition of money’
[XXI.104]. As an intellectual, Weber might not have liked this, but he could see its
rationale, and as always he was prepared to set his own personal claims aside in a
“value-free” academic utterance. As suggested above, even if his views were ‘pessim-
istically tinged’, they were never pessimistic.

180 Cf. Sociology of Religion [c.1913], MWG I/22–2.297—a piece of text almost certainly written

with the PE to hand.

181 The originator of this view was David Zaret, ‘Calvin, Covenant Theology and the Weber

Thesis’, British Journal of Sociology, 43 (1992), 369–91. It was then taken up by members of his original
conference audience, e.g. Gianfranco Poggi, ‘Historical Viability, Sociological Significance, and
Personal Judgement’, in Hartmut Lehmann and Guenther Roth (eds), Weber’s Protestant Ethic
(Cambridge, 1993), 295–304, here 295–6, and has since become textbook orthodoxy: Frank
Parkin, Max Weber (London, 20022), 45–51. It is true that initially predestination was an ethical
test, which gave rise to ‘torments’ (Qualen) [XXI.20]. However, this was not a psychological state to be
dwelt upon, but a problem to be solved, which it was and triumphantly so.—For similarly bleak views
of modern capitalism and the predicament of modern man within it, Wolfgang Schluchter, Religion
und Lebensführung (1988), ii. 502–4; Hartmann Tyrell: ‘Worum geht es in der “Protestantischen
Ethik”?’, Saeculum, 41 (1990), 130–77, here 131. I suggest this striking consensus tells us more about
sociology c.1990 than about Max Weber c.1905.
182 Sociology of Religion [c.1913], MWG I/22–2.265.
 Religiosity and Modernity (II) 289

In the same way he was convinced that ascetic Protestantism and Calvinist
predestination provided a uniquely appropriate general training for modern Occi-
dental man: otherwise they could hardly have been so extraordinarily successful and
‘world-conquering’ [XXI.30], above all in their English and American incarnations.
Just as a prohibition on thinking in “personal”, humanly vital, terms allowed the
ascetic Protestant to be self-centred, ‘ultimately concerned only with himself and
his own salvation’ [XXI.14], so not having to worry about the problems of social
justice and meaning in a world that to the earthly eye was unjust and meaningless,
was a liberation, a ‘release’ or ‘salvation’ (the German Erlösung carries both these
meanings):
If he is to act within the world, hence through inner-worldly asceticism, the ascetic must be
stamped with a kind of happy closed-mindedness regarding every question about the
“meaning” of the world, and need not bother himself about it. So it is no accident that
inner-worldly asceticism could develop itself most consistently on the basis of the Calvinist
God whose motives are absolutely inscrutable and divorced from every human standard.
Accordingly the inner-worldly ascetic is the model “vocational” or “professional being”, who
neither asks, nor thinks it necessary to ask, about the meaning of his exercise of an objective
[sachlich] vocation within the world as a whole—something for which of course not he but
God carries the responsibility—because he is satisfied by the consciousness that in his
personally rational conduct within this world he is realizing the will of God, even though
its ultimate meaning is inscrutable.183
This was Calvinist “theodicy”, which had nothing to do with conventional Christian
notions of theodicy and the enactment of earthly “justice” [XXI.10], but was rather a
sacralized version of Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’, where one was devoted to one’s
specialized calling and need never think outside its limits. As a device for promoting
active conduct within the world, it was eminently functional and rational, and so it
was that, instead of ‘the modest sinners’ nurtured by personal and emotional
Lutheran doctrines of penitence and contrition, ‘there were bred up those self-
assured “Saints” [of the seventeenth century], whom we meet again in the steel-hard,
Puritan businessmen of the heroic age of capitalism and in individual cases down to
the present day’ [XXI.20]. Here we should recall how Weber never tired of
emphasizing the psychological importance of the certitudo salutis (the certainty or
assurance of salvation): ‘the mighty aura of joyous certainty in which the immense
contortions produced by the feeling of sin are relieved’ [XXI.8]; ‘the only psycho-
logically tangible element in the salvation goods of this ascetic religiosity’; the ‘centre
from which all else was nourished’; ‘the source of all psychological stimuli of a purely
religious character’ in any religion [i.103 n. 2]+.184 Coupled with the determin-
istic insistence of the predestinarian that God’s grace once granted could never be

183 Ibid. 328; cf. ‘Zwischenbetrachtung’ AfSS 41 (1915), 390; and PE [i.101]+: ‘The complete

exclusion of the theodicy problem and all those questions regarding the “meaning” of the world and of
life on which others wore themselves out, was something which the Puritan took entirely for granted’.
184 Quotations outside the PE are from ‘Einleitung’ [1915/20], MWG I/19.98; Sociology of

Religion [c.1913], MWG I/22–2.428, resp. See above II.3 at n. 47 on certitudo in Buddhism.
290 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

lost, this was an enormous, present empowerment, and not just a distant hope for the
afterlife.185
By the eighteenth century, let alone the early twentieth, the religious or more
accurately ‘dogmatic roots’ supplied by predestinarian theology had died out, as
Weber frequently notes [XXI.3]. But while the theological superstructure of
argument founded on the rewards and punishments of the next world had lapsed,
the operation of the ascetic Protestant ethic in this world went on undisturbed. All
those practices that had been introduced in response to the impersonal and
unfathomable will of the hidden God now became ‘ends in themselves’: increasing
one’s fortune; the infinite acquisition of money; and, most comprehensively, the
‘conception of labour as an end in itself or “calling”’ [XX.24; cf. 14, 16, 23, 32].
This is nothing less than the first significant (yet critical) recognition of a funda-
mental assumption that dominates first-world Kultur today: that an individual who
does not have a defined employment within the cosmos of an infinitely specialized
division of labour is fundamentally maimed and lacks purpose or meaning in
life.186 At the same time, while any appeal to the next world (Jenseits) had been
abandoned, the idea that there were higher powers standing above the individual
had not. The situation ‘where a man exists for his business’ or calling ‘and not the
other way round’, is simply a secular copy of the religious predicament where ‘God
is not there for the sake of man, but man for the sake of God’, and both are equally
‘irrational’ when judged by any elementary, ‘unconstrained’ or “natural” calcula-
tion of enjoyment or pleasure [XX.30; XXI.10].187 Just in case we have missed the
point—and even Weber might have been impressed by the inability of later
generations to read the PE, for all that they did not share his Kultur and
assumptions—he reminds us that what is an ‘end in itself ’ appears to us ‘as
something wholly transcendental’, hence analogous to the ‘absolute transcendence’
of the Calvinist God [XX.16; XXI.22]. Conversely, he finds that the ‘absolute
determinism and complete transcendence’ of Calvinism were in principle ‘much
“more modern”, extraordinarily so’ than any Lutheran or Catholic alternative
[XXI.36]—and the idea that Weber was offering ‘pessimism without transcend-
ence’ is doubly mistaken.188 Transcendence was ever-present in his eyes (even if it
was by no means an unmixed blessing), and again we see why to describe the
historical movement he portrays as secularization, with its implications of radical
qualitative change, would be deeply misleading.

185 Contrast [XXI.9–10, 36] on the Lutheran doctrine of gratia amissibilis, grace that can be lost.
186 Contrast Émile Durkheim’s benign, ‘organic’ conception of the division of labour: De la division
du travail social (1893).
187 For Weber there is no such thing as original human nature, hence (aside from quotations or his

abuse of “organically” constrained peasants), “natural” commonly appears in “”: [XX.17, 21; XXI.39,
69, 73]. He is more tolerant of the idea of being ‘unconstrained’ (unbefangen), a frequent entry in the
text and a less emotive term than ‘free’, though evidently this leaves the question of what is
‘unconstrained’ or “natural” unresolved.—On higher powers, compare Schluchter, Religion und
Lebensführung, ii. 531, who supposes that ‘The acknowledgement of non-rational, supra-personal
powers, on which our life depends’ is a religious situation only.
188 Volkhard Krech, Wissenschaft und Religion (Tübingen, 2002), 240.
 Religiosity and Modernity (II) 291

Believing that the statement he had made in the PE was sufficient, Weber saw
little need to add to it in 1912–15. So there is only one point in the Sociology of
Religion where he returns to the doctrine of predestination; but it still supplies a
telling rhetorical climax. Thus it expands without altering his earlier views, when
it insists that there is a modern, ‘non-religious’ (religionslos) ‘pendant’ or equiva-
lent to the original religious doctrine. The predestination of the contemporary
neo-Calvinism of Abraham Kuyper (Dutch Minister-President between 1901 and
1905) was, in his view, decadent, in that it did not dare to advocate it in its full
rigour.
But the belief as such has not been truly rooted out. It has changed its form only. For in all
cases the determinism of predestination was an instrument for the most intensive, systematic
focusing [Zentralisierung] of the “ethic of conviction” that can be conceived. . . . The non-
religious pendant to this religious valuation of faith, founded on a this-worldly determinism,
is that specific kind of “shame” and, so to speak, godless feeling of sin which possess modern
man, arising in the same way from ethical systematization leading to an ethic of conviction,
regardless of whether it has a metaphysical foundation or not. This is not something he has
done; he simply “is” this way, without trying to be so, by force of an unalterable make-up, so
that he could act thus. This is the secret torment he must bear, as is the rejection [in human
terms] which is expressed by the deterministically framed “pharisaism” of other people—
both are equally alien to humanity, because equally lacking in the meaningful possibility of
“forgiveness” and “repentance” or “atonement”, in exactly the same way as the religious
belief in predestination itself was . . . 189
The emphasis on historical continuity in fundamental forms of human behaviour
carrying over into a “secular” world, ‘regardless of whether it has a metaphysical
foundation or not . . . by force of an unalterable make-up’, could hardly be more
explicit. Such is the religious argument of the PE.

APPENDIX (SEE NN. 93, 131). WEBER, TOLSTOY

AND THE QUESTION OF ‘MEANING.’
Both Edith Hanke and Hartmann Tyrell, ‘Intellektuellenreligiosität, “Sinn”-Semantik,
Brüderlichkeitsethik—Max Weber im Verhältnis zu Tolstoi und Dostojewski’, in
A. Sterbling and H. Zipprian (eds), Max Weber und Osteuropa (Hamburg, 1997), 25–58,
relocate Weber’s interest in universal meaning in a Tolstoyan and Russian context. How-
ever, without suggesting that Tolstoy should be excluded from the consideration of Weber’s

189 MWG I/22–2.367. ‘Pharisaism’ signifies the insulated complacency that derives from believing

oneself to be in correct possession of the law: [XXI.104]. Thus for Weber the Pharisees were ancestors
of the legal formalism of the Puritans: cf. MWG I/21.777–846.—In his remarks on Kuyper Weber
almost certainly draws on the latter’s 1898 Stone lectures on Calvinism (Amsterdam, Edinburgh, New
York, 1899), which state that while ‘particular grace’ continues to determine the salvation of the
individual, ‘there is . . . also a common grace by which God, maintaining the life of the world, relaxes the
curse which rests upon it’: p. 30. For Kuyper, Calvinism became more effective in its worldly work
through a relaxation of the double decree of predestination within a Christian context; for Weber, by
contrast, it was precisely the retention of predestination’s deterministic rigour that produced its worldly
efficacy, even if the theology itself was left behind.
292 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic
religious ideas generally, he is marginal at this point. Besides the arguments presented in the
text, note the following:
(1) The implication of such treatments is that Weber’s own thinking and experiences
were to some extent secondary matters, and that he was reduced to a simple rejection or
acceptance of Russian ideas, “Either–Or”, which thus supply the real clue to his thinking; cf.
Hanke, Prophet des Unmodernen (Tübingen, 1993), 208. But this would be most unlikely
when, so far as Weber was concerned, Russia was part of the Orient, not the Occident (e.g.
Sociology of Law, MWG I/22–3.419, 542–3, 554), and the premisses of his own thought
were relentlessly Occidental.
(2) Given the Oriental/Occidental rift, it is hardly surprising that Weber’s and Tolstoy’s
conceptions of meaning and meaninglessness are different and rarely intersect even as
opposites. For Weber, the central datum is that the modern world is meaningless in a
universal religious perspective, whereas Tolstoy asserts that the world throughout eternity
can and should still be understood along religious lines. To this extent the modern world
might, if its inhabitants so chose, be (in Weberian language) meaningful. Accordingly
(Weber supposes), Tolstoy, like all Russians, finds the secular, modern, Occidental, ration-
alized life orders or spheres ‘meaningless in fact’ (at Frankfurt, 21.10.10, GASS 467). But
this is different from Weber’s view. For Weber, today’s life orders are meaningful, albeit they
confer only partial meaning. What is now meaningless are the universal claims of religion,
and there is no choice in this matter. So his ideas on modern meaning or the want of it have
little to do with Tolstoy: plainly the latter did not know or conceive of the scheme of the
modern, secular life ‘orders’, and few will be persuaded by Tyrell’s contention that Tolstoy
was an ‘ever-present’ ‘representative of “religious rationalism” ’ for Weber when discussing
this subject (‘Intellektuellenreligiosität’, 35). The one direct connection between them
comes when Weber acknowledges a debt to Tolstoy’s reflections on why death is now
meaningless to the modern man: ‘Science as a Vocation’, MWG I/17.87. But here he has
inverted Tolstoy’s ideas. For Weber the span of an individual life is meaningless because
modern man is aware (as Weber was most profoundly aware) of long-term, secular historical
movements operating over millennia; hence of human existence extending ‘into infinity’
(loc. cit.). For Tolstoy, by contrast, modern man experiences something like Weberian
meaninglessness (but more accurately, the constant fear of death) only because of exaggerated
selfishness: that is, an exclusive focus on himself and his own lifespan alone. However, he will
regain a sense of “meaning” (but more accurately, tranquillity and joy) once he understands
that his ephemeral existence is part of a much greater continuum of human love over the
generations: Tolstoy, On Life [1887], }}XXVII–XXXIII (Tolstóy Centenary Edition, vol. 12,
London, 1934). In short, what for Weber produces meaninglessness—eternity or infinity—
produces meaning (or rather, joy) for Tolstoy. The only qualification to this is Weber’s
acceptance that modern death on the battlefield was still meaningful, but this is equally anti-
Tolstoyan: ‘Zwischenbetrachtung’, AfSS 41 (1915), 398; cf. MWG I/22–1.206.
(3) So far I have assumed that there was some approximation between Weber’s and
Tolstoy’s ideas about meaning, but while Tolstoy does speaks of “the meaning of life” on
occasion, and an assembly of Tolstoyan materials by other hands was published as The
Meaning of Life (Munich, 1901) (cf. Hanke, ‘Erlösungsreligionen’, in Max Webers »Reli-
gionssystematik« [Tübingen, 2001], 218), this was not a central discursive focus for him, and
his idea of meaning (such as it was) was not the same as Weber’s. For Tolstoy, the
“meaning” of life had no separate existence apart from spiritual and ethical rightness in
the life of the ordinary individual. For Weber, by contrast, “meaning” was an intellectual
preoccupation, the attempt to construe the world as a whole, as a rational cosmos, which
 Religiosity and Modernity (II) 293
reached its apex in the class of intellectuals: ‘The intellectual seeks . . . to endow his conduct
of life with a thoroughgoing “meaning”; hence “unity” with himself, with fellow men, and
with the cosmos’ (Sociology of Religion, MWG I/22–2.273). Weber recognized this
difference in viewpoint. For him, Tolstoy’s view of the world, like that of Russian religiosity
in general, was ‘acosmic’, and so not concerned with conscious meaning at all, which
could only exist in a rational cosmos (Weber at Frankfurt, 21.10.10, GASS 467; MWG
I/22–2.288). The fundamental question Tolstoy posed about life was not the question
posed by the Weberian intellectual, ‘what is the meaning of life?’, but a different one, which
is reproduced by Weber: ‘Who will answer the question . . . : what should we do? and: how
shall we arrange our lives?’ (‘Science as a Vocation’, MWG I/17.105). This recalls, and was
intended to recall, Tolstoy’s famous book What is to be Done? (1886). In sum, the Tolstoyan
question is a question about how the ordinary individual should live his or her life, where
any perceived movement in history was illusory. The Weberian question, “What is the
meaning of life?”, applied to the universe and the course of world history in its entirety.
(4) Closely related to the question of “meaning” is that of the category of intellectuals,
given Weber’s definition of the latter as a class particularly concerned with meaning. Weber
never placed Tolstoy in the category of intellectuals, because he in no way conformed to his
definition of the term. As noted above (II.5.iii), there were two roots to this definition: first,
the idea of intellectualism as the over-refined corruption of true religion—the antithesis of
his (or anyone’s else’s) view of Tolstoy. Secondly, Weber sees another strain of intellectual in
the Russian revolutionary intelligentsia. This is an oddity in a religious context: it is ‘like a
religious movement of intellectuals’, but it is not. Its eclectic mixture of populism, agrarian
communism, Slavophilism, Marxism, and mysticism came ‘under the influence of Tolstoy
and Dostoevsky’, who stand respectively for acosmism and asceticism, but who are not part
of the movement (MWG I/22–2.288). But while this may place Tolstoy adjacent to a
particular, eccentric group of intellectuals, it does not place him in any connection with the
search of intellectuals for religious meaning; nor does it make him an intellectual. In a
religious light Weber was interested in Tolstoy simply as a backward-looking continuation
of the ideas of the Sermon on the Mount, of love, and hence by implication Lutheranism
(‘Zwischen zwei Gesetzen’ [1916], MWG I/15.97). Hanke’s description of Tolstoy as a
Prophet of the Unmodern is entirely appropriate.
(5) Thus the attempt to create a Weberian category of ‘religious intellectualism’ with
Tolstoy and Dostoevsky at its heart, is mistaken (Tyrell, ‘Intellektuellenreligiosität’, 29–31).
Weber may plot the engagement of ‘elite’ and ‘proletaroid intellectuals’ with religion (MWG
I/22–2.266–90), but there is no category of ‘religious intellectuals’ or ‘religious intellect-
ualism’ as such, because for Weber authentic religiosity—the source of effective imperatives
to ethical conduct—was in principle separate from the bases of intellectual reflection,
empirical knowledge and its conceptual construction, which could tell one nothing about
ethics. Ethical and salvation religiosity capable of creating universal meaning was by
definition something infinitely greater than the commonly misplaced reflections of intel-
lectuals on religious subjects, about which he was deeply suspicious. Hence Weber’s
cognitively founded contempt for such intellectual delusions as ‘the worst of devils’, which
was (he held) the counterpart of the religiously based stance of Occidental Christianity that
had ‘from its first beginnings placed itself in opposition to intellectualism’ (MWG I/17.105;
I/22–2.282, resp.). Tyrell supposes that Weber, in introducing his discussion of intellectuals
in the Sociology of Religion, described his subject as ‘den religiösen Intellektualismus rein
als solchen’ (‘Intellektuellenreligiosität’, 31). But here the wish has been father to an
imaginary text. Weber’s actual subject is ‘den Intellektualismus rein als solchen’ (MWG
I/22–2.265): ‘intellectualism’ not ‘religious intellectualism’.
 7
Capitalism and Herrschaft

If the PE has framed a black hole at the mid-point of Weber’s life, capitalism is at
the heart of this darkness. Today interest in what Weber had to say about capitalism
is distinctly muted which, given the nature of our contemporary Kultur, seems very
strange.1 Why should this be? The situation was different in the 1920s, when the
PE was ‘the best known’ of all Weber’s works,2 yet even then the difficulties in
promoting him as a theorist of capitalism were apparent. Most obviously, ‘capital-
ism’ appeared to be a Marxist subject. It was not in fact. Marx talked only about
‘the capitalist mode of production’, and the all-embracing ‘capitalism’ of the PE, of
‘modern’ or ‘material Kultur’, was a distinct innovation [XX.53–4; XXI.107–10].3
But by 1920 the distinction between the two was a somewhat distant scholastic
nicety, and to notice it was to overrule it: the subject was equally ‘capitalist
“economy and society” or the capitalist “production process”’, Weber or Marx.4
Now in fact Weber made a major contribution to the reshaped image of Marx that
arose then and shapes our understanding even today. The starkly individual
foundation to the argument of the PE was as crucial to the emergence of a
“humanist” Marx as nascent existentialism. It was the PE that took capitalism
out of the purely economic sphere and made it into a subject for social science, a
move that Marxists, who had no answer to the marginalists’ dismissal of Marx’s
economic theory as obsolete, were only too happy to follow, so that Marx could
reappear as a sociologist.5 The first and principal agent of this reshaping, Georg
Lukács, was closely connected to Weber and made ample use of his ideas. At this
date it seemed obvious that Weber’s critique of modern capitalist Kultur in terms of
rationalization and Versachlichung (objectification) was little different from Lukács’
Verdinglichung (reification) or Marx’s newly rediscovered ‘self-alienation’, and that
dehumanization in these terms, like Weberian capitalism, was a cross-class condi-
tion, the common fate of capitalist and worker alike.6 No wonder Lenin’s blood

1 See, for example, the centenary celebration of the PE: W. Schluchter and F. W. Graf (eds),

Asketischer Protestantismus und ,Geist’ des modernen Kapitalismus: Max Weber und Ernst Troeltsch
(Tübingen, 2005), where, as the sub-title suggests, capitalism does not feature in any significant sense.
2 Siegfried Landshut, ‘Max Webers geistesgeschichtliche Bedeutung’, Neue Jahrbücher für

Wissenschaft und Jugendbildung, 7 (1931), 513.

3 Above I.4, 8.
4 Karl Löwith, ‘Max Weber und Karl Marx’, AfSS 67 (1932), 54.
5 Ibid. 61; Siegfried Landshut, Kritik der Soziologie (Munich and Leipzig, 1929), 63. Society (‘all

the phenomena of society and socialized man’) rather than the economy is Lukács’ reference point
throughout: Geschichte und Klassenbewußtsein [1922] in Frühschriften II (Darmstadt, 1968), here 189.
6 e.g. Löwith, ‘Max Weber und Karl Marx’, 56, 88; Siegfried Landshut, Kritik der Soziologie,

54–82; Lukács, Geschichte und Klassenbewußtsein, 349–50, on the identity of experience between
 Capitalism and Herrschaft 295

boiled. But if the Western European Marxism of the 1920s was in important
respects Webero-Marxism, the fact remains that this strain of thought continued to
be identified as Marxism: if Weber was mentioned at all, then it was a case of ‘Max
Weber within the tradition of Western Marxism’.7 Thus the high road of Marxist
and post-Marxist thought, and the principal outlet for thinking about capitalism,
ran from Lukács, where Weber was a figure in the background, to the Frankfurt
School ,where he was persona non grata, until Jürgen Habermas reintegrated him
into the mainstream of critical social theory c.1968–81.8 To be sure, this belated act
of justice was a sign of the times and by this date Weber had found his own
defenders; but even so, when they entered on the subject of capitalism, it was a
Marxist “capitalism” and Weber’s response to Marxist categories that they ex-
pounded, rather than Weber’s own conception of capitalism.9 A further conse-
quence has been that, with the general decline in the prestige of Western Marxism
since c.1980, Weber’s views on a capitalism perceived in essentially Marxist terms
have ceased to be of interest, even if in general Max Weber, the canonical author,
has been a major beneficiary of this process. So Weberians have fallen silent on the
subject, while by a delicious irony Habermas has berated Weber for not being
sufficiently post-Marxist: that is, for having equated ‘the capitalist model of
rationalization with social rationalization as a whole’.10
There was a tradition of social thought standing outside Marxism, but those who
retained an allegiance to Weber (men such as Karl Löwith, Albert Salomon,
Siegfried Landshut) did so only in authentic Weberian fashion: as individuals
who presumed to think for themselves, and who owned personal allegiance to no
one, not even Weber. As Löwith remarked, ‘It was thoroughly characteristic of
Weber that he had in no respect created a “school”’ of disciples,11 and the post-
1918 generation did not intend to flout his wishes. So besides a detached acknow-
ledgement that one could as well call him a ‘bourgeois Marxist’ as a ‘heroic
bourgeois in the era of the bourgeoisie’,12 the most noticeable contribution these
German–Jewish emigrés made to the canon of liberal social thought was not
the promotion of Max Weber and capitalism, but of Alexis de Tocqueville and

capitalist and worker; cf. 275 on reification as a ‘basic category’ for capitalist society as a whole. The
relevance of Weber to Lukács’ development in 1919–22 was surprisingly ignored by Michael Löwy, for
whom he is simply one of the bourgeois classics, ‘Weber, Simmel, etc.’: Pour une sociologie des
intellectuels révolutionnaires (Paris, 1976), 214.
7 Jürgen Habermas, Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns (Frankfurt, 19874), i. 461–88; cf.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Les Aventures de la dialectique (Paris, 1955).

8 Two milestones are ‘Technik und Wissenschaft als »Ideologie«’ (1968) and Theorie des

kommunikativen Handelns (1981).

9 Wolfgang Mommsen, ‘Kapitalismus und Sozialismus: Die Auseinandersetzung mit Karl Marx’,

in Max Weber: Gesellschaft, Politik und Geschichte (Frankfurt, 1974), 144–81; Guenther Roth, ‘The
Historical Relationship to Marxism’, in Guenther Roth and R. Bendix (eds), Scholarship and
Partisanship: Essays on Max Weber (Berkeley, 1971), ch. 12.
10 Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns, ii. 449.
11 Löwith, ‘Max Weber und Karl Marx’, 57.
12 Albert Salomon, ‘Max Weber’ [1926], in Werke, ed. Peter Gostmann et al. (Wiesbaden, 2008),

I. 148, 154. Salomon was the nephew of Alice Salomon, an old friend of Marianne Weber: Meurer,
Marianne Weber, 483–4.
296 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

democracy.13 The one modern Weberian who latched onto these “Weimar”
authors was another determined individualist, Wilhelm Hennis, and this surely
accounts for the modicum of attention he paid to capitalism. But it was overridden
by his primary “humanist” agenda (derived from these same authors and Karl
Jaspers), and so remained a minor component in his work.14 Meanwhile, despite
the fertility of German and German–Jewish emigration after 1933, the emigrés’
Marxist and Weberian histories had relatively little impact on the indigenous
British and Americans who, in the absence of a European socialist tradition, had
no particular interest in Weber’s relationship with Marx.15 For them capitalism was
primarily an economic phenomenon and to be understood as such, within cultures
where the disciplinary profile of economics far outweighed that of social science. Of
course there was an American social science, but consciously or not, it was
increasingly framed apart from the hegemonic discipline of economics, while
historical and institutional economics waned. Hence the later deviation whereby
(most famously) Talcott Parsons, having initially imbibed something of the Wei-
mar German interest in Weber and capitalism and translated the PE as a result,
became progressively more interested in a separate, systemic sociology after 1945.16
An alternative side-product of this Anglophone environment was the curious
empiricist assumption—alien to anyone interested in social theory, but a cultural
fact all the same—that a principal means of engaging with Weberian ideas about
capitalism was to prove that the historical account of its origins suggested by the PE
was incorrect. However, the deficiency of such work in a Weberian perspective was
that it commonly exhausted itself in historical criticism, without making any
significant statement about the present, even though this was Weber’s central
concern.17 This was indeed “history in the narrow sense”.

13 Siegfried Landshut, Albert Salomon, and their friend and associate J. P. Mayer (also a Weberian)

were principal instruments in the promotion of Tocqueville after 1930, though his American
credentials were, of course, invaluable.
14 Wilhelm Hennis, Max Webers Fragestellung (Tübingen, 1986), iii; cf. Historian, 90 n. 62.
15 Talcott Parsons supposed that Weber was broadly anti-Marxist, H. M. Robertson that he was

just as fierce a critic of capitalism as Marx: resp. The Structure of Social Action (New York, 1937),
503–13; Aspects of the Rise of Economic Individualism (Cambridge, 1933), 207.
16 See Talcott Parsons, The Early Essays, ed. Charles Camic (Chicago, 1991); U. Gerhardt, Talcott

Parsons: An Intellectual Biography (Cambridge, 2002).

17 e.g. H. M. Robertson (Economic Individualism), coming forward to Gordon Marshall,

Presbyteries and Profits (Oxford, 1981), In Search of the Spirit of Capitalism (London, 1982). Note,
however, that R. H. Tawney, an original social thinker who subordinated any use of Weber to his own
purposes, falls outside this category: Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (London, 1926). Since Marshall
wrote, allegedly “historicist” criticism of this kind, which ignores Weber’s own sophisticated and
explicit premisses about historical method, has taken many directions, and has ceased to serve anything
more than the most localized function. Heinz Steinert’s Max Webers unwiderlegbare Fehlkonstruktionen
(Frankfurt, 2010) advertises itself as historicist, but what is really being advertised is Steinert’s previous
work as a sociologist. This enjoys an enhanced profile by being pitted against a sociological classic, but
is derisory in scope when compared to the range of Weber’s historical knowledge, and has no
connection to it. That Weber’s agenda in 1904 had nothing to do with the agenda of his
seventeenth-century subjects is repeatedly emphasized in the PE, which makes literally dozens of
reference to ‘our purposes’, and ‘the perspectives which interest us here’ [XX.53, 12]. So it has nothing
to do with historicist construction of the past on its own terms, and in these terms it is radically
“mistaken”. Surely it is not necessary to write a book to prove such an elementary point.
 Capitalism and Herrschaft 297

Still, the problems of reception are only part of the explanation as to why
Weberian capitalism is so much at a discount. Weber himself was equally to
blame. As we have seen, he could not get a final ‘conceptual fix’ on capitalism in
1904 [XX.12], and after 1907–8 capitalism ceased to enjoy the headline status that
it occupied in the PE. As a result there is no explicit focus on capitalism in the
surviving drafts of ‘Economy and Society’. This is partially offset by the famous
statement in the 1919 ‘Vorbemerkung’, where capitalism remains ‘the most fateful
power of our modern life’, but still Weber does not seek to explain capitalism as
such. Instead his ‘first concern is: to recognize the special peculiarity of Occidental
rationalism . . . and to explain its rise’ [i.4,12]. Statements such as this underlie the
orthodoxy of today that ‘Capitalism is Max Weber’s first theme’ but that subse-
quently ‘the theme of capitalism passes over into that of rationalism.’18 Here, in
other words, is the principal and indeed only substantial evidence for the view that
Weber’s thinking changed decisively after the composition of the PE. Yet, as we
have also seen, the idea of any radical discontinuity in Weber’s thinking after 1905
has proven to be false. There can be no doubt that rationalism or rationality is
already the principal theme of the original PE—its historical argument moves from
proto-rational asceticism to the formal rationality of modern Kultur—just as (on
the other hand) there is no sign of Weber abandoning his interest in capitalism in
later life. ‘Capitalism’ may be formally absent from ‘Economy and Society’, but the
overall scheme of the Grundriss der Sozialökonomik within which ‘Economy and
Society’ sits, is explicitly focused on ‘capitalism’ and the ‘capitalist economy’. Indeed
the focus is tightened between 1910 and 1914, and this too was a scheme drawn up
by Max Weber, the general editor, for whom capitalism was “modern economy and
society”.19 In short, here is another problem in his intellectual biography: where
exactly does capitalism fit into Weber’s later thinking?

I . MORE PROBLEMS WITH CAPITALISM

We have already mapped the outlines of Weber’s fundamental problem with

capitalism (I.8, II.1). In its capaciousness and modernity it resembled modern
rationalism; yet rationalism was far superior as a conceptual instrument for the
interpretation of Occidental history and Kultur and so superseded it in the years
1902–8, even if capitalism remained unshaken as a historical fact. However,
capitalism was not a mere negative, a discarded approximation to rationalism,

18 Wolfgang Schluchter, Die Entwicklung des okzidentalen Rationalismus (Tübingen, 1978), 15, 18,

resp. Something like this view can be found in the early Talcott Parsons, who states that Weber’s first
theme after 1902 was ‘an empirical concentration on a particular historical phenomenon—“modern
capitalism” ’, which ‘ultimately issued in an analytical sociological theory’: Structure of Social
Action, 503.
19 The Grundriss is divided into six Books, and by 1914 the titles of Books II–VI all make specific

reference to capitalism or the capitalist economy, leaving only Book I, ‘Foundations of the Economy’,
to consider the economy and economics in principle. This is where Weber’s ‘Economy and Society’ is
placed. Compare the ‘Stoffverteilungsplan’ (1910) with the ‘Einteilung des Gesamtwerkes’ (1914): e.g.
MWG II/8.808–23.
298 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

just as we cannot reduce his later thought to a set of reflections on rationalism. The
central social function of capitalism that concerned Weber in the 1890s was its
operation as an agency of impersonal Herrschaft or rule.20 Thus the central shift in
agenda from capitalism to rationalism can also be described in more specific terms
as a shift from capitalism to bureaucracy, where the latter would emerge as the
leading type of modern Herrschaft after 1910. This transition and its working-out
are our central subjects here.
Herrschaft is yet another in the litany of leading ideas that Weber did not wait to
discover until he was in his late forties. The fact that he wrote successive treatments
of Herrschaft in ‘Economy and Society’ after 1910 does not mean that he omitted to
consider the subject previously; far from it.21 In fact the history of his thinking on
this subject begins with capitalism. Both in the 1890s and again in 1904–5 he
conceived of capitalism as a form of Herrschaft, yet its status here as in other respects
was ambiguous and unresolved. We usually think of the structures of Herrschaft as
political, yet Weber always insisted they were social in the first instance, since in
principle rule signified the working of any form of orderly hierarchy within a social
group or association (Verein, Verband): ‘every group to which one belongs presents
a relationship of rule between persons.’22 The ‘political association’ (not ‘the state’)
was only a sub-set of this wider social category, albeit a prominent one, and at the
institutional level, Herrschaft could also embrace hierocracy or (in plainer language)
the rule exercised by churches.23 Capitalism occupied an uncertain position on the
frontier between the social and the more obviously political and institutional forms
of rule. That Weber should think in such terms shows that the pan-European
intellectual engagement with Marx after c.1885, which embraced liberals quite as
much as avowed socialists, to say nothing of more local symptoms such the political
aspirations of the German SPD, forms a significant if general context. After all, Marx
had solved an analogous problem with elegant, if somewhat brutal, simplicity. For
him the capitalist mode of production undoubtedly translated into the class rule of
the bourgeoisie with the state as (ordinarily) a mere projection from these founda-
tions. But while Weber had a well-developed post-Marxist belief in the power of
material interest, he rejected the idea that the state was a mere ‘superstructure’,

20 The common, though not universal, translation of Herrschaft is ‘domination’. This is a mistake.

Domination signifies the unrestricted power of a lord (dominus) within his private domain based on the
household, the domus or oikos. This is different from and contrary to Weber’s subject of legitimate rule
requiring the mobilization of opinion within the social and public sphere, just as his pronounced
interest in the oikos shows his sensitivity to this distinction. ‘Rule’ is a better translation though not a
perfect one. It too underplays Weber’s concern with the reciprocal nature of the relationship between
ruler (or rules) and ruled; but still it is a public and non-arbitrary category. For this reason I continue to
refer to the German original, but in all translated quotations from German ‘rule’ signifies Herrschaft.
21 The principal modern authors on this subject are preoccupied with the Sociology of Herrschaft in

‘Economy and Society’, and so take it for granted that Weber’s interest in Herrschaft commences with
the text, c.1910. This produces excellent commentary by historically informed writers, but not a history
of Weberian ideas: Edith Hanke, ‘Max Webers »Herrschaftssoziologie« Eine werkgeschichtliche Studie’,
in Edith Hanke and W. J. Mommsen (eds), Max Webers Herrschaftssoziologie (Tübingen, 2001), 19–46;
‘Einleitung’, MWG I/22–4.1–25. Stefan Breuer makes an admirable declaration of principle to the
contrary, but it makes little practical difference to his text: »Herrschaft« in der Soziologie Max Webers
(Wiesbaden, 2011), 4.
22 Weber at Frankfurt, 20.10.10, GASS 444. 23 MWG I/22–4.579–679; WuG 29–30.
 Capitalism and Herrschaft 299

or that the world of politics lacked an autonomous life of its own [XX.18–19, 33]. In
addition, Weberian ‘capitalism’ was a larger, more comprehensive entity than Marx’s
‘capitalist mode of production’, presenting its own problems of definition. So
clarification of the relationship between capitalism and Herrschaft was required.
In the 1890s he was profoundly impressed by the invasion of what he would later
call the “spirit” of capitalism into agrarian society east of the Elbe. This subversion
of a previously feudal and personally based landlord rule was accompanied by the
rise of ‘something impersonal, the rule of capital’, which was also ‘the impersonal
class rule’ of the propertied or bourgeois class.24 Now Weber never doubted that
the socio-economic precursor to capitalism, the rule of the Junker landlords (Grund-
herrschaft), was also a form of political rule (here is another context to set alongside
Marx and Marxism); so why should one not have the same expectations regarding
its triumphant successor? Capitalism was certainly an enormously powerful force.
When, at the Protestant–Social Congress in 1897, the economist Karl Oldenberg
expressed the hope that the growth of Germany’s industrial development and
involvement in international trade could be limited, so as to preserve a more stable,
autarkic agrarian sector, Weber did not mince his words in response. His col-
league’s ‘observations were a violent assault against industrialism and capitalism,
against the rule and leading position of capital . . . Instead of colleague Oldenberg
venting his wrath against capitalism, it would have been as well, from an academic
[wissenschaftlich] standpoint, to pose the question: can such a capitalist development
for Germany be prevented, and however long colleague Oldenberg goes on simply
asserting the contrary, I say: no, it cannot be prevented’.25 Its precise form might
vary, but the rule of capital and capitalism was inevitable. It was part of the body
of long-term evolutionary–historical truths that were ‘academically’ or even ‘scientif-
ically’ founded, and operated regardless of one’s value-standpoint or Kultur. Here is
a side to Weber going “beyond values” that expositions of his “value-free” method-
ology commonly overlook—though his Frankfurt School critics did not—and his
prediction in 1905 of the inevitability of the forthcoming rule of high capitalism in
Russia, a country outside the pale of European Kultur, was just as unsparing.26
Yet this apparently unstoppable power had its limits. Modern capitalism might
transform economy, society and Kultur, but it did not necessarily confer political
power and Herrschaft. It had not done so in Germany, for example, as Weber made
plain in the famous conclusion to his Freiburg Inaugural address of 1895: ‘At all
times it is the attainment of economic power which has given rise to the belief within
a class that it is a candidate for political leadership. It is dangerous and in the long run
irreconcilable with the national interest, if an economically sinking class’—the
Junkers—‘retains political rule in its hands. Yet it is still more dangerous if classes
towards which economic power is moving’—the bourgeoisie—‘and with it candi-
dacy for political rule, are not politically ripe for the leadership of the state.’27
Elsewhere and in a deeper historical view, he held that modern times had witnessed

24 e.g. ‘Die deutschen Landarbeiter’ [1894], MWG I/4.327. 25 MWG I/4.631.

26 ‘Zur Lage der bürgerlichen Demokratie’, MWG I/10.270. 27 MWG I/4.566.
300 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

‘the elimination of the formal connection betw[een] economic & political rule’, a
disjunction that had arisen with the original capitalist economies of the high
medieval cities, the cradle of the modern bourgeoisie, since, however advanced
they might have been economically and socially, they lacked political power.28
Capitalism was an impersonal rule not only in the principal Weberian sense, that it
was not ethically warm and humanly direct, but also in a more literal one, that it
lacked personnel: ‘For this reason one speaks of the rule of “capital” and not that of
capitalists.’29
So the nature of the Herrschaft exercised by modern capitalism was unresolved,
and this problematic status is clearly—if, as usual, concisely—stated in the PE. As
in the 1890s, there was no doubt as to the power of capitalism, when expressed
through the merciless logic of the market:
Today’s capitalist economic order is an immense cosmos into which the individual is born; it
is presented to him, at least as an individual, as a housing [Gehäuse] that in practice cannot
be modified, and in which he must live. It forcibly imposes its norms of economic conduct
on the individual, insofar as he is caught up in the relationships of the “market”. The
manufacturer who persistently contravenes these norms will just as infallibly meet with
economic elimination, as the worker who cannot or will not adapt to them, will be thrown
unemployed onto the street. [XX.17–18; cf. 29]
Furthermore, this was in lineal historical succession to another form of extra-
political Herrschaft, that of the churches or hierocracy:
the Reformation signified not so much the elimination of church rule over life in general, but
rather the replacement of the previous form of rule by another: that is, the replacement of a
rule which was extremely comfortable, in practice little felt at the time, and in many respects
of a largely formal kind, by an infinitely burdensome, deeply serious regimentation of the
whole conduct of life, as extensive in conception as it could be, reaching into every sphere of
domestic and public life. [XX.3]
But unlike either churches or states capitalism was, as noted, lacking in physical
agents. The obvious capitalist “leaders” and “rulers” were entrepreneurs, but
though they might exercise some tangible discipline on the factory floor [XX.18
n. 1], the principal agency of rule and leadership was their ability to prevail in the
marketplace, which was a matter of economic superiority not physical force. For
this reason the logic of the market could operate only once the members of a society
had internalized its logic and prescriptions: ‘the product of a long sustained “process
of education”’, something (in Weber’s view) that began with the interior ‘discipline’
and ‘self-control ’ of the Puritans (as distinct from the external and institutional
church discipline that had already been perfected by Catholicism).30 The end-result
was that ‘today’s capitalism . . . has secured a position of rule over economic life’

28 ‘Allgemeine . . . Nationalökonomie’ [1894–8], MWG III/1.367. For a converse case where ‘The

superior power of capitalism enslaves the helpless state by all legal forms’, see Weber to Helene Weber,
18.9.[96], Nachlaß Max Weber 30/12 Bl. 78, writing about Bilbao.
29 Die Börse I [1894], MWG I/5.148.
30 Resp. [XX.23; XXI.19 n. 27, 81 n. 20; 25, 28–9].
 Capitalism and Herrschaft 301

[XX.18], but not of rule overall. Implicitly, therefore, a fundamental question had
been raised: was a Herrschaft without personnel and political presence really a form
of Herrschaft at all? Until Weber decided on this, the status of capitalism was
necessarily in doubt, and this doubt could hardly be settled in a text such as the PE
that formally excluded politics.
There was a second problem relating to capitalism, which was more subtle, and
yet equally far-reaching. Besides doubt as to whether it was an effective form of
Herrschaft, there was a further question: if it was a form of Herrschaft, what type was
it? In the PE and the accompanying methodological essays of 1904–5, Weber had
worked out for the first time some of the most fundamental building-blocks of his
thought: that is, the nature of rational conduct; the distinction between formally
and materially rational conduct; the decision to classify conduct in terms of its
greater or lesser degree of rationality; and a typology of religious behaviour framed
along these lines (ascetic or mystic). At the same time, within the original PE, Weber
had also begun to map out a typology of Herrschaft calibrated according to its degree of
rationality—an instinctively conceptual thinker could not do otherwise. Yet the
placement of capitalism within this typology was a renewed source of uncertainty.
The PE may not present three clear types of Herrschaft in the way it presents the
polarity between asceticism and mysticism; nonetheless, its author is preoccupied
with three clearly identifiable sets of ideas. That such a suggestion (however novel
to some readers) is not implausible can be seen from the fact that the earliest known
statement of the famous three types that make up the “mature” or final typology
of Herrschaft, ‘traditional . . . bureaucratic . . . charismatic’, dates from as early as
1906.31 To be sure, the context is not that of rule over the community as a whole
but the forms of authority exercised over children: parents represent tradition,
the schoolteacher bureaucratic authority, and then there is a third category: the
charismatic leader, with the comment attached: ‘Yearning for leaders.’ Now why
children should yearn for leaders and who these charismatic persons are is
unclear—perhaps this was an autobiographical comment? Perhaps Friedrich
Kapp appeared as a charismatic figure to the young Max Weber?32 But still the
coincidence with the much better-known typology of his later years is far more than
mere coincidence, and sends us back to the PE text to enquire.
In the first instance we face two types and not three: the opposition between
capitalism and its generic counterpart, ‘that type of feeling and behaviour which is
commonly called “traditionalism”’ [XX.20]. But the latter is evidently a precursor
to traditional Herrschaft in the post-1910 scheme. However, within the PE Weber
constructs traditionalism as a mirror image of capitalism: like capitalism it has at its
core a ‘spirit’ or even “ethic”, and here too, in a mirror of his uncertainties over
capitalism, Weber refuses to offer a firm conceptual definition and contents himself
with illustrations only, drawn from his work on East Elbean agricultural labour
[XX.28; cf. 20]. This self-restraint was surely more to do with the problems of

31 ‘Hausverband, Sippe, Nachbarschaft’, MWG I/22–1.322. On this text: II.5 n. 119.

32 This is by no means a remote speculation: Weber to Hermann Baumgarten, 8.11.84,
Jugendbriefe, 140–2; cf. MWG I/22–4.484–5, on Henry Villard.
302 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

capitalism rather than traditionalism: Weber could hardly operate asymmetrically

with a secure traditionalism and insecure capitalism. Nonetheless reference back to
his work from the 1890s shows that there were some limits to his conception of
traditionalism at that date. The specific manifestations of behaviour that was
economically traditional, based on ‘traditional grouping of professions [Berufe]’,
‘traditional wages’, and primitive market ‘haggling’ according to ‘traditional forms’,
do not extend to political rule as the later ‘traditional Herrschaft’ will do. When
Weber speaks (as he does) of ‘the traditional relationship of Herrschaft’ that is
under attack by capitalism, he is thinking of a landlord not a political ruler, even if
that landlord had been a political ruler in the past.33 So there is a gap between
traditionalism here, and traditional Herrschaft as expounded after 1910, with the
PE occupying a somewhat soggy interim position. All the same, these versions of
traditionalism have everything in common psychologically, and there is little to
choose between traditionalist hostility ‘to the flexibility of human motives’ in the
1890s; the desire of the worker in the PE ‘to live in the manner to which he is
accustomed’ [XX.21]; and adherence to ‘the norms of tradition’ after 1910.34
Furthermore, the reason why his conception of traditionalist behaviour in the
1890s fell short of traditionalist landlord Herrschaft in the more remote past is
evident: it was decadent, having been subverted by the insurgent spirit of capitalism
that had invaded the Junker estates since c.1850.35 But if contemporary tradition-
alism was unresolved, still this carried no implication for the idea of traditionalism
as such. Once it was removed from its mirror relationship with capitalism in the PE,
it was subject to none of the conceptual doubts and difficulties that assailed
capitalism—there was no parallel to the competitive and destabilizing relationship
between capitalism and rationalism in the case of traditionalism—and it could
become one of Weber’s three pure types of Herrschaft.
So there was a filiation between traditionalism in the PE in 1904 and traditional
Herrschaft after 1910.36 But what was the relationship between modern capitalism
in 1904 and the other, non-traditional types of Herrschaft, rational and charismatic,
as they emerged after 1910? The immediate suggestion must be that there was an
affinity between capitalism, which in the PE is in some sense rational, and rational
Herrschaft. At the opening of his treatment of ‘bureaucratism’ (c.1911), the
embodiment of rational Herrschaft in ‘Economy and Society’, Weber lays down
three minimum conditions for its existence (the presence of defined bureaucratic
spheres of competence; rules for the enforcement of duties within these spheres;
and formally qualified personnel to fulfil them). He then comments: ‘In public and
legal Herrschaft these three factors constitute the durable substance of a bureaucratic

33 Resp. ‘Allgemeine . . . Nationalökonomie’ [1894–8], MWG III/1.394–5; ‘Entwickelungstend-

enzen . . . ’ [1894], MWG I/4.399; cf. PE [XX.27–8].

34 Resp. ‘Allgemeine . . . Nationalökonomie’, MWG III/1.358; ‘Die drei reinen Typen der

legitimen Herrschaft’ [c.1917], MWG I/22–4.729.

35 Historian, 104–8.
36 This is not to overlook the fact that, after 1910, ‘traditionalism’ will generate the new sub-types

of patrimonialism and feudalism. It is thus a good deal more complex than the well-known pure type
suggests.
 Capitalism and Herrschaft 303

“authority”, and in that of the private economy, the substance of a bureaucratic

“enterprise”.’37 In short, there is an elementary affinity between the capitalist
enterprise (Betrieb) and the legal–rational rule of the bureaucracy, and this is
something to which he constantly returns in his later writings. Hence (for example)
the dictum that ‘Very large modern capitalist undertakings are themselves normally
an unsurpassed model of strict bureaucratic organization’,38 while in the ‘Vorbe-
merkung’ of 1919–20, where he is particularly concerned to locate the place of
modern capitalism within the overall evolution of Occidental rationalism, he refers
repeatedly to ‘modern, rational enterprise–capitalism’ and the ‘modern rational
organization of the capitalist enterprise’ [i.11, 8; cf.4, 8 n. 1].39 Furthermore, the
idea of a nexus between the capitalist enterprise, rationality, and bureaucracy was
far from new. Company structure had been at the heart of Weber’s early disserta-
tion on medieval trading societies (1889), and the definition he gives there of the
Betrieb as a continuous concern, as distinct from companies set up for the occasion
only, is essentially the same as that recorded in ‘Economy and Society’ in
1919–20.40 Such durability necessarily implied some form of apparatus, and so
in the lectures on ‘General Economics’ (1894–8) we find Weber noting, in regard
to all enterprises that were not merely local, that as their size increased they were
‘more rationell ’. At the same time, ‘Emphasis on bureaucratic management’ also
increased.41 Now Weber did not deploy the term rational in the 1890s (I.2), but in
this instance the established term rationell definitely anticipates his later neologism.
So the idea that by its bureaucratic and rational capacity the capitalist enterprise
might be construed as a modern form of rational Herrschaft was clearly present in
Weber’s mind by the time he wrote the PE.
Nonetheless, the idea of a rational capitalism (as distinct from the rational
capitalist enterprise) is not broached in the PE. Now one might suggest that this
was a simple omission—because capitalism in its institutional form as an enterprise
was part of the extra-individual “second side” to social enquiry that Weber neg-
lected in the original PE [XXI.110]. However, the story is the same when we
examine the “first side”, the “individualistic” and “ethical” argument of the PE,
where the ethic or “spirit” is the very kernel of Weberian capitalism. While it is clear
that Weber sees a connection between ascetic Protestantism and the “spirit” of
capitalism, hence that rational behaviour deriving from ascetic Protestantism is at
least a component in capitalist behaviour, he nowhere says that there is an identity
between capitalist and rational behaviour. He nowhere speaks, for example, of
‘the rational “spirit” of capitalism’; he does not, as he does of asceticism, use a series
of equivalents such as ‘capitalist, i.e. rational ’;42 nor does he classify capitalism
in the way he will later classify legal–bureaucratic Herrschaft, as ‘rational in
character’.43 Yet, as we have seen, the explicit argument of the PE takes us from

37 MWG I/22–4.157. 38 Ibid. 186; cf. WuG [1919–20], 128–9.

39 ‘Enterprise-capitalism’ first appears in ‘Confucianism’, AfSS 41 (1915), 56.
40 Cf. MWG I/1.157–8, 183–4; WuG 63–4.
41 MWG III/1.580. These ideas are then repeated: in regard to bureaucracy (599) and what is

rationell (652).
42 Cf. Eranos Minute, MWG I/9.220-1: ‘ascetic, i.e. rational ’. 43 WuG [1919–20], 124.
304 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

ascetic or proto-rational behaviour to that which is rational. So why did Weber not
drive this to what appears to be its logical, capitalist conclusion? If he had said that
rational behaviour was capitalist behaviour, his argument would have been closed;
its rational thrust would have been much clearer; and the not unjustified suspicion
of Weber’s readers that there was some opacity to the argument of the PE could
hardly have arisen. And it was surely some such closure as this that Weber had in
mind—or toyed with—when he first introduced the “spirit” of capitalism and
expressed the hope that ‘the final conceptual fix’ regarding its nature might be
established ‘at the close of the investigation’ [XX.12]. However, as we saw (I.8),
the hope was vain, for the birth of ‘the rational conduct of life on the basis of the
vocational Idea . . . out of the spirit of Christian asceticism’ was only ‘[a] constituent
component of the capitalist spirit’, not its entirety [XXI.107].44
Resistance to identifying capitalism as rational, except in the specific context of
the enterprise or Betrieb, continued to the end of Weber’s life.45 In the final draft of
‘Economy and Society’ (1919–20), his principal definitional statement regarding
capitalism relates to the various forms of capitalist acquisition (Erwerb)—a genuine
psychological category, and one that permeates the vocabulary of the PE, for
example, where Weber assents to Sombart’s equation between a capitalist economy
and one based on ‘acquisition’ [XX.25].46 The definition lists market acquisition;
speculative acquisition; and various forms of political acquisition; but no specific-
ally rational acquisition.47 It is true, he surely regards the first of these categories as
significantly more rational than the others, and elsewhere in the same text he speaks
on one occasion of ‘rational, market-oriented capitalism’ in contrast to ‘politically
oriented capitalism’.48 But this is an occasional remark generated by a comparison;
not a conceptual definition. Indeed, it is because the chapter on ‘Fundamental
Categories of Economic Activity’ in ‘Economy and Society’49 seeks to lay down
categories that are sociologically usable—that is, to be measured on a spectrum of
rationality—that it has so little to say about capitalism. So in fact the only common
shorthand description of capitalism for Weber after 1907 is not ‘rational’ but

44 Later textual revision makes the point more explicit: ‘One of the constituent components of the

capitalist spirit . . . ’, GARS i.202.

45 Contra Richard Swedberg, Max Weber and the Idea of Economic Sociology (Princeton, 1998),

47–52; Dirk Kaesler, ‘Vorwort’ to Max Weber, Die protestantische Ethik . . . (Munich, 2004), 14, 42,
48, 55.
46 ‘Acquisition’ is, however, distinct from the more or less biological suggestion of an “acquisitive

drive” (Erwerbstrieb), which Weber found deeply suspect [XX.19].

47 WuG 95–7.
48 Ibid. 117; cf. 174. This same comparison produces a reference to ‘rational capitalism’ as a

heading in the late Staatssoziologie in a student transcript: MWG III/7.66. That Weber said something
like this seems reasonable; but that he did not say this also seems clear, since, in an alternative transcript,
the heading is given in entirely different form (III/7.67). When the transcripts coincide there is a
reasonable presumption that we are close to Weber’s meaning; but here the presumption must be that
his language was rather too subtle for the students to catch.
49 WuG 31–121. The extremely modest description of this text at its opening is much the best brief

guide to Weber’s intentions when writing it: ‘In what follows no kind of “economic theory” is being
advanced; rather it is just a matter of defining some frequently used concepts and establishing certain,
extremely simple sociological connections present within the economy.’
 Capitalism and Herrschaft 305

‘modern capitalism’50—which is a historical, not a conceptual label, identifying a

unique ‘historical individual’ [XX.12]; and it is this particular, historical identity
that reappears in the description in the 1919 ‘Vorbemerkung’, ‘the most fateful
power of our modern life’, where ‘fate’ (Schicksal) signifies historically conditioned
destiny [i.4].
In short, Weber’s failure to identify either “capitalism” or capitalist behaviour
with rationality, either in the PE or later, is deliberate. This then implies that there
is more to capitalist behaviour (the ethic or “spirit” of capitalism) than rationality
alone—and we are reminded of Weber’s youthful association between capitalism
and “freedom” or free space (I.4). Most obviously it points to the behaviour of
capitalist entrepreneurs rather than the rational, wage-maximizing, skilled labour
force, since their opportunities for practising market exchange—the psychological
essence of Weberian capitalist behaviour—are so much more expansive and “free”,
standing outside the key rational qualities of system, method, and logical consist-
ency [e.g. XXI.25–30]. Weber does not say this because he is anxious to stress the
rational commonality of entrepreneurs and skilled labour bridging the class divide
of material interest; but there can be no doubt that the centre of gravity of the
materials illustrating the “spirit” of capitalism in the PE lies with the entrepreneur
and not with labour, that is, with Carl David Weber, Benjamin Franklin, and, in a
negative sense, Jakob Fugger [XX.14–15]. Our hypothesis must be then that, if we
wish to site capitalism within the evolved typology of Herrschaft, then capitalist
behaviour may contain both rational and extra-rational, or implicitly charismatic,
components. If this is true, it follows that the roots of all three categories of
Herrschaft are present in the PE.

I I . CHARISMA

Here then we must pause to consider charisma. It is another of those great

Weberian themes that “everybody knows”, but where one sometimes wonders if
anybody does. Much the most insightful writer on this subject was Albert Salomon
writing in 1926, who recognized charisma as a general theme permeating Weber’s
thought as a whole.51 By contrast, modern commentary has set Weberian charisma
fairly and squarely within the Sociology of Herrschaft in ‘Economy and Society’.
Such is the triumph of scholasticism and political science; but it narrows Weber’s
thinking in two principal respects. First, charisma cannot be tied to Herrschaft
alone. Not only is it prominent in the Sociology of Law,52 but it is a fundamental
component of the Sociology of Religion. The typical modern suggestion that
‘charisma is not something genuinely religious’ is untrue. Charismatic behaviour
in the religious sphere is undoubtedly religious behaviour, while Weber simply does

50 See II.1 at n. 67. ‘Rational, modern capitalism’ [PS i.234] is a variant, but still one tied to

historicity.
51 ‘Max Weber’ [1926], in Werke, ed. Peter Gostmann et al. (Wiesbaden, 2008), I. 135–56.
52 e.g. MWG I/22–3.446–66.
306 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

not share the modern anxiety about what constitutes “genuinely” religious behav-
iour, and such a premiss all too easily gives rise to health warnings against switching
‘too quickly onto the terrain of the Sociology of Religion’ and away from the
“primary” terrain of Herrschaft.53 Secondly, the modern view suggests that Weber’s
thinking about charisma is confined to the period after c.1910 when it is most
visible. But such a chronology is as mistaken here as elsewhere. In regard to
charisma (most unusually) Weber draws our attention to the original source of
his ideas: Rudolph Sohm’s work on the early Christian Church. When doing so he
of course referred his readers to Sohm’s major published work, Kirchenrecht
(Church Law) of 1892, which is already well before 1910, but in fact he had
attended Sohm’s lectures on the subject at Strasbourg ‘with some regularity’ in the
winter of 1883–4, and the central feature of his impression of Sohm at that date, as
a man who gave ‘the impression of a religious apostle . . . preoccupied with a few,
wholly one-sided ideas’, would be reproduced in his first and fullest mention of
Sohm before 1914.54 So the history of Weberian reflection on charisma really
begins in 1883 at the beginning of his formative legal education—and at the same
time that his wider religious–historical views were in the process of gestation. As he
said in 1919–20, the idea of charisma was ‘nothing new’.55
Rudolph Sohm (b. 1841) was a lawyer, not a churchman, who was fully as
enthusiastic about conceptual jurisprudence as Max Weber.56 They were also
connected through the Protestant Social Congress in the 1890s, where their
positioning on church and social politics was not dissimilar, and both enjoyed
close links to Friedrich Naumann.57 Sohm’s starting point in Church Law was to
posit an absolute division between church law and ‘the essence of the church’ or
religious life. The purely conceptual and formal structure of law excluded religious
life and vice versa. It followed that the only truly religious form of church organ-
ization was not the legally defined institutional church epitomized by the Catholic
and Reformation churches, but ‘charismatic organization’, where the leaders of the
church were teachers—no doubt an agreeable point of view to a deeply religious

53 Resp. Hartmann Tyrell, ‘ “Das Religiöse” in Max Webers Religionssoziologie’, Saeculum, 43

(1992), 181; Stefan Breuer, »Herrschaft« in der Soziologie Max Webers (Wiesbaden, 2011), 31.
54 Resp. ‘Lebenslauf ’ [1891], pr. MWG I/1.353; to Max Weber Sr, 21.12.83, pr. Jugendbriefe, 85;

cf. Sociology of Herrschaft [c.1911–14], MWG I/22–4.462. Sohm began working on church law in
1881: Das altkatholische Kirchenrecht und das Dekret Gratians (Munich, 1918), Vorwort, although his
essential premiss, the radical separation between religion and law, was established earlier, as is clear (for
example) from a polemical debate regarding the status of the marriage ceremony in the mid-1870s.
55 WuG 120. Taking as his premiss the need to explain ‘Max Weber’s ideal-type of charismatic

Herrschaft’ in ‘Economy and Society’ after 1910, Thomas Kroll supposes that this stemmed from a
debate between Sohm and Adolf Harnack in 1909 regarding the decay of the apostolic church into its
Catholic form: ‘Max Webers Idealtypus der charismatischen Herrschaft und die zeitgenössische
Charisma-Debatte’, in ed. E. Hanke and W. Mommsen, Max Webers Herrschaftssoziologie
(Tübingen, 2001), 47–72, see esp. 53–4. The result is a conscientious and scholarly speculation,
but the false premiss renders it null.
56 Sohm, ‘Über Begriffsjurisprudenz’, Deutsche Juristen-Zeitung, 14 (1909), 1019–24.
57 Biographical data in Hans Fehr, ‘Rudolf Sohm’, Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für

Rechtsgeschichte. Germanistische Abteilung, 51 (1917), lix–lxxviii. See Weber to Siebeck, 17.5.07,

Briefe, assessing Sohm as one of a number of broadly acceptable names who might discuss the
subject of Evangelisch-sozial.
 Capitalism and Herrschaft 307

university teacher—even if this had been viable only in the peculiar circumstances
of the early church.58 Weber took hold of this ‘one-sided’ view, linked to a unique
historical case, and reworked it as a general sociological category, applicable at all
times and places.59 What interested him was not so much the law of the early
church, but the status of law as such, where Sohm’s rigorously conceptual insistence
on law’s divorce from religion, taken as the most real form of real life, chimed with
his own belief in modern law descended from Roman law as the epitome of a
formally closed and logically pure scheme of thought, untouched by the contin-
gency, infinity, and value chaos of what he took to be real life or “the world”. Now
the formalism of law, as we saw (I.7), was the origin of the set of ideas that would
emerge in the PE as formal rationality. Thus for Weber charisma became an
antithesis not to law as such—unlike Sohm, he had no doubt that there could be
charismatic as well as rational law60—but to rationality. It marked out a sphere
untouched by formally rationalizing procedures and structures—where the very
pervasiveness of rationality in his work evoked an equally pervasive anti-rational
opposite. As an antithesis to rationality, charisma also bears a resemblance to magic.
Hence its frequent association with magic and primitive social states, particularly in
the cases of the charismatic priest and the warrior. However, charisma is a much
more fully developed idea than that of magic and, unlike magic, could be defined
more (though still not exclusively) in terms of positive attributes, and not simply as
an empty negative to set against rationality.61 It was, above all personal, not
impersonal. The possessor of charisma possessed human ‘qualities’ that marked
him or her out as ‘extraordinary’ and as humanly ‘qualified’ above the ‘everyday’
level, although in Weber’s formal and value-free analysis, he does not identify any
specific ‘qualities’ as charismatic: they are marked out only by the fact of being
received as extraordinary on a specific occasion, and the most disreputable people
can be charismatic if contemporaries recognize their charisma and thereby certify
it.62 Like magic, charisma was associated with what was ‘specific’ or unique rather
than what was conceptually developed and open to generalization;63 but charisma is
also marked out by anti-rational attributes that Weber does not notice in the case of
magic, such as the antithesis to specialization and, most importantly, its ephemeral
status. Thus charisma was a central, yet evanescent agency of historical discontinu-
ity and free movement, standing outside the housing created by a uniquely
powerful, long-term Occidental rationalization. One could never say, as one
could about salvation religion, that it would be rooted out, and charisma, unlike
magic, could be completely modern; but still (Weber considered) ‘it is the historical
destiny of charisma to be in retreat given the increasing development of long-term
institutional structures.’64

58 Kirchenrecht (Leipzig, 1892) i.1, 26.

59 Sociology of Herrschaft [c.1911–14], MWG I/22–4.462.
60 Sociology of Law [c.1910–14], e.g. }3.
61 See Sociology of Herrschaft [c.1911–14], MWG I/22–4.460–535; WuG [1919–20], 124, 140–8,

155–8. There is almost complete consistency in the treatment of charisma here, and, unlike the
treatment of bureaucracy, the interval 1914–18 seems to have made no difference.
62 MWG I/22–4.460–1; WuG 140. 63 MWG I/22–4.513. 64 Loc. cit.
308 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

Just as conceptually charisma is an antithesis to rationality, so its historical

emergence in Weberian thought broadly follows the latter, but it is one step behind.
The PE marks the first time Weber uses the words charisma and rational; but,
whereas rational and its adjuncts make up a major and explicit theme, charisma is
apparently negligible, and this has justified scholars in setting it aside.65 There are just
two usages, both of which relate to the Pietists’ interest in doctrines emanating from
Christ’s Apostles that are touched by their ‘charisma’ [XXI.54, 106]. But, while these
may seem unremarkable when taken in isolation, in context they are plainly import-
ant, since the category of ‘disciples’ or the immediate ‘following’ is an essential
component of the charismatic group in the later sociologies of Herrschaft, even if
there the disciples are commonly subordinated to the charismatic leader.66 More
obviously striking are the uses of the term in the ‘Protestant Sects’, a text that, as we
have seen, must be dated primarily to 1907. Here charisma is associated with the
elite, voluntary association of the sect—an obvious analogy to the Apostles. Weber
speaks of ‘the old Donatist principle of personal charisma’ at work within the sects of
the early church, in opposition to the ‘institutional grace’ that governed the Catholic
and the ‘official Reformation churches’ [i.225], and this contrast is repeated several
times over. In the sects ‘only charisma’ or ‘the charisma of the state of grace’ shall
prevail; ‘not [theological] training and [priestly] office’ [i.229–30, 231].67 The
antithesis between the personal charisma of the sects and the institutional church
‘office’ (or its university apparatus of theology faculties) is clear. The identification of
charisma as a sectarian idea is also marked out in another relatively “early” use of the
term—that is, prior to ‘Economy and Society’—when in 1910 Weber notes that ‘the
circle around Stefan George bore within it all the characteristics of sect-formation—
and hence too the specific charisma of such a process’.68 Here again charisma is all
about the group and not the leader. It is an idea of ‘charismatic organization’, which
remains quite close to that of Rudolph Sohm, who, though he would never use the
deeply pejorative term ‘sects’, undoubtedly conceived of a world where there was no
institutionalized ‘church’. All the same, in Sohm’s view, the early Christian teachers
do not practise Herrschaft; God alone rules.69
It will be clear from this that, while the term ‘charisma’ was available to Weber
when writing the PE,70 he wished to reserve it for the projected discussion of the
sects that he aborted in 1905. Nonetheless, however important linguistic usage may

65 e.g. Stefan Breuer, »Herrschaft« in der Soziologie Max Webers (Wiesbaden, 2011), 26.
66 WuG 141, 143. However, after 1918 Weber was more prepared to allow for a reversal of the
priority of leaders over led: ibid. 155–8.
67 For the view that there is no connection between Weber’s thinking on the sects in 1905–7 and

on charisma thereafter, Hartmut Tyrell, ‘Katholizismus und katholische Kirche’, in H. Lehmann and
J. M. Ouédraogo (eds), Max Weber’s Religionssoziologie in interkultureller Perspektive (Göttingen,
2003), 215.
68 To Dora Jellinek, 9.6.10, Briefe. Edith Hanke, an excellent scholar, refers to this as ‘the first time’

Weber mentions ‘the concept of charisma’: ‘Einleitung’, MWG I/22–4.54

69 Kirchenrecht, i. 51–6, 53 on Herrschaft.
70 Note too a mention in one of Weber’s surviving notes for the PE: ‘Prediger muß åÆæØÆ haben’:

Nachlaß Max Weber, 31/6 Zettel 35v. I am indebted for this reference to Hans Henrik Bruun.
 Capitalism and Herrschaft 309

be with Weber, as it is with almost any German author who chooses to exploit the
unique plasticity of the language, it is not the whole story. He was, after all, not a
theorist of discourse but a firm believer in a social science of empirical reality.71
Words are only labels or ‘names’ to him,72 and the history of his thinking about
charisma is by no means exhausted by use of the term. Scrutiny of the text of the PE
will show how abundantly true this is.
Setting aside the point that for Weber there was no sharp distinction between a
more individualistic Calvinism and the more obviously charismatic sects, we may
start with the elementary meaning of ‘charisma’, which is practically its dictionary
definition: the ‘gift of grace’.73 Now the principal, predestinarian theological
argument of Part II of the PE is an argument about grace, and in that sense it is
an argument about charisma. Thus it opens with ‘the doctrine of election to grace
[Gnadenwahl]’ [XXI.6], and, after a near continuous commentary on the ways in
which grace might be achieved, lost or secured irrefragably amongst ‘the body of the
elect by God’s grace, hence Saints’ [XXI.32], it closes with this summary: ‘time and
again what was decisive for our point of view was . . . the recurring conception in all
denominations of the religious “state of grace”’ [XXI.73]. We customarily think of
Calvin’s distinctive theology as one of ‘predestination’, but while Weber does use
this term, ‘election to grace’ is equally common in the PE, because the idea of the
possession of grace by an elite of the elect is as important to him as predestination’s
inscrutability and want of human meaning. Hence the emergence of the com-
pound, the ‘grace of predestination’ (Prädestinationsgnade), in the Sociology of
Religion.74
The crucial ‘linkage’ between faith in God’s grace and ethical activity was
supplied by the ‘fundamental idea of personal proof’ (Bewährung) [XXI.36]. Now
Weber the unbeliever is not interested in theology for its own sake, and the idea
that ‘the focus [of the PE] lies unambiguously in purely theological aspects’ of
thought is a radical misunderstanding.75 All the same, his faith in the power of
religious imperatives governing past conduct is such that in the PE he invents the
pseudo-theological idea of Bewährung, the ascetic Protestant’s need to “prove”
himself before both the Christian God, and human peers: ‘It was specifically outside
the divinely prescribed schemata laid down by the religious community . . . that the
Christian should personally prove [bewähre] his state of grace through action “for
the greater glory of God”’ [XXI.14 n. 21].76 However, this idea of proof was not

71 »Objektivität« [1904], WL 170. 72 ‘Antikritisches’, 179.

73 Sociology of Herrschaft [c.1911–14], MWG I/22–4.148; WuG 124. This is also Sohm’s
definition, e.g. Kirchenrecht, i. 22, 26, but is significantly different from that of mainstream
Lutheran theology, which—contrary to the dictionary definition—substitutes ‘spirit’ for ‘grace’ and
thereby renders it more commonplace: Hermann Cremer: ‘Geistesgaben, Charismata’, PRE 3 vi.
460–3.
74 MWG I/22-2.362 cf. 364, 366; ‘Einleitung’, AfSS 41 (1915), 18.
75 Stefan Breuer, »Herrschaft« in der Soziologie Max Webers, 216.
76 Nowhere in the theological literature read by Weber or in the principal reference works, such as

the Realencyklopädie für protestantische Theologie und Kirche (1896–19133) or Die Religion in Geschichte
und Gegenwart (1908–13), will one find a concept of Bewährung, either in a Weberian or any
Protestant sense [c].
310 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

just a doctrine of good works. What was being proven was the person, and their
ethical qualities: ‘what is then decisive for the practical significance of this type of
“sanctity through works” is a knowledge of the qualities which characterized the
conduct of life corresponding to it, and which distinguished it from the everyday
life of an average . . . Christian’ [XXI.26]. This emphasis on ethical ‘quality’ is
readily recognizable as the kind of meritocratic and individualist priority that was
common to wide swathes of Continental liberal opinion c.1900, even if Weber has
relocated it to the seventeenth century—and here is another reason to suppose that
his thinking in this area was ‘nothing new’. But at the same time a focus on
‘personal proof ’ and personal ‘quality’ is also the essence of Weberian charisma,
once the label has fully surfaced after 1910. Hence we read in ‘Economy and
Society’: ‘“Charisma shall be defined as an extraordinary . . . valid quality of per-
sonality’. Again: ‘The validity of charisma is decided by the free recognition of the
governed . . . assured by the personal proof ’ of the leader.77 A great range of other
known charismatic attributes attach to ascetic Protestants in the PE: they are heroes
from the ‘heroic age of capitalism’ [XXI.20, 92]; they are prophets, wedded to
“prophecy” and “prophesyings” [XXI.40 n. 76, 46 n. 83, 62 n. 123, 69]; and they
are an elite, an ‘aristocracy of the Saints’ [XXI.37 n. 74, 46, 51]. That is, they stand
for ‘the aristocratism of grace’ as against the indiscriminate Lutheran ‘universalism
of grace’ [XXI.49–50], just as they are marked out by superior ‘ethical qualification’
[XX.43]. But heroism, prophetic power, aristocracy, and ‘qualification’ are all
defining features of charisma after 1910.78
In short, if by charisma we mean charisma as defined by Weber after 1910, then
the argument of the PE of 1904–5 is as much charismatic as rational. This does not
mean that the only novelty after 1910 was the use of charisma as a heading, since the
worked-out typology of Herrschaft is also new. Nonetheless, the idea of charisma,
an idea much broader than that conveyed in the Sociology of Herrschaft alone, is
undoubtedly born in the PE, and we cannot be surprised if in the sociologies
written after 1910 Weber should refer unhesitatingly (back) to ‘the aristocratic,
charismatic principle of predestination’ or to the ‘aristocracy of the Saints’ as

77 WuG [1919–20], 140.

78 For prophecy and heroism as defining elements of charisma, e.g. MWG I/22–4.466; WuG 140.
On charismatic aristocracy and qualification: e.g. MWG I/22–2.317–20; I/22–4.486, 668, 670; WuG
156–7. Another trait of this kind is religious ‘rebirth’ (Wiedergeburt). In the PE it does, of course,
signify membership of the (charismatic) group of the elect: thus even Pietists sought to realize ‘an
aristocracy of the reborn resting on God’s special grace’ [XXI.49]. Even so, at first sight what is said
seems merely consistent with Christian theology. Yet it is clear from the Sociology of Religion that such
references in the PE are not merely Christian or accidental, and that Weber had a “charismatic” idea of
rebirth in mind in 1904–5: ‘ “Rebirth” is at first something only for the professional magician, but then
out of the magical presupposition of the magician’s or hero’s charisma, it becomes a quality of ethical
conviction [Gesinnung] which is indispensable for religious salvation within the most logical types of
“salvation religion”, something which the individual must make his own and then prove [bewähren] in
his conduct of life’ (MWG I/22–2.305). This can only mean ascetic Protestantism and its most logical
type Calvinism [XXI.36], since, while Buddhism is also a logical type of “salvation religion”, it seeks
salvation or release from a meaningless cycle of “rebirth”, and knows nothing of ascetic and ethical
conviction, or personal proof through active conduct. Hinduism is not even a salvation religion in
Weber’s eyes, let alone a logical one.
 Capitalism and Herrschaft 311

possessors of an ‘incomparably important charisma’.79 Once more we witness the

extraordinary capacity of this text to embrace practically all the significant compo-
nents of Weberian thought. Yet the idea that its argument can contain both
charismatic (or anti-rational) and rational elements is obviously problematic: how
can they coexist? Consideration of this point will take us back to our primary
agendum: capitalism.
Much of the answer to this question is historical: charisma and rationality are not
merely conceptual opposites but a historical sequence: charisma can become
“routinized” and so rationalized over time; alternatively, a previously entrenched
rationalist framework or Gehäuse can be disrupted by a charismatic incursion. Here
we should recall just how radically historicist the foundations of Weber’s thinking
were. His 1904 exposition of the ideal-type, written with the conceptual materials
of the PE in mind, repeatedly emphasizes that these are ‘genetic concepts’80—
something that today’s methodologists and sociologists, operating in a partially
dehistoricized environment, find perplexing.81 Their idea of a concept is a static
one. But Weber was one of the most sophisticated products of the most historically
conscious generation in all European history, and vitally concerned with surmount-
ing the problems posed by historicist relativism. Ideal-types are thus conceptual
assemblies ‘which are framed by us as remaining within the flux of events, as
historical individuals within which development takes place.’82 The point was well
grasped by Otto Hintze, Weber’s contemporary and another truly historicist mind,
who observed his hostility to ‘substantive concepts, because overall he thinks not in
the category of substance, but of function, of the momentary.’83 For example,
Weber struggled to find a noun to convey ‘reason’ in his sense—he sometimes
borrowed the Latin ratio, but it was an occasional usage at most—and this was not
only because of his antipathy to the normative associations of classical idealist
Vernunft, but because words conveying process or (at least) enduring psychological
states were much more congenial to him than substantives: hence rationality,
rationalism, and rationalization. The tendency is so ingrained it can lead to what
in the ordinary meaning of words is close to absurdity or contradiction, as in the
description of the onset of capitalism as a ‘process of revolution’ or even ‘process of
revolutionization’ [XX.27, 29]. The ordinary contrast between evolution and

79 Resp. Sociology of Herrschaft [c.1911–14], MWG I/22–4.670; Sociology of Religion [c.1913],

MWG I/22–2.363.
80 »Objektivität« WL 194; cf. 191, 202.
81 H. H. Bruun finds ‘genetic concept’ ‘rather obscure’, Science, Values and Politics in Max Weber’s

Methodology (Copenhagen, 1972), 204; cf. 213. He is rightly cautious about the majority view, which
supposes that the historicity of Weber’s language regarding the ideal-type in 1904 was abandoned ‘in
favour of generalizing and sociological formulations’ after 1910 (201), but he can defend Weber’s
continuity only by largely ignoring the issue of historicity and focusing almost exclusively on value. For
the majority view, e.g. Uta Gerhardt, Idealtypus (Frankfurt, 2001), esp. 246–7, 267.
82 Ibid. 203. In accordance with the previous note, see how even the excellent Hans Henrik Bruun

mistranslates this text: in contravention of the sense of the passage, he construes ideal-types not as
developmental entities but as ‘stable points’: Max Weber, Collected Methodological Writings, ed.
H. H. Bruun and S.Whimster (London, 2012), 131.
83 ‘Max Webers Soziologie’ [1926], Gesammelte Abhandlungen (Göttingen, 1962–72), ii. 135–47,

here 140.
312 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

revolution is thus overridden, since Weber hardly knows what rupture is; he only
recognizes change of direction within the historical continuum. Herrschaft too is a
process—finely described by a modern writer as ‘mass political justification’ or
‘mass legitimation’84—and so are its components: not ‘bureaucracy’ but ‘bureau-
cratism’; not ‘charisma’ but ‘charismatism’, which is in turn an echo of (not
‘aristocracy’ but) the ‘aristocratism of grace’ [XXI.50].85 Charismatic rule is a
particularly obtrusive case of this dynamic and process-oriented cast of mind,
since, as we are repeatedly told, in its pure form it exists only ‘in statu nascendi’,
as it is being born.86 Duration, by contrast, implies conditions of regularity that
contradict its very nature, and since it is so ephemeral, most of Weber’s discussion
focuses on the ways in which it mutates in its after-life.
Now at no point does the PE offer a traditional historical narrative—indeed
viewed in chronological terms its organization is wildly eccentric—but still it
contains a sequential, historical argument moving from charisma to rationality
and the routine of economic interest. It begins with a charismatic intervention—
ascetic Protestantism, ‘the “eschatological” epoch of movement’87—which then
gives way to a durable consequence: the ‘steel housing’ of modern rationalized
Kultur [XXI.108]. The decline of charisma within Puritanism, transposed into the
political sphere, is captured in the Sociology of Herrschaft, when it identifies the
Roundheads as a political party that ‘displays the . . . typical course of events,
moving on from a period of charismatic arousal, where class and rank boundaries
are broken down in favour of one or a few heroes’—Cromwell or the Saints—‘to
the development of associations of notables’ such as the later, more durable Whig
party.88 Within the PE evidence of a similar sequence is clear, provided—as
always—that we recognize that every word of the text counts. For example, in
regard to capitalism and its “spirit”, Weber makes it plain that what interests him in
the first instance is ‘the youth of such “Ideas”’ [XX.19], and here the seventeenth
century is the ‘heroic’, charismatic or formative, ‘epoch of capitalism’ [XXI.92; cf.
20]. This is to be distinguished from the capitalism of Weber’s own day where,
even if entrepreneurs such as Carl David Weber had retained the ethical and
rationalizing discipline bequeathed to them by the Puritans, there was little heroism
in a ‘conduct of life where a man exists for his business and not the other way
round’ [XX.30]. Another important category here is that of the ‘everyday’ (Alltag,
alltäglich)—a frequent appearance in the PE, which stands in contrast to the
implicitly charismatic conduct of the Saints, who enjoy grace, just as the contrast
between everyday and ‘extraordinary’ (außeralltäglich) conduct is basic to the later,

84 Jan-Werner Müller, Contesting Democracy (Yale, 2011), 3.

85 On bureaucratism, charismatism: Edith Hanke, ‘Editorische Berichte’, MWG I/22–4.155–6,
458–9. ‘Aristocratism’ lives on as Heilsaristokratismus (the aristocratism of salavation):
‘Zwischenbetrachtung’, AfSS 41 (1915), 399, 402, 419. Its proximity to charismatism is evident.
86 MWG I/22–4.489, 491; WuG [1919–20], 143–4; cf. 147 ‘typische Anfangserscheinung’.
87 ‘Zur Lage der bürgerlichen Demokratie’ [1905–6], MWG I/10.272.
88 MWG I/22–4.508. For Cromwell as a charismatic leader, WuG 156–7. Note how this remark

also captures the social argument of the PE.

 Capitalism and Herrschaft 313

explicit definition of charisma.89 This too was not just a qualitative distinction, but
one that contained an idea of sequence: from the extraordinary to the everyday.
This sequence is mirrored in the chapter structure. Part II.1 is all about the
construction of ascetic Protestantism, which in its pure form is the world of
those with grace or charisma. The following and final chapter [II.2] marks the
transition from the world of grace to charting its impact on the everyday world. As
its opening words announce, it seeks ‘To lay bare the connections between the
fundamental religious conceptions of ascetic Protestantism and the maxims of
everyday economic life’ [XXI.74]. It asks: how did the initial period of charismatic
arousal translate into the durable rational structures epitomized by ‘everyday
worldly work’ within one’s employment (Beruf ) [XX.41]—where, because of its
specialized character, the Beruf is firmly identified as an anti-charismatic category
after 1910.90 Thus the terrain of the final chapter—prior to its emotive conclusion
at least—is far more worldly than its predecessor: working hard in one’s calling, the
avoidance of “idle talk”, ‘private economic “profitability”’, ‘formal rectitude’, the
‘solid comfort of the bourgeois “home”’ [XXI.77, 81, 85, 90, 100], etc.
In fact we have already met many of the most basic statements of the sequential
movement from the initial subversive impact made by the ‘heroes of asceticism’91
to its long-term, rationalizing consequences. As, for example, when Weber speaks
of ‘the turn’ or ‘switch [Umschlag] from the will of God’—the bestower of grace in
the eyes of ascetic Protestantism—‘to the purely utilitarian perspectives of later
liberal theory’ based on economic interest [XXI.76n.6], or the famous metaphor of
the switchmen on the railway, where it is implicitly charismatic religious ‘Ideas’ that
make the crucial junction switch, the change of direction, but thereafter ‘the dynamic
of interests’—economic interests—dominates subsequent progress along lines or
tracks that have now been broadly laid down.92 This is then a close parallel to the
argument set out in ‘Economy and Society’ when it discusses the Veralltäglichung of
charisma—how it is made ‘everyday’ or routine—and its ‘Connection to the Economy’.
With the onset of this process, ‘The power of charisma, which is commonly mighty
and revolutionary even in an economic context . . . is then reversed into the opposite
of its initial effect.’ Hence ‘At this point the economy is the leader, not the led’, and at
this point (but no other) Weberian analysis intersects with Marx’s.93
Where does this leave capitalism? At first sight the sequence from the ‘Protestant
ethic’ to the “spirit” of capitalism might appear to be the same as the sequence from
the charismatic intervention of ascetic Protestantism to its rationalizing outcome. If
this was so, then capitalism could be identified with rationalism. However, as noted
above, Weber refuses to make any such straightforward identification—and here
we return to his uncertainties regarding the conceptual status of capitalism. The
rational kernel of capitalism was located in the organized, institutional structure
represented by the capitalist “enterprise” (Betrieb), which was generically the same

89 e.g. WuG 140. 90 MWG I/22–4.460, 465.

91 WuG 142; cf. MWG I/22–4.481. 92 ‘Einleitung’ [1919–20], MWG I/19.101.
93 WuG 148. For further examples of the historical sequence from charisma to rationality, see

Sociology of Herrschaft [c.1911–14], MWG I/22–4.594–9, 636–9.

314 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

as any other enterprise, such as the bureaucracy, the universities, the army, or a
mass political party; but this left open the status of its personnel and especially its
leadership, the entrepreneurs. Writing in 1919, Weber was adamant that the
rational bureaucratic enterprise could not be led—if it was to have leadership at
all—by ‘a purely bureaucratic’ head.94 Something more than bureaucratic ration-
ality was required; and in a Weberian context the obvious something standing
outside rationality is charisma. So the space for a charismatic leadership component
within capitalism seems clear enough. While he could conceive of a leaderless state
structure resting on bureaucratic inertia—this (famously) was the gravamen of his
critique of German politics between 1890 and 1918, although even after 1918 he
was prepared to admit that ‘in everyday circumstances [modern] rule is primarily:
administration’95—he did not admit a comparable vacuum in the capitalist case.
Here the testing or proving mechanism of the market operated almost instantly in
penalizing or rewarding leadership failure, and so entrepreneurial or leadership
presence was required at all times. By contrast in political structures there was no
comparably immediate testing or proving mechanism, and the equivalent of market
collapse could be put off almost indefinitely: the consequences of want of political
leadership might be catastrophic in fact (as they were in 1914) but in the short and
medium term (1890–1914) they were usually veiled. To correct this the bureau-
cratic enterprise required an injection of charismatic leadership from without—in
Weber’s view via the working of political parties in a parliamentary system so as to
produce qualified leaders—but in capitalism the leadership component was intrin-
sic and not external. Hence the judgement in ‘Politics as a Vocation’ (1919) that,
while the development of the modern state was ‘a complete parallel to the evolution
of the capitalist enterprise’, still ‘despite [such] far-reaching analogies, at its heart
the leadership [Leitung] of capitalist economic enterprises operates according to
completely different laws from the political administration.’96
Such is the broad truth expressed in the late political writings—yet reference to
charismatic capitalism is just as absent as rational capitalism from the Weberian
phrase-book. To scrutinize more closely the question of the relations between
Weberian capitalism and charisma, we must turn to his academic or wissenschaftlich
work. When in his 1890s lectures Weber sought to define the large-scale
enterprise—he had little time for the small businesses of the declining Mittelstand
that would later prove a fertile recruiting ground for Nazism [XX.27]—the first
feature he noted was this: ‘Formation according to the division of labour of an
independent organizing & leading position within the enterprise’, that is, the
entrepreneur. Furthermore, there was a ‘Measure of social differentiation within
the enterprise: no transition from a dependent to a leading position’.97 In other
words, there was a fixed, albeit empirical (rather than kulturell), division between
capital and labour. It is a reminder of a fundamental point: that for Weber the
relationship between skilled labour and the capitalist entrepreneur was one of

94 WuG 127; cf. MWG I/22–4.491.

95 WuG 126; cf. Parlament und Regierung [1917–8], MWG I/15, }}II–IV.
96 MWG I/17.165–6. 97 ‘Allgemeine . . . Nationalökonomie’ [1894–8], MWG III/1.577.
 Capitalism and Herrschaft 315

diversity within a greater unity. They were united by a joint commitment to the
“spirit” of capitalism, hence by their bourgeois, market, vocational, and rationalized
situation; but still they occupied different places within the division of labour.
Workers performed skilled operations so as rationally to maximize earnings; entre-
preneurs directed economic enterprises so as rationally to maximize profits. But
how great was the difference between the two? was the entrepreneur merely
rational, or was he something more? was he charismatic in fact?
The PE and the ‘Protestant Sects’ touch on this question when, out of an anxiety
to show that capitalism was “ethical”, Weber excluded from his argument some of
the most famous names in American capitalism, since they were associated with
speculation and financial organization rather than the rational mass production of
industrial goods for the democracy. Pierpont Morgan, Jay Gould, and John
D. Rockefeller (he held) did not represent the “spirit” of capitalism, but were rather
timeless phenomena like Jakob Fugger: ‘there have always been economic “super-
men” [Übermenschen] who, like today’s “captains of industry”, stand beyond
good and evil’, and this set them apart from ‘the broad stratum of capitalist
behaviour which lies beneath them’ [XXI.71n. 139; cf. XX.14–15; PS i.214].98
In the Sociology of Herrschaft Weber then aligns this thought with charisma.
He cites the German–American Henry Villard, another figure from the era of
late-nineteenth-century American railroad expansion and speculation who
was personally known to the Weber family, to show that ‘in the area of the
specifically capitalist economy one finds the antagonism between charisma and
the everyday . . . [where] charisma and the “enterprise” oppose one another’.
But while Weber undoubtedly associates charisma with the ‘booty’ acquired by
the warrior, and in Villard’s case with ‘booty capitalism’,99 which appears to set
the charismatic entrepreneur quite apart from the formally legal, “ethical” capital-
ism which is Weber’s principal concern, the illustration (which is not repeated)
cannot be read as pronouncing a final judgement on the relationship between
charisma and capitalism.100 Thus elsewhere we find him offering a quite different
picture of the relationship between the capitalist entrepreneur and charisma in
the case of ‘the sober, bourgeois Selfmademan’ [XXI.88]. Such a person is not
an economic “superman” but rather one of the unnamed Saints and heroes,
who enjoys to the full the ethical approval of ascetic Protestants, and is one of
the reflections of the ‘private economic energy’ that Weber derives from
this root [XXI.71]. Following on from this, we are told in the Sociology
of Herrschaft that ‘the genuine American (Puritan) cast of mind glorifies the
selfmademan who has “made” his fortune for himself as the carrier of charisma’,

98 Weber is, however, more cautious when he introduces a true “captain of industry”, Andrew

Carnegie, into the discussion: 28.9.05, Verein für Sozialpolitik, MWG I/8.270.
99 MWG I/22–4.484–5; cf. WuG 142. On Villard and the Webers: Roth, Familiengeschichte,

480–8.
100 This is a knotty text, but I suggest Richard Swedberg has misconstrued it. Villard is not

representative of the “spirit” of specifically modern capitalism, so his charismatic traits cannot show
‘that modern capitalism is not only rational but has some charismatic elements’: Max Weber and the
Idea of Economic Sociology (Princeton, 1998), 51.
316 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

in contrast to the person who merely prides himself on his inheritance.101 So here it
is the ethical rather than the Nietzschean entrepreneur who is charismatic, and
there does appear to be a space—a small space—for charisma within a largely
rational Occidental capitalism.
The conclusion must be that Weber regarded the modern capitalist entrepreneur,
in contrast to the capitalist enterprise he oversaw, as more than simply rational; hence
as in some degree charismatic. Yet it did not suit him to say so. The care required to
tease out the case of the selfmademan surely confirms this. A variety of reasons
suggest themselves. Looking at the PE, we have seen how Weber located the ‘heroic
age of capitalism’ in the seventeenth century and not the nineteenth. It is doubtful
whether he had any specific capitalists in mind here: they were invisibly rising petty
bourgeois ‘industrials’ [XX.9], and the very idea that one could identify them
personally (as one could Fugger or Jay Gould) would render them suspect in his
eyes (as indeed would any pronounced personal identity). But his thinking here is
clear all the same: that the seventeenth century was a great epoch of charismatic
change in Kultur, whereas the nineteenth century, the epoch of Carl David Weber,
was not. Thus it is noticeable that even the radical change, the ending of ‘old-style
traditionalism’, epitomized by Carl David [XX.27], is described as a ‘“rationalization”
process’. So while this was a “process of revolution” [XX.29], it should be classified as
a revolution ‘from the outside’ typically effected by the ‘revolutionizing [sic] power of
“ratio”’, and not one ‘from the inside’, ‘a change in the central direction of ethical
conviction’, which is the charismatic form of revolution.102 In short: Weber was
persuaded of the reality of the historical sequence from seventeenth-century charisma
to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century rationality and utilitarianism in the PE and so,
regardless of the fact that the activities of entrepreneurs such as Carl David could not
be explained as simply rational—indeed they possessed ‘all encompassing “great-
ness”’103—any extra-rational, implicitly charismatic or “free” component in his
behaviour appeared drastically reduced when compared to the seventeenth-century
‘heroes of asceticism’. Note further that for the entrepreneur the crucial charismatic
category of personal proof (Bewährung) did not arise within a modern market context.
The market might be transcendental and inscrutable like the Calvinist God, but still
that God no longer existed, and market operations also excluded proof before a circle
of peers (as in the case of the sects) or before a following (as in the sociology of
Herrschaft), since the labour of the factory workforce was by no means a voluntary
‘recognition’ of entrepreneurial charisma, but was habitually equated by Weber to
military discipline: ‘The fact that obedience by means of military discipline is formally
“involuntary” and that by means of workplace discipline is formally “voluntary”, in no
way alters the fact that workplace discipline too is subordination to rule.’104 So whatever
else the entrepreneur might do that was dynamic and creative, the management
of labour relations was emphatically not charismatic. The control exercised by the
putter-out (such as Carl David) over his homeworkers was not so direct and coercive
as the factory-owner, but here again Weber sees no charismatic relationship.105

101 MWG I/22–4.524. 102 WuG 142.

103 To Alwine Müller, 6.3.13, Briefe. 104 WuG 123.
105 e.g. ‘Allgemeine . . . Nationalökonomie’ [1894–8], MWG III/1.508–9.
 Capitalism and Herrschaft 317

In sum: the nascent typology of Herrschaft was undoubtedly present in the PE,
but capitalism had no clear place within it. It exceeded the category of the purely
rational without entirely occupying that of charisma—again we see the attractions
of the less specific idea of ‘freedom’ that Weber attached to capitalism in the
1890s—and this (again) militated against Weber continuing to work with capital-
ism as a leading concept after 1905. This uncertainty adds an extra dimension to
the story of Weber’s difficulties with capitalism (I.8, II.1), as it does to our
understanding of his thinking about Herrschaft, but it does not, of course, change
that story. A resolution was achieved in 1907–8 when Weber demoted capitalism
in favour of bureaucracy as a headline concept in ‘Agriculture in Antiquity’, because
bureaucracy seemed to resolve all the difficulties attaching to capitalism: it could be
conceived as strictly rational; it was unproblematic as a form of Herrschaft because it
was backed by human agency; and, unlike a specifically modern capitalism, it was
trans-historical, and so could easily be deployed as a sociological type.

I I I . CAPITALISM, LAW AND BUREAUCRACY, c .1910–1914

So what became of Weberian capitalism after 1908? That there was a mismatch
between capitalism and Weber’s preferred type-categories is confirmed by the
discussion at the opening of the Sociology of Herrschaft (c.1911–14), which acts
as a formal gateway to consideration of the subject as a whole. Revealingly, it begins
with capitalism, and by implication the legacy of the PE, as a possible intellectual
starting point. After surveying the full variety of possible situations of command
and rule—for example, in an erotic relationship, the university lecture theatre, or in
sport—Weber suggests that there are two principal bases for rule that might be
developed as conceptual types: rule exercised ‘by means of the constellation of
interests’—in other words group material interest, hence the Marxist postulate—
and rule ‘by the power of authority’, where a literal power of command was
reciprocated by the received and accepted duty of obedience.106 However, while
he accepted it as empirically self-evident that economic interest could operate so as
to give effective control within a formally free economy, and also that there were
abundant links between rule based on authority and property ownership, he
nonetheless discarded rule by interest as a type, and with it capitalism or any
economically rooted Herrschaft. In his view there was a ‘polar antithesis . . . between
market exchange regulated solely by the compromise of interests, that is the factual
power that has arisen out of property as such’ and a ruler ‘appealing to the
authoritative force of the simple duty of obedience’.107 In another formulation,
market exchange, defined as ‘the specifically peaceful form of securing economic

106 MWG I/22–4.126–38, here 129; cf. WuG 122–4. Weber uses the term ‘constellation’ because,

as always, he refuses to acknowledge the existence of a social group in principle. ‘Constellation’,

meaning a vast multiplicity or mass of individual interests with a certain tendency or profile, is thus an
elaborate yet necessary circumlocution.
107 MWG I/22–4.133.
318 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

power’, was ‘the conceptual opposite of the appropriation of goods through

coercion of any kind, above all physical coercion, the regulated exercise of which
is constitutive of political communities in particular.’108 Logically and in
principle—and logic was what was needed for the ‘sociological concept formation’
that operated with pure, ideal-typical categories—market exchange was not coer-
cive or authoritative but represented ‘the free play’,109 the compromise or accom-
modation of interests, that could also yield a mutually satisfactory return. The only
logically pure case of authoritative direction exercised by economic interest was that
of monopoly, the antithesis of the free market, whatever coercive power the market
might exercise in empirical fact. In principle, then, the logic of the market could not
serve as the basis for a type of Herrschaft. It is perhaps the closest Weber would ever
come to a rebuttal of Marx on first principles: the society they saw before them was
not radically different, but their respective estimates of the position and capacities
of the observer were. For Marx theory and practice must be fused; for Weber
Wissenschaft and politics, whatever their connections in fact, were qualitatively
distinct spheres, and the premium placed on Wissenschaft, the act of detached
observation when confronted by an intrinsically meaningless infinity, was much
higher. As always, Weber’s want of interest in academic personality meant that any
confrontation with Marx in direct terms was to be avoided. Note too his declaration
in the PE admitting the arbitrariness of his categories in regard to capitalism, a
caution that applied to all ideal-type categories in principle [XX.12].110 But still we
can see how such an academically and methodologically conditioned approach to
the analysis of capitalism might enrage the Marxist or post-Marxist thinker, for
whom Weberian Wissenschaft should really be unmasked as bourgeois “ideology”.111
In this way Weber gave his own modern capitalism and incidentally Marx’s
capitalist mode of production a conceptual quietus: Herrschaft would be confined
to the scheme of the three types of rule exercised by direct command. Yet this does
not mean that the empirical fact of capitalism had become unimportant or been
dissolved. Having noted Weber’s distance from Marx, we should also remember
how far he was from the contemporary marginalist critique of Marx, where social,
historical, and even psychological observation was excluded112—and it is their
empirical affinity that, in an ultimate sense, made possible the assimilation of
Weber to twentieth-century Marxist thought. So, despite the relegation of capital-
ism as a leading type, it nonetheless remains a pervasive presence in his thinking
after 1910. That Weber did not change his spots is clear in an elementary sense
from occasional references in ‘Economy and Society’ that stray outside the strict
scheme of the three types of Herrschaft. Late on in the pre-war Sociology of
Herrschaft and not just as an opening gambit, he observes that, ‘In contrast to all
other forms of Herrschaft, the economic rule of capital cannot be regulated ethically

108 ‘Marktgemeinschaft’ [c.1910–14], MWG I/22–1.199. 109 MWG I/22–4.135.

110 Cf. »Objektivität« [1904], WL 181–2, etc.
111 Cf. Jürgen Habermas, Technik und Wissenschaft als ›Ideologie‹ (Frankfurt, 1968), 48–103;

Herbert Marcuse, ‘Industrialisierung und Kapitalismus’, Max Weber und die Soziologie heute
(Tübingen, 1965), 172, on ‘der . . . “wissenschaftliche” Kapitalismus’.
112 Historian, ch. 9.
 Capitalism and Herrschaft 319

on account of its “impersonal” character. Even externally it mostly appears in an

“indirect” form, such that one simply cannot lay hold of the actual “ruler” and so
cannot make ethical demands upon him.’ It thus constitutes a “masterless or
rulerless [herrscherlos] slavery”. This is identical to his conception of the rule of
capital without capitalists from the 1890s,113 and tells us that, whatever the precise
forms of Herrschaft he operates with ordinarily after 1908, the original, less
discriminate, yet more potent idea of the rule of modern capitalism remains in
his mind. Hence similar summary references in the Sociology of Religion to ‘the
objectified [versachlichte] cosmos of capitalism’; or in the Sociology of Law to ‘The
universal rule of the social formation based on the market’.114
Furthermore, while capitalism was not now a leading type, it remained a major
category or point of reference in three distinct areas. First: even in 1904 the
historical evolution Weber was charting was not simply capitalist but ‘bourgeois–
capitalist’ [XX.19; cf. XXI.56]. Then in 1908 he decided that in a long-term
perspective the category of the urban bourgeoisie should be prioritized over its
modern capitalist product. However, in making such a move, he was at most
redeploying his ideas—Weber’s conscious control and self-awareness in this respect
is of a fabulous order—and what he has to say about bourgeois life and Kultur is still
an indirect commentary on, or extension of, ideas about capitalism. This is a
subject to which we will return (II.8).
A second redeployment of ideas is that whereby capitalism is subsumed under
bureaucracy in the pre-war Sociology of Herrschaft. Weber’s leading idea here, as
suggested above, is to highlight the parallel between the capitalist ‘enterprise’ and
the bureaucratic ‘authority’; between the ‘business office’ (Komptoir, Kontor)
and the public ‘bureau’ (157, 158).115 English-speaking readers may find such
a grouping unlikely in principle, yet it certainly elucidates the distinctively
Continental-yet-Anglophile idea of modern Kultur set out in the PE. At a number
of central points which, with the exception of law, had been identified in the PE,
‘bureaucratism’ and capitalism are held to be almost identical: in their rational
attributes; their reliance on rational law; and their commitment to what is sachlich
(material or concrete), operating on an impersonal or ‘depersonalized’ basis bereft
of love, hate, or personal piety (187; cf. 209). At other points, such as the
historically specific nature of modern capitalism, where we might expect it to
stand well apart from a trans-historical bureaucracy, Weber tends to bring them
back together. Thus his starting point is ‘the specifically modern form of adminis-
tration’,116 which takes in both the ‘modern state’ and ‘the most advanced struc-
tures of capitalism’, that is, the modern capitalist enterprise, which is the most
rational component within capitalism (157). This emphasis on a common mod-
ernity is not to deny the important distinction already laid down: that there are also

113 MWG I/22–4.635; cf. Sociology of Religion [c.1913], MWG I/22–2.400. See above at n. 29.
114 MWG I/22–2.379; MWG I/22–3.247, resp.
115 Cf. [XX.28; XXI.98 n. 64]. References in ( ) in this and the next paragraph are to the Sociology

of Herrschaft [c.1911–14], MWG I/22–4.

116 WuG 124; cf. MWG I/22–4.157, 234.
320 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

historical forms of bureaucracy going back to ancient Egypt and Rome, which enable it
to stand as a trans-historical type. The objective, functional aspect of the ancient
Egyptian official philosophy was ‘entirely utilitarian–bourgeois in character’ (452).
Nonetheless, it turns out that bureaucracy too has a history; that Weber wishes to draw
a distinction between the pre-modern ‘officialdom’ (Beamtentum) he identified in
patrimonial regimes before 1789, where a significant element of personal connection
remained, and the purely impersonal, modern ‘bureaucracy’ (Bürokratie) that fol-
lowed.117 So the conceptual demotion of capitalism in 1908 on the grounds of its
want of historical depth was qualified in its nature, even if the more iron-clad
differences between capitalism and bureaucracy remain. (Bureaucracy is strictly ra-
tional; it exercises Herrschaft via direct command; and is untainted by slavery.)
Some of Weber’s alleged parallels between capitalism and bureaucracy turn out
to be resemblances or linkages rather than true parallels; but, subject to this
qualification, his argument is a powerful one. For example, the functions performed
in an advanced society by the private economy and the state bureaucracy might be
different in fact, but in each case their rationalized, technical complexity is such
that, if the administrative base sustaining them were to cease to exist or be subject to
forcible constraint, then (Weber holds) the consequence would be the same: an
insupportable ‘chaos, which could hardly be overcome by any improvised substi-
tute arising out of the ranks of the governed’, or one might add consumers (208). In
each case there is practically no alternative to rationalism and its procedures. Weber
also insists that specialization of function is basic to both capitalism and bureau-
cracy; thus bureaucracy, too, acknowledges the ‘ideal of the “Beruf ”’ or calling
(452). But while this is true, the meaning of specialization is different in each case.
Capitalism in the PE rests on the integrated multiplicity of specialist functions or
“callings”. So everyone within the economy is (in Weber’s eyes) trapped within a
particular calling—this is what the ‘steel housing’ is in a strict construction
[XXI.108]118—and there is no way out to match his own escape from the confines
of academic specialization (itself a most unlikely history). By contrast, public
officialdom is in any simple sense a single specialized pursuit in its own right,
however various its sub-components might be (208). When Weber states that ‘The
[public] office is a “calling”’ (160), his stress lies on an alternative and indeed
positive facet of the calling: the official’s ethical commitment to that particular,
impersonal calling, because here specialization is the source of the official’s power,
not of his entrapment. Hence the very different sources and structures of bureau-
cratic and capitalist power (although at this date the account does not highlight
this): bureaucracy represents ‘the rule of specialized knowledge’ outright, whereas

117 This is most clear in the organization of the pre-1914 text of Herrschaft where (modern)

‘Bureaucratism’ is followed by (pre-modern) ‘Patrimonialism’, which is in large part defined by its

centralized administrative character: MWG I/22–4.247–370, see esp. 285–338, e.g. 294, on the
contrast between patrimonial ‘officials’ and ‘bureaucracy’. This textual group is then followed in
mirror image by ‘Feudalism’, a kind of opposite to patrimonialism, and then ‘Charisma’ and its
offshoots. Thus, apart from the final section on ‘Hierocracy’, bureaucracy with its historical varieties is
almost as much the organizing principle of this great text as rationality itself.
118 Cf. Wahlrecht und Demokratie (1917), MWG I/15.356.
 Capitalism and Herrschaft 321

capitalism, however useful the specialized knowledge of a particular firm might be

(219–20), embodies the rule of the market over two exchange parties, which is in
every way different. In adopting these alternative approaches to specialization,
Weber has moved beyond the over-hasty and one-sided denunciation of “specialists
without spirit” in the PE [XXI.109], and is looking forward to the more balanced
analysis of specialization as both fundamental and constraining in ‘Science as a
Vocation’ (1917/19).119 In association with their specialized character, Weber
notes as another commonality that both capitalist and state bureaucracies are
dependent on specialized education. But, while this may be so, the fact remains
that they rely on different parts of the education system. The training ground for
Western European and German bureaucracy lies in the state universities (229),
whereas—as the PE has already laid bare—the crucial tier for capitalism c.1900 is
secondary education [XX.4–5], while the unqualified claim that both private and
public officials enjoyed social esteem as a product of their educational qualification
(161–2, 231–2) is deeply misleading, when the degree of esteem is so different in
each case. Indeed, Weber himself makes this point by implication in his later
wartime writings, when he insists that ‘Every businessman, every clerk, every
worker . . . has a broader perspective on political realities than the holders of any
diploma from an academic faculty’, by which he meant the university-educated
state bureaucracy.120 As a result of their education, members of the state bureau-
cracy possess the Goethean status good of Bildung, of culture and cultivation (as
distinct from the more elemental and substantial Weberian Kultur); office clerks
do not.
Still, in the pre-war Sociology of Herrschaft and in contrast to the later writings,
Weber’s principal aim is to assimilate capitalism to bureaucracy, albeit the latter is
now the headline category. One of the few obvious points of departure from the PE
is that the empirical model of Weberian capitalism is twentieth-century enterprise-
capitalism rather than the early modern capitalism of the putter-out—the Grundriss
der Sozialökonomik in which ‘Economy and Society’ appeared was, of course,
designed to be a guide to contemporary economy and society, unlike the ‘purely
historical’ PE. But focus on the enterprise (Betrieb) as a rational organization again
brings capitalism close to bureaucracy: ‘the capitalistically centralized large-scale
enterprise’ is an obvious analogy of centralized and large-scale administration (200),
and this focus allows Weber to emphasize features such as the hierarchical discip-
linary function exercised by the management within the factory, something which
is held to resemble the discipline and hierarchy within the state apparatus (209). But
perhaps the most striking evidence of Weber’s desire to assimilate capitalism to
bureaucracy is the fact that he has almost nothing to say here about the capitalist
entrepreneur—the one irreducible point of difference between the two, since the latter
(as we have seen) is “something more” than simply rational. Weber attempts to finesse
the point when he suggests that the entrepreneur might conceive of himself ‘as the “first
official” of his enterprise, just as the ruler of a specifically bureaucratic modern state

119 MWG I/17.80–3. 120 ‘Das preußische Wahlrecht’ [1917], MWG I/15.230–1.
322 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

[Frederick the Great] designated himself as its “first servant”’ (158). But this is
an almost purely rhetorical conceit—something truly exceptional in Weber—
which draws on no empirical illustration, and elides the considerable difference
between Frederick and his bureaucrats, however he may have liked to describe
himself. (Predictably this suggestion was discarded in 1919–20.)121 Still, the
very weakness of this conceit supplies the clearest indication of Weber’s desire to
assimilate the capitalism and bureaucracy, even to the point of masking their
differences—and this tendency is hardly explicable except in succession to the
priority originally allotted to capitalism in the PE. In summary: before 1914
Weber had really taken only one step forward from the PE: the replacement of
capitalism by bureaucracy as his headline category. But important though this
was, he had by no means taken the next step, and achieved a satisfactory
working-out of the relationship between capitalism as a whole (including entre-
preneurs) and bureaucracy. This would have to wait until after 1914.
A third area where capitalism remained a major presence after 1910 lies in the
texts on law in ‘Economy and Society’. The second and longer of these, the so-
called Sociology of Law, offers the more comprehensive, evolutionary–historical
treatment, but the agenda underlying both is given by the title of the first,
‘Economy and Law, their connection in principle’, as set out in the 1914 contents
plan.122 Weber is no legal Marxist, and he does not, unlike Karl Renner in his
contemporary treatment of ‘The Social Function of Legal Institutes’ (1904), simply
equate ‘the sphere of private law’ with that of ‘the capitalist mode of production’.123
Nonetheless, except for the alien incursion of natural law, Weber is as much a
believer now, as he was in 1882, that ‘after all the evolution of private law’, the law
of property, ‘constitutes the history of law’ overall,124 and so his initial agendum is
hardly different from that of a Marxist: what is the relationship between law and
bourgeois–capitalist economic interest?
It goes almost without saying that the force of this interest is substantial and the
connections between law and the economy are ‘most intimate’125—and as a result
there has always been an opening for critics to suppose that Weber construed the
law as a capitalist agency.126 For Jürgen Habermas, the outstanding modern writer
of this kind, Weberian ‘formal law’ was the ‘organizing instrument for the capitalist
economy and the modern state’, and together they made up a linked, unwholesome
trinity, entrenching cognitive–instrumental rationality at the expense of a healthier

121 Cf. WuG 127. 122 On this title, above II.3 n. 21.
123 Josef Karner [Karl Renner], ‘Die soziale Funktion der Rechtsinstitute’, in Marx-Studien
I (Vienna, 1904), 65–192, here 70.
124 To Helene Weber, 2.5.82, Jugendbriefe, 41. Cf. Sociology of Law, MWG I/22–3.521, 547.
125 MWG I/22–3.193.
126 N. Gane, Max Weber and Contemporary Capitalism (Basingstoke, 2012), ch. 5. In fact this is a

minority route because the bulk of the literature is by lawyers, anxious to uphold the autonomy of the
law. They are not wrong to do so, but the common consequence is that the relationship between law
and capitalism is diminished: the perspective is too juristic and not (as Weber would have wished)
sufficiently sociological. Even works of this kind that claim to highlight the social aspect of Weber’s
thinking have in fact nothing to say about capitalism (under any definition): e.g. Werner Gephart,
Gesellschaftstheorie und Recht (Frankfurt, 1993), 419–587; Stephen Turner and Regis Factor, Max
Weber: The Lawyer as Social Thinker (New York, 1994).
 Capitalism and Herrschaft 323

moral or aesthetic rationalization. (The latter categories are of course Habermas’,

not Weber’s.)127 But while it is undoubtedly true that Weberian law, bureaucracy,
and the capitalist enterprise display common, instrumentally rationalizing features,
this does not make them a linked unit. However threatening Weber’s occasional
references to ‘the general rationalization of life’ may appear—I would suggest that
the threat is exaggerated and that capitalism and rationalism are precisely ambiva-
lent, in that they constitute both a constraint and a practical necessity of modern life
as the famous metaphor of the ‘steel housing’ (stahlhartes Gehäuse) implies
[XXI.108][c]128—this is an empirical and historical accumulation, not a Hegelian
or sociological system. In fact Weber’s treatment of law and capitalism marks out
the distinction between them, in contrast to the assimilationist strategy practised in
regard to capitalism and bureaucracy, although what these two bodies of work share
in common, nonetheless, is fidelity to positions laid down in the PE.
So Weber’s starting point is that the formal rationality of lawyers and the
mindset of agents operating in the capitalist economy are distinct entities (193):129
It is obvious that these two perspectives pose entirely different problems for themselves, and
their “objects” [of interest] can in no way come into direct contact with each other; that the
ideal legal order of legal theory has nothing to do, directly, with the cosmos of actual
economic conduct, since the two are located at different levels: the one in ideal imperatives,
the other in real events. If despite this the economic and legal orders stand in the most
intimate connection with each other, then this connection is to be understood not in a
juristic [ideal and theoretical] sense but a sociological one: as empirically valid.
In accordance with this general prescription, Weber spends roughly half his energy
insisting on the principled autonomy of law: ‘Economic situations do not simply
give birth to new legal forms automatically, of themselves’ (346). The kernel of the
history of law is the history of legal practitioners who are theorists above all—here is
the acme of Weber’s conceptual “idealism”, though the inadequacy of the term in
this context is clear—men who in the modern period are overwhelmingly a product
of the universities: ‘The unleashed force of the purely logical requirements of legal
doctrine, and of the legal practice it governs, can have the consequence that the
needs of [economic] interests as the driving force in the shaping of law are really, to
a large extent, ruled out’ (485).130 The purely formal qualities of Roman law are of
world-historical importance in the overall rationalization of law, because it is
‘absolutized quite simply as “logically correct” law’ regardless of any external
circumstance; while the end-point of the rationalizing process is also defined purely
internally: ‘what the jurist cannot think, does not legally exist’ (582).
However, there is also a set of extraneous but convergent factors that promote
Occidental legal rationalization. For example, this process is a product of ‘concrete
or material [sachlich] necessities’ such as the ‘increasing significance of commerce in
goods and of those legal interests involved in them’ (579, 485). It is taken as

127 Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns (Frankfurt, 19874), i. 227; cf. 331–66.
128 Historian, 9 n.10. For ‘general rationalization’, ‘Vorwort’, GdSÖ Abt. I (Tübingen, 1914), vii.
129 References in () in this and the next two paragraphs are to MWG I/22–3.
130 Emphasis added.
324 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

virtually self-evident that ‘bourgeois social strata’ are the ‘economically rational . . .
strata’, because it was ‘natural’ to them to demand ‘an unambiguous, clear law,
removed from irrational, administrative arbitrariness . . . a law that functioned cal-
culably’ (557, 567). On one occasion we are even told that ‘today’s institution [of
law] resting in principle on formal “equality before the law” is the work of two great
rationalizing powers: market expansion on one side, and [political] bureaucratization
. . . on the other’ (367). This is an unusual instance of Weber thinking explicitly in
terms of something like Habermas’ trinity (state, law, economy), but the independ-
ence of the market from the bureaucracy and, as a matter of fact, of legal evolution
from these two, remains clear. Still, it is true that internal rationalization was not
sufficient in itself to produce the modern legal system in which Weber qualified, as is
evidenced by an exposition of the historical problems that first surfaced in the PE
[XX.35]. Thus it was not Roman law, the great instrument of formal rationalization,
that was responsible for the materially rational innovations in company law that
were basic to Continental capitalist activity—these were largely the product of
medieval Germanic law instead (346–7, 580); and in any case these legal provisions
were lacking in England, with its entirely different legal system, even though
England was the outstanding exemplar of European capitalism (631–5).
Natural law is another significant example of extraneous intervention in the
process of legal evolution—in this case revolutionary, religious intervention (519,
596). Here we find Weber giving vent to a leading idea that was in his head in
1904–5 but went unexpressed then, regarding the natural law of the Puritans.
In 1905 he had made the elliptical remark that seventeenth-century natural law (lex
naturae) represented the introduction of a set of ‘purposive structures in the world’,
which are of an obscurely portentous kind [XXI.23]. After 1910 the structures are
specified: they are forms of contract. Revolutionary religiosity introduced the idea
of contract, which in Weber’s eyes has a dual significance. It supplied both the
‘individualistic’ conception of society as a whole—the idea of an original, social
contract between autonomous agents—and the basis of ordinary economic trans-
actions: ‘“Legal freedoms” are an essential component of such a natural law, and
above all freedom of contract. Voluntary rational contract, either as the real historical
basis of all social formations including the state or else as the regulative standard for
[economic] valuation, was one of the universal, formal principles of natural law
construction’ (599). In this way we see how natural law can, despite its evidently
substantive and ethical origin, be significantly assimilated to the legal formalism
that is so important to Weber. It thus provides a historical bridge, such as only he
could construct, between religion, law, and capitalism. Understandably this intri-
cacy eluded (or was rejected by) Habermas, who wished to read Weber in a rigidly
social scientific light: that is, to correct his theoretical ‘errors’ of detail so that the
underlying ‘systematic content’ of the Weberian diagnosis of the present could be
better brought out.131 But Weber, however insistent on the virtues of logic and

131 Habermas, Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns, i. 365; cf. i. 356–8. The desire to correct and

improve Weber so as to bring out his full systematizing potential is a major bond of sympathy between
Habermas and Wolfgang Schluchter: cf. Die Entwicklung des okzidentalen Rationalismus (Tübingen,
1979).
 Capitalism and Herrschaft 325

system for the individual in particular situations, is not a systematic thinker. Unlike
Habermas, he insists that when modernity is conceived on anything other than an
individual level, it is meaningless, because the collected individuals no longer
subscribe to a common Kultur, and so man’s predicament under these conditions
is mixed: he is innately capable of creating his own conceptual structures of
meaning (on the one hand), but this is no more than a necessary response (on
the other) to ‘the inexhaustible multiplicity inherent in every historical phenom-
enon’ [XX.11].
By their differing routes the pre-war Sociologies of Law and Herrschaft focus on
different aspects of capitalism: the first produces a picture of the semi-detached
relationship between law and capitalist (or bourgeois–capitalist) interest, while the
Sociology of Herrschaft yoked together bureaucracy and the capitalist enterprise.
The former, pluralistic strategy is the more mature one—Weber’s legal thought was
much more deeply embedded than that on bureaucracy—and the point will be
confirmed by examination of his thinking after 1914. In contrast to these detailed
perspectives, holistic references to ‘capitalism’ or ‘modern capitalism’ in the sense of
the PE or the later ‘Vorbemerkung’ (1919–20), are largely absent from the pre-war
‘Economy and Society’, apart from the flagrant exceptions noted above, and this
accords with Weber’s conceptual demotion of “capitalism” in 1907–8. Nonethe-
less, because of its variety of presences, capitalism remains a pervasive part of a
modern Kultur. Today it is uncommon to read the differing components of
‘Economy and Society’ together, despite the fact that they were written by one
man for a single handbook entry. Yet without going to Habermasian extremes, it
remains the case that the texts we have been reviewing are closely linked: salutes to
the significance of political forms of Herrschaft are commonplace in the Sociology
of Law (for example, political unification or the want of it is essential to explaining
the differences between English and German legal evolution), just as, conversely,
the treatment of ‘bureaucratism’ includes an extended excursus on the law.132 If
they are read together, we continue to gain a clear sense that Weber was evoking
a common modern Kultur dominated by the recurrent themes and tropes we
have observed—impersonality, specialization, Sachlichkeit, calculability, hence
“rationality”—with capitalism too as an common factor. In the broadest sense
this is a continuation of the message of the PE in 1904–5.

132 MWG I/22–4.188–94; cf. Parlament und Regierung [1917–18], MWG I/15.453–4. I do not,

however, go so far as Wolfgang Schluchter, who, in the quest to assimilate the Sociology of Law to that
of Herrschaft, almost obliterates Weber’s focus on private law and hence on capitalism. Thus the
Sociology of Law is described as offering ‘suggestions for a historical–empirical theory of
“constitutional” evolution and of “public” law’: Die Entwicklung des okzidentalen Rationalismus
(Tübingen, 1979), 156; cf. 128–9. This is to read Weber through the spectacles of Hermann Heller
(155 n. 91, etc.). Siegfried Hermes reaches a similar conclusion by a more cautious route when he
speaks of ‘the identity of (political) Herrschaft and law’ in Weber, and denies that Weber ever
established any independent ‘sociological concept of law’: ‘Das Recht einer “soziologischen
Rechtslehre” ’, Rechtstheorie, 35 (2004), 195–231, here 230, 226; cf. 224. A progenitor of this line
of argument (even though he had not then seen the Sociology of Law) was Hans Kelsen, Der
soziologische und der juristische Staatsbegriff (Tübingen, 1922), 156–70.
326 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

IV. THE IMPACT OF WAR

The final stage of Weber’s intellectual odyssey with capitalism took place as a result
of Germany’s entry into war in July–August 1914. It finds its principal expression
in the pamphlet Suffrage and Democracy in Germany, and the more institutionally
focused treatment of Parliament and Government in a Restructured Germany, both
written in the summer and autumn of 1917, though as ever subject to later
revision.133 (One should not discount the 1919 ‘Vorbemerkung’, but it was an
elementary rather than an advanced statement, speedily composed and recapitulat-
ing, as we saw, positions established in 1907–8. These had not been superseded;
but Weber had gone beyond them.) Weber described these texts as ‘academic’ but
not wissenschaftlich.134 This may sound like hair-splitting, but in fact his meaning is
clear. The material they expose and the concepts they deploy are indistinguishable
from his academic, ‘sociological’, and ‘universal–historical’ work (358, 452, 180).135
However, they depart from the strict canons of Weberian Wissenschaft in one
crucial respect: they contain open declarations of value-judgement and political
preference. (In fact this distinction had been present throughout Weber’s life, and
the Preface to his inaugural lecture as professor at Freiburg in 1895, an eminently
academic yet political statement, is essentially the same as that to Parliament and
Government in highlighting the presence of value-‘judgement’.)136 Since the divide
between these genres was ethical, not intellectual, it was one that could easily be
crossed for intellectual purposes. Thus the wartime writings offer a first outline of
the significant revisions Weber would make to the Sociology of Herrschaft in
1919–20—the one major Weberian sociology to be rewritten after the war—as
well as materials for its unwritten appendage, the ‘Sociology of the State’ (a modest
but noticeable departure from the pre-war format of ‘Economy and Society’).137
There is also seamless chronological continuity between the composition of the
political writings and Weber’s first return to the Sociology of Herrschaft in a
university context, in Vienna in 1918. Thus he gave a pilot lecture in Vienna on
‘Problems of State Sociology’ as early as October 1917,138 even before the political
writings were finally revised.

133 Wahlrecht und Democratie was published at the beginning of December 1917 (MWG I/15.344).

The genesis of Parlament und Regierung was still more protracted. It contains a number of references to
the events of January 1918 (ibid. 485, 497, 500, 538), and the final text was not established until
March (429–30).
134 Weber described Parlament und Regierung as ‘a polemic, academic in its character and tone’,

which well captures its mixed nature: to Duncker Verlag, 26.8.17, Briefe; cf. ‘Deutschland unter den
europäischen Weltmächten’ [1916], MWG I/15.163. For explicit disavowal of Wissenschaft: MWG
I.15.432. Parlament und Regierung is discussed at length in correspondence, but little is known about
the origins of Wahlrecht und Demokratie. Its starting point is clear—the three-class franchise in the
Prussian Landtag—but the wide-ranging, largely social and kulturell treatment this received is
eminently personal. We do know, however, that Weber sought to separate it from the more political
analysis in Parlament und Regierung, and, despite some repetition, the two texts are broadly
complementary: to Duncker Verlag, 27.11.17, Briefe.
135 References in this section in ( ) are to MWG I/15. 136 MWG I/4.543.
137 See the Appendix to this chapter. 138 MWG I/22-4.752–6.
 Capitalism and Herrschaft 327

Revision of his thinking on Herrschaft was pressingly necessary, owing to the

experience of the war, whereas the so-called German Revolution of 1918–19,
which Weber famously dismissed as a ‘carnival’,139 made no impression at a
fundamental level. (Indeed he actually anticipated a “syndicalism of immaturity”
in the aftermath of war in Parliament and Government) (550). At the same time,
there is no sign that the war was of any consequence for his thinking on law and
religion, and the want of post-war rewritings of these sociologies owing to his death,
though formally regrettable, is of little substantive importance. A further notable
feature is that in his political writings Weber was released from adherence to the
deep- and trans-historical format imposed by ‘Economy and Society’ before 1914.
Notwithstanding occasional “academic” references to ancient Egypt (464–5,541),
his subject here was contemporary Germany, and this gave him free rein to say what
he wished about the specifically historical phenomenon of modern capitalism, just
as he had done in the PE. However, this then impacted upon his altered conception
of the sociologies of Herrschaft and the state, so that, to judge from the contents
scheme supplied by his lecture course on the ‘Sociology of the State’ (1920), the
latter would have included a treatment of the relationship between the state and
modern capitalism. Its place would not have been a large one (just as the emergence
of the ‘state’, a conceptual heading deliberately eschewed by Weber before 1914,
should not be exaggerated), but it seems that capitalism would after all have
supplied a heading in ‘Economy and Society’.140
Yet while the war had a real impact on Weber, it should not be supposed that, in
a mind so wedded to continuity and accumulation, this was exclusively a story of
change.141 At the opening of Suffrage and Democracy he proclaims the fundamental
importance of ‘capitalist economy and society’ (503) over politics, which is prac-
tically a return to the capitalist-centred perspective of the PE in 1904. It is laid
down as an axiom ‘that the whole future of Germany, economic and political, the
living standard of the masses as well as the provision of means for the “needs of
Kultur”, depends in the first instance on not reducing the intensity of German
economic work’ after the war (352). Indeed, this intensity will have to be increased:
‘In an economic–political perspective, the maximum possible rationalization of
economic work is . . . a vital question not only for [Germany’s] position in the
world, but simply for the chance of a bearable existence for the nation as a whole’
(353–4). These statements about the primacy of the future peacetime society and
economy over politics are important in that they recur unflinchingly, in the midst
of an apparently successful war, to Weber’s pre-war viewpoint, where warfare is
extraneous to the rationalizing evolution of the Occident.142 He returns to the idea

139 e.g. ‘Politics as a Vocation’, 28.1.19, MWG I/17.74. 140 MWG III/7.66–7 }12.
141 This is the principal defect of Marcus Llanque’s substantial work Demokratisches Denken im
Krieg (Berlin, 2000), which too readily discerns ‘frequent change in Max Weber’s political
argumentation’ in accordance with the narrative the author has himself constructed (240).
142 In fact post-war economic reconstruction dominated Weber’s thinking about the war, and also

his abortive attempts to secure war work after leaving the hospital service in the autumn of 1915.
Hence his work on the Mitteleuropa Committee in 1916. See e.g. [Zur Frage des Friedenschließens,
1915], MWG I/15.65–7; to Friedrich Naumann [2.11.15], Briefe.
328 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

of the essential difference between a historically ubiquitous, politically fuelled

capitalism, which might well—as in the ancient Roman case—be dependent on
warfare, and a uniquely rational, peaceable, economically generated Occidental
capitalism, which had been worked out in ‘Agriculture in Antiquity’ (1908), in
1917 when he stresses ‘the profound contrast’ between (on one side) ‘capitalism
living off state contracts, war finance, the profits of illicit trading and all those
chances for robbery and opportunism that have been further gigantically increased
by the war’, and (on the other) ‘the calculation of systemic profitability [Rentabi-
lität] made by the rational bourgeois enterprise in peacetime’ (356).143 Weber
further entrenches the contrast by appealing to the ethical qualities of the latter
(albeit in his distinctive understanding of the term): this is ‘the ethic of vocational
duty and professional loyalty’ and the embodiment of the principle that ‘honesty is
the best policy’—an appeal that takes us back to the PE in the most literal sense
(356–7)[XXI.71]. In short, the war was not to be understood as a new departure,
but must be set within the long-term scheme of Occidental evolution, where it
appeared as a damaging deviation.
Speaking in 1905, Weber had opined that warfare was, if not quite an anachron-
ism, a primitive activity in a modern world where ‘the great deeds of statesmen are
no longer performed by wielding the sword on the battlefield, but take on the
extremely prosaic form of drops of ink on paper or sound-waves—speeches in
parliament or writing documents.’144 One might suppose this reflected the com-
placency arising from a context where there had been no all-out European war for
over a century, yet he made the same point with identical words in 1917.145 It will
be clear from this that, at a fundamental level, Weber was a liberal multinationalist
who would have regarded the sequence of world wars of 1914–45, beginning with
‘the political catastrophe’ of July 1914 (436), with the same degree of distance as we
do today, even if our response is one of sorrow and regret whereas his was one
of outrage. He still believed that nation states were all-sufficient for the ethically
low purposes of politics and had no time for pacifist or ethical internationalism,
which he regarded as a Christian delusion.146 Nor, even in the 1890s, had he
supposed that the classical “Cobdenite” international market of the nineteenth
century operating independently of national political intervention could last.147
But his fundamental assumption that the principal embodiment of national com-
petition, as well as the primary agreed purpose of public and social life at home, was
socio-economic and peaceful, and that the “Occident” as a whole was united by a
supra-national, rationalizing Kultur that entrenched this priority, is very close to
our own. (Of course today such assumptions extend to many areas that were once
outside the Weberian Occident but have now been sucked into its orbit and

143 Above II.1. 144 At the Verein für Sozialpolitik, MWG I/8.268.
145 ‘Today it is not the actual wielding of the sword, but utterly prosaic sound waves and drops of
ink—written and spoken words—that are the physical carriers of leading (political and: military!)
action’: MWG I/15.490.
146 e.g. ‘Politics as a Vocation’ [1919], MWG I/17. 234–6, 240–1, 248.
147 ‘Allgemeine . . . Nationalökonomie’ [1894–8], MWG III/1.528–35.
 Capitalism and Herrschaft 329

premisses—but this too Weber anticipated [XXI.108].) His conception of long-

term historical evolution (Entwicklung) was empirical and so (as he would have
been the first to accept) open to historical alteration, just as the course of a big ship
may change; nonetheless, his grasp of the elementary ‘realities’148 on which that
evolution was founded was so powerful that the sense of long-term continuity that
was fundamental to Weber is one we can still share with him today.
The profound importance he attached to society and economy meant that his
political analysis in 1917–18 had three pillars: parliamentary and party politics;
bureaucracy; and capitalism. Yet the last is commonly ignored.149 It is true that in
volume terms the first two receive the most attention, since the immediate issues at
stake (the Prussian franchise, the right of the Reichstag to form responsible ministries)
are political and institutional. This superficial priority is emphasized by the fact that,
as always, Weber found it hard to write about capitalism at length. He remained
‘about one-third economist’ at most;150 he was long since detached from the faculty
of economics;151 and neither Schmollerian empirical description of the elementary
phenomena of capitalism nor ahistorical, neo-classical economic theory was of central
interest to him. But what does interest him, here as in the PE, is capitalism as a
holistic phenomenon within society, economy, and Kultur. Hence his insistent focus
on the mirror image provided by the contemporary “literati”, the authors of a profuse
wartime occasional literature, who hailed ‘above all’ from ‘the academic and extra-
academic teaching body’ (531), and displayed the instinctive hostility of cultural
conservatives towards the dragon ‘“capitalism”, the father of all evil, the source of
unrest’ (355). In such a context most of what he has to say about capitalism, while
never uncritical, is very positive, and gives the lie to the distinguished tradition of
commentary that sees Weber as simply a critic of the Kultur of his day.152 In fact,
criticism became substantial in his eyes only when tempered by prior identification of
the inescapable realities of modernity, which as evolutionary-historical necessities
stand beyond criticism. This is why his criticism, when it comes, is so powerful.
At first Weber’s argument in 1917 appears much the same as in the pre-war
Sociology of Herrschaft: bureaucratization represents an unstoppable power, which
is all the more potent because it operates alike within the state apparatus and
outside it. We are told, quite conventionally, that ‘From a social scientific perspec-
tive, the modern state is as much an enterprise [Betrieb] as a factory’, and the same

148 A central trope of the wartime writings: MWG I/15.367, 369, 373, etc.
149 e.g. Andreas Anter, Max Webers Theorie des modernen Staats (Berlin, 1995); Marcus Llanque,
Demokratisches Denken im Krieg (Berlin, 2000), 179–91, 237–63. The famous analysis of Wolfgang
Mommsen, which focused on Weber’s “Caesarist” and implicitly anti-democratic prescriptions for a
post-war German constitution, is vulnerable not merely because Weber’s preferred version of
“Caesarism” was based on an unthreatening English parliamentarism, but because Mommsen too
ignored Weber’s insistence on an autonomous capitalism, free from both politicians and bureaucracy:
Max Weber und die deutsche Politik (Tübingen, 20043), 201–5. Hence the indiscriminate and mistaken
verdict that ‘capitalism . . . appeared to [Weber] to be inevitably allied to the forces of rationalization
and bureaucratization’: Political and Social Theory of Max Weber (Oxford, 1989), 109.
150 To Hermann Baumgarten, 3.1.91, Jugendbriefe, 327.
151 To Rickert [28.1.16], Briefe.
152 e.g. Lawrence Scaff, Fleeing the Iron Cage (Berkeley, 1989).
330 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

can be said about political parties (452; cf. 454). Here is the pre-war conception of
bureaucratization as part of a long-term rationalizing Occidental evolution over
millennia, apparently unaltered . But whereas before 1914 Weber’s message was, if
not enthusiastic, one of sober acceptance, focusing on the unique impersonality,
objectivity and efficiency generated by bureaucracy, it was now offset by an equal
and contrary emphasis on the need to keep the bureaucratic tide in check, by
breaking it down into its separate ministerial, capitalist, and party political com-
ponents. Without denying that they were both bureaucracies, by 1917 Weber was
passionately committed to upholding ‘the contrast between private–capitalist and
state bureaucracy’ (357). This is where the impact of the World War registers. It
offered what he took to be incontrovertible proof that the German state, the
supreme example of the modern bureaucratic state, had been guilty of a catastroph-
ic deficiency of political leadership. The leadership had placed the country in a
situation in 1914 where the balance of powers against it (above all the opposition of
England) was so ‘unnatural’ and unfavourable that Weber’s initial expectation was
that Germany must lose, although battlefield success then encouraged him to hope
that the army might at least cancel out the worst consequences of the blunders
previously made in policy (517–20; cf. 468).153 So while the war did not affect
Weber’s thinking in regard to capitalism directly, it did impact on the adjacent
subject of bureaucracy. Previously his implicit assumption was that political lead-
ership was extraneous to its central qualities of impersonality and efficiency; now
absence of leadership was identified as a structural characteristic: bureaucracy was
rule ‘by means of an . . . administrative staff ’ and nothing more.154 This then had a
significant indirect consequence for capitalism, which, as we have seen, was always
something more than a purely rational, administrative structure for Weber. Cap-
italism remained implicated in the long-term processes of bureaucratization and
rationalization of course, but now he was anxious to stress that it had a separate
identity, outside both party politics and the state bureaucracy, and that this separate
identity was an essential good.
A further impetus in this direction came from the assaults of the literati. Under
the heading of the so-called ‘Ideas of 1914’, there was an imprecise yet widespread
desire to promote the national solidarity created by the outbreak of the war so as
decisively to overcome the political and social differences of peacetime. This was the
modish view which—in sharp contrast to Weber—held that the outbreak of war had

153 To Paul Siebeck, Mina Tobler, 7.9.14, Briefe; cf. above II.4, n.5.—Note here the contrast

between Weber’s pre- and post-1914 conceptions of the consequences of Bismarck’s retirement in
1890. Originally, while he perceived an evident want of capable leadership thereafter, any wider or
structural responsibility for this lay with the inadequacy of the bourgeoisie: Freiburg Inaugural [1895],
MWG I/4.567–70. However, in regard to bureaucracy, Weber’s primary point was that Bismarck’s
retirement was of no consequence—an entirely different position from that adopted in wartime: e.g.
Sociology of Herrschaft [c.1911–14], MWG I/22–4.195. In fact most of the components of Weber’s
later political analysis are present before 1914 (critique of foreign policy, support for parliamentarism),
but at this date he was unwilling to let them impinge on his emergent, sociological analysis of
bureaucracy. It is a reminder that Weberian Herrschaft was not a narrowly or solely political
conception.
154 WuG [1919–20], 126.
 Capitalism and Herrschaft 331

changed or could change everything. The principal agency for such domestic
integration was the state, which was idealized as an ‘organic’ entity that would
purify a sordid capitalism by bringing it under state control (355–7, etc.).155 It is
hardly possible to pin down an amorphous body of opinion that ranges from
cultural conservatism to state socialism to covert support for military dictatorship,
especially when this whole spectrum was in rapid flux in 1916–17, but it is worth
noting that the original progenitor of the ‘Ideas of 1914’ was Johann Plenge, an
exponent of “organizational socialism” and an academic economist well known to
Weber. Not only had Weber recruited him as a contributor to the Grundriss der
Sozialökonomik, but Plenge had even dedicated a book to Weber, and if this was
partially an apology for failing to deliver his Grundriss contribution, it also reflected
real esteem.156 Furthermore, one of the most prominent, if vacuous, early pro-
moters of the ‘Ideas of 1914’ was none other than Ernst Troeltsch,157 a man for
whose political views Weber had no time at all, but who was nonetheless a
significant spokesman for the powerful strand of educated, intellectual opinion in
a polity where there was no fully developed parliament to represent public opinion.
With well-meaning enemies like these “good people but bad musicians” (161,
361),158 not to mention a wide range of other participants in the debate well
known to Weber—it was a debate where economists were particularly prominent—
capitalism was in need of defence. Here is another reason why the wartime writings are
the closest he ever came to appearing as an apologist for capitalism.
For Weber the essence of the capitalist economy and party politics was a
commitment to moral ‘struggle’ or competition, leading to negotiation and ‘com-
promise’, since they started from a ‘voluntaristic’ and ‘formally free’ basis (364–6).
This was in contrast to the bureaucrat who worked within a formally regulated
environment of ‘fixed spheres of competence . . . hierarchical sub- and super-ordin-
ation’, which provided the environment for ‘peaceful administrative work’, un-
troubled by either struggle or the need to negotiate with independent and opposed
interests (451, 364). It is when Weber uses the elementary language of freedom that
we see most readily why capitalism was more than merely rational, even if it was not
quite charismatic: the specialist division of labour under capitalism might be a
principal creator of the ‘steel housing’ of modern constraint [XXI.108], but still
there was a component in capitalism that maintained a crucial residue of freedom

155 Cf. ‘Das preußische Wahlrecht’ [1917], MWG I/15.231.

156 e.g. Weber to Plenge 5.6.09, 11.8, 4.11.13, Briefe.
157 ‘Die Ideen von 1914’ [1916], pr. Deutscher Geist und Westeuropa (Tübingen, 1925), 31–58; cf.

Troeltsch, KGA 13.267–72. Weber, who heard Troeltsch’s original talk, judged it ‘weak’: to Marianne
Weber, 21.3.16, Briefe. Several principal objects of Weberian criticism feature here: appeal to an
‘organic’ political and social community (44–5); denial of the weight of numbers (37); appeal to the
“pre-political” German classics (39–41); attack on individualism (45); as well as a striking inversion of
the idea of the literati, which Troeltsch places before 1914 (42).
158 The phrase suits Plenge very well, a man to whom Weber displayed considerable personal

sympathy across the years 1909–16. Hence a personally friendly but still dissentient reception in
private of Plenge’s book, Der Krieg und die Volkswirtschaft (Münster, 1915), which first raised the
slogan of the ‘Ideas of 1914’—something MWG finds ‘astonishing’: to Plenge, 13.8.15, Briefe.—See
further my ‘Max Weber and the Literati’, in Kay Waechter (ed.), Grenzüberschreitende Diskurse
(Wiesbaden, 2010).
332 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

within the housing. The principled distinction between capitalism and the state
bureaucracy is reinforced by the fact that, while both might be products of
bureaucratic evolution, they had ‘grown from different historical roots’.159 ‘Just as
the [medieval] Italians developed the modern capitalist economic organization, so it
was the Byzantines, after them the [Renaissance] Italians, the territorial states of the
absolutist era, French revolutionary centralization and finally, surpassing all others,
the Germans who developed the rational, division-of-labour, specialized, bureau-
cratic organization of all human associations of rule in virtuoso manner . . .’
(461).160 This was important to the historically minded Weber as showing that
these were separate phenomena, which were not destined to be bound together in
the modern day. On the contrary: a fusion of capitalism and the state would be a
domestic catastrophe hardly less than that in foreign policy. Two unbreakable and
unstoppable forces would be made into one, thereby crushing the last ‘remnant of
“individualist” freedom of movement in any sense’:
An “organic”, Oriental–Egyptian social organization would then arise, but in contrast to
this, it would be as strictly rational as a machine. Who can deny that such a thing lurks as a
possibility in the future? . . . Let us assume for a moment that this very possibility was an
inevitable fate—who would not then smile at the fear of our literati that in future our
political and social evolution could bring us too much “individualism” or “democracy” and
[their belief] that “true freedom” will only dawn when the current “anarchy” of our
economic production and the “party machinations” of our parliament have been eliminated
in favour of “social order” and “organic structure”—that is, in favour of the pacifism of social
impotence in the shadow of the one power that was quite definitely inescapable: the
bureaucracy in state and economy. (465 cf. 357)
Now here Weber is arguing not only against his opponents but against himself and
in particular his pre-war self. He himself (as the text suggests) had always enter-
tained the possibility of a complete bureaucratization of German social organization
as a consequence of rationalizing evolution—though of course he had no time for
the implicit suggestion of the literati that this should be done wilfully, as a
conscious act of wartime solidarity—and when in this gloomy, prophetic mood
he would laud the “anarchy of (capitalist) production” and the ‘individualism’ of its
Kultur as an offset [XXI.12].161 Because these fears derived from his own, long-
term analysis, they had not gone away and, however much he argues against them,
the chance that they might be realized ‘at some point’ was always there. Even when
he was explaining to Austrian army officers in June 1918 how to cope with the
socialist threat, he would not rule out an evolutionary process of ‘socialization’, nor
of the ‘standardization . . . of production’ [cf. XXI.96], which meant in turn that
‘the old, free pioneer spirit of the bourgeois entrepreneurial class of the past’ was in

159 WuG 129.

160 In the capitalist case Weber is thinking of the medieval Italians who are the subject of his 1889
dissertation On the History of Medieval Trading Societies; in regard to bureaucratic Herrschaft, it must be
assumed that he draws on the conventional idea of the Italian invention of ‘lo stato’, going back to
Jakob Burckhardt, Kultur der Renaissance (1860), Ab. I.
161 ‘Zur Lage der bürgerlichen Demokratie’ [1905–6], MWG I/10.269–72; ‘Agrarverhältnisse im

Altertum’3 [1907–8], MWG I/6.724.

 Capitalism and Herrschaft 333

decline, albeit the practical outcome would not be the one the Social Democrats
desired: ‘The dictatorship of the officials rather than that of the workers is seen to be
on the advance—for the present at any rate.’162 Similarly in 1920, he broke off all
connection with party politics rather than be involved in a parliamentary commit-
tee to consider the possible “socialization” of the economy, on the ground that ‘the
entrepreneur . . . needs us.’ Yet he accepted that such an agenda was legitimate for
politicians who, unlike a scholar such as himself, had to make compromises and
were right to do so according to the reduced “ethic of responsibility”.163 But in all
this there was an important difference from the pre-war situation. Before 1914
(as we saw), he was afraid that ‘capitalism [was] the pioneer of the bureaucratization
of the economy’, where bureaucratization was understood principally as a unitary
phenomenon. Now he decided that capitalism might be the salvation of society,
provided that it was not sucked into the clutches of the state bureaucracy.164
As part of the campaign to disentangle capitalism from state bureaucracy, and
reflecting his enhanced interest in leadership, Weber highlighted not merely the
need for the party and parliamentary arena to generate authentic political leaders to
lead and control the bureaucracy, but also the importance of the “free”, extra-
rational, and extra-bureaucratic qualities of the capitalist entrepreneur. Though he
might sit in an office and in this formal sense wear a bureaucratic appearance, still
‘The leading spirit, the “entrepreneur” . . . is something other than an “official”’
(466). Thus, in contrast to his pre-war reticence regarding Fugger, Rockefeller, or
Villard, Weber chose to celebrate Gustav Krupp as one of the ‘born leaders by
nature’ present in contemporary Germany (480). Now the nobly born Gustav von
Bohlen und Halbach, who married into the Krupp dynasty in 1906—a match in
which the Kaiser took a personal interest—had little in common with the anonym-
ous ‘selfmademan’ of the PE, starting his business from scratch ‘with a few
thousand marks in capital’ [XX.29]. Again, as Weber acknowledged, Krupp’s
politics were the very opposite of to his own: hence his financial backing for the
literary ‘drivel’ that Weber opposed.165 At a purely personal level, a man such as
Walter Rathenau would have been a far more suitable illustration of the virtues of
capitalist leadership. However, his great contribution had been to move over from
industry to help organize the war economy,166 and as such he was complicit in the
wartime tendency to fuse capitalism with the state. By contrast, Krupp, however
unattractive in other respects, had left the state bureaucracy on his marriage to go
into industry. This was why he was Weber’s preferred illustration (481). At the

162 ‘Der Sozialismus’ [1918], MWG I/15.621, 623.

163 To Carl Petersen, 14.4.20, Briefe; cf. Mommsen, Max Weber und die deutsche Politik
(Tübingen, 2004), 332–5.
164 MWG I/6.723–4.
165 Praise of Krupp also casts a critical light on Weber’s insistence that rational enterprise-capitalism

was a peacetime affair (MWG I/15.356), although the Krupp firm had existed long before 1914 and
was not created by war. Perhaps Weber had this conundrum in mind when in 1919–20 he argued that
modern Occidental capitalism was ‘(formally) peaceful’ [i.4].
166 See the allusion in Weber to Siebeck, 10.7.16, Briefe; Ernst Schulin, ‘Max Weber and Walther

Rathenau’, in W. Mommsen and J. Osterhammel (eds), Max Weber and his Contemporaries (London,
1987), 316–18.
334 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

same time Weber was determined to stand up for specifically industrial capitalism
in the face of the wartime borrowing that was creating a vast new stratum of rentiers,
and so he chose to contrast Krupp’s profits from armaments favourably with those
of a black-marketeer profiting from food shortage (356).167
Now a suitably jaundiced reading of these texts could be constructed to portray
Weber as a doctrinaire whose liberalism could be reduced to economic laissez- faire;
but it is not so. His starting point is the acceptance of state and capitalist
bureaucracy as data. He contests neither the supreme efficiency, nor consequential
necessity, of bureaucracy; only the dangers that efficiency presents, when it is not
properly controlled or directed. Again, his conception of capitalism is more cap-
acious than ours or Marx’s.168 Thus skilled labour as much as the entrepreneurial
stratum is subject to a meritocratic ‘process of selection’ (611). The cohort of
authentic leaders includes trade-union leaders alongside Gustav Krupp, and their
participation in ‘the ordered economic struggle’—an interest they share in common
with employers against bureaucrats and literati—is a central component of the
combination of ‘freedom and order [freiheitliche Ordnung]’, which is Weber’s socio-
political ideal—something for which, by no means coincidentally, the English had
always been celebrated (550–1; cf. 351, 354, 392) [XX.11]. Here is the cross-class
constituency of the PE all over again. Furthermore, Weber’s conception of “laissez-
faire” is not simply a political or economic preference, but also a recognition of
what he takes to be an elementary and unalterable reality of historical evolution.
The literati may stand in alliance with property and capitalist interests (the coalition
of Bildung und Besitz, literary culture and property, 370), while the foundations of
the bureaucracy are ‘plutocratic’ owing to the costs of their education (484–5). But
still he believes that the crucial autonomy of the capitalist or socio-economic sphere
from politics, if it can be preserved from state encroachment, is guaranteed on its
side by an empirical fact: that it is impractical for an economically active entrepre-
neur to enter party politics in person. ‘Of all the representatives of the propertied
strata, a modern factory owner, chained to the constant, harsh, wearing work of his
enterprise, is the type who is most “unavailable” for politics’ (378).
Empirically Weber was surely correct: it is not feasible to combine constant
attention to market forces with the equally constant, but different, demands of
politics, although whether this prevents business leaders from exercising a control-
ling interest in the party-political and parliamentary sphere is another question. Yet
ultimately the latter is a secondary point. While he is aware of the power of interest,
such that in ‘today’s social order . . . the inequality of external life-situation, above
all of property, can be softened no doubt but never entirely eliminated’ (370),
emphasis on the employer’s political unavailability is a reminder that, ultimately, it
is the analysis of the ‘qualities’ of the “inner” person [PS i.234], of their capacity to
exercise freedom beyond rationality, that is of most importance to him. The “inner”
life of the entrepreneur (he believes) must stand outside politics and within the

167 See also ‘Die Nobilitierung der Kriegsgewinne’ [1917], MWG I/15.206–7.
168 See today Larry Neal’s thin ‘operational definition of capitalism’: ‘Introduction’, Cambridge
History of Capitalism (Cambridge, 2014), i. 4.
 Capitalism and Herrschaft 335

capitalist sphere, because the society and economy that are the foundations of a
modern Kultur must stand outside politics. Thus in a healthy society and polity all
the three pillars, capitalism, bureaucracy, and parliamentary politics, are independ-
ent of each other so that they can interact frictionally and fruitfully. Note here that
the category of the state is excluded. The wartime analysis is in fact an excellent
illustration of Weber’s lifelong reluctance to deploy such a category, because, as he
said in 1904, any truly realistic ‘concept of the state, however it is formulated, is of
course always a synthesis’ of multiple components.169 What we have instead is a
socio-political system of ‘Kampf und Kompromiß ’, ‘struggle and compromise’ (364),
on the largest scale. The analysis is also notable in that it sets a limit to his bleak
unresolved critique of ‘the political immaturity of broad strata of the German
bourgeoisie’ made at Freiburg in 1895.170 By 1917 Weber is clear that there can be
no simple or direct transition from ‘the attainment of economic power’ to ‘candidacy
for political leadership’ such as he posited then,171 because those who have attained
economic power, most obviously capitalist entrepreneurs, should in fact remain as
economic leaders, while the business of politics should be left, assuming adequate
political institutions exist, to professional politicians such as lawyers (376–7, 535).
As of 1917 the political institutions of Germany are no more adequate from his
point of view than they were in 1895; but still they are in flux, and he can envisage a
working model for the future, resting on a capitalist and bourgeois foundation.172

V . A CONCLUSION

The road forward from the unresolved and incomplete idea of capitalism in the PE in
1904 was complex, and the implications of its bifurcated capitalist-and-rationalist
agenda for Weber’s subsequent work, above all his thinking on Herrschaft, were
considerable. In 1907–8 capitalism was demoted from the titular priority it enjoyed
in ‘The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism’, and the view that suggests
that Weber’s primary conceptual focus moved from capitalism to rationalism is a
just one, subject to the substantial qualification that even in 1904–5, in both the
text of the PE and the parallel writings on methodology, rational conduct was
already his primary concern. The implicit discrepancy between capitalism—a nexus
of ideas established in the 1890s—and purely rational conduct—the novel overlay
that emerged after 1902—is surely the immediate root of Weber’s anxiety in 1904
that he had not yet found ‘the final conceptual fix’ for the “spirit” of capitalism
[XX.12]. Yet this did not mean that capitalism went away thereafter. It was always
present in his mind, as something large, historically specific, and conceptually
intractable. Thus it remained an irreducible sub-component in ‘Economy and

169 »Objektivität« [1904], WL 200.

170 Freiburg Inaugural [1895], MWG I/4.570; cf. below II.8.v. 171 Ibid. 566.
172 Just when Weber worked this out is an open question. For example, many of its elements can be

found in his letter to Michels of 6.11.07, where he supposes that ‘Political democratization’ is
attainable in the foreseeable future: Briefe.
336 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

Society’ before the war and underwent a resurgence after 1914. In the ‘Vorbemer-
kung’ of 1919–20, he filled in something of the missing “second” or external “side”
of capitalism by his exposition of ‘the modern, rational organization of the capitalist
enterprise’ based on ‘the rational-capitalist organization of (formally) free labour’
[i.7–8]. Nonetheless, the enterprise-capitalism expounded here was not the entirety
of Weberian capitalism, which exceeded the rational limits of the enterprise or
Betrieb, above all in the person of the entrepreneur. Thus the one adequate
description of capitalism given here was the least precise: ‘the most fateful power
of our modern life’.
I suggest that there are two underlying causes behind Weber’s 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 (487), of rationalizing religion on his mother’s. Politics and religion were for
him ‘the old general types of ideal’, to which he then sought to assimilate the modern
interest in the economy, whether Marxist or more vulgarly materialist: ‘the eco-
nomic way of viewing things’.173 But this was an alien category. When at the age of
30 he took up a chair in economics, he regarded himself ‘as a beginner in 9/10 of
the subject area’ and had to construct his lectures ‘ab ovo’.174 So it is unsurprising
that the encounter should generate a considerable degree of friction, even if the
higher synthesis that emerged in its wake, the conceptualization of modern Kultur
in terms of its rationality, impersonality, and Sachlichkeit (objectivity), was bril-
liantly successful. Seen in this light the relegation of capitalism in favour of
rationalism, bureaucracy, and law by 1907–8 was at least a partial reversion by
Weber to his historical roots. Nor can there be any doubt that he found it easier to
write about law and bureaucracy, albeit from a sociological rather than a juristic
perspective, than he did about the economy, because these were subjects where he
felt instinctively at home.
However, 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 contem-
porary focus. There was indeed no difficulty in principle here. His stringent
(re)writing of history according to the terms required by his modernist agenda
(“our perspectives”), of which the PE is a classical example, allows for no obstruc-
tion or deviation arising from nostalgic reverence for the past for its own sake. But
still there was an empirical problem: how far back should, or need, one go? Weber
as a consistent thinker and a conventional representative of the culture of his day
assumed instinctively that genetic enquiry should be pursued back to the begin-
nings of recorded history. This perspective was entrenched when he sought to
master this historical database in sociological form, since viable trans-historical
sociological types—such as bureaucracy—had of necessity to be capable of embra-
cing the full range of recorded data. But this was problematic for both the central

173 Ibid. 563, 561, resp.

174 To Adolf Wagner, 14.3.95, cit. W. Hennis, Max Webers Fragestellung (Tübingen, 1987), 122 n.
15; to Alfred Weber, 29.7.04, Nachlaß Max Weber, 30/4 Bl. 100. Ab ovo: from the egg.
 Capitalism and Herrschaft 337

phenomena Weber identified in the PE, ascetic Protestantism and capitalism, since
both were modern- rather than remote-historical. (Indeed, it was even an incipient
problem in the case of bureaucracy, where Weber was tempted to prioritize its
modern over its ancient, ‘patrimonial’ form.) All the same, the problem was less in
the case of ascetic Protestantism, for, though the latter was ‘no longer’ a salvation
religion and in a radical sense unique and modern, Weber still felt able to assimilate
it to the pre-existing category of the salvation religions.175 In this way it could be
placed within a sociology and typology of religion. By contrast, modern capitalism
was a brand new category, in part Marx’s and in part Weber’s own. To situate it
historically he had not only to invent it, he had also to construct its universal and
trans-historical hinterland of political, speculative and adventure capitalism. Hav-
ing done so, he concluded that modern capitalism was simply too historically
limited, that is, too unique (sic), to form a type. Only political capitalism was
trans-historical; and this was largely uninteresting to him. So there was no impetus
on either the modern or the political side to generate a sociological typology such as
we find in the cases of religion and Herrschaft, where a rational type is balanced by a
non-rational one—although, when Weber originally posited the opposition be-
tween traditionalism and capitalism in the PE [XX.20], he may perhaps have hoped
for such an outcome. Capitalism, and especially modern Occidental capitalism, was
relegated in part at least because it was too much of a novelty to be incorporated in a
historically based sociology.
A conclusion regarding Weberian capitalism might then run as follows. The
outstanding and obviously successful component in his analysis of capitalism is not
what he has to say about capitalism itself but its integration within the general
theme of the rationalism of modern Kultur. The simple inference from this is that
the analysis of capitalism was not a success in its own right. However, three
considerations militate against this. One is the substantial, yet veiled, contribution
Weber made to twentieth-century critical thinking about capitalism under the
heading of Marxism via Lukács and the Frankfurt School. This is a major theme
that awaits its historian.176 A second is the irreducible importance Weber attributed
to modern capitalism in its present-day, historical context. It is a crucial reminder
that the entirety of Weberian thought cannot be derived from his sociological and
type structures. However much the latter were dominated by ideas about ration-
ality, the Weberian modern was in fact as much about capitalism and bourgeois life
as rationality and bureaucracy: type construction did not squeeze out empirical and
historical reality. The further defence of Weberian capitalism is that, whether
Weber was prepared to admit it or not, it evidently contains an implicit sociology
after all, based on the distinction between primarily rational, industrial capitalism
committed to the efficient mass production of goods, and speculative, politically
privileged, and opportunistic capitalism catering to luxury [XXI.77, 99], where
both constitute logically equal, trans-historical types. (Within these types the
entrepreneur need not be conceived as a purely random element, since

175 Above II.6.iii.

176 Today (2014) we must still rely on Merleau-Ponty, Les Aventures de la dialectique , chs 1–2.
338 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

entrepreneurs too have a Kultur, which can be located typically.) In principle such a
sociology offers a simple and powerful analytical tool; and had Max Weber been
alive today, without the handicaps of novelty he faced a century ago, he could surely
have developed it as such.

APPENDIX: ‘STAATSSOZIOLOGIE’

As usual Weber tells us almost nothing about this. The evidence consists of a set of forward
references in the final draft of ‘Economy and Society’ (WuG 168), pointing to (further)
discussion of political parties; additional, unspecified references pointing to (further) dis-
cussion of parliaments and representation (WuG 162, 173–4); and student transcripts of the
contents listing for Weber’s last lecture series entitled ‘Allgemeine Staatslehre und Politik
(Staatssoziologie)’. Only the contents listing of is of interest, because the brief fraction of
the course that he lived to deliver was ‘old hat’, coming almost entirely from the treatment
of Herrschaft in ‘Economy and Society’: to Marianne Weber, 19.5.20, Briefe; cf. MWG
III/7.66–7. It is clear from these data that the ‘Staatssoziologie’ works outwards from the
Sociology of Herrschaft, but does not constitute an independent statement. Out of sixteen
section headings in the contents listing, only }1 ‘The concept of the state’, and }}12–16
cannot be derived from the Sociology of Herrschaft. }1 reiterates the deliberately low and
vulgar definition of the state as the monopoly of the legitimate violence given in ‘Politics as a
Vocation’, where it is not the idea that is new, only its elevation as a heading. The final four
sections derive from the political writings of 1917 or else (}15 ‘The councils’ state’) from the
German and Bolshevik Revolutions. In short, this is a current affairs supplement arising
from the political flux of 1917–19, which Weber seeks to digest and assimilate to his
established categories, while meeting an obvious publishing need. It is, however, an
exaggeration to say that this brought the state ‘into the centre’ of Weber’s analyses of
Herrschaft (Gangolf Hübinger, ‘Einleitung’, MWG III/7.17). In fact the state remains
conceptually marginal and primitive as always. Even when used as a heading, it is simply
a heading and no more.
 8
From the Sects to ‘The City’: Max Weber
‘the fairly pure bourgeois’

Most intellectual enquiries into the ‘Protestant Ethic’, let alone Max Weber, pass
over consideration of the Protestant sects—either completely or in haste. Weber’s
thinking on this subject remains largely uncharted, just as reception of his essay on
‘The Protestant Sects and the Spirit of Capitalism’ (PS) has rarely risen above polite
dismissal.1 The one apparently fixed idea about this essay is that, since it was first
published in 1920, it should be grouped with the 1920 text of the PE, and yet (as
we can now see) the date of publication is largely misleading (II.1).2 Now, as with
many scholarly “errors”, this neglect has its reasons. The PS is a brief text; its origin
in the 1906 essay ‘“Churches” and “Sects” in North America’ (CS) is occasional;
and Weber himself could hardly have complained if since 1920 the successive essays
on the sects appear to bob in the wake of the PE as afterthoughts. However, while
these essays are indeed of a fragmentary and strangulated nature, this is by no means
a complete guide to what he thought. The sectarian idea is a fundamental compo-
nent 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. As
with all Weber’s “religious” thought, the sects are not merely a religious subject.
The sectarian idea is also the idea of voluntary association in secular society and
politics, and is in fact a significant component in his “political” thought, even if as
yet political theory has hardly recognized the point. Furthermore, exploration of
this idea after 1907–8 will prove to be a highway through Weber’s “later” thought,

1 e.g. Hartmut Lehmann, ‘»Kirchen« und »Sekten« in Nordamerika: Anmerkungen zu einem Essay

von Max Weber’ [2006], Die Entzauberung der Welt (Göttingen, 2009), 83–94. Sung Ho Kim
deserves great credit for the centrality he attaches to the PS in Max Weber’s Politics of Civil Society
(Cambridge, 2004): this is pioneering. From an earlier period, Stephen D. Berger, ‘The Sects and the
Breakthrough into the Modern World’, Sociological Quarterly, 12 (1971), 486–99, displays
considerable knowledge of the texts in the service of a “sociological” agenda c.1970, but it cannot
stand as a historical statement.
2 It is omitted not merely from the texts but the ‘Einleitung’ to MWG I/9, Asketischer

Protestantismus und Kapitalismus. Schriften und Reden 1904–1911. For the unexamined assumption
that the PS dates from 1920: e.g. Dirk Kaesler, Max Weber:Schriften 1894–1922 (Stuttgart, 2002),
738; Peter Baehr and Gordon Wells, Max Weber: The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism
(Harmondsworth, 2002), 203; Jean-Pierre Grossein, Max Weber: L’Éthique protestante et l’ésprit du
capitalisme (Paris, 2003), 533; Sung Ho Kim, Max Weber’s Politics of Civil Society, 64; Fritz Ringer,
Max Weber: An Intellectual Biography (Chicago, 2004), 134; Wolfgang Schluchter, Grundlegungen der
Soziologie (Tübingen, 2006–7), i. 299, 300. See per contra Historian, ch. 4, esp. 61–4.
340 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

which leads into a quite new area: his thinking about bourgeois group association,
hence bourgeois identity in general. The latter is another major strand of ideas like
that on capitalism which, because it is largely historically defined, marks out the
limits of the formal sociologies set down in ‘Economy and Society’.

I . THE LEGACY OF 1648

Weber’s conception of the sect as a typical and recurrent form of voluntary human
association—hence as legitimate—was one of several abrupt departures from
previous German thinking enacted by the PE, alongside the creation of ‘ascetic
Protestantism’ and formal rationality. If we take ‘sect’ in its ordinary religious
meaning, the simple reality of the world into which Weber was born was that there
had been no sectarian life in modern German history. The Treaty of Westphalia in
1648 had drawn a line under the religious conflicts engendered by the Reformation
by stipulating that there were just three legally recognized churches, Lutheran,
Calvinist, and Catholic, allowing the German states within the Reich to select from
amongst them. Small amounts of pluralism were allowed—for example, a Calvinist
ruler over a Lutheran people as in Hohenzollern Prussia—but the three recognized
churches constituted the entirety of the religious universe, and the space for
independent, sectarian religiosity was precisely nil. Religious attitudes might
change and relax in succeeding centuries, but the assumption that religious life
existed within the framework supplied up by the recognized churches and no others
remained. It was the starkest possible contrast to the comparable historical evolu-
tion of England and America, where unregulated Protestant nonconformity and
sectarianism were established in ‘the most fateful epoch of the seventeenth century’
[XXI.36] and developed enormously thereafter. This was the heritage Weber had in
mind when in February 1906 he brusquely informed Adolf Harnack, the most
celebrated Lutheran “modernist” of the day, that ‘our nation has never undergone
the school of hard asceticism, in any form’, where by ‘the school of hard asceticism’
he meant the experience of sect formation. It was now too late to remedy this
deficiency, since ‘the historical time for “sects” or for anything essentially like them
[had] passed by’.3 Accordingly (as Weber noted elsewhere) ‘the expression sect . . .
has fallen into a very characteristic form of disrepute with us . . .’, although his
associated suggestion that this was ‘entirely without reason’ could be justified only
from an Anglo-American perspective.4
Sectarian disrepute took various forms. Amongst the authors Weber grew up
with and esteemed, a staunch believer in church law as the only authentic form of
religious law, such as Rudolph Sohm, dismissed ‘mere sect formation’ as no more
than the assembly of ‘disorderly crowds’ (Rotterei).5 Less brusque, but still emi-
nently recognizable, was the procedure of Albrecht Ritschl. He sought practically to

3 5.2.06, Briefe.
4 Address to the German Sociological Society [October 1910], GASS 446.
5 Kirchenrecht (Leipzig, 1892), i. 554.
 From the Sects to ‘The City’ 341

supersede the distinction between the visible and invisible church: that is, between
the visible church in the world and the invisible community of the elect, known
only to the eye of God. In Protestant theology this distinction lay at the root of any
questioning of the institutional church framework, and so at the root of sect
formation. The ‘invisible’ elite of true believers who were not identified by any
outward, worldly form was the Protestant analogue to the meritocratic voluntary
elite that Weber would celebrate in the sects. For sectarians and sometimes for
Luther himself, the invisible church, the church freed from any outward legal
bonds, was the highest divine community on earth. However, for Ritschl—the
epitome of the practical, worldly Lutheran, who wished to prove the continued
relevance of his church in the increasingly doubtful cultural climate of the late
nineteenth century—it was the visible church, the necessary political and legal
framework of fallen man, rather than any sect, which should be conceived of as the
true ‘community [Gemeinde] of Saints’ that was closest to God. There was no
higher, invisible or sectarian body; only the pure exposition of the faith delivered by
the academic theologians of the German universities (such as Ritschl himself ),
where the latter were central components of the institutional fabric of the German
states alongside the churches.6 Here was another typically Lutheran and most
unWeberian idea [XXI.17 n. 22, 62 n. 123]. So despite Weber’s intellectual regard
for its author, Ritschl’s essay on this subject is cited in the PE only to be passed over
[XXI.63 n. 125]. The divergence of their views at this point was simply too radical
to allow for any fruitful critical engagement.
More pertinent in this context are Hermann Weingarten and Ernst Troeltsch,
men whom Weber greatly esteemed and who represent something like the limits of
Lutheran accommodation of the sectarian idea. Unlike Ritschl they showed much
greater interest in independent lay religiosity, yet even in cases such as these, the
weight of an uncomprehending German tradition was almost insuperable. From
Weber’s standpoint, the great virtue of Weingarten’s ‘classical’ 1868 account of The
Churches of the English Revolution7 was its acceptance of the legitimacy and
significance of radical Independency and the Quakers within Protestant history.
In particular, Weingarten accepted that seventeenth-century England had made a
distinctive contribution to the development of individual religious freedom that
went beyond the foundations laid in the Reformation in Germany—a remarkable
concession for a Lutheran author at this date, who may perhaps have gained an
extra degree of detachment from the fact that his father was a converted Polish
Jew.8 Yet though the sects were indubitably among the principal historical agents in
England at this time, still Weingarten could not bring himself to grant them any
autonomous value and status. Consider the following statement:

6 Ritschl, ‘Ueber die Begriffe: sichtbare und unsichtbare Kirche’ [1859], Gesammelte Aufsätze

(Freiburg and Leipzig, 1893), 68–99; the quoted phrase recurs continually. For explicit linkage of
the theological or dogmatic perspective with that of faith, e.g. 72, 75–6.
7 Felix Rachfahl, ‘Kalvinimus und Kapitalismus’ [1909], Kritiken und Antikritiken, 130.
8 Adolf Jülicher, ‘Weingarten, Georg Wilhelm Herrmann’, ADB 55 (1910), 364.
342 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic
For the factor which runs through all those struggles and forward movements of the English
church, from the first beginnings of Puritanism to its last remnants, is solely that of the
Christian community or congregation [Gemeinde]. The history of the English church at that
time is not, like that of the Lutheran and Reformed churches in the seventeenth and almost
the whole of the sixteenth century, a history of theological developments in which the
Christian community participated only as a recipient. All the religious strivings and
achievements of the period had their root exclusively in the Christian people, and imme-
diately took on a congregational shape. In Independentism and its sects the distinction
between theologians and laity was eliminated more radically than in any other form of
Protestant church. No church has been less of a clerical church than the English one in the
era of Cromwell; and one of the most powerful tendencies of that epoch was to help the
Protestant and Reformation idea of the priesthood of all believers attain its full historical
truth. Within the Reformed churches of the Continent the participation of the congregation
[Gemeinde] was limited to the institutional realm, to a more or less extensive share in
directing the church through presbyteries and synods. Within the German–Lutheran
church it was only in Pietism and its precursors—the separatist communities of the
religiously awakened and mystics—and amidst much external and internal atrophy, that
the religious community [Gemeinde] secured the impact and significance that was inherent
in the thinking of Luther and the earliest Reformation epoch. Within the Protestant world
of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries it was only in the English church of the day that the
religious community secured for itself a significance appropriate to the fundamental ideas of
the Reformation, so as to be the true bearer of the Reformation, the chief factor in religious
and church evolution taken as a whole. (442–3)9
Now it was surely passages like this that underlay Weber’s estimate of Weingarten’s
work as ‘excellent’ [XXI.5 n. 4], for Weber had a similarly passionate belief in the
importance of the Gemeinde, the lay religious and voluntary community, and the
historical pre-eminence of seventeenth-century England relative to other Protestant
nations. But still there remained a central difference between the two men: for
Weber, sect and Gemeinde were one and the same [e.g. XXI.68]; for Weingarten,
they were not. Instead the Gemeinde was a part of the institutional church, and he
nowhere praises the English for being sectarian. In fact, as a careful reading of the
extract reveals, Weingarten’s frame of reference was Lutheran throughout. Thus
any contribution the English might have made to the development of lay Protest-
antism remained a contribution to a famously Lutheran idea, ‘the priesthood of all
believers’. Hence to ‘religious and church evolution taken as a whole’, or in other
words to ‘the overall evolution of the Reformation’ that had commenced in Germany
with Luther (441). As a Lutheran, it was axiomatic for Weingarten that the life of
the religious community, however valuable, was only one component of the wider
church alongside a clergy conceived as a professional and intellectual class, with its
acme in academic theologians and theological learning. Both were necessary, and
they must stand or fall together. He did not, as Weber did, wish to elevate the laity
at the expense of the institutional clergy and academic theology or ‘doctrine’ [PS
i. 234; cf. 229, 231]. Weingarten was no reactionary, but even Lutheran

9 References in ( ) here and in the next two paragraphs are to Weingarten, Die Revolutionskirchen

Englands (Leipzig, 1868).

 From the Sects to ‘The City’ 343

modernism only took him as far as Friedrich Schleiermacher’s classical discussion of

these issues in his addresses On Religion (1799). Here the divisions between an
institutionalized priesthood and the wider lay society that angered Weber so much
a century later [XX.24 n. 1, 44], were indeed acknowledged, but still they were
intellectually “overcome”, and the word ‘sect’ remained a synonym for division and
fracture within an ‘indivisible’ religious universe where ‘All things should . . . be
only One’.10 It was symptomatic, then, that in the extract above, and in defiance of
his own title, Weingarten should persistently refer to ‘the English church’ in the
singular because for him too religious life was unitary by definition. For all their
merits, the greatest failing of the English was an inability to bring about a union
between the claims of the Gemeinde, ‘the thousand-year-old constitutional forms of
the church’, and the equally important contribution made by theology (451). This
failure to achieve a true union between Anglican churchmen and “Nonconformist”
sectarians between c.1653 and 1689 would led to a near 200-year stagnation in
religious life thereafter.11 The English had had their historical moment, but they
had failed to anticipate what (somewhat illogically but predictably) Weingarten
regarded as the true telos of modernity: the Church Union that was realized in
Prussia and elsewhere in Germany from 1817 on.
Insofar as Weingarten sought to defend the sects, he did so in anti-sectarian
terms. Hence his conviction
that the usual talk of a chaos of sects [in mid-seventeenth-century England] is based on
exaggeration and misunderstanding, and that those Waiters, Ranters, Familists, Seekers and
whatever else they might be called, do not point to a set of different denominations, which
should have been constituted as closed religious societies coordinate with the existing
churches; rather they designate only the shades, merging into one another, of One great
enthusiastic party of Saints, in which the subjective principle of original Independency
reached its high point. (109)12
What was meaningful within the life of the sects was not the religious plurality
created by competitive voluntarism but a deeper religious unity standing above
any human agency—the very negation of the sectarian principle. For this reason,
as Weingarten observed, ‘It would be an entirely false conception of the [seven-
teenth century], if one wished to view it simply as the increasing expansion of
sectarian life.’ Before 1689 (he asserted) there were in fact no Nonconformists
and so no sects. What he meant by this most curious statement was that he had

10 F. D. E. Schleiermacher, ‘Über das Gesellige in der Religion’, in Über Religion: Reden an die

Gebildeten unter ihren Verächtern [1799], in Kritische Gesamtausgabe: Schriften aus der Berliner Zeit
1796–1799, ed. G. Meckenstock, I.2.266–92, quotation 271. On Sekten and Sektengeist: 270, 277,
288. Cf. Weingarten, Revolutionskirchen, 391.
11 For an analogous view of English religious history, from another important Weberian source,

consider Friedrich Loofs’ 1903 ‘Methodism’: PRE xii. 747–801. Loofs was a warm supporter of
evangelical religiosity, but this could have meaning only within the state church framework. Owing to
its secession from the Anglican “state” church, Methodism, however admirable otherwise, was a
historical failure in England, and still more so in America.
12 Cf. Schleiermacher, ‘Über das Gesellige in der Religion’, 271: ‘every individual association is only

an ephemeral, integrative part of the whole’.

344 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

no sense of the Black Bartholomew’s Day endured by Richard Baxter and the
ministers ejected from the Church of England in 1662, who made up the original
Nonconformists—an episode faithfully signalled in the PE [XXI.75]. For Wein-
garten ‘the hope of a “Comprehension” between the episcopal church and Pur-
itanism was never abandoned. Both were One Whole’ (443 n. 1). In addition to
this unusual defence of an underlying religious unity pervading sectarian life, there
were more conventional assaults on the sects qua sects. For example, any appeal to
the Donatists—the classic example of a sectarian community in early Christianity,
and one commonly invoked in theological discussion13—was evidently mistaken
because it implied a one-sided elevation of the invisible church of the elect at the
expense of the visible and institutional one (387). Weingarten further held that,
while the development of Christian freedom and subjectivity in the English case
might be laudable in itself, still it had led ‘to an atomistic fragmentation, which did
not correspond to the idea of the Christian church and its history’ (443). Politically
the history of sects in the 1650s was ‘in part’ one of ‘fanatical and lunatic ravings, just
like the earlier Anabaptists’ in the German Reformation [cf. XX.47]. So Cromwell,
like Luther in the 1520s, had been right to turn against the sects and to close them
down (256 cf. 263), whereas for Weber this episode was a tragic decline into
Realpolitik and the admission of ‘extra-religious values’, which put Cromwell in fear
for his eternal soul [CS 582]. Both the stagnation of religious life in England after
1688 and its excess of vitality before 1660 could be traced to the same root, since
stagnation, both in England and colonial America, arose from the fact that these
countries offered ‘a new and all too favourable terrain for luxuriant and proliferating
sect formation’ (451). It was thus left to the ‘German theology’ of Spener, Zinzen-
dorf, and Schleiermacher to continue the forward march of ‘the Reformation and
the Protestant world ’ over the years (451, 431). This was certainly a very different
conception of religious and political history to Weber’s.
A generation later, Ernst Troeltsch displayed an equivalent, if differently aligned,
sectarian deficit when he confronted the same era of English history in his important
article on the ‘English Moralists’ of 1903, a piece used by Weber when composing
the PE [XXI.5 n. 4, 31 n. 60]. According to Troeltsch, mid-seventeenth-century
England—the central historical terrain of the PE—was above all a moment of pure
negativity: ‘the complete dissolution of the previous political and church order’
(445.26)14 that had existed since the establishment of Christianity as a state church
under Constantine. Now the acceptance that there had been a rupture in the
tradition of church-based Christianity had a forward-looking aspect. It was an
admission that a church and dogmatic framework would cease to provide a complete
fulfilment for the religious life of the individual; thus that there was a fundamental
sense in which the Lutheran Reformation was outmoded. Here was the decisive point
at which Troeltsch had advanced beyond Weingarten’s generation. Even so, the

13 Among many examples, Ritschl, ‘Ueber die Begriffe: sichtbare und unsichtbare Kirche’,

esp. 78–81, 83.

14 References in ( ) here and in the next paragraph are to Troeltsch, ‘Moralisten, englische’, PRE xiii.

436–61.
 From the Sects to ‘The City’ 345

seventeenth century, the historical epoch that Max Weber regarded as the acme of
sectarian life and radical political liberation, was no more than a moment of
negativity. Thus for Troeltsch—a religious modernist perhaps, but one who sought
to insulate modern religiosity from any modern political implication—the utopian
attempt by religious radicals in the 1650s to draw on the power of the state to regulate
all areas of life in accordance with Biblical principles had simply resulted in an
‘anarchy’ (447.13), which revealed the bankruptcy of Christian literalism as a
foundation for action in church and state. The most this social dissolution had
done was to lay bare ‘the task of reconstruction in politics and the church’ (445.27),
and its preliminary requirement: complete separation of ‘the [private] religious idea of
autonomy from the [public] political idea of freedom’ (447.16–17). Here, too,
Troeltsch, like Weingarten and unlike Weber, was firmly on the side of the Crom-
wellian dictatorship in enforcing such a separation. But no more substantial legacy
arose at this point, other than that the way was then left free for later thinkers in a line
down to Troeltsch himself to confront the problem of reconstructing a modern
religiosity that, without denying the need for church structures for the “masses”,
would allow sufficient room for the spiritualism and mysticism of the educated
individual. Such were ‘the real tasks of modern ethics’ (448.13).
The story of modern religion was thus a dual one: that of ‘Religion and Church’,
of ‘Protestant Christianity and Church’.15 But Troeltsch’s dual emphasis on the
institutional church and the private religiosity of the individual left even less space
for an appreciation of the Independent sects—a kind of halfway house between
these two—than had Weingarten. Troeltsch agreed with Weingarten that modern
religiosity entailed a fuller development of individualism and subjectivity. As a
result, following Weingarten, albeit somewhat tepidly, he was prepared to accept
that the Täufer had made some contribution to the development of individual
subjectivity and spiritualism. More surprisingly, he even detected their hand in ‘the
strict puritan–religious control and direction of civil life by the state government’ in
the 1650s (445.51–2).16 Even so, the real credit for these achievements lay
elsewhere: ‘the move to erect a Christian commonweal [Gemeinwesen] was . . . an
essentially Reformed leading idea’, indebted to politically radicalized Huguenots
and Scots rather than anything so fleeting as ‘historical reminiscences of Thomas
Münzer’ and the Täufer (445.58–446.1; cf.446.42–5). Insofar as Troeltsch felt he
needed to discuss the sects in more general terms, he was brusquely dismissive: ‘the
popular enthusiasts’ who stood at their head had ‘turned the great idea of Christian
Kultur . . . into a principle of anarchy’ (447.45–7)—this from a writer for whom the
idea of a comprehensive, unitary Kultur resting on a Christian foundation was
the ideal to which, even in the modern day, one must always aspire. Underlying
this dismissal was the elementary assumption that the Enlightenment was ‘the

15 I cite the titles of two of Troeltsch’s synoptic productions in this area: ‘Religion und Kirche’, PJb 81

(1895), 215–49; ‘Protestantisches Christentum und Kirche in der Neuzeit’ (1906). Emphases added.
16 This is far removed from Weber’s or Weingarten’s or indeed any usual construction of

Independency. Nonetheless, what Troeltsch writes is well considered as a set of statements from his
own standpoint.
346 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

beginning of the truly modern period in European Kultur and history in contrast to
the previously dominant Kultur defined by the church and theology’.17 Thus the
seventeenth century, the focal epoch for the transition to a modern Kultur so far as
Weber was concerned, remained pre-modern. We see then how far Troeltsch stood
from Weber when the PE was being conceived: in his anxious denial of the political
implications of radical (or indeed any) Christianity; in his want of interest in the
Täufer, who for Weber constituted the historical origin of the sectarian idea [XXI.66]
[PS i.220]; in his construction of historical periods; and his assertion that modernity
remained religious. Meanwhile at this date Troeltsch had no interest in a third
or intermediate term between the church and the individual supplied by the sects:
this was a concession to Weber’s influence that would come only later.
Such a conclusion is confirmed by another of Troeltsch’s essays from this period,
on ‘Leibniz and the Origins of Pietism’ (1902).18 Intellectually it is a minor work,
but it is of obvious interest in a Weberian context because it traverses a part of the
terrain of the PE at the time of the latter’s composition (1902–5). As in the ‘English
Moralists’, the “progressive” element in Pietism is all to do with the promotion of a
more subjective, individual and even mystical religiosity, which is to be seen
primarily as a continuation of Lutheran ideas (e.g. 371–2).19 However, the ‘con-
venticles’ [XXI.44, 46, 51] or (in Troeltsch’s words) ‘small circles’ that are central to
Weber’s conception of Pietism because they approximate to sect formation within a
German context, are of little account. They were but a reflection of German
‘narrowness’ where “narrowness” (Enge), as Weber noted [XXI.39], was one of
the typical complaints of Lutherans against sectarian life. So although Pietism ran
over into what Troeltsch considered to be the modern period commencing c.1700,
The reform of the church which it demanded [was] not a fundamental renewal of church
life, which drew the consequences of the new [i.e. modern] situation, but the formation of
conventicles . . . In all this Pietism is undoubtedly a narrowing of the ethical life of the
Reformation, which had its root in the narrowness of German circumstances and in the
pettiness of its leaders that stands out so strongly despite their decided piety. (372)
Because of its narrowness, Pietism’s impact on personal conduct was not, as it was
for Weber, part of a great unitary theme such as ascetic Protestantism, but was
instead ‘most various’ (370), hence diffuse and inconsequential. It touched only
‘private life’, not social life, and in particular not ‘vocational life’ (Berufsleben, 372).
When Pietism decayed, as it did during the mid-eighteenth century, it decayed
either (at an elite level) ‘into externality and stereotyping, church structure and
compulsory regulation’ or else (amongst the people at large) into ‘separatism and
sectarianism’ (374). Here was the authentic voice of liberal Lutheranism c.1900,
which was interested above all in an enlightened religious individualism, at once

17 Troeltsch, ‘Aufklärung’, PRE ii (1897) 225–41, here 225. Weber does not cite this piece in the

PE, but then he had no cause to do so and good cause not to do so.
18 ‘Leibniz und die Anfänge des Pietismus’, in C. Werckshagen (ed.), Der Protestantismus am Ende

des XIX: Jahrhunderts in Wort und Bild (Berlin, 1902), 353–76. References in () in this paragraph are to
this essay.
19 On the mystics, see ibid. 368, 370.
 From the Sects to ‘The City’ 347

mystical and cerebral; and in church reform as an (ill-defined) adjunct to this; but
not in sectarian life. Accordingly, there is no space in this portrayal of Pietism for
Count Zinzendorf and the Herrnhut Gemeinde. Yet Troeltsch explains very well
why they bulk so large in Weber’s account in the PE, when he notes in an obiter
dictum that the outstanding characteristic of Herrnhut was that, unlike the ordinary
Pietist conventicles, it ‘did not participate in the church compromise, but created a
distinctively new religious organization’ (375). If we take the PE at face value, as an
account of the individual psychology of ascetic Protestantism [XXI.72], the amount
of attention devoted to the emotionalism and outright silliness of Zinzendorf and
the Herrnhuter must appear perplexing. However, Weber was not interested in
Zinzendorf because of his ‘childlike quality’ or his irrational reliance on random ‘lots’
[XXI.51–2]—i.e. his relative failure to reproduce Calvinism’s psychological hard-
ness and rigour—but as the pioneer of a distinctive, communitarian form on
German soil that went beyond the conventicle, described in the text with absolute
precision as ‘a peculiar kind of sect formation’ [XXI.2]. But on this subject Weber
and Troeltsch had nothing in common before 1905; and so it is that Troeltsch’s
treatment of Pietism—on the face of it an obvious point of reference for the author
of the PE—is simply omitted.

I I . THE SECTARIAN IDEA, 1884–1905

The full extent of Weber’s reaction against even these “liberal” Lutheran positions
would not become clear until 1904–7 in the PE and the essays on the sects.
Nonetheless, the kernel of his thinking was in place from an early date because,
like so much else in his “religious” thinking, it originated in reaction to the
Lutheran world in which he grew up.20 Above all this meant his repudiation of
‘the inner falsehood of “confirmation”’ in the Lutheran church—the rite whereby
teenagers formally entered the church on their own account, as distinct from entry
at birth via baptism. This rejection was no new idea when he set it down in 1906,
but reflected his own experience as an adolescent at the beginning of the 1880s [CS
578]. Thus when he conceived of religious allegiance as involving membership of
the religious community or Gemeinde—as he did in his fundamental discussion of
this subject in 1884—this was to be understood as a community of free and
consenting adults, not of adolescents who, regardless of any assent in words, were
being co-opted involuntarily. Entry into this community should be a ‘significant
turning point in . . . life’, ‘a task which all must resolve and each in his own way’,
rather than an act of compulsory bureaucratic registration as part of the state
church.21 Here was the germ of the sectarian idea.

20 Sung Ho Kim’s insinuation that Weber’s sectarian thinking is American in derivation, leading to

the polarity of ‘america versus europe’ is a common error: Max Weber’s Politics of Civil Society
(Cambridge, 2004), 68; cf. I.3 n.122.
21 To Alfred Weber, 25.3.84, Jugendbriefe, here 105–6; cit. above I.6 at n. 33. Cf. Weber to Fritz

Baumgarten, 17.1.79, ibid. 20, and to ?Alfred Weber [n.d.], Lebensbild, 62.
348 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

A decade later other familiar components in Weber’s conception of the sects

emerge into view. For example, in defending the beneficial effects of ‘luxury’ in a
lecture in 1895, where ‘luxury’ meant raised living standards for the working class,
he mentioned ‘the doubts voiced against a raised standard of living . . . in Germany’,
on the ground that such a rise was ‘not favourable for behaviour towards the
church’. However, he counselled caution before drawing any hasty conclusions
from a ‘democratization of luxury’, which was in any case inescapable. Rather than
raised wages, it might be ‘that the state of affairs in our church is itself to blame’ for
the religious ills laid at the workers’ door. Outside Germany it was not the case that
church attendance fell off amongst affluent workers, ‘and nowhere [was] this so
where sects are widespread ’.22 This was most likely a reference to England, a constant
point of comparison in this lecture, rather than America, but it tallies with what he
said later in 1906 about the high church attendance and high money contributions
made to churches by working men in America [CS 559]. Weber also commented
on the historical provenance of the sectarian idea. In his 1896 lecture on ‘The social
causes of the decline of ancient Kultur’ he focuses on the decay of slavery in the later
Roman Empire, which allowed for a return to family life and the emergence of
some modest property rights. This development proceeded ‘in parallel with the
victorious evolution of Christianity: in the slave barracks it would hardly have
found any footing, but the free African peasants in Augustine’s day were already the
supporters of a sectarian movement.’23 Here is an early reference to the Donatists,
who are a recurrent presence in the PE and the PS as the embodiment of a
legitimate sectarian life, either under their own name or else under the rubric of
early Christianity [XXI.64 n. 126, 65], [i.121]+, [PS i.225]. The example is a
famous one, continually invoked by orthodox theologians and church historians;
but the positive (or non-negative) value judgement Weber attaches is quite the
reverse of theirs, and the association between the sects and personal freedom is
instantly evocative of his writings after 1904. So it is we find him drawing this
“early” remark from 1896 to the attention of Ernst Troeltsch in 1907, when the
latter was just setting out on his enquiry into the nature and place of the ‘sect type’
within the ‘Social Teachings of the Christian Churches’.24
These few references are not much in volume, though this is a typical state of
affairs when we look for “anticipations” of later thinking in Weber’s early writings.
But they are sufficient to show that the statements he made about the sects in
1904–7 had their roots in ideas formed much earlier. They also illustrate the
obvious difference between Weber’s construction of a ‘sect’ and that of liberal
Lutheranism. For the latter, whether sectarianism was simply a defect or else, as in
the case of Weingarten, a contribution in detail to religious history, was a subor-
dinate matter; what mattered was a religious frame of reference, founded on a

22 ‘Die Bedeutung des Luxus’ [1895], MWG I/4.740, emphasis added; cf. ‘Zum Preßstreit über

den Evangelisch-sozialen Kongreß’ [1894], where Weber outlines a contrast between viewing the
Action Committee of the Congress as members of a ‘conventicle’, with some analogy to England, or
alternatively as ‘quasi-officials’. Unsurprisingly Weber repudiates the latter option: MWG I/4.477–8.
23 MWG I/6.114.
24 ‘Soziallehren’, AfSS 26 (1908), 20 n.14, cites the passage that I have done.
 From the Sects to ‘The City’ 349

history that began in Germany as ‘the core territory of the Reformation’,25 and
ending with modern Lutheranism. Weber’s conception was different. For him,
although positive religion was the original psychological motor that made the sects
such a powerful force, they were emphatically “inner-worldly” bodies, which took
on significance because of their engagement with secular problems such as slavery
and workers’ living standards. This gave relevance to the idea they embodied in the
modern day, when the need for either sects or religion had been set aside.
Consider in this context Weber’s portrayal of the ‘clubs’ that controlled the
English stock exchange in the mid-1890s. There is no mention of religion or sects
here; but generically clubs and sects were alike for Weber, since both were
‘exclusive’ voluntary associations [CS 560; PS i.214–17]. Here he identified an
obvious difference between England and the Continent, Germany above all, owing
to the absence of state control in the English case. The German state, by ensuring
legally regulated forms of open access to stock exchanges, was robbing the Berlin
bourse (for example) of any ‘aristocratic’ (that is, meritocratic) trait that might come
from voluntarism—we are reminded of the comparable emphasis on the ‘aristoc-
racy of “quality”’ present in ascetic Protestantism and sectarianism [CS 580 n. o]. In
contrast to Berlin, the English ‘clubs’ are aristocratic: they exercise a strict voluntary
control over who is to be admitted, just like the sects when they regulate admission
to holy communion [PS i.210]; again, like the sects, they exercise a compelling
“ethical” ‘discipline’ over those who have once gained admission.26 In a thinker
such as Weber, whose mind focused quite consciously on analogies between the
forms of human behaviour displayed in different spheres of life, this congruence of
characteristics is in no way coincidental. On the contrary, it is a further testimony
to his interest in the sectarian and associational idea at an early date, which shows
that even in the 1890s his conception of voluntary associations was a broad one,
embracing both secular and religious spheres. Here too, early thinking anticipates
positions that become explicit after 1900.
If we turn now to Weber’s writings in 1904–7 (‘Protestant Ethic’, ‘Protestant
Sects’, ‘“Churches” and “Sects”’), the most salient characteristic to note is that in
terms of subject matter and construction these form a linked group. We have seen
how the PE was incomplete and that formally it postponed consideration of the
sects for another day (II.1). Yet when Weber began Part II of the text he fully
intended to write about the sects and (so far as we can see) the treatment
of Calvinism and Pietism [XXI.5–57] is complete in itself, written with that
intention in mind.27 More fundamentally, the integrated composite of ‘ascetic

25 Troeltsch, ‘Leibniz und die Anfänge des Pietismus’, Der Protestantismus am Ende des

XIX. Jahrhunderts, 354.

26 See, e.g., ‘Die Ergebnisse der deutschen Börsenenqûete’ [1894], MWG I/5.217–25;

‘Börsenwesen’ [1895], ibid. 559; ‘Börsenfragen’ [1896], 905.

27 These sections of the text are accompanied by references that point forward to ‘later’ discussions

of social dimensions that will only become fully apparent from a treatment of the sects: [XXI.14 n. 21,
17, etc.]. Clearly ‘later’ is ambiguous: it could mean either ‘a later part of the PE ’ such as Weber
originally intended to write, or ‘at some point in the future’, after the incomplete PE was terminated.
When these opening sections were written, I suggest that ‘later’ carried the first meaning; but
afterwards it easily and invisibly shifted to the second.
350 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

Protestantism’, ‘one collective mass’, knows no boundary between Calvinists and

Täufer [XXI.74]. As a result the sectarian idea is a pervasive presence throughout the
PE, not least in the opening, “non-sectarian” sections of Part II. The other
foundation of this textual unity is the fact that the PS was first drafted in 1907:
i.e. at a point in time close to the original composition of the PE and as part of a
linked group of “Protestant” writings.
That there was to be a sectarian component in the PE is spelt out in Part I of the
text when Weber declares (as we saw) that his subject was ‘the striking role of
Calvinism and the Protestant sects in the history of capitalist evolution’ [XX.50].28
Nonetheless, one might perhaps expect to hear relatively little of the sects and the
specifically social dimension to Weber’s argument, once he had decided that the PE
should be formally limited to ‘the subjective appropriation of ascetic religiosity on
the part of the individual ’, while ‘the objective, social institutions of the early
Protestant churches’ were apparently off-limits [XXI.72].29 An individual focus was
an essential attribute of ‘the vocational Idea’, the titular subject of Part II, since the
idea of a vocation, profession or employment (Beruf ) within the division of labour
of a modern rationalized and specialized society was at root an individual one: the
mental world of the individual, centred on his or her employment. There is no
collective vocation, even if there is a collective capitalist outcome. This is what
underlies Weber’s acknowledgement that the sectarian ‘ethic of the Täufer is only of
very limited significance for . . . the religious foundations of the “bourgeois” voca-
tional Idea’ [XXI.62 n. 123], and a parallel comment about the (equally sectarian)
Methodists [XXI.61]. But while distinctions of this kind are undoubtedly drawn, to
treat the individual and social spheres as antithetical and exclusive is unsustainable
for a thinker such as Weber, for whom social behaviour was in principle the
behaviour of a mass of individuals.30 Practically all the leading arguments associated
with the sectarian idea are canvassed in the original PE, and again we observe the
comprehensive nature of this remarkable text.
What is remarkable here is not so much the short sections of text on the
Methodists and Täufer that are present in the PE only to serve as ‘provisional’
announcements of Weber’s explicitly sectarian thinking [cf. XXI.63], but the
presence of the foundations of such thinking within the more fully developed
sections on Calvinism and Pietism. For example, the opening, seven-page para-
graph or sub-section of text on Pietism locates it firmly between the twin individual
and social poles of predestinarian theology and the conventicle. On the one hand,
Calvinist ‘dogmatic orthodoxy retreated into the background’ and ‘election could
in no way be proven by the possession of theological knowledge’ [XXI.42–3]. In its
place there was greater emphasis on purely practical religion, of which the primary

28 Cf. »Objektivität« [1904], WL 194.

29 Thus Sung Ho Kim supposes that the PE deals with ‘the Spirit of Individualism’, and the essays
on the sects with ‘the Spirit of Civil Society’: Max Weber’s Politics of Civil Society (Cambridge, 2004),
chs 2–3.
30 In this respect Weber is a man of his time, since this proposition would be equally true of

Bernsteinian revisionism, Durkheimian sociology (within limits), French Radical Socialism, and
English New Liberalism.
 From the Sects to ‘The City’ 351

symptom was the formation of conventicles. The conventicle was the small reli-
gious group or ecclesiola (little church) that created a sectarian environment—this is
what Weber means when he speaks of ‘the religious aristocracy of the Saints’
[XXI.46]—but stopped short of ‘drawing the logical consequence of forming a
sect’, by forcing the dissolution of the institutional church [XXI.44]. The dogmatic
weakening of Pietism came at a cost. The fading of the transcendental threat of
damnation in the next world—the decretum horrible—in favour of the desire of
‘asceticism to taste the blessedness of community with God in this world already’,
fostered Lutheran-style emotionalism [XXI.44]. Thus in a purely theological light
‘the non-Calvinist ascetic movements . . . appear to us as dilutions of the consistency
of Calvinism’, but still this was a one-sided view, since ‘the Calvinist doctrine of
predestination was only one amongst a variety of possibilities’ [XXI.39]—a state-
ment that anticipates the perspective of the PS with its hostility to ‘theological
governance over the congregation’, which all too easily produced ‘a professional,
theological priesthood’ [PS i.229]. The Pietist emphasis on the praxis pietatis
(practical piety) and group organization in the conventicle offered an alternative
stimulus. Its consequences for social behaviour might not be entirely predictable,
but normally the ‘effect of Pietist principles was simply a still stricter ascetic control
of conduct within the vocation, and a still firmer religious anchorage for vocational
ethics than could be engendered by the mere, worldly “respectability” of the
normal, Reformed Christian’ [XXI.45–6; cf. 70]. In short, Pietism in its social
aspect could trump dogmatic Calvinism if the latter was simply predestinarian and
individualistic.
Yet Calvinism, too, was more than the psychology of the individual in ‘inner
isolation’ [XXI.11]. The proposition that ‘no church’ could assist the Calvinist in
the quest for eternal salvation may derive from the individual theology of predes-
tination [XXI.11], but it leads to a social and sectarian conclusion, that of the
futility of an institutional and bureaucratic ‘church’. This logic is elaborated more
fully in the pre-war Sociology of Herrschaft (c.1911–14): ‘The root dogma of strict
Calvinism, the doctrine of predestination, rules out in principle that the church of
the Calvinists should be the dispenser of goods [i.e. sacraments], receipt of which is
of any consequence for the eternal soul of the recipient. . . . For his own sake the
person predestined to blessedness needed no church.’ Thus Weberian Calvinism
was always implicitly or latently sectarian: ‘the inner character of this [Calvinist]
church deviates substantially from that of all other churches’, since ‘in the long run
[it] cannot remain a church’, while ‘any apparatus it possesses as a church in
contrast to a sect is generally placed in flux!’31 Furthermore, even as it stood, the
Calvinist church supplied ‘instruments of discipline’ [XXI.11], a category Weber
regarded in an ethical light, and not simply as a compulsory, coercive instrument.
Thus Calvinist discipline comprised both external punishment for the reprobate
(Zucht) and an inner incentive to regulate conduct in the potentially elect
(Disziplin)—and in the latter case it was no different from the sects and their

31 Resp. MWG I/22–4.659, 658; Weber at Frankfurt, 21.10.10, GASS 465–6.

352 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

passionate concern with what Weber (yielding to a historically predictable defi-

ciency in German vocabulary: the want of a neutral adjective deriving from ‘sect’)
called “church” discipline, meaning the discipline imposed by the religious group.
So it was a mark of the maturing of Calvinist religiosity in the generations after
Calvin’s death that ‘“disciplina” was given equal status’ with doctrine and the
sacraments, whereas previously it had been subordinate to them [XXI.19 n. 27].
Predestination appeared problematic in a social sense owing to its isolating
impact, and Weber recognizes this when he states that ‘At first sight it seems a
puzzle, how the undoubted superiority of Calvinism in social organization could be
bound up with such a tendency towards loosening the inner individual from the
closest ties with which the world surrounds him’ [XXI.14]. But this is a question of
appearances only. The immediate answer is that ‘The social labour of the Calvinist
in the world is labour solely “in majorem gloriam Dei ” (for the greater glory of
God). Even vocational labour, placed in the service of the worldly life of the
collectivity, carries this character’ [XXI.15–16]. We see from this how, once
again, Calvinism is both like and unlike the sects. It is like them in that, Weber
insists, Calvinism does have a social function, albeit (and this is the paradox of
ascetic Protestantism as a whole) this is only within the impersonal, rational cosmos
of modern society [XXI.17], and not an intuitive community based on glutinous
emotional warmth (Gemütlichkeit) [CS 581] [XXI.39]; yet it is not like them, in
that individually focused vocational work is its primary contribution. However,
exposition of the social identity of Calvinism by no means ends here. The under-
lying source of its superiority in social organization lies in the fact that for Calvinists
as for avowed sectarians ‘it was necessary for salvation to be received into a comm-
unity conforming to divine precepts’ [XXI.14 n. 31], something above and beyond
the depersonalized society that all moderns inhabited. (Weber’s reliance on the
antithesis between ‘society’ and ‘community’ popularized by Ferdinand Tönnies is
explicit, and yet Tönnies was doing no more than highlight the pre-existing
meaning of the terms [CS 581]).32 This was the community of the elect, those
who offered ‘personal proof ’ (Bewährung) to their peers of their capacity to meet
the demanding meritocratic requirements of ascetic Protestant religiosity. But this
community is hardly different from the sect—and no doubt if a third, sectarian
essay had been added to the PE in 1905, Weber would have said so.
So throughout the relevant section of text [XXI.5–39] Calvinism is in a state of
continual approximation towards sectarianism, and this is true even when it seems
to focus most closely on psychological and individual argument: ‘There was one
question which was bound to arise immediately for every individual believer,
pushing all other interests into the background: am I then chosen? and how can I
become certain of this election?’ [XXI.18] But although the answer to these
questions is of the utmost importance to the individual, it cannot be answered
except in a social context, since the question about one’s own state of grace is also a
social question: ‘whether there might be certain signs by which one could recognize

32 Ferdinand Tönnies, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (Leipzig, 1887).

 From the Sects to ‘The City’ 353

membership of the “electi”’ [XXI.19]. Here we come to the crucial question of

admission to communion (the central act of Christian worship), which Weber saw
as the vital test of character underpinning ‘membership’ of the socio-religious body.
In the Lutheran church any question about the ethical quality of the membership
created by the rite of “confirmation” was of no consequence, given its ‘its character
as an institution for salvation’, the logical opposite of the sect, where all could gain
admission regardless of personal quality [XXI.18 n. 39]. By contrast, in the
Calvinist case admission to communion was not a formality but ‘a decisive measure
of the social worth of those who participated’ [XXI.19], and (as Weber makes plain
in the PS) ‘maintaining the purity of communion’ was of as much concern to
Calvinists (‘denominations which did not take the step of sect formation’) as to
the sects [i.222; cf. 225 n. 34]. So while the PE may not finally resolve the question
of Calvinism’s status relative to the sects, because formally this is a subject that is
reserved for ‘later’, there can be no doubt what the decision will be.
Another tie between Calvinist and sectarian religiosity lies in the idea of ‘personal
proof ’ or Bewährung. Now if the PE is taken in isolation, this might appear to be a
distinctively Calvinist idea, as for example when Weber urges that it was the need to
“prove” themselves that preserved Calvinists from that fatalism that was a logical,
but not psychological, consequence of predestination [XXI.25 n. 67]. However, the
fact that such “proof” had to take place in the world before one’s peers meant that
Bewährung was always a social idea as well as an individual one, and its principal
focus was really the social one of sect or group formation. When Bewährung is
formally introduced [XXI.31–2], we are told that
the idea of the necessity of personal proof of faith within the worldly, vocational life . . .
supplied a positive impulse to asceticism and, with its ethic anchored in the doctrine of
predestination, the place of the intellectual and spiritual aristocracy of monks outside and
above the world was taken up by the intellectual and spiritual aristocracy of Saints in the
world, predestined from all eternity by God . . .
The argument here is practically a repetition of the argument noticed above
regarding the ‘social labour’ of Calvinism. The first impulse of Bewährung may be
to promote the vocational life and labour of the individual according to an ‘ethic
anchored in the [individualistic] doctrine of predestination’; however, the second is
social and communal, the formation of an elite ‘aristocracy’, and as long as we
understand the word ‘aristocracy’ correctly in this context—as a meritocratic
aristocracy of ethical “quality” rather than of inherited “position” [CS 580 n. o]—
we can see that it is a synonym for the sect, which is also an elite and exclusive
group. Hence Weber’s conclusion: thinking along these lines ‘could be heightened
to such an extent that, under certain circumstances, it gave rise to the formation of
sects’ [XXI.32–3].
In fact, although the first significant appearance of Bewährung falls within the
discussion of Calvinism in the PE, there can be no doubt that it is primarily a social
and sectarian idea. (The textual oddity is due to the sequence of literary compos-
ition where the vocational Idea preceded the planned treatment of the sects.) As we
have seen, the only valid judgement of merit—hence proof—was social, by one’s
354 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

fellow individuals, and ‘qualification of the individual through “personal proof” was
the sole foundation of the social assembly of the congregation’ [CS 580]. That this
idea was primarily sectarian is further enforced at the conclusion to the PS when it
states that ‘Premia, in the sense of the assurance of salvation, were placed on
“personal proof” before God in all the Puritan denominations; and on “personal
proof” before man, in the sense of personal self-assertion, within the Puritan sects’
[i.235]. The doctrine of predestination only required one to prove oneself before
God, whereas the sectarian community required something more: personal proof
before both God and one’s peers. Nonetheless, the introduction of Bewährung in
the PE and the assimilation of Calvinism to it remain deeply significant. As Weber
notes at the end of his treatment of Calvinism, ‘we had to begin with that doctrine
[predestination] in its most rigorous [Calvinist] form, not least because this idea
[the ‘fundamental idea of personal proof ’] as the framework linking faith and ethical
life recurs with great regularity in the religious denominations to be discussed
subsequently’ [XXI.36]. The thrust of the remark is clear: had he not first linked
Bewährung to Calvinism and predestination, and hence to the capitalist vocational
life [XXI.101], it might all too easily have appeared as an exclusively social and
sectarian doctrine, the property of the ‘denominations to be discussed subsequently’.33
But here as always Weber is anxious not to insert too sharp a cleft between Calvinists
and sectarians or (more generally) between the individualizing and social components
of ascetic Protestantism; and the text of Part II of the PE is in fact a constant
negotiation between these two poles, despite the formal priority given to individual
and psychological argument.
A final evidence of this point has already been noted (II.7): that the intervention
of ascetic Protestantism (including Calvinism) in seventeenth-century history is in a
substantial sense charismatic as well as rationalizing. Calvinist predestination or (as
Weber regularly calls it) ‘election to grace’ is a charismatic doctrine, because
charisma is grace. But for Weber in 1905–7 charisma is a sectarian attribute
above all.

I II . ‘THE PROTESTANT SECTS’, 1907

Once Weber brought the PE to a de facto conclusion in March 1905, the prospects
for any further, significant development of the sectarian part of his work on ascetic
Protestantism were remote. He had discussed the sects in the form of ‘preliminary
remarks’ [XXI.72] precisely in order to remove any immediate need to continue with
the subject. It was no doubt misleading, even devious, of Weber to say in 1919, when
introducing the ’Protestant Sects’, that ‘the necessary’ regarding the concept of
the sect had ‘already been said’ in the PE [i.207 n. 1]. After all, this supplementary
essay only existed because the treatment of the sects in the PE had repeatedly

33 Conversely, Weber sought to promote the importance of predestination to the sects, as in the

case of ‘Hanserd Knollys confession’ [XXI.36], but this was a weak argument in relation to Methodists
[XXI.36, 59] and no argument at all for Quakers.
 From the Sects to ‘The City’ 355

been declared provisional and incomplete in 1905. All the same, if ‘the necessary’
signifies the minimum necessary for an abstract comprehension of the church/sect
distinction, then the statement is literally true [XXI.63–4] (regardless of the deeper
yet less visible penetration of the PE text by sectarian thinking just outlined). So the
independent significance of the sects as a subject for enquiry was much reduced,
and the history of Weber’s reflection on the sects after 1905 is largely the same as
that of the history of the PE set out above (II.1). Still, even if the history
of the sects after 1905 was a secondary one, it raised problems of its own, so
confirming the trend of the “primary” history. First, as noted, a complete treatment
of the sects, such as was suggested by the snapshot in ‘“Churches” and “Sects” in
North America’ (1906), would need to cover both their socio-economic and socio-
political significance. But such a treatment would exceed the boundaries of the
formally unpolitical PE and could in no way have encouraged him to return to the
aborted presentation that emerged in 1905. A further problem was that, when Weber
turned to write about the sects in 1906–7, he found his focus and interests moving
away from the strict historical construction of ascetic Protestantism in the seven-
teenth century towards the present day.
Weber’s interest in modern sectarianism was a novelty aroused by his American
trip in 1904, and is reflected most obviously in ‘“Churches” and “Sects” in North
America’. However, even in the PS, which marks a conscious return to the
seventeenth century and the concerns of the PE [i.218], the historical perspective
is only half the story: not only does modern America take up the first third of the
essay, but the later part is supplemented by quite copious materials on the modern
Dutch Protestant political movement inspired by Abraham Kuyper, which pro-
duced both a new political party (1879) and a secessionist church (1892).34
A modern focus also led him to think, however briefly, about the Presbyterianism
in nineteenth-century Scotland, focused on the Disruption of 1843 [i.220 n. 2,
222 n. 1],35 and about Reformed church practice in the mid-century German
Palatinate [i.227 n. 3]. However, this presentist tendency was problematic in
Europe at least, because (as we saw) for Weber ‘the historical time for “sects” or
for anything essentially like them [had] passed by’.36 (By contrast the twentieth-
century persistence of the American sects was relatively easily explained, since
Weber had always regarded America as a belated example of ‘Europeanization’.
America would follow the same evolutionary path as Western Europe, but with a
substantial, if unspecified, time lag [PS i.208, etc.]). Like ascetic Protestantism
generally, he construed the sects as essentially seventeenth-century phenomena.

34 [i.220 n. 2, 222 n. 1, 224 n. 1, 226 n. 1; cf. i. 221].

35 Weber read about the Scottish church Disruption of 1843 in Karl Sack, Die Kirche von Schottland
(1844–5) [i.220 n. 2], but there is no evidence of what he thought about a specifically Scottish religious
history. However, while the Disruption might perhaps be taken as a parallel to the Dutch secession of
1886, there was no Kuyper in Scotland, and no new dynamic movement of lay piety with a powerful
political arm. In short, it did not present the same problems as the Dutch case, and it would have been
much easier here to adhere to the core proposition that the seventeenth century was the axial moment
in religious history, and that all that happened subsequently was a mere evolutionary–historical
working out from this starting point.
36 To Harnack, 5.2.06, Briefe.
356 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

This was not to deny that, as part of the evolutionary–historical accumulation of

Kultur, they bequeathed an important legacy for behaviour in the present, if one
was fortunate enough (unlike German states) to possess it. But still observing them
in the present day alone was intrinsically a deviation from the historicist premiss
that contemporary phenomena must be understood through genetic analysis—and
when Weber resumed his study of religion in 1912 he went back in time. This was
how fundamental historical method was to him, and it should be stressed that,
despite the interest he displayed in the Dutch case, Weber did not accept or
understand that what he was looking at was something new, readily recognizable
to us as nascent twentieth-century, West European Christian Democracy.
So neither his American experience nor the writing of ‘“Churches” and “Sects”’
signified any real intellectual advance or dawning pathway of enquiry. Not only was
their presentism something of a deviation, but the modern sects created a further
problem by calling the logic and chronology of Weberian history into question. If
in ‘the old capitalist countries’ of Europe the ‘religious root’ of ascetic Protestantism
had died out [XXI.63, 104] and had been transmuted into enlightened utilitarian-
ism in the eighteenth century, how could there be a revived and popular Dutch
Protestantism (for example) c.1900? Weber could hardly deny Kuyper’s existence
and significance, but even so the only convincing interpretation he could make of
Kuyper’s movement was as a prolonged continuation from the past. Everything he
did was ‘following on from [Gisbert] Voët’ [i.220 n. 2]; he did not represent an
innovation in the present day, but was still governed by the “sacrosancta synodus” of
Dort (1618–19).37 Yet if that was the case, what lay behind the late nineteenth-
century upsurge in the fortunes of politically organized religion and its embrace of
that novel, yet potent instrument of modern politics, the mass political party?
There was no answer to such questions within either Weber’s frame of reference or
that of Robert Michels—his obvious point of contact on such a question, but
someone with far less interest in secularized religiosity than Weber.38 Another
problem produced by present-day consideration of the sects was this: were the
Dutch to be seen as relatively insignificant compared to the English in the
seventeenth century owing to an insufficient penetration by rigorous Calvinism
at that date (as he had supposed when writing the PE in 1904–5), or was this
judgement belied by the resurgence of Dutch Calvinism in the 1880s and 1890s?
As he admitted in 1910, ‘in fact I am still far from clear regarding these problems.’39
Of course, this was a question of detail only, and Weber was certainly not tempted
to depart from his overall evolutionary schema regarding the nature and impact of
ascetic Protestantism; but even so, it was hardly an encouragement to proceed with
publication of a revised PE in 1907, when some treatment of the sects was necessary
to its completion.

37 ‘Antikritisches’, 185 n.14 at 187.

38 In Michels’ Zur Soziologie des Parteiwesens in der modernen Demokratie (Leipzig, 1911) party
political Protestantism is entirely absent, whilst most of the references to Catholicism are simply anti-
clerical. There is just one reference to the Kulturkampf where Catholics are treated as participants in
party politics (p.191), but neither the Centre Party nor any Catholic politician is mentioned.
39 ‘Antikritisches’, 185 n. 14 at 186. See further Historian, 61–74.
 From the Sects to ‘The City’ 357

The upshot of any such local difficulty, taken together with the obstacles or
dampers arising in relation to the PE, was something of a paradox. On the one
hand, Weber was able to produce a draft of the essay on the ‘Protestant Sects’, most
probably in 1907 and at the prompting of Siebeck, and this is surely the principal
substance behind his statement to Siebeck in 1908 that ‘work on “capitalism”’—
the new edition of the PE—‘is already fairly advanced’.40 Yet the text he produced,
which is the essence of what was finally published in 1920, was of a drastically
reduced kind, and reflects his psychological detachment from the project after
March 1905. Thus the crucial historical section of the text—the only part that was
a real continuation of the PE—was at most ‘a short survey’ [i.220].
Just how much was omitted thereby can be reconstructed at least partially, from
what is said in the PS itself and from prospective suggestions made in the PE. For
example, Weber tells us in the PS that he would ‘not examine in detail the various
[organizational] forms of this voluntarist, inner-worldly asceticism—the old
Täufer, the Mennonites, the Baptists, the Quakers’ [i.220], nor does he suggest
any comparison with the Pietist conventicle. Yet given that the ethical significance
of the sect arises precisely from its anti-institutional form, this would seem to be
central. One aspect of this subject that clearly interested Weber a good deal was
the “class” organization of the Methodists as an instrument of ‘church discipline’
[cf. XXI.72]. As noted above, Methodists were included in the PE only as an
advance notice of their sectarian interest—a clear signal that there was something
significant that he wanted to say about them. Yet the fullest supplementary
statement on this subject comes not in the PS but in the essay on ‘“Churches”
and “Sects”’, which draws a connection between the Methodist class system or
organization—in itself an entirely conventional subject—and the ethical qualities
he sees as being promoted by it:
limiting the size of the congregation, the unit of church law, to such an extent that all its
members know each other personally, and so can mutually judge and regulate their religious
“proof of the self ”, has always been one of the fundamental principles of the Täufer, as also
of genuine Methodism, through the formation of so-called class meetings, in which the
members . . . practised a kind of reciprocal confessional control . . . [CS 577]41
However, when the point recurs in the ‘Protestant Sects’, where we might expect a
fuller treatment, it has been reduced to skeletal form: ‘in the case of Methodism,
members were gathered together into groups’—the classes are not even men-
tioned—‘which became the agents of church discipline’ [i.227]. He cannot entirely
pass over the abundant materials he has accumulated on Methodist organization,
but though he signals their presence quite fully, this occurs in largely mechanical
and descriptive fashion in the notes.42 Evidently he has made some sort of
conscious renunciation, and now refuses to draw out the full “ethical” implications
of the empirical material available to him.

40 Briefe, 27.7.08. Above II.1.

41 Cf. Sociology of Herrschaft [c.1911–14], MWG I/22–4.673.
42 [i.227 nn. 2–3, 228 n. 1, 230 nn. 5–6, 231 n. 1, 23 2nn. 1–4].
358 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

The PE indicates a number of other themes that should have been taken up in a
full-scale treatment of the sects, to which the PS fails to do justice. Thus it looks
forward to the treatment of ‘discussions about credit . . . in another context’
[XXI.107 n. 83a], but again it is striking that the best sketch we have of Weber’s
thinking about the social web of ‘personal credit’ in fact comes from ‘“Churches”
and “Sects”’ [CS 560], while in the PS this subject is reduced to brief and separate
fragments, supplemented by a fleeting and somewhat misplaced addition to the PE
[i.213, 233] [i.33]+.43 Another subject Weber had looked forward to was a
‘discussion of the social policy of ascetic Protestantism’ [XXI.72], but in the PS
this is reduced to a single reference to the ‘highly developed’ and indeed over-
developed ‘support system of the Quakers’ [i.232]. Now it must be assumed that
Weber wanted to discuss the hostility of a deliberately impersonal ascetic Protest-
antism towards what he regarded as an enfeebling and sentimental ‘welfare policy’
here, something that he regarded as typical either of old-fashioned patriarchal
regimes or else of the neo-mercantilism that he saw as looming on the horizon of
modernity as the successor to free market capitalism.44 But this brief utterance
cannot be construed here. Instead it raises an unsolved mystery: how did the
Quakers whom he admires so much come to take such a wrong, anti-individualistic
turning? Still perhaps the most drastic act of compression and omission performed
in the PS relates to the promises voiced in the PE to discuss ‘the class conditioned
nature of asceticism’, which would almost certainly have taken in a discussion of the
geographical determinants of religious affiliation as well [XXI.78 n. 14; cf. 56].
There can be little doubt in the face of a wealth of such promises45 that the
projected “third” essay on the sects of 1905 would have been eminently “two-
sided” in its approach—covering social and external conditions as well as the
spiritualistic and internal “ethic” [XXI.110]—and would have confronted the
problems posed by the simplistic Marxist theory of “base” and “superstructure”,
which Weber also announced as a subject for future discussion [XX.18]. However,
in the PS the only hint we receive of this kind is the isolated remark that ‘Itinerant
artisans were the chief carriers of the Täufer movement’ [i.220]. Now this is by no
means a trivial remark, since these nine words summarize the crucial Christian
conclusion of the 16,000–17,000 words of }7 of the Sociology of Religion
(c.1913), which presents a systematic consideration of the class conditioning of
religious affiliation46—one of the jewels of that miscellaneous text. Nonetheless,
the summary is so extreme as to be practically invisible. A final evidence of the
reduced status of the PS is the device we have already noticed, whereby, after
looking forward to a later, adequate treatment of the sects throughout Part II of the

43 The addition to the PE (in praise of ‘the creditworthy man of honour’) is explained by association

with the highlighting of the ‘credit’ in the famous quotation from Franklin in the 1904 text: [XX.13].
Nonetheless, this was unquestionably a sectarian theme, and should have been reserved for the PS.
44 e.g. ‘Allgemeine . . . Nationalökonomie’ [1894–8], MWG III/1.532 (on neo-mercantilism);

Sociology of Herrschaft [c.1911–14], MWG I/22–4.334 (patriarchalism), 450 (seventeenth century),

652 (modernity again).
45 See further [XXI. 57, 65 n. 129, 69 n. 136, 93 n. 52, 101 n. 69].
46 Cf. MWG I/22–2.282–3. Above II.5.iv.
 From the Sects to ‘The City’ 359

PE in 1905, the PS then looks backward to the PE as if it was already sufficient. In

1905 the ‘ethic’ embodied in ‘honesty is the best policy’ was presented in the PE in
anticipation of a future and more substantial treatment later [XXI.71; cf. 107 n.
83a]; but this fundamental subject is then passed over with great brevity in the PS
because it is something ‘which has of course already been discussed in detail in the
previous essay’, meaning the PE [i.219]. It is like an illusion performed with
mirrors—wherever we look, the full treatment of the sects is always to be found
somewhere else; and Weber is using sleight of hand to compensate for the fact that
there is no full treatment of the sects in either place.
It is clear then that the PS was a minimum treatment of the sects and by no
means the full completion that the plethora of signals in the 1905 text of the PE
leads us to expect.47 Any such completion would take place by other routes.
The depleted state of the essay is in full accord with what we know of Weber’s
desultory production and psychological depression in 1907. Given these deficien-
cies, it is not surprising that initially Weber was lukewarm about publication
in 1907, and was then happy to set Siebeck’s publishing plans aside and leave the
PS in a desk drawer after 1907 alongside the PE. The chief reasons for doing so
have already been outlined (II.1): the obstacle posed by Weber’s doubts and
difficulties regarding capitalism (which affected the ‘Protestant Sects and the Spirit
of Capitalism’ quite as much as the PE ) and the incentive to delay presented by the
entry of Ernst Troeltsch into the field of socio-religious enquiry. But here we may
note the particular importance of the sects to Troeltsch. For the sectarian idea was
of greater consequence in his eyes than any of the other religious arguments
expounded in the PE.
The PE was generally important to Troeltsch because it researched and expound-
ed ‘the Protestant ethic’ by historical means: the ethical working of religion in
society and Kultur. He too was in pursuit of ‘the Protestant ethic’ so defined, and
elucidating it was ‘of course the most important thing’.48 So from the moment
Troeltsch began to assimilate Part II of the text in 1905, he began to deploy large
amounts of historical data under recognizably Weberian headings such as Calvin-
ism, asceticism and capitalism, which led to the supposition by Rachfahl in 1909
that ‘troeltsch–weber’ was a kind of intellectual conglomerate.49 Yet this was a
mistake, because the world-views of the two men were so different. It is true,
Troeltsch gave a large space to ascetic Protestantism as ‘a world historical power’,
existing at the time (seventeenth century) and place (primarily England and
America) that Weber said it had, and such was the basis for Weber’s invocation
of Troeltsch’s work as an ‘extremely welcome supplement and confirmation’ of his
own views in 1919–20 [i.17 n. 1]+. However, Troeltsch’s overall assessment of
ascetic Protestantism was quite different from Weber’s. Given his construction of
modernity as commencing after 1700, he viewed its claim to provide a compre-
hensive or ‘universal Christianity’—or, in Weber’s language, to govern the conduct

47 Above II.1.
48 ‘Protestantisches Christentum’, 261, 351; cf. 372.
49 ‘Kalvinismus und Kapitalismus’ [1909], Kritiken und Antikritiken, 115, etc.
360 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

of life as a whole (Lebensführung)—as pre-modern, since its only real analogue was
the equally universal, if differently framed, Christianity of the medieval church.50
This radical denial of Weber’s historical scheme then led to a different conception
of the present. Troeltsch accepted that the position of religion in modern Kultur
was doubtful and unresolved, but as a Christian idealist he could not for a moment
suppose, as Weber did, that that Kultur had lost its ‘religious root’ [XXI.104].
Above all, Troeltsch simply does not mention the idea that for Weber was the very
centre of modern Kultur, formal rationality (he adheres to the established discourse
of what was rationell, practically rational or efficient in a particular case), because
this assumed that there was an unresolved value-plurality—the very negation of the
normative idealism Troeltsch sought to uphold and refound. He may have coined
the phrase ‘anarchy of values’, but this was an anarchy he was determined to
overcome. Hence his posthumous denunciation of Weber’s scepticism.51 In
short, Troeltsch denied the central argument and assumptions of the PE, as distinct
from its religious historical data, almost entirely.
However, the position regarding the sects was different. Prior to the Social
Doctrines (1908–12), Troeltsch’s conception of the organization of religious life
was (as we have seen) dualistic: there was ‘Religion’ (the religion of the individual)
and ‘Church’. But in the Social Doctrines, Troeltsch took a new step and decided
that there were three principal organizational forms or types: church, sect, and
mystical (or individual), and he reinterpreted Christian history on this basis. (Apart
from honest empiricism, his primary motive, I suggest, was to diminish the harshly
Manichaean character of his original scheme, ‘absolute individualism and univer-
salism’, and provide a historical way-station to contemporary individualism and
mystical religiosity.)52 Such was the impact of Max Weber. In response to Weber’s
call for an ‘entirely value-free’ use of the term ‘sect’,53 Troeltsch now repudiated the
centuries-old German tradition of denouncing the sects ‘as pejorative ancillary
formations, instances of one-sidedness, exaggerations or abbreviations of church
Christianity’. On the contrary (he suggested), they were ‘often peculiarly charac-
teristic of essential and fundamental Ideas of Christianity.’54 So when he sought to
summarize his contribution relative to Weber’s regarding the formation of a
modern ‘economic ethic’ (which, however, he thought centred on work rather
than rationality—this was the Protestant work ethic),55 he focused on the sects:
‘I think that it is only through my portrayal of the sects, and especially the
delimitation of mysticism relative to the sect-type, that I have made Weber’s
conception clearer in detail; likewise, by showing the sectarian element in early
Calvinism, I have made the fusion of Calvinism with the sects [in ascetic Protest-
antism] more intelligible.’56 It is a nice question as to whether Troeltsch was more
moved here by Weber’s essay on ‘“Churches” and “Sects”’ (1906) than by the

50 Soziallehren, 958–60; cf. ‘Die Bedeutung des Protestantismus für die Entstehung der modernen

Welt’, HZ 97 (1906), 1–66, }}II–III.

51 Above II.6.iv. 52 Soziallehren, 178.
53 At Frankfurt 20.10.10, GASS 446. 54 Soziallehren, 367–8.
55 Above I.8. 56 Soziallehren, 957 n. 512.
 From the Sects to ‘The City’ 361

preliminary presentation of the sectarian idea in the PE. He may well have been.
The essay is ‘often’ and ‘frequently cited’ in the Social Doctrines, not least when the
sect-type is first introduced.57 Chronology also suggests that it was important, since
it was only after it appeared that his thinking began to shift; by contrast his initial
reception of the PE in 1905–6 reveals no movement at this point.58 But however
this may be, Weber had secured quite as much from his theological “expert” as he
could reasonably have hoped: a major breach in the entrenched Lutheran resistance
to the sectarian idea; and the best possible (though still slim) chance that his non-
specialist hypotheses regarding the nature of the sects might receive a fair hearing.
For this reason, unlike the general encomium of the Social Doctrines that appears in
the revised PE [i.17 n. 1]+, in regard to the sects he is able to announce a more
specific triumph: ‘the concept of the sect I developed (in contrast to the concept of
the “church”) has—I am pleased to say—been taken over by Troeltsch and treated
in detail in his “Social Doctrines of the Christian Churches”’. And it was surely as a
result of Troeltsch’s work rather than the sufficiency of the PE, that further
‘discussion of concepts’ such as church and sect ‘[might] be dispensed with’,
when he came to publish the PS in 1919–20 [PS i.207 n. 1].59 But as of
1907–8, the message was simpler: the PS should be kept out of sight until Troeltsch
had concluded his enquiries.

I V . SECTS AND VIRTUOSI

So between 1907 and 1912 the ‘Protestant Sects’, like the PE, was put to bed. But
this does not mean that Weber’s thinking in this area was dormant. On the
contrary, its fertility after 1907 easily outstrips the formal limits of the PS and
PE. A synopsis of his thinking appears in the address he gave under the heading of
the ‘Sociology of associations [Vereinswesen]’ at the inaugural meeting of the Deutsche
Gesellschaft für Soziologie (German Sociological Society) at Frankfurt in October
1910, when he proposed that the Society take up the study of voluntary associ-
ations as a major project for empirical enquiry.60 As noted above (II.3), this
proceeded from the challenge announced at the end of the PE [XXI.109]—and
in similarly conceived language—by proposing to investigate all ‘those formations
which one conventionally designates as “social”, i.e. everything that lies between
politically organized or recognized powers on the one hand—the state, the
locality, the official church—and the naturally arising community of the family

57 Af SS 28 (1909), 391 n. 164 (SL 364 n. 164); cf. SL 768 n. 417; 948 n. 509. The principal

additions to the revised version of the text are clearly addressed to Troeltsch, as the type of the
intelligent, well-meaning Lutheran: CS 580 n. o, 582–3 (the final two paragraphs, including the
reference to Richard Rothe).
58 ‘Protestantisches Christentum’ [1905–6], ‘Die Bedeutung des Protestantismus . . . Vortrag

gehalten . . . am 21. April 1906’, HZ 97 (1906), 1–66.

59 See similarly PE [i.153 n. 1]+.
60 This was outlined within his ‘Business Report’ delivered on 20.10.10, pr. GASS 441–7.
362 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

on the other’.61 This modern agenda of ‘social communities’ (the language of

the PE ), or ‘associations’ (Vereine) in 1910, had a religious–historical root: ‘The
original type of all associational life is . . . the sect in the specific sense of the word’,
that is, the voluntary assembly of ethically and meritocratically ‘qualified persons’ as
distinct from those who are gathered by force of bureaucratic and institutional
regulation.62 However, the 1910 project displays a breadth and systematic ambition
in regard to sects or associations that was missing from the PE and PS. Hence this
central question: ‘how, I say, and by what means, do [associations] work in two ways:
first, the shaping of single individuals and then in shaping the objective, supra-
individual, values of the Kultur?’63 Now the answer to the first question was no
different from that given in 1905–7: that is, in terms of Bewährung or personal proof,
of ‘self-assertion’ and the display of personal ‘qualities’ within the group [i.234].64 In
secular terms this was a conventional ideal of liberal individualist meritocracy
modified only by being set within a group and social context. However, the second
question was in principle new, since it called for the examination of the socio-political
impact of sects and associations that had been largely or formally excluded in 1905–7.
Hence frequent reference in the address to political parties, the state, and above all to
the idea of Herrschaft. Although Weber does not mention ‘charisma’, the ideas of the
charismatic sect, the charismatic leader, and also the “routinization” of the leader’s
following are plainly in view: ‘Every association to which one belongs presents a
relationship of rule [Herrschaft] between people’, where ‘in reality rule is always rule
by a minority, and sometimes dictatorship by one man’.65
So in October 1910 Weber was proposing a major enquiry into modern-day
associational life in Germany, which would (he hoped), when completed, lead to
the construction of a ‘newly made [frisch], sociological typology’, and which was in
large measure an enquiry into the workings of Herrschaft.66 Now in fact the enquiry
never got under way. However, we may feel that it was not entirely necessary, since
his scepticism about the inert nature of German associational and political life is
already clearly in evidence when he suggests that the German love of choral singing
was an outlet or ‘psychological discharge [Abreaktion]’ for the mighty passions
and energies that should have gone into a more active and less servile politics.67
(The contrasting case of the collapse of English musical life to an ‘absolute nullity’
in the seventeenth century, in parallel with its great, energizing political upheaval,
to say nothing of the ‘unbearable screeching’ of American church congregations
amidst a similarly vibrant political context, had been outlined in 1905) [XXI.94

61 GASS 441–2. 62 Ibid. 442. 63 Ibid. 447.

64 Cf. GASS 443–4. Weber does not mention Bewährung in 1910, presumably because he
conceives of the term as theological and less suitable in this context.
65 GASS 444. On parties, politics, ‘routinization’, e.g. 445, 447. ‘Dictatorship’ must, of course, be

taken in its classical sense, and this remark raises the suggestion that, once Weber chose to make
charisma a type of Herrschaft, Roman history was a significant source of inspiration, even if his
illustrations for the Grundriss were necessarily modern.
66 Loc. cit.
67 GASS 445.—Weber’s personal interest in the press enquiry is much clearer than that on

Vereinswesen: writing to Tönnies less than three weeks after the Frankfurt speech, he describes his
personal interests as ‘press enquiry, association of theoretical economists’, with no mention of
associations: 8.11.10, Briefe.
 From the Sects to ‘The City’ 363

n. 54; cf. XX.52].68 But whatever difficulties Weber faced in promoting collective
empirical enquiry, the personal significance of his proposal will be clear. He is
looking forward to a very particular slant on the sociology of Herrschaft—implicitly
an enquiry into the extent to which vertical rule could be limited by the horizontal
association of equals—at a time when the commission for ‘Economy and Society’
had been accepted, and the construction of sociological typologies was becoming a
central concern. What then was the place of sects and associations there?
The simple answer is that suggested in 1910. Weber attached much greater
weight to their religiously derived, anti-political significance than to their purely
religious or socio-economic function, and their treatment in ‘Economy and Society’
is a decisive demonstration that his interest in the sects and voluntary associations
was primarily “political” in this sense: it was a component in his persistent
dismantling of ‘the German “organic” metaphysic of the state’.69 Thus there is
no treatment of sects, nor even mention of the famous antithesis between institu-
tional churches and voluntary sects, in the pre-war Sociology of Religion.70 The
closest approximation is a short section (}5) on the religious Gemeinde—defined as
a durable, local ‘lay community’ where, in contrast to ‘the medieval Occidental [i.e.
Catholic], Anglican, Lutheran . . . parish’, the laity plays an active and not a merely
passive part.71 Now this could be a preliminary to the Weberian sect, where the
idea of the Gemeinde is also central; but still the preliminary is not developed, and
the focus here is on the interrelation between the prophet or priest and the laity, not
on a body of secular equals. At first sight such reticence in relation to the sects may
seem surprising, but the elementary reason behind it will be clear: that the starting
point for all Weberian sociological, type-based analysis lies in the individual, and
not in any social unit. For example, in the treatment of the differing routes to
religious salvation in the Sociology of Religion (}10), there is plenty of illustrative
reference to the typical, exemplary Weberian sects: Donatists, Kuyper’s Neo-
Calvinists, and ‘the mystical–pneumatic sects of the seventeenth century’.72 Also
present are obvious hallmarks of sectarian behaviour such as Bewährung, and the
contrast between charisma and the priestly ‘office’.73 Nonetheless, the church/sect
distinction does not feature as a conceptual heading, and the overall scheme of
‘paths to salvation’ centred on the polarity between ascetic and mystical religiosity,
is indubitably individualistic.

68 Cf. Max to Helene Weber [19.10.04], Lebensbild, 311. Oskar Schmitz, Das Land ohne Musik.

Englische Gesellschaftsprobleme (Munich, 1914), plays to this familiar stereotype regarding the English,
and is also significantly indebted to the PE.
69 »Objektivität« [1904] WL 201.
70 There is a suggestion in the post-war ‘Economy and Society’ that the post-war ‘Sociology of

Religion’ will discuss the church/sect distinction: WuG 30. Nonetheless the primary context that raises
the sectarian idea in Weber’s head here is supplied by politics and hierocracy; furthermore, the obvious
post-war descendant of ‘Political and hierocratic Herrschaft’ in the pre-war Sociology of Herrschaft will
be the discussion of ‘Political power and hierocratic power’ in the Staatssoziologie: MWG III/7.66–7.
So, while it is quite possible that the church/sect polarity would be mentioned in a later Sociology of
Religion, in accordance with the placement set out below, there is no evidence that the war produced
any change in his thinking here, or any religious subject.
71 MWG I/22–2.197, 200, resp. 72 Ibid. 331, 344, 355, 366.
73 Ibid. 318–19, 344–5, resp.
364 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

Even so, this is by no means a complete explanation of the absence of the sects
from the Sociology of Religion. Sects are, after all, intensely individualistic bodies in
Weber’s eyes. Bewährung or the ‘proof ’ of the person before his sectarian peers
‘placed the individual absolutely on his own in the most important of all his
concerns’ [CS 580], just as ‘The formation of ascetic sects and conventicles . . .
formed one of the most important historical foundations of modern individualism’
[PS i.235]. What interested him about the sect was precisely its nourishing of
individualism within a social context (the central agendum of all Weberian social
thought): ‘that connection between the inner isolation of the individual, signifying
a maximal release of his active power into the world outside, and his capacity to
form social groups of the utmost cohesion and maximum impulsive force—this is
something that, in its highest and most potent form, first arose on the ground
supplied by sect formation’ [CS 581]. So Weber’s individualistic premiss does not
in itself explain the exclusion of the sectarian idea as a leading category or type from
the Sociology of Religion.
A further explanation of the demotion of the sect as a religious category derives
from Weber’s enquiries into the ‘Economic Ethics of the World Religions’ (1912),
conducted immediately prior to writing the Sociology of Religion (c.1913). Spe-
cifically this means the treatment of the Hindu sects in ‘Hinduism and Buddhism’.
As Weber states in his 1915 ‘Introduction’ (written just before his revision of the
original 1912 text of ‘Hinduism and Buddhism’ in 1915–16), ‘When observed
from the outside, numerous Hindu religious communities appear to be “sects” just
as much as those of the Occident; but the goal of salvation and the way in which it
was presented followed an entirely opposite direction.’74 Now we cannot say what a
Weberian sociology of religion would have looked like in the absence of the
‘Economic Ethics’, since without the ‘Economic Ethics’ the Sociology that we
have would not exist. But still, if one was trying to make a case for the impact of the
‘World Religions’ on the wealth of ideas outlined in and around the PE, then it is
plausible to suggest that scrutiny of ‘the Asiatic sects’75 promoted the demotion of
the specifically Occidental idea of the sect within a Weberian sociology of religion,
albeit that sociology was emphatically Occidental in its overall construction.
Even in its revised form, ‘Hinduism and Buddhism’ is a striking example of a
text that charts the internal development of its author’s thinking as he was writing
it. Thus Weber’s starting point is a restatement of the familiar distinction between
“church” and “sect” which appeared in the PE [XXI.64–5], in ‘“Churches” and
“Sects”’ [CS 578–9] and again at Frankfurt in 1910:76 the polarity between the
institution that extends to all persons indiscriminately and the voluntary commu-
nity of those who were ‘specifically qualified in a religious sense’ (56).77 However,
the moment he makes this statement, difficulties begin. Although in some general

74 ‘Einleitung’ Af SS 41 (1915), 25. This is the closest we can get to the 1912 text; but there is no

reason to suppose that the perspectives of the revised text of ‘Hinduism and Buddhism’ were
significantly different from the original, just as there is none in ‘Confucianism’ between 1912, 1915,
and 1919–20.
75 MWG I/20.369 (title). 76 GASS 463.
77 References in ( ) in this and the next paragraph are to MWG I/20.
 From the Sects to ‘The City’ 365

and much reduced sense Weber might like to equate Hinduism and the caste
system with the idea of a church—as representing an entrenched and stable
formation that embraced the vast majority of the populace—he knows he cannot:
‘the expression “church”’ is not applicable (103). Indeed, it is even reasonable to
conclude ‘that Hinduism is simply something other than a “religion” in our sense of
the word’ (78). The Hindu social and ‘religious system’ (49 n. 1) is like a Western
church in that one is born into it; it is a universal, indiscriminate assembly, and
personal merit plays no role in securing membership. Yet at the same time it goes
far beyond a Western sect in its exclusivity: an outsider cannot (in principle at least)
gain admission to it at any price, and certainly not as an individual. Equally, once a
Hindu was excluded or “excommunicated” because of an infraction of caste ritual,
such a person could never gain readmission (56–9; cf. 67–8). In fact, the standard
Weberian antithesis between “church” and “sect” has broken down at the outset,
and this breakdown informs the whole of the rest of the text.
Because caste is the organizing basis of Hinduism, it has none of the bureaucratic
and “institutional” qualities of Western churches. Weber might have liked to
compare Hinduism to pre-Reformation Catholicism, but it lacked an ‘institutional
organ’ (286), and so there could be no connection to the Occidental idea of a
“church”. This is not to say that he loses faith in the idea of the institutional
church—the whole trend of his thought after 1907–8 is to entrench and confirm
such bureaucratic structures. But caste is ‘the Hindu social system’ (49); the
obvious types of comparison it raises are social, not institutional, such as the
tribe, the guild and the Stand (88–103), just as the obvious analogy to caste in
an Occidental context is not institutional but the Beruf or calling. Yet while the idea
of the church recedes, Weber continues to makes free use of the vocabulary of the
‘sect’. However, the ‘Asiatic sects’ (369) are not sects in the Western sense, being
‘absolutely heterogeneous in relation to the sect movements with which Occidental
Catholicism or Anglicanism had to do.’78 In other words, they are neither mod-
ernizing, nor rationalizing, nor politically subversive, and there had never been a
point in Indian history when there might have been a movement committed to the
introduction of a revolutionary natural law of the kind that (in Weber’s view)
marked out the Puritan sects in England (231–4).79 The most important Indian
‘sects’ were the cults of Shiva and Vishnu, which promoted the conservative
‘restoration’ of Hindu orthodoxy in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries
(460–74), that had (in Weber’s view) determined the relentlessly “traditionalist”
structure of Indian society and economy down to the present (193–208). Unlike
rationalizing and ascetic, yet socially elite, movements such as Buddhism and
Jainism, these sects attracted popular, lay support—and here is the source of their

78 ‘Confucianism’, Af SS 41 (1915), 369. The treatment of sects here runs parallel to that in

‘Hinduism and Buddhism’, and so the idea of the sect recedes in favour of the Gemeinde (371), ‘lay
communities’ (375), and ‘the religiosity of the virtuosi’ (376). However, Chinese sects are few and far
between; the Confucian bureaucracy suppresses them; lay Gemeinden are not formed (369, 371); and it
is clear that Weber is waiting to discuss the question fully in an Indian context (365, 368, 371–2),
which can embrace the ‘Asiatic sects’ as a whole.
79 Cf. Sociology of Law [c.1910–14], MWG I/22–3.519, 598–9, 608.
366 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

claim to be classified as sects. Yet their organization was ‘hierarchical’ (469). There
was none of the ‘democracy’ that marked out the Protestant sects [i.215–17], and
the idea of the Gemeinde or autonomous lay community was unknown to Hindu-
ism (126). By the same logic, they operated in alliance with the socially elite
Brahmins, the conservative guardians of the caste principle and the ‘Hindu priest-
hood’, albeit a priesthood that never developed an institutionalized priestly “office”
on the Occidental model (122). Hence a set of the bizarre paradoxes—bizarre by
Western and Weberian standards at least. Thus the nearest analogue to a Catholic
‘bishop’ in India was the sect guru who ‘visited his diocese (whether traditionally or
explicitly defined) in the company of his following, excommunicated in the case of
gross sins, gave out absolution in return for penance, raised contributions from the
faithful, and was in each and every respect the decisive authority in counsel and
confession’ (510–1). Equally paradoxical was the general conclusion that ‘a truly
pious Hindu is not merely a Hindu, but the member of a Hindu sect’ (79), so that
Hinduism was a multiplication of sects and yet in no way diluted thereby.
Transposed into a Western context this would produce simple gibberish: “the
truly pious Catholic was not merely Catholic, but a member of a Catholic sect”.
So the effect of detailed enquiry into the world religions, far from being the kind
of liberating and transformative experience for Weber that modern scholars some-
times suppose (II.5), could—if it induced change at all—be problematic. The
breakdown of the idea of the ‘sect’ when viewed in a universal, religious perspective
was surely decisive for its absence or demotion within the Weberian Sociology of
Religion. In a religious context the sect/church contrast that had been standard
down to 1910 is overtaken by a new distinction: ‘“Virtuoso” religiosity . . . against
“mass” religiosity’.80 The fundamental idea that underlies sect formation, ‘the
differential nature of religious qualification among men’, now causes Weber to
speak instead of ‘the religious virtuosi methodically working out their salvation
[who] everywhere formed a specifically religious “Stand ” [elite group] within the
community of the faithful’.81 The virtuoso, not the sect, becomes the category
heading, when previously the term ‘virtuoso’ had been almost invisible. (It appears
just once in the original PE, though its association there with ‘Oriental monasti-
cism’ suggests that, as ever, the later development was not entirely new [XXI.28],
and not at all in the PS or CS.) There can be no doubt that the sectarian idea
underlies the new terminology, since, besides its root in men’s ‘unequal religious
qualification’, the category of the virtuosi includes ‘all true “sects”’.82 By the same
process of transference, meritocratic ‘proof ’ of the person (Bewährung) and cha-
risma become characteristics of ‘the virtuoso body [Virtuosentum]’, just as the
religion of the ‘ascetic sects’ is also ‘the religion of the virtuosi’.83 Nonetheless,
while sectarians may be virtuosi, not all virtuosi are sectarians, since the virtuoso is
by definition an individual and not a group category in the first instance. So far as

80 ‘Einleitung’, Af SS 41 (1915), 21.

81 Sociology of Religion, MWG I/22–2.318.
82 Af SS 41.21–2.
83 Sociology of Religion, MWG I/222.318, 359.
 From the Sects to ‘The City’ 367

social categories are concerned, this means a shift from the religious category of the
‘sect’ to the much more general one of the Stand or group, which is an undoubted
retreat, designed to take account of the Indian case where, although Buddhist
mystics and monks were undoubtedly recognizable as a group, they did not act as
one in the manner of the Western sects. As he himself observes, ‘The disposition
towards mysticism is an individual charisma’, and it is this specifically individual
character and want of group solidarity that best explains the collapse of Indian
‘mystical prophecies of salvation’ such as Buddhism back into the ‘pure ritualism’ of
Hinduism.84 So it is that, in a religious and sociological context, the idea of the
sects is demoted, and in the final text of the PE even the Calvinist could, when
subsumed within the ‘the classification of all practical religiosity’, occasionally
appear as a ‘religious virtuoso’ [i.108]+.85
But still the Sociology of Religion is only half the story, since the sectarian idea
retains a significant presence in the Sociology of Herrschaft—just as Weber’s
address to the German Sociological Society would suggest. Here too there is an
individualizing movement in his categories: the idea of charisma, another defining
characteristic of the sects, shifts its primary emphasis away from the sectarian and
group form that is pre-eminent in 1905–7 [PS i.225, 229, 231] to that of the
individual leader, and in the exposition of charismatic Herrschaft the autonomous
‘sect’ is commonly downgraded to the leader’s ‘following’ or ‘disciples’. But this
in no way precludes extended discussion of the sectarian idea within the treatment
of ‘Political and hierocratic Herrschaft’ (first drafted in 1911),86 and this is where
the formal definition of the sect (if not the church/sect distinction) appears
in ‘Economy and Society’ as we have it. This major section of text examines
the fortunes of the institutional and priestly church (‘hierocracy’) when it descends
into the political world of power (Macht) and force (Gewalt). But if the
relationship between the political and hierocratic powers (in vulgar terms “church
and state”) is the historical starting point and occupies the bulk of the account, still
the climax of the account lies in the epoch-making limit set to both political and
ecclesiastical power by the seventeenth-century Protestant sects.87 Now the modern
neglect of what is said at this point about Calvinism and the sects is a further

84 Ibid. 307. 85 Cf. ‘Zwischenbetrachtung’, AfSS 41 (1915), 396, 403.

86 MWG I/22–4.579–679. I cite the title given by Weber in the ‘Einteilung des Gesamtwerkes’,
2 June 1914, in preference to Marianne Weber’s ‘State and hierocracy’. In editing the text for MWG
Edith Hanke opted to use the series of titles supplied by Marianne Weber, which taken as a whole have
much to recommend them: ‘Zur Edition’, MWG I/22–4.97. Note, however, (1) that Marianne’s list is
not complete, and Dr Hanke herself departs from it, in the section labelled ‘Erhaltung des Charisma’.
(2) There is an obvious objection to ‘State and hierocracy’ because of its unWeberian elevation of the
category of the ‘state’ (as Dr Hanke appreciates, ibid. 576, 578). Weber’s alternative title is much
superior. (3) In the post-war ‘Economy and Society’ this section would have reappeared within the
projected ‘Sociology of the State’, in #11. The title given here, ‘Political power and hierocratic power’,
effectively reiterates Weber’s 1914 title, since Herrschaft operates in the realm of power, even if it is not
the same as it: MWG III/7.66.—On dating: the markedly Occidental structure of the text suggests
what detailed enquiry confirms, that it was first drafted in late 1911, prior to the studies of the world
religions, even if it was subject (like all Weber texts) to later revision: ‘Editorischer Bericht’, MWG
I/22–4.567.
87 Ibid. 658–62, 668–79; cf. 590–1.
368 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

testimony to the ingrained belief that the PE and ‘Economy and Society’ have
nothing to do with each other.88 Yet ‘Political and hierocratic Herrschaft’ is the
single most significant development of the religious aspect of the PE in Weber’s
later writings: a text that is primarily Occidental and historical in its structure, and
an obvious precursor to the volume-length treatment of Occidental Christianity
proposed in the 1919 Advertisement.89 Understandably, therefore, the revised
edition of the PE implicitly directs us towards it (or its concerns) when it introduces
entirely new references to the political significance of ascetic Protestantism and the
sects. Hence the statements that we shall understand the Täufer properly only
through a discussion ‘in future’ of ‘the entire political and social ethic of Protestant
asceticism’ [i.160]+ [cf. XXI.71]; and that the first of the future tasks that might
follow the PE would be better to understand ‘the substance of socio-political ethic’
(as distinct from ‘socio-economic ethic’ in 1905) of the voluntary communities
lying between the conventicle and the state [i.205]+ [XXI.109]. (The ‘future’ here is
most obviously a reference to ‘Economy and Society’, rather than the speculative
proposal for a volume on Occidental Christianity, but it could of course be either.)
‘Political and hierocratic Herrschaft’ implicitly recalls the interest that the original
PE had taken in religious rule or Herrschaft, whether it be the rule of the Catholic
Church, the Calvinist God, or the inner light of the Täufer [XX.3; XXI.1, 6 n. 5, 14
n. 21, 68, 95]. Nonetheless, a decade later there is a change compared to what was
said—or said out loud—in 1904–5. When hierocracy and church organization are
made the specific point of reference, and when politics is not formally excluded as
in the PE and PS, ‘the Täufer and related sects’ (that is, Quakers) emerge as ‘the
most principled opponents of the Papacy’, ahead of the Calvinists (656)90—a
distinct reversal of the centre of gravity of the account in the PE. Indeed much of
the discussion of Calvinism here is devoted not so much to any positive contribu-
tion it might have made, but to showing in quasi-apologetic fashion that it was a
transitional form “on the way” to being a sect (thereby rendering explicit a principle
that, as we saw, was implicit in the original PE). Although it might formally be
classified as a church according to the standard institutional criterion, it diverged
from ‘all other churches’ in its ‘inner character’, because ‘the person predestined to
salvation needed no church’, while its insistence on exclusion of the reprobate from
the celebration of communion brought it ‘inwardly near to the sects’ (658–9, 674).
Overall it was more a divinely ordained ‘social arrangement [Veranstaltung]’ than a

88 I believe the most recent writer to take a significant interest in this text was Max Graf zu Solms

(1893–1968), whose edition of Max Weber, Aus dem Schriften zur Religionssoziologie (Frankfurt,
1948), gave as much space to hierocracy as to the entire Sociology of Religion: cf. 170–245,
245–318. Solms’ interest is reflected by the fact that Marianne Weber presented him with a section
of the original manuscript on hierocracy, yet (amazingly) MWG sees fit to mention only his edition of
Weber’s Schriften zur theoretischen Soziologie in this context: I/22–4.572.
89 MWG I/19.28. Amongst the wide range of sources considered by Wolfgang Schluchter in his

reconstruction of what Weber might have said in this volume, he passes over ‘Political and hierocratic
Herrschaft’ almost entirely—an understandable consequence of a secular perspective: Religion und
Lebensführung (Frankfurt, 1988), ii. 383–407; cf. 476–504.
90 References in ( ) for the rest of this section are to MWG I/22–4.
 From the Sects to ‘The City’ 369

‘church’ (659).91 The general judgement in favour of the priority of the sects is then
reproduced at the conclusion to the ‘Protestant Sects’ (which unlike the bulk of the
essay was probably drafted in 1919),92 when it states that ‘the Puritan sects are the
most characteristic carriers of inner-worldly asceticism, and the most consistent—
in a certain sense the only consistent—antithesis to the universalist Catholic
institution of grace’, that is, the Catholic Church [i.234]. This was because (as
we saw), while the Calvinist had to supply “personal proof” of merit to God alone,
within the sects one had to justify oneself before man as well, and as the PS
repeatedly states, ‘According to all experience there is no more powerful instrument
of cultivation than the necessity of social self-assertion in the circle of one’s equals’
[i.234]. By contrast, no such instrument could be derived from Calvinist and
predestinarian theology.
Having established the identity between the sects and Puritanism (or ascetic
Protestantism) (668), Weber then offers his most compact and comprehensive
statement of the sectarian idea. As usual, we cannot say that its materials are new,
for they were at work in his mind in 1905–7; but their presentation then was
fragmentary, because of the formal exclusion of politics from the PE and PS. His
starting point is that the sect, ‘an absolutely freely formed association of persons
with a specifically religious qualification’ (676), is radically opposed to both the
hierocratic or institutional church and the equally institutional Herrschaft of
political power, just as it is alien to the world of Herrschaft and power as such.
Both points were made in the PE (for example), yet in different places, and with
much greater prominence attaching to the church/sect antithesis than to that
between sects and politics; only now do we have a complete statement. A stray
reference in 1905 to the ‘unpolitical or actually anti-political principles’ of the
Täufer could be mistaken for a comment limited to the Quakers’ refusal to hold
political office or their hostility to the ‘aristocratic lifestyle’ [XXI.70], but here the
statements made are general and absolute. The sect’s ‘position towards political
power is distinctive and extremely important: it is a specifically anti-political or even
apolitical structure’ (676). The crucial implication of ‘anti-political’ that is not spelt
out in the PE let alone in the present-day context of the Sociological Society—
though it is implicit in the dictum that ‘only God shall “rule”’ [XXI.14 n. 21]—is

91 The English translation of Veranstaltung as ‘institution’ obliterates Weber’s meaning: whatever

else it is, Calvinism is not a straightforwardly institutional church: Economy and Society (New York,
1968), 1199.
92 Setting aside the final paragraph of the PS as a self-evident case (a proof addition deriving from

the late lecture course, the ‘Outline of Universal Social and Economic History’ delivered in the winter
semester 1919–20), I suggest that the previous paragraph [i.233–5] is a late composition on the
following grounds: (1) the opening placement of the paragraph within historical ‘evolution’ as a whole
[i.233], and the consequent antithesis drawn between the sects and the Catholic Church [i.234], will
not be found in the writings of 1905–7, but derive from the perspective laid down in ‘Political and
hierocratic Herrschaft’. (2) Reference to ‘the “bourgeois” Puritan ethic’ [i.234], with no mention of
capitalism, is much more likely to post-date 1907–8 and the germination of the ideas that led to ‘The
City’, than before. (3) Some items of vocabulary, such as the substitution of ‘ethos’ for ‘ethic’ [i.235],
undoubtedly stem from 1919. (4) More generally, given that Weber did some rewriting of the PS in
1919, however hasty, it would be surprising if he had not (at the very least) carefully revised such a
strategic component of text [c].
370 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

the unique hostility of the Protestant sects to all forms of rule or Herrschaft, a claim
legitimized by the religious self-discipline they voluntarily imposed upon them-
selves: ‘On the foundation of the strict sect there grew up a “right” of the ruled, of
every single ruled person, which was seen as inalienable, against power [Gewalt],
whether political, hierocratic, patriarchal or in whatever form’ (678).
Now this ‘inner’, religious and “ethical” foundation gave it an ‘elective affinity
with the [external] structure of democracy’ where any official must act as ‘the
“servant” of the lay community [Gemeinde]’ (676). In saying this, Weber antici-
pates the exploration of what are sometimes regarded as “late” themes in his
work—the ‘minimization of Herrschaft’ and ‘leaderless democracy’, where similarly
bureaucracy is only a servant93—though his interest in such subjects must by
definition go back to the point when he first began to reflect on the sects and
ascetic Protestantism. Yet such thinking could have only limited importance within
politics. However interested Weber might be in the institutional mechanisms that
limited Herrschaft in a technical sense,94 at the end of the day mass states operating
in a context of great power competition required leaders, who exercised rule within
the sphere of power. The political model of ‘direct democracy’ suggested by analogy
with the sects would only carry one as far as the ‘North American township and the
small Swiss canton’, and even though Weber himself was a ‘decided adherent of
democratic institutions’, he held that ‘every idea of eliminating the “rule of one
person over another”, through . . . the forms of “democracy”, however highly devel-
oped, [was] a utopia.’95 When religiously inspired persons entered the political
realm, this could only lead ‘to compromises and loss of the specifically sectarian
character’ (676), whether it be Cromwell in the 1650s [CS 582] or the Quakers in
eighteenth-century Pennsylvania [i.217–18].96 Note here that modern political
parties were not (in Weber’s eyes) descendants of the sects—their historical origin
was secular.97 The most he would allow was that there might be ethically convinced
“Weltanschauung-parties” such as the Catholic Centre and the Social Democrats,
and even this modest ethical input, based on a “world-view” rather than a view of
god, had been sufficient to remove them from real politics before 1918.98
The true importance of the sects lay outside politics, by setting an absolute,
religiously derived limit to the realm of politics and Herrschaft: ‘a freedom from
power [Gewalt], and especially state power’, which was supplied by the “rights of
man”, those rights created by the sects, which had never existed before the
seventeenth century (678 cf. 650). Now Weber’s longstanding interest in this

93 WuG [1919–20], 157; cf. 169–70. For the idea that this is “late” thought, e.g. Hanke,

‘Editorischer Bericht’, MWG I/22–4.719–20.

94 Ibid. 155–76.
95 Resp. WuG 170; ‘The Rural Community’, 334 (corrected: ‘follower’ = Anhänger = ‘adherent’); to

Michels, 4.8.08 [616], Briefe.

96 On the Quakers, cf. Sociology of Religion [c.1913], MWG I/22–2.392. In all these cases Weber’s

account derives from his reading of Isaac Sharpless, A Quaker Experiment in Government (Philadelphia,
1902 edn), a book he was almost certainly given on his visit to Haverford College in 1904, where
Sharpless was President cf. [XXI.103 n. 75].
97 Below }V.
98 Weber at Frankfurt, 21.10.10, GASS 447; ‘Politics as a Vocation’ [1919], MWG I/17.219–20.
 From the Sects to ‘The City’ 371

subject and his belief that Georg Jellinek’s essay on The Declaration of the Rights of
Man (1895) had established this (very doubtful) point of legal history are clear (I.7),
and amongst the many pregnant fragments thrown up by the PE is a paean to
“fundamental rights” as ‘an idea to which, in the last analysis, we owe not much less
than everything that even the most “reactionary” person today conceives as the
minimum definition of his sphere of individual freedom’ [XXI.46 n. 83]. But it is
only from the later writings that we can fully decode what this means. One of the
defining characteristics of the lay community of the sect is that ‘it cannot and may
not make universalist claims’ (676)—and here it stands in opposition not merely to
all institutional formations, which are legally comprehensive, but to all salvation
religions, which are ethically universal. Its idea of freedom, specifically ‘freedom of
conscience’, which for Weber is the ‘first’ of all human rights, is freedom not for
oneself alone but one that ‘recognizes the “freedom of conscience” of others’ on
religious grounds (678). (This also clarifies further fragments from the PE: the
sectarian defence of toleration ‘on positive-religious grounds’, and the encomium on
English freedom as a ‘religious trait’) [XXI.42 n. 78, XX.11]. Here once more we
meet Weber in what is to us his most “modern” light: the Weber who is “no longer”
a salvation-religionist, who recognizes the “anarchy of values” and ‘chaos of value-
criteria’99 at work within modern differentiated and even partially disintegrated
societies. In today’s language, he recognizes the elementary fact of cultural
difference—where the recognition of difference has been endowed with a quasi-
religious legitimacy by its sectarian origin. In principle this religious freedom
governs ‘the totality of ethically governed conduct’ (678). However, in the particu-
lar context of ‘Economy and Society’ and the Grundriss der Sozialökonomik, Weber
also gives it an economistic twist—equally modern to us, yet apparently more limited
in scope. For in the list of rights that come after freedom of conscience, he notes
‘above all the right to free identification and estimate of one’s own economic interests
within the limits of a system of legal rules valid in the abstract for each person alike’,
the principal components of which are ‘the inviolability of private property, freedom
of contract and the freedom of choice of profession’ (679).100 It is a symptom of the
extent to which Weber viewed Kultur c.1900 as a ‘material Kultur’ [XX.53], domin-
ated by ‘the economic way of looking at things’;101 but still this too was a residue
from the religious past, and helps explain just how important to him the conception
of economic or capitalist freedom was, as another limit on a potentially all-compre-
hending state bureaucracy (II.7.iv).
Note finally that, notwithstanding its placement in ‘Economy and Society’, this
treatment of the sects is as ‘purely’ (or impurely) ‘historical’ as the argument of the
PE [XX.53; XXI.109]. When Weber speaks of sects in ‘Political and hierocratic
Herrschaft’, he does not invoke a trans-historical type but the Täufer and their
Protestant descendants in the seventeenth century. Although this text was first

99 Freiburg Inaugural [1895], MWG I/4.563.

100 Cf. Sociology of Law [c.1910–14], MWG I/22–3.599–600; above II.7.iii.
101 MWG I/4.561.
372 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

composed in 1911 prior to the enquiries into the ‘Economic Ethics of the World
Religions’ (1912) that produced the demotion of the ‘sect’ as a sociological type in
favour of the virtuoso, the later movement carried no implications for the earlier text.
Relegation of the sect/church distinction in a general religious context had no
implication for the religio-political working of the sectarian idea in an Occidental
context. Notwithstanding some comparative insertions arising from work done for
the ‘Economic Ethics’ (most obviously, regarding Oriental and Occidental monasti-
cism, 595–609, which include some inconsequential references to ‘virtuosi’, 597–8),
‘Political and hierocratic Herrschaft’ remains a text that reaches its climax in the
Protestant sects of the seventeenth century, and this stands at the end of a evolutionary
progression that in its second half is almost entirely Occidental and Judaeo-Christian,
beginning with the Papacy (626–79). So the true significance of the conceptual
revision brought about by the investigation of Hinduism was not simply the down-
grading of the sects as a sociological type. It simultaneously highlighted the extent to
which the sects were historically individual [cf.XX.12]—just like ascetic Protestantism,
the unique case of the salvation religion that was ‘no longer’ such,102 and a uniquely
Occidental ‘modern capitalism’. This is not to depreciate the trans-historical, socio-
logical and typological framework that largely governs ‘Economy and Society’; but it
does mean that, given Weber’s explicitly Occidental focus [i.1], where the modern
Occident is itself a historically unique phenomenon, we cannot treat him as a
sociological thinker alone. He is irreducibly sociological and historical.

V. THE BOURGEOIS IDEA AND THE CITY

Plainly the sectarian idea was important; but no account of the ‘social organization’
of ascetic Protestantism [XX.14]—hence of Weber’s understanding of social for-
mation in general—can be complete without consideration of what was (in
Weberian jargon) its other, outward “side”: the bourgeois city.103 No doubt
because it seems so self-evident, it has been easy to overlook Weber’s bourgeois
identity and its intellectual deposit. Yet his urban and legal upbringing placed him
socially at the very centre of the bourgeoisie; self-description as ‘a class-conscious
bourgeois’ was the only personal identity statement that he was ever prepared to
make; and it was one he made repeatedly.104 By contrast, he never called himself a
nationalist. In his conception of the present, the secular bourgeois identity he
inherited from his father was certainly more important to him than the cerebral
religious interests he derived from his mother, and when his uncle Adolf Hausrath

102 ‘Zwischenbetrachtung’, AfSS 41 (1915), 396. 103 On “sides”: II.5.iv.

104 To Michels, 6.11.07, Briefe; ‘Die deutschen Landarbeiter’ [1894], MWG I/4.335; cf. Freiburg
Inaugural [1895], ibid. 568; to Michels, 4.8.08 [616], Briefe.—There is a substantial literature on ‘The
City’, but its principal agenda (Herrschaft, rationalization, historical validity) is different from mine
(Weber’s modern bourgeois identity, the relation between the bourgeoisie and the sects, the
significance of voluntary associations) and so I shall not try to engage with it in detail. See esp.
Hinnerk Bruhns and Wilfried Nippel (eds.), Max Weber und die Stadt im Kulturvergleich (Göttingen,
2000); Stefan Breuer, Max Webers tragische Soziologie (Tübingen, 2006), chs.7–11; Wolfgang
Schluchter, Religion und Lebensführung, ch.10.
 From the Sects to ‘The City’ 373

warned him in 1896 not to get too close to Christian-Socials such as Friedrich
Naumann, he answered that he could not ‘stand further apart from the Christ[ian]-
Socials but [was] a fairly pure bourgeois’.105 Nonetheless in the past he considered
that the histories of the bourgeoisie and Christianity went loosely together and he
regretted that in the German case a wedge had been driven between Protestant
Christianity and ‘“liberalism” in the widest sense of the term’—a remark that surely
included its bourgeois social constituency [CS 581]. By definition the two “sides”,
internal Christian ethic and external bourgeois social form, need not be directly
connected; nonetheless, seen from Weber’s characteristic, universal–historical per-
spective, the Occidental city was the historical heartland of active religiosity and
they enjoyed an ‘elective affinity’.106
We saw above (I.2) that in the 1890s the idea of the late medieval city economy,
at once bourgeois and capitalist, formed a crucial precursor to the historical
enquiries of 1904–7 in the PE and the PS. Yet there was a difference between
these two phases in Weber’s life. True to its internal and ethical focus, the PE
sidelined the secular medieval context and highlighted instead the ascetic contri-
bution of medieval monasticism. Nonetheless a residual and instinctive “bourgeois”
context remains clearly in view. The starting point of the argument in 1904 remains
that of the ‘rich cities’ of the German Reich and the questions raised by the embrace
of a harsh and demanding ‘Puritan tyranny’ by ‘specifically bourgeois classes’
[XX.2–3], while the modern capitalist Kultur that will result is that of ‘bourgeois
capitalism’ [XX.19]. This same instinctive usage resurfaces at the close of the PE
when it highlights the creation of a ‘bourgeois, economically rational conduct of
life’ and ‘a specifically bourgeois vocational ethic’ as the principal results of the
historical evolution Weber has sought to portray [XXI.103–5]. Once more we
observe the instability of his conception of capitalism at this date; and how a
transfer of some of its content into other categories, such as the bourgeois city, is
already a possibility in 1904–5.
In the years after 1905 Weber’s promise to rectify the ‘one-sided’ account of the
place of ascetic Protestantism in European history by bringing ‘to light the way in
which Protestant asceticism for its part has been influenced in its character and
genesis by the totality of the social conditions . . . in the Kultur’ [XXI.110]107 would be
redeemed in two ways. By typological examination of the relationship between
social and economic classes (Stände, Klassen) and forms of religiosity in the
Sociology of Religion (}7); and by historical analysis of the bourgeoisie, which
was surely the single most important ‘social condition’ preceding and enabling the
ascetic Protestant revolution of the seventeenth century. The principal textual fruit
in the latter case was the long essay on ‘The City’, an unpublished working paper
dateable to c.1908, and directly descended from Weber’s pivotal work on

105 15.10.96, cit. MWG I/4.38 n. 129.

106 Sociology of Herrschaft [c.1911–14], MWG I/22–4.583, 623; cf. 661, ‘Einleitung’, AfSS 41
(1915), 24–5. Given a correct understanding of the nature of Weber’s two “sides”, the meaning of this
much discussed and apparently elusive term is clear: it is the necessarily elastic link between the two
“sides”, internal ‘ethic’ and outward ‘forms’: [XX.54; cf. XXI.56].
107 Emphasis added.
374 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

‘Agriculture in Antiquity (1907–8). A good deal of mystery and perplexity has

surrounded this text hitherto, but here we shall boldly set perplexity aside, since in
fact its subject is quite simply what its title suggests: an exposition of the place of the
bourgeoisie and its urban identity within Occidental history.108 In principle (as
I say), the relationship between the city and ascetic Protestantism is that given by
Weber’s conception of the two “sides” to human social conduct and experience,
“inner” ethic and “outer” form, and in this sense they are quite distinct. But in
practice (as we saw) the distinction between the “sides” was rarely clear-cut or
absolute. Consider, most simply, the sect: this is ethically and internally defined, yet
it is also a social formation. In fact Weber’s conception of the role of social
formations in determining Occidental Kultur was both bourgeois and Christian;
and historically they were hardly separable. Just how significant the connection
between the two was, is indicated by this typical statement at the conclusion to
‘Hinduism and Buddhism’ (1915–16):
In the Occident the rise of the rational, inner-worldly ethic associated with the emergence of
thinkers and prophets grew up . . . on the basis of the political agenda [Probleme] of a social
construct which was alien to Asiatic Kultur: the politicized bourgeois estate [Bürgerstand ] of
the city, without which neither Judaism, nor Christianity, nor the development of Hellenic
thought is conceivable.109
The most elementary link between ‘the politicised bourgeois estate of the city’ and
‘the rational inner-worldly ethic’ of the seventeenth century lies in the affinity and
parallelism between the medieval bourgeoisie and the sects as forms of social
association. Like the sects, the bourgeoisie constituted a community or Gemeinde
‘in the full sense of the word’, as a consciously formed and organized group. Thus
the city has an ‘associational character’, which possesses ‘autonomy’ (84).110 Like
the sects, it is rooted not in any “organic” or “natural” community [CS 581], but in
individualism: it is ‘a confederation of individual bourgeois’, for each of whom
‘personal membership of the local association of the city, rather than membership
of clan or family, guaranteed his personal legal position as a bourgeois’ (112, 118)
[cf. PS i.234–6]. The relationship between individuals is thus not instinctive but,
like that of the sects, consciously ‘solidaristic’ (104) [cf. PS i.225, 229]. Only in this
sense do the members of either city or sect form a ‘brotherhood’ or ‘fraternity’
(confraternitas, Verbrüderung) (108, 136, etc.),111 which is not to be confused with
the Lutheran and philanthropic ethic of ‘brotherliness’ or ‘fraternity’ (Brüderlich-
keit), symptomatic of the quite different, personal and emotional ethic intrinsic to

108 See the Appendix.

109 Af SS 42/3 (May 1917), 808 (= MWG I/20.537). I have omitted the forward reference (‘as we
shall see’), which makes it plain that already by 1916, when Weber sent the text to press (to Siebeck,
22.7.16, Briefe), he was looking forward to a précis of ‘The City’ within the collection of his religious–
historical writings. Surprisingly this point was not picked up in MWG.—‘Prophets’ in this context
means persons such as Thomas Münzer and George Fox; the separate ‘development of Hellenic
thought’, apart from Christianity, refers to Occidental Wissenschaft at its origin.
110 All subsequent references in ( ) are to ‘The City’, MWG I/22–5.
111 Cf. [XXI.65] [PS i. 213, 228, 231–2].
 From the Sects to ‘The City’ 375

all salvation religions except ascetic Protestantism.112 Another obvious parallel

between city and sect derives from the role of ‘clubs’, that is, voluntary associations,
as ‘driving forces’ in the original establishment of city communities that were
substantively autonomous relative to their feudal or princely overlords. Here ‘The
City’ devotes particular attention to the Richerzeche or ‘Guild of the Rich’ in
twelfth-century Cologne, which in origin was ‘a purely private club of especially
prosperous bourgeois’ (126; cf. 133–4), and as such little different from ‘the
numerous élite clubs for businessmen and the bourgeoisie’ that Weber found in
modern America [PS i.215].
To say this is not, however, to deny some obvious differences. In conformity
with the model of the two “sides”, the community of the city, once established, is
defined legally and not (as with the sects) in terms of the voluntary commitment of
the individual. It is ‘institutionally framed ’ (107). It has its own bureaucracy, and
in the most developed, democratic city communities, this becomes an ‘inundation’:
there are ‘4–5 dozen categories’ of official in even small cities (220)—perhaps there
is an implied swipe at modern socialism here. Again, the city codifies ‘a particular
rational law for the citizen of the city [Stadtbürger]’, which sets it apart from feudal
law, not least by its commitment to the free disposition of private property in land
(131 cf. 101, 236), and when Weber lays stress on the significance of a community
that is bound together by oath, conjuratio (125, etc.)—which may sound
voluntaristic—it should be remembered that the oath is an external and (proto-)
legal form for him and not a certificate of ethical ‘qualities’. Note similarly that,
while Weber rejects a purely quantitative definition of the city as ‘large’, he
nonetheless assumes it to be ‘relatively’ so. Thus, whilst ‘reciprocal personal
knowledge of the inhabitants’ is not excluded in principle (59, 84), size is not a
defining component of city life, as it is for members of the sectarian community,
where judgement of a member’s qualification must rest ‘on the basis of personal
knowledge and examination’ [PS i.226].
The gap between the sects and the city is in principle at its starkest in regard to
religion, since sects are by definition religiously driven groups, whereas the city is ‘a
worldly foundation’ (119). Christianity (Weber finds) contributed something
(alongside law and institutions) to marking out the identity of the city, but little
to the specific personal qualities of the individual bourgeois. Yet the generically
individualist foundation of the city community like that of the sects derives
ultimately from Christianity. It was this that ‘definitively undermined and des-
troyed the religious significance of all . . . ties of clan’ and ethnicity—Weber cites
Paul’s letter to the Galatians upholding Jewish commensalism with the uncircum-
cized113—so as to create ‘the Christian Gemeinde’ of the city, which ‘by its
innermost nature was a confessional association of believing individuals’ (114,
119 cf. 111). He even notes that the fraternity of the city was grounded in the
community of those who took holy communion together, excluding only the Jews
(119). This is at once an echo of the intense emphasis placed on admission to

112 Above II.6.iii. 113 2.11–16.

376 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

communion in the definition of the sectarian body, and yet a distancing remark,
since here it is assumed that all city Christians, worthy and unworthy, will take
communion (unlike the sectarian case). Another area of likeness and unlikeness
stems from the fact that both the sects and the city stand apart from the institu-
tional church. Both, in their different ways, relied on ‘the separation of church and
state’ (251) [cf. PS i. 207, 217], which rendered ‘the clergy in general . . . the
specifically alien body in the city’, alongside the Jews (249). However, the impli-
cations of such separation or rejection were very different in each case. For the sects
it signified an enhanced, personal religiosity; in the city it entrenched the worldly
and secular nature of the community where ‘the [church] parishes worked not as
clerical bodies with and through their church representatives’, but through ‘the lay
committees of the parish communities’ (119). There can be no talk in this context
of Bewährung, the meritocratic ‘proof ’ of the person, which takes the individualism
of the sects and ascetic Protestantism to a quite new level. Even so, when Weber
remarks that ‘Full membership [Vollwertigkeit] of the church community instead of
ritual clan qualification, as in antiquity, was a precondition of qualification as a
citizen’ in the city (119), this is literally the same as what he says about colonial
Massachusetts [PS i.216–17].
It is a pointer to the fact that the most striking similarities between the sects and
the medieval city relate to politics—the principal focus of Weber’s interest in the
sects after 1905. Both were major contributors to modern Occidental freedom:
the one (as we saw) by the pioneering creation of extra-political human rights, the
other in accordance with the famous principle that “town air makes free” (105),
whereby the serfdom of medieval rural society was abolished in the towns. Such
dramatic expansions of the realm of freedom could be achieved only by revolu-
tionary bodies. For the Täufer of the early German Reformation, for the Quakers
and Independents of Cromwellian England as for Abraham Kuyper in the 1880s
(Weber holds), ‘revolutions can be a duty before God’ [PS i.220 n. 24]. Similarly,
the city’s dissolution of the right of feudal overlords to enforce serfdom ‘was the
one great innovation of the medieval–occidental city in relation to all other cities
which was by its nature revolutionary’ (105). Now besides this meaning, ‘revolu-
tionary’ also carries the literal meaning of a revolutionary movement to seize
power. The Italian popolo in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was ‘the first
quite consciously illegitimate and revolutionary political association’ (200), and this
is Weber’s point of reference when in the ‘Zwischenbetrachtung’ he refers to ‘the
five great revolutions which were decisive for the historical destiny of
the Occident: the Italian of the twelfth and thirteenth, the Dutch of the sixteenth,
the English of the seventeenth, the American and French of the eighteenth
centuries’.114 But the greater meaning here is that of a series of moments of free
movement within the generally constrained continuum of Occidental history, of
switch-points in the tracks, where the first of these five invokes the city and
the other four chart the incursion of ascetic Protestantism (the Dutch and English)

114 ‘Confucianism and Taoism’, MWG I/19.226.

 From the Sects to ‘The City’ 377

and its working out down to the Declaration of the Rights of Man in 1789 (the
American and French).
To create this free space the revolutionary bourgeoisie had, like the sects, to stand
outside conventional politics. Like the seventeenth-century incursion of the sects,
the formation of the medieval Occidental city was another historically unique and
anomalous moment, and yet its political oddity was different. The bourgeoisie is
not anti-political as the sects are. On the contrary, the concept of the city is
‘political’ (72), and it is only as an autonomous political unit that it can pursue
‘economic politics’ and the ‘politics of the city economy’ (70). Nonetheless, this is
still politics of a very unusual kind. The original rise of the city takes place at a
moment of ‘anarchy’, in the political vacuum created by the decay of one of
Weber’s central historical types of Herrschaft, feudalism (127), prior to the rise of
another, ‘the modern patrimonial–bureaucratic state’ (235, etc.).115 From these
historical circumstances Weber drew a theoretical consequence: ‘the sociological
construct of the Occidental city’ supplied the origin of a new, fourth type of Herrschaft
that was deviant, because it did not sanction the principle of hierarchy common to
the other types. Uniquely, rule was not legitimated from above by an appeal to the
qualities of rule as such (charisma, legal rationality, tradition) but derived ‘officially
at least . . . from the will of the governed’.116 In this way ordinary ideas about
legitimacy are set aside: hence reference to ‘non-legitimate’ (but not illegitimate)
‘rule’ in this context.117 However, the qualification (‘officially at least’) makes it
clear that Weber has not suddenly become an uncritical populist. In the first
instance the fact that ‘non-legitimate’ rule stands outside the three pure types of
Herrschaft simply shows that it is an oddity; it does not subvert the primary doctrine
of the three types, and rule of the pure kind based on ‘the “principle of small
numbers”’, the fact that in ‘mass states’, unlike Swiss cantons, ‘rule is always really
rule by a minority, and sometimes dictatorship by one man’, remains the starting
point of socio-political analysis.118 Thus the era of city autonomy, between
(roughly) the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries, was a unique ‘historical inter-
mezzo’ (272) and no more, accompanied by superior (and more conventional)
political powers throughout, prior to the re-establishment of a normal Herrschaft
over cities in the form of the modernizing, patrimonial–bureaucratic state. The city,
like the sects, might stand outside ordinary Herrschaft, but it in no way abolished it.
Yet like the sects, the moment of city autonomy created a lasting deposit
within the historical accumulation of Occidental Kultur, which was of immense

115 Cf. Sociology of Herrschaft [c.1911–14], MWG I/22–4.247–370, 380–453.

116 ‘Probleme der Staatssoziologie’ [1917], MWG I/22–4.755. In other words, the very idea of
Herrschaft ordinarily implies some form of leadership, and again we see, in this light, how problematic
Weber’s pre-war idea of bureaucratism was.
117 ‘Einteilung des Gesamtwerkes’ [1914], ‘Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft’, I.8.c. The ‘illegitimate’

revolutionary origins of the city community are consistent with this, but they are origins only; and
Weber was anxious to stress—not least with an eye to Georg von Below—that, once established, the
corporation of Bürger was ‘ “legitimately” constituted’ in a formal–legal sense: MWG I/22–5.124;
cf. 200.
118 Resp. ‘Parlament und Regierung’ [1917–18], MWG I/15.483; Weber at Frankfurt, 21.10.10,

GASS 444; cf. Sociology of Herrschaft [c.1911–14], MWG I/22–4.145, etc.

378 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

importance for all subsequent politics, the development of the economy and the
right relation between the two. This is Max Weber’s theory of the longue durée. The
principal difference between the city and the sects is that while the latter, being
religious, stand outside politics altogether, the former does not; it only stands
outside ordinary Herrschaft. Both are committed to the ‘minimization of Herrschaft’,
but in the case of the city this is done not by marking out the limits to politics in the
form of human rights, but by fostering ‘Herrschaft-alien’ forms within the political
sphere: the ‘tribunician . . . right of supervision’ over the executive by the captain of
the popolo (208);119 the development of horizontal, collegial, and representative
forms, pointing forward to that great object of Weber’s personal, political commit-
ment, parliamentarism (221);120 and the foundation of organized political parties
such as the Guelfs and Ghibellines (206).121 Here it should be remembered that
parties on their own do not necessarily produce charismatic leaders—charisma,
after all, is the epitome of conventional, top-down Herrschaft—even if Weber
thinks that this is what ideally they should do in modern mass states. Hence his
famous alternative: ‘leadership democracy with [party] “machine” or leaderless
democracy’, that is, the “machine” on its own.122 Because of their ‘Herrschaft-
alien’ nature, the cities pioneered leaderless democracy, which at most produced
demagogues controlled by the machine (206), and when Weber writes in the post-
war ‘Economy and Society’ that ‘Every class privileged by rank fears leadership
based on the emotional surrender of the masses at least as strongly as a democracy
hostile to leaders’, he is surely referring inter alia to the two successive states of
medieval city government: by an elite of patrician families and by the democratic
popolo.123
Why should there have been such an anomaly as the city? The answer is revealing
of the extent to which Weber’s interest in the limits of politics dominated his long-
term conception of European history. Political autonomy was essential to the city,
and to this extent its roots, particularly in Italy, went back to the ancient polis. Here
is the long-term, Occidental continuum at work. Nonetheless the ancient and
medieval cities turned their political autonomy to radically different ends. With the
striking exceptions of Venice and Genoa, which were still interested in overseas,
politically directed expansion on the Athenian and Roman model, ‘the specifically
medieval city, the bourgeois, industrial, inland city, was in general economically
oriented’. Where the ancient bourgeois or citizen (the term Bürger covers both) was
‘homo politicus’, ‘the political situation of the medieval city-bourgeois pointed him
in the direction of being homo economicus’ (275). In the latter case political
autonomy did not promote an authentically political interest in the establishment
of, and competition over, power. Instead this was a bourgeois stratum ‘in the
modern sense’ (loosely, the sense pioneered by Marx), which had the distinctly

119 Cf. WuG 159, 155–76, passim. 120 Cf. ibid. 163 (‘Kollegialität der Leitung’).
121 Cf. ibid. 169; ‘Probleme der Staatssoziologie’ [1917], MWG I/22–4.756.
122 ‘Politics as a Vocation’ [1919], MWG I.17.224.
123 WuG 164. ‘Leaderless democracy’ was a subject to be developed, like so much else, in the

subsequent unwritten Sociology of the State (ibid. 157). This would have included treatment of the
contra-state formation of the city and the ‘Various types of “democracy” ’ (}}.6–9): MWG III/7.66.
 From the Sects to ‘The City’ 379

non-political ends of trade, industry, and wealth-getting (265): ‘The positive goal of
the sworn [city] fraternity was . . . the monopolization of economic opportunities’
(129). In this way ‘The City’ may be said to represent a final component in the
resolution of the conceptual problem attaching to capitalism in 1904 regarding its
status as a form of Herrschaft [XX.12]. Not only did capitalist Herrschaft contain
elements of both rational and charismatic Herrschaft (II.7), but the related phe-
nomenon of bourgeois economic Herrschaft, if one could speak of such a thing at
all,124 was simply herrschaftsfremd or Herrschaft-alien.125
The city and economic development went together in Weber’s mind c.1908, just
as the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism had done in 1904–5, and both
are historically unique episodes standing outside or apart from the normal political
or socio-political frame of reference. However, ‘The City’ adjusted the argument of
the PE at one significant point. Whereas in the 1890s Weber had considered it
quite acceptable to speak of the ‘capitalism’ of the medieval city economy (I.2), and
even the PE had recognized that the ‘forms of capitalist business enterprise’ had long
preceded the Reformation [XX.54], in ‘The City’ he refined his argument to
highlight the discontinuity created in the seventeenth century. This was now the
point at which ‘modern capitalism’ was created because (he decided) the economic
politics and policies of the city (Stadtwirtschaftspolitik) had been significantly
limited. It remained crucial (as in the 1890s) to the identity of the city that it
was a market—the foundation of capitalism—but now it was only a ‘local market’
with restricted geographical horizons (61 cf. 246). Based on weakly capitalized or
even kapitallos (capital-free) artisanal enterprise, it ‘was marked out by the fact that
it sought to fix the then largely naturally prescribed conditions of the urban
economy through economic regulation, in the interests of securing the constancy
and cheapness of mass food supply, and the stability of the acquisitive chances of
those pursuing trade and industry’ (71).126 So while its primary concerns were
economic, industrial and peaceful—and in all these ways uniquely modernizing—
this was still an economism that looked to the satisfaction of minimum needs and
economic stability rather than the limitless striving for ‘the acquisition of money and
ever more money’ that identified the authentic capitalist ethic [XX.16] [cf.i.4].
Thus its principal organizing instrument was the trade guild (Zunft), strongly
committed to trade regulation on an exclusive, monopolistic basis; a “closed
shop” that was then overthrown by the original, open, early capitalist ‘form’, the
putting-out system that formally divorced the entrepreneur (putter-out) from

124 The closest Weber comes to saying this is a reference to ‘Herrschaft on the part of “bourgeois”

classes in the economic sense of the word’ (I/22–5.172). However, this is a circumlocution for the
more common expression Zunftherrschaft, ‘the rule of the trade guilds’ (172, 194, 233, etc.). This is
still bourgeois Herrschaft, but its economistic character stands out more clearly.
125 Cf. WuG 155, 169.
126 This might be described as a regression towards Karl Bücher’s famous lecture Die Entstehung der

Volkswirtschaft [1893] (Tübingen, 1898), ch. 2: above I.2. However, any conceptual movement here
was generated by Weber not by Bücher.
380 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

skilled labour [XX.27–8].127 So although ‘The City’ represents an undoubted

return to the terrain of the economics lectures of the 1890s and is an attempt to
rectify the most glaring historical weakness of the PE—its effective suppression of
the medieval pre-history of capitalism—Weber’s resolution of this problem was
distinctly loyal to the PE and its emphasis on the crucial importance of the
seventeenth century: medieval pre-history was only readmitted at the cost of losing
its capitalist status. The city was now neither the ‘carrier’ of capitalism nor its ‘sole
decisive preliminary stage’. All the same, it remained ‘a most decisive factor’ in
creation of ‘modern capitalism’, above all as an eccentric political form that made
the non-political type of modern Occidental capitalism possible (233).128
So the successive phases of the medieval city and the Protestant sects make up a
powerful yet evolving historical continuum. A final aspect of the continuity
and contrast between them relates to geography and the national communities
set within geographical areas—where geography signals nature (Natur): it is
the conceptual opposite of Kultur, but still a vital determinant of the latter’s
evolution. The all-embracing, classically derived idea of the Occident might be
Weber’s primary unit of both geography and Kultur, but still there were perceptible
gradations within it. In principle, the urban bourgeois community is pan-Euro-
pean: it is ‘The City of the Occident’ (100). Yet as noted, Weber also identifies a
difference between trading ports with residual expansionist ambitions and inland,
industrial cities. A more important (yet derived) distinction was that between
northern and southern Europe. They constituted two types: ‘the one . . . particu-
larly Italian and southern French stood essentially closer to the type of the ancient
city than the other, pre-eminently north French, German and English’ (253). It
will be clear that this distinction, favouring northern over southern Europe, maps
closely onto the geography of the PE. The latter is of course northern European,
and here it should not be forgotten that Weber displayed a real interest in the
French Huguenots in the PE, at least as a starting point for his researches (I.3).
Conversely, his substantial (if complex) interest in the Netherlands in 1904–5129 is
also reflected (fleetingly) in ‘The City’ (133). England may not be quite so
outstanding in ‘The City’ as it is in the PE, but still its ‘special historical evolution
[Sonderentwicklung]’ compared to that of the Continent is specified, and as always
with the “Anglophile” Weber, it enjoys a marked degree of attention (169 cf.
162–71, 235, etc.). So here as elsewhere, medieval history prepares the ground for
ascetic Protestantism, without however predicting or dictating it. Such is the

127 In ‘The City’ Weber ignores the putter-out (Verleger) and with good reason: partly because he

could use rural labour and also because his origins clearly go back to the period of the medieval city
economy, a fact that clouded the distinction Weber was now trying to draw between the city economy
and nascent capitalism. Thus in the lectures on ‘Allgemeine . . . Nationalökonomie’ [1894–8], the
putter-out had first appeared within the section on the city economy (strengthening the claim made
then that this was a capitalist economy), even if he is more prominent in the subsequent section on
the national economy: MWG III/1.489–90, 493, 505–7. For further late ambiguity on this subject, see
‘Vorbemerkung’ [i.9], Abriß [1919–20], MWG III/6.219–27.
128 Cf. ‘Probleme der Staatssoziologie’ [1917], MWG I/22–4.756.
129 Historian, ch. 3.
 From the Sects to ‘The City’ 381

essence of Weber’s conception of empirically founded, evolutionary–historical

accumulation.
However, reference to Germany highlights the differences between the bourgeois
and sectarian epochs. On the one hand, the cities of the medieval Reich are
undoubtedly central to the history of ‘The City’ (e.g.132–42), but on the other,
Germany was at least partially deficient in ascetic Protestantism and wholly in
sectarian life, whatever the incipient tendencies Pietism and Zinzendorf in this
direction [XXI.2, 46–57]. The conclusions Weber draws from this view of German
history are one of the most striking examples of his negotiations between past and
present. Although he never says so explicitly, Germany’s ascetic Protestant defi-
ciency cannot have been very great, since the PE takes it for granted that the
Westphalian Carl David Weber was an authentic and effective representative of the
capitalist “spirit” (I.4). It is a moot point whether this is because the Bismarckian
Reich had an outstandingly and undeniably successful capitalist economy by 1900,
or because the proto-capitalist history of the high medieval German cities was
equally undeniable, or both; but in any case Germany’s socio-economic history was
adequate (at the very least). The great historical deficiency was socio-political.
Owing to the fact that Germany had never ‘gone through the school of hard
asceticism’ and sect formation,130 it was politically deficient. This is the same
deficiency that Weber outlined at Freiburg in 1895, where the bourgeoisie had
attained economic power but was not a candidate for political rule, owing to its
‘unpolitical past’,131 and also that which reappears in the complaints of the PE
about German “infatuation” and servility towards Bismarckian Caesarism [XXI.14
n. 21]. Of course, it would be a mistake to suggest that this conception of
Germany’s present-day deficiencies was created by historical analysis—Weber’s
memory of such a crucial present-day episode as Bismarck’s breach with the
National Liberals in 1878 and the disillusion that followed was undoubtedly
personal and formative;132 but it would be equally mistaken to suppose that his
view of the present was detached from reflection on the past. On the contrary, his
conception of the relationship between past and present embraces both ideas: the
individual creates meaning on the basis of what s/he finds valuable in the present,
but still the past is the inescapable terrain on which meaning must be created.133 So
it is at least possible that his more tempered political expectations and demands
regarding German politics after 1900 march in parallel with a developing concep-
tion of history. Support for the German Navy League accompanied by the idea that
in a well-constituted state there should be out-and-out bourgeois Herrschaft and
‘political leadership’134 in the later 1890s could have found encouragement in the
model of the ancient city (Rome and Athens) as bourgeois, political, and expansion-
ist.135 Conversely, his subsequent focus on human rights, collegial parliamentarism,

130 To Harnack, 5.2.06, Briefe. 131 MWG I/4.570.

132 e.g. Parlament und Regierung [1917–18], MWG I/15.442.
133 II.6.iv. 134 MWG I/4.570 cf. 566 on Herrschaft.
135 On the city in Roman history, e.g. ‘Die sozialen Gründe des Untergangs des antiken Kultur’

[1896], MWG I/6.102–6, 115, 118–19, 127.

382 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

and an altogether more temperate conception of the importance of lawyers in politics

(a bourgeois sub-class) without regard to the specific social origin of charismatic
political leaders, offset by the strongest possible emphasis on the need to retain an
extra-political, industrial-capitalist sphere,136 sits well with the bourgeois-cum-sectarian
conception of history established in the PE and ‘The City’, and unaltered thereafter.
This is speculative; what is not in doubt is the importance of this history. The
significance of the emergence of the “bourgeois idea” as an alternative focus to
capitalism would have been clearer had Weber lived to write the shorter, finished
version of ‘The City’ that he planned for the Collected Essays, and the treatment of
non-legitimate Herrschaft that was intended for ‘Economy and Society’. Even so, the
fact that it had a place in both his principal historical and sociological projects is an
index of its significance,137 and it remains pervasive in Weber’s latest, post-war
writings even as they stand. It is a continual point of reference in the final draft of
‘Economy and Society’;138 it is rehearsed in the lecture ‘Outline of Universal Social
and Economic History’ (1919–20);139 and it even surfaces in the revisions to
‘Confucianism’ (1919–20).140 However, in lieu of the statements he did not write,
primary importance attaches to its place in the PE, the ‘Protestant Sects’, and the
closely associated ‘Vorbemerkung’ (1919–20), which together offer the capitalist
beginning and bourgeois conclusion to Weber’s thoughts.
Our sense of the shift in emphasis from capitalism to the bourgeoisie is
significantly more pronounced in the ‘Vorbemerkung’ and the ‘Protestant Sects’
than in the PE. Owing to Weber’s concern not to be seen to give ground to the
critics of the PE [i.17 n. 1]+, strategic revision here in 1919 was hived off to the
‘Vorbemerkung’ [i.1–12]. The changes effected by post-war revision are necessar-
ily harder to detect in the case of the previously unpublished PS, even if we know
that its kernel was that of an ‘older’ essay from 1907. Yet I suggest that there is a
contrast between the old and the new states of the text, reflecting the movement
in Weber’s historical thought that was completed in 1907–8 just after the initial
draft of the PS. Its title marks out ‘the spirit of capitalism’ as its modern telos, just
as the PE had done in 1904, where capitalism is an ‘older’ and certainly a
conservative component. Yet within the text we repeatedly encounter statements
pointing towards a different goal: ‘the specifically Occidental bourgeois spirit’; ‘the
typically bourgeois ethic’ and even ‘the “bourgeois” Puritan ethic’ [i.214, 219 n. 2,
234].141 At the conclusion to the whole (or what was intended as such in
September 1919), Weber feels he cannot omit all reference to ‘the “spirit” of
modern capitalism’, but it is now redefined as ‘the ethos of the modern bourgeoisie’,
and its principal impact is not economic but (anti-)political: the ‘radical breaching
of patriarchal and authoritarian constraint’ that laid one of ‘the . . . foundations
of modern “individualism” ’ [i.235].142 The shift from a capitalist to a bourgeois
focus is palpable, even without the somewhat incongruous final paragraph

136 II.7.iv. 137 See the Appendix. 138 WuG 155–76.

139 MWG III/7.206–27; 350–69. 140 Above at n. 114. 141 Original emphasis.
142 Of the four statements quoted, three [i.214, 234–5] are almost certainly from paragraphs

inserted into the text in 1919; that at [i.219 n. 2] could be. Cf. above n. 92.
 From the Sects to ‘The City’ 383

tacked on at the proof stage, which rehearses the distinction between the sects and
the trade guilds that were the central organizing instrument of the medieval city
[i.235–6] (e.g. 199–207).143 One can never speak of outright rupture or discontinuity
in Weber’s views, but still this is another facet of the major movement in his ideas
that was completed in 1908. Its full measure is set out in the ‘Vorbemerkung’ [i.10]:
Within a universal history of Kultur the central problem for us, in a purely economic
perspective, is ultimately not the unfolding of capitalist activity as such . . . It is much rather
the rise of a bourgeois capitalism based on the enterprise with its rational organization of free
labour. Or, expressed in terms of the history of Kultur : the rise of the Occidental bourgeoisie
and its peculiar character, which does indeed stand in close connection with the rise of the
capitalist organization of labour, but is of course not simply identical with it. For there were
already “bourgeois” in the sense of a group elevated by social rank prior to the development
of a specifically Occidental capitalism—though of course this was only the case in the West.
For someone as tight-lipped as Max Weber, the admission that in the long term ‘the
central [historical] problem . . . is ultimately not the unfolding of capitalist activity
as such’ is immense, and what takes its place, ‘the rise of the Occidental bourgeoisie
and its peculiar character’, will now be readily recognizable as the combined
bourgeois and sectarian history that begins with the ancient polis and (more
directly) the medieval city, and finds its climax in the PE. This historical movement
is not the whole of his deviation away from ‘capitalism’ as set out in 1904, and there
follow a series of paragraphs that enact the other, more purely conceptual shift away
from capitalism towards ‘rationalization’ in both law and bureaucracy [i.11]. But it
is one of the principal components of change.

* * * * *

To conclude: while the ‘Protestant Sects’ may be a secondary text, the sectarian idea
that lay behind it and the PE was not secondary at all; nor, more broadly, was
Weber’s thinking about the peculiar social formations that were most decisive in
shaping Occidental history—the sects and the bourgeoisie. The individualistic
premisses of his thought are so powerful that the latter are too easily overlooked.
But still Weber was a social thinker, even if the social groups that interest him most
remain strenuously individualistic. They alert us to the fact that, besides the
conceptually streamlined thinking that appears (for example) in his famous classi-
fication of individual ‘social action’,144 he was deeply engaged with the conceptual
oddity that was created by historical peculiarity. When measured by one of the
most famous, if briefest, of Weberian typologies, the Protestant sect is neither an
economic class (Klasse)145 nor a social group (Stand ) enjoying esteem or rank across

143 Reference to Boileau’s Livre des metiers shows that this paragraph derives in the first instance

from the Abriß delivered in the winter semester 1919–20, after the PS had been originally sent in, in
September 1919; cf. MWG III/6.219, 475. But its original root lies in the extensive treatment of guilds
in ‘The City’. This late addition to the PS is nonetheless ill-judged, because it diverts the argument of
the PS away from early modern and modern history to the medieval period, and from the bourgeoisie
to the guilds, an extraneous category in this text.
144 WuG 12. 145 Strictly, acquisitive or propertied class: WuG 177–9.
384 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

the whole society (though traces of both market advantage and an ideal profile are
present); yet the bourgeoisie could be, and had been, both; and it is evident we
cannot explain their historical affinity in terms of such a classification.146 Above all,
these peculiar social formations turn out to be crucial in mapping out the bound-
aries between politics, the economy and religion—another characteristic Weberian
concern. The road of enquiry we have been following may have its twists and turns
but, when measured by its significance, it is very much a highway and not a byway.

APPENDIX: ON THE DATING AND STATUS OF ‘THE CITY’

This text is problematic for two reasons. One is purely objective: there is no evidence as to
when Weber first drafted it. Secondly, there is a self-inflicted wound: ever since Weber’s
death, scholars and above all editors have struggled to decide whether it should be classified
as part of ‘Economy and Society’ or not. Marianne Weber decided that it was, and she has
been followed by the Max Weber Gesamtausgabe,147 on the grounds that ‘The City’ is the
necessary raw material for the projected sub-section of the pre-war Sociology of Herrschaft
on ‘Non-legitimate rule. Typology of Cities’, or post-war for the comparable section in the
‘Sociology of the State’ under the heading ‘Bourgeoisie and City State’.148 Nonetheless, this
allocation is problematic. As has long been recognized, ‘The City’ is a historical study, not a
typological and sociological one, so it can hardly be part of ‘Economy and Society’ as it
stands.149 Furthermore, it also has a place, a more natural place, within the historical
assembly of the Collected Essays on the Sociology of Religion, though again only as raw
material. In the Advertisement drafted by Weber in September 1919 outlining the scheme
of the Collected Essays, it states that the studies of the world religions need to be supple-
mented ‘in particular by a sketch of the historical evolution of the European bourgeoisie in
antiquity and the middle ages, focusing on the peculiar social character of the Occident.’150
Now this is an exact description of ‘The City’, as regards both its historical period and its
Occidental–comparative perspective. However, the text as it stands can hardly be the
intended contribution to the Collected Essays. It is far too long to be described as ‘a sketch’
comparable, for example, to the ‘Protestant Sects’ (also described as a ‘sketch’ here), and to
insert an essay on a secular subject of over 50,000 words—as long as the text of the PE
itself—within a collection of essays on religion would have been anomalous. This is
confirmed by a letter from Weber to Siebeck written just days before the Advertisement

146 For this classification, MWG I/22–1.252–72; WuG 177–80. The first (which may well have

been drafted before ‘Hinduism and Buddhism’ tended to subvert the sect as a type) makes fleeting
reference to ‘a sect which was only accessible with difficulty’ as ständisch (261). This could refer to the
sects around Stefan George or Freud, but the stark contrast between the Stand and ‘free market
development’ (267) rules out the Protestant sects completely. The bourgeoisie are (I suggest) located in
the second scheme, when it speaks of the possible superimposition of ständisch position on a material
foundation: WuG 180 cf. ‘The City’, MWG I/22–5.146–72. However, this still makes no allowance
for the urban component in bourgeois identity.
147 See ‘Zur Edition von “Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft” ’, first published in 2001 and printed in all

volumes of MWG I/22, vii–xvii, here xv.

148 Resp. ‘Einteilung des Gesamtwerkes’ June 1914, ‘Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft’, I.8.c;

‘Staatssoziologie’, #6, MWG III/7.66. Cf. ‘Die Stadt’, MWG I/22–5.200, 224, etc.
149 Marianne Weber to Siebeck Verlag, 3.6.21, pr. Wilhelm Nippel, ‘Editorischer Bericht’, MWG

I/22–5.52; Wolfgang Schluchter, Religion und Lebensführung (Frankfurt, 1988), ii. 580–1.
150 MWG I/19.28.
 From the Sects to ‘The City’ 385
was penned, which also goes over the scheme of the Collected Essays. Here again he proposes
an addition to the treatments of specific world religions: ‘Then there is an essay to insert
which has still to be written (it’s all done in my head) on the general foundations of the
peculiar development of the Occident’. This, it may reasonably be inferred, is a commit-
ment to rewrite ‘The City’ in précis.151
From this known body of evidence, it is clear that ‘The City’ stands significantly closer to
the Collected Essays project than ‘Economy and Society’, and that MWG was guilty of an
excess of sociological pietas in classifying it as part of ‘Economy and Society’.152 Nonethe-
less, it is also clear that the idea of the bourgeois city was important to both projects; but that
‘The City’ as it stands fits neither. As a result, it currently appears as one of Weber’s most
elusive texts, a curious oddity floating in limbo somewhere between the two great projects of
his last decade.153 It is a perfect recipe for scholarly neglect. However, as I say, the difficulty
here is in large measure self-inflicted, produced by an exaggerated fixation on the great
projects. The fact that ‘The City’ fits neither tells us something very obvious: its origin was
entirely separate from both of the Collected Essays and ‘Economy and Society’, and it should
be treated as an independent project in its own right. Again, the fact that it had a subsequent
relation to both these major projects is a positive, not a negative or mystifying, factor: a
compelling evidence of just how important the bourgeois idea was to Weber.
The documentary difficulty—the fact that we do not know when ‘The City’ was
first drafted—is not as conclusive as appears at first sight, since the kernel of the text
(a comparative study of the classical and medieval cities) already exists in a preliminary draft
at the end of ‘Agrarverhältnisse im Altertum’ in early 1908.154 Intellectually it was in
existence in posse from this time on—‘it’s all done in my head’—and could have been
written down at any point subsequently. In short, it joins the ranks of the fertile but
undervalued miscellany of independent projects that Weber undertook between 1908 and
1912 prior to the ‘Economic Ethics of the World Religions’ and the point at which
‘Economy and Society’ became all-consuming, at the beginning of 1913 (II.3). The idea
that he started it after this date is extremely unlikely. Within the tolerably well-documented
period 1913–14, there is no mention of ‘The City’ in correspondence, even if there is
reference to its unwritten sociological derivative.155 Besides the fact that work on a fairly
major project of this kind would most probably have prompted some mention, it is hardly
conceivable that Weber would have commenced a historical undertaking that was formally
alien to ‘Economy and Society’, when he was under immense time pressure and his
immediate interest required any component he chose to include to be cast in sociological
form. In the case of the ‘Economic Ethics’, which I suggest occupied only a relatively short
time period in late 1912 (II.3), it seems unlikely that Weber would have begun two
essentially separate projects simultaneously: there is no other known case of him doing so.
The additional fact that when he did wish to assimilate ‘The City’ to the ‘Economic

151 11.9.19, Briefe. The cautious Prof. Nippel notes the possibility and does not deny it:

‘Editorischer Bericht’, MWG I/22–5.48.

152 However, this is really the only significant charge that can be brought against the edition’s

presentation of ‘Economy and Society’, which resolves what was once seen as an immense problem
with great clarity and common sense.
153 See the agnostic position expounded by Wilfried Nippel, ‘Editorischer Bericht’, MWG

I/22–5.46–8, and similarly Helwig Schmidt-Glinzer: ‘Einleitung’, MWG I/19.33–4, 45–6.

154 MWG I/6.690–705.
155 To von Below, 21.6.14, Briefe.
386 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic
Ethics’—this idea was in his head by 1916156 and so, most probably, from the moment the
Collected Essays project was conceived in mid-1915—he again wanted a different text
(shorter and properly finished) seems practically conclusive. (Conversely, the presence or
absence of cities is taken by Weber as an elementary starting point for all his studies of the
‘world religions’—quite literally so in the cases of ‘Confucianism’ and ‘Hinduism and
Buddhism’157—which is plainly consistent with the prior existence of ‘The City’.) This is
not to deny that Weber the compulsive reviser continued to make changes to the text of ‘The
City’ in 1912–14.158 However, given the prior existence of the essay, this need not have
taken much time, and the overall addition to the text is modest: of the order of 10 per cent
or 5,000 words. Revision is most noticeable in the opening chapter, which incorporates
quite substantial passages relying on data and reading done for work on the world religions
(e.g. 84–100). Revisions to the second chapter are then much less; and the final two
chapters—fully two-thirds of the text—are largely untouched. In scale this is as nothing
to the continuing and wholesale revision in the Sociologies of Law and Herrschaft that went
on at this time, reflecting the clear intellectual priority of ‘Economy and Society’.159
Just when between 1908 and the autumn of 1912 Weber first drafted ‘The City’ is
necessarily speculative and, as I have implied, a matter of secondary importance in terms of
charting his intellectual development. Two possibilities suggest themselves. One is that he
wrote it in February–March 1908, immediately after completing ‘Agrarverhältnisse’ (during
the period of proof revision), while the initial idea was fresh in his mind. The declared focus
of ‘The City’ is medieval rather than classical (121; cf. 100). In this sense it appears as a
logical progression forward from ‘Agrarverhältnisse’, even as it returns to, and develops,
knowledge deployed in his early dissertation On the History of Medieval Trading Societies
(1889). However, Weber could not formally or tidily finish the text because, despite his
declared intention, he could not let go of his classical materials, and it is with these that the
text “ends” (275–99). This certainly suggests that the materials of ‘Agrarverhältnisse’ were
very much in his mind. An alternative possibility is that ‘The City’ was drafted in
conjunction with preparation for the enquiry into the modern sociology of associations
for the German Sociological Society, which might point to a date in the spring of 1909,
when Weber was drafting a “memorandum” on the modern project.160 But of these two the
first seems a good deal more likely. In any case we should be clear that the essay we have is a
unique survival in Weber’s œuvre. Unlike his other unpublished manuscripts (for ‘Economy
and Society’), this was a first draft or working paper that was not intended for publication:
besides much repetition and formal incompletion, it is devoid of the scholarly apparatus that
Weber deemed so important for historical publications. This goes far to explain its
invisibility in correspondence. Yet the fact that he saved it, even in its primitive state,
reminds us once more of the importance of its subject.

156 Above n. 109. 157 AfSS 41 (1915), 30; MWG I/20.49.

158 Loc. cit. Nippel, ‘Editorischer Bericht’, MWG I/22–5.48–9.
159 It is a reasonable assumption that revision to the Sociology of Herrschaft was on a scale

comparable to that in the known case of the Sociology of Law, and correspondence supports this: to
Siebeck, 15.3, 2.4.14, Briefe.
160 To Herkner, 11.5.09, Briefe.
 Envoi: Who was Max Weber?

The underlying aim of this book has been to show that there really was a Max
Weber, a single individual and not an undigested accumulation of dispersed
scholarly industries; that (in the words of Albert Salomon) his ‘works are all the
expression of an integrated, compact personality, and they complement and inform
one another.’1 Who then was this man?
He was a German thinker who reflected on a modernity that was the outcome of
history. The distinctive feature of nineteenth-century German thought was not its
nationalism but its universalism. Manifest in a proliferation of front-rank univer-
sities spread across a wide variety of states with no regard for political boundaries
(Swiss, Russian, Prussian, Habsburg), German-speaking Central Europe formed an
unusual society that devoted proportionately more resource, and attached a higher
value to understanding the world, than any other in recent history. Universal
Wissenschaft was a crucial component of German identity where the nation state
could not be. This unpolitical cast of mind was indeed overlaid by nationalist
commitments after 1813, but down to 1914 the original cultural foundation
remained unaltered.2 Seen in this light, nineteenth-century German thought
represented the third, and last, great cultural flourishing of a network of European
cities in succession to classical Greece and Renaissance Italy. Max Weber, the
bourgeois laureate of the city and a man with a clear sense of the diminished status
of politics, was an outstanding if slightly unusual product of this society and its
Kultur. Unusual because he was not prepared to admit that the calling of a
university academic dedicated to Wissenschaft stood higher than any other, while
his exalted conception of Wissenschaft was such that it cast a sceptical light on some
of the premisses of academic life. Nonetheless after painful hesitation this was the
path he chose, albeit in a conditional manner: living amidst the academic commu-
nity but without its elementary duties or rewards.
The range of his thinking was as broad as any of his encyclopaedic German prede-
cessors, and in this sense he stood within a great tradition of ideas going back to Leibniz
and beyond. But still he was not a systematic thinker in the manner of Hegel or (in
aspiration) Marx, because his starting point was new and unprecedented in the history
of European thought: not system and unity but their absence. Youthful experience
and cultural formation had presented him with a series of disintegrative contexts.

1 ‘Max Weber’ [1926], in Werke, ed. Peter Gostmann et al. (Wiesbaden, 2008), I. 138. cf. Karl

Jaspers, Max Weber. Rede . . . bei der Trauerfeier [1920] (Tübingen, 1926), 26.
2 The Baltic German university of Dorpat, which produced Adolf Harnack inter alia, was, however,

subject to compulsory Russification from 1895.

388 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

First, the developing perception of an “anarchy of values” within society, where a

Catholic saw the world differently from a Socialist, who saw it differently from a
Liberal, and so on. Alongside these social and kulturell divisions , there also existed a
sense of the multiplicity of possible individual value-commitments, as was evident
from the great Nietzschean vogue after 1890. Secondly, there was an emergent sense
of history as infinite and potentially unmasterable. In principle the past was not
orderly but an infinitely voluminous and implicitly relativistic ‘chaos’, a state of affairs
that had been laid bare (or created) by a century or more of academic enquiry into the
remote past. This was ‘the stream of immeasurable happening [that] rolls on endlessly
in the face of eternity.’3 Thirdly, there was specialization: the ongoing specialization
of function in society—evidenced by the multiplicity of occupations or Berufe—and,
most tangibly, the specialization of academic enquiry as data and research findings
accumulated and the size of the university sector expanded—enormously so after
c.1860. Specialization was distinctive in that it was historically inevitable and so a
necessary form of disintegration. The modern blinkered commitment to the Beruf
as an ‘absolute end in itself ’ [XX.23], without any wider vista, was a peculiarly deep-
seated form of torment because, from an individualist Weberian perspective (unlike
a holistic Durkheimian one), one’s horizons were continually being narrowed with
good reason.
How did Weber respond to these contexts? He looked above all to religion and
history because these were the only resources that, he supposed, could supply
comprehensive answers regarding the fragmented modern predicament. (This
comprehensive and universal frame of reference was the crucial residue of the
encyclopaedic past). His first conclusion was elementary: the modern “world”
like its past history was indeed fragmented and infinite, and so meaningless in
itself. Unlike his contemporaries, many of whom also took ideas about present-day
plurality and historical relativity as a starting point, he did not suppose that “the
world” could be reconstituted like Humpty Dumpty, as something unitary and
meaningful. Ascetic Protestantism, the ultimate form of Christianity both logically
and historically, was also the first attempt to cope with this situation, in the form of
a functionally efficient, tough-minded admission of human inability to construe
the world as meaningful: the meaning of the world might still be supposed to exist,
but only the hidden god (deus absconditus) could know it. However, this seven-
teenth-century theological ‘root’ was now long since discarded. In a modern situation
one must construct meaning for oneself, as an individual within a particular Kultur at
a particular point in time—and such is the obvious light in which Weber can appear
as a proto-existentialist thinker. The first resource here was the purity of abstract
thought detached from infinite and chaotic reality, operating according to its
own formal logic; yet thought and Wissenschaft were worthless if they were simply
disconnected from reality. Social science must, therefore, operate according to
an equally weighted, bipolar mantra, ‘the thinking ordering of empirical reality’,4
just as its two great instruments were the (ordering) concept and the (empirical)

3 »Objektivität« [1904], WL 184. 4 Cf. ibid. 150, etc., emphases added.

 Who was Max Weber? 389

experiment.5 Here is another elementary difference from Marx: the belief that
personally generated conceptual abstraction was an indispensable moiety of thought,
whatever the volume of ideology emitted by academic literati.
Weber’s 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. In
an academic context a dilettante could be as intellectually fruitful as a specialist, and
was logically no more imperfect. Social science could not transcend specialization,
and reunite disintegrated reality; yet it could and should insist on the inadequacy of
reliance on specialization alone. It was not a master science, but it could serve a
unique function by acting as a mediator between a series of specialized disciplines,
and the sociologist’s perspective should be multidisciplinary at least. Weber’s
multidisciplinary and universal frame of reference, combined with his refusal to
portray the world in simple unitary terms, are principal causes of the difficulty that
we, as victims of a still more developed specialization, experience in trying to grasp
him as an individual. Yet any failure on our part in this respect is fundamental,
since it denies precisely what is unique and individual about him.
The empirical conclusion to his historical thought was that, while the past was
no longer intrinsically meaningful, it still offered us external coherence, in the form
of the accumulated legacy of the past into which we are born. This legacy was,
however, ambivalent. The result of millennia of cumulative rationalization was a
‘steel housing’ (stahlhartes Gehäuse) [XXI.108], though this was not (contrary to
widespread misconception) simply coercive. The ‘steel housing’ was not an ‘iron
cage’,6 since its unparalleled rational and technical efficiency provided the essential
services and goods of mass consumption that few inhabitants of the housing would
willingly go without. Dropping out was always a possibility, in Weber’s day as in
ours, for there was no Berlin Wall to prevent it. Yet the high watermark of protest
rarely exceeded the creation of bohemian communities, such as the one at Ascona
that Weber visited in 1913–14, or (more conventionally) the creation of a defined
and regulated space for leisure, which in his case seems to have consisted primarily
of over-conscientious and only partially successful attempts to escape Kultur and
return to nature on solitary holidays.7 In short, the inherited, “rationalized” cast of
mind left only a small amount of “free” room for manœuvre in the present, and the
power of such externally imposed but now internalized constraint was if anything
more far-reaching than the shared understanding of universal, religious meaning
that preceded it [cf. XX.3], and from which it was descended. Today Weber’s
comprehensive historicism is surely his most remote trait; but any want of sym-
pathy on our part by no means invalidates his chain of thought or the impact of the
past upon us. There is a longue durée in history, whether we attend to it or not,

5 ‘Science as a Vocation’ [1917/19], MWG I/17.89–90.

6 Cf. Lawrence Scaff, Fleeing the Iron Cage (Berkeley, 1989)—a pioneering book.
7 His daily postcards to Marianne, who might be busy at home or on her own separate cure, form a

considerable body of correspondence.

390 Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic

while the world we live in today, which is bound together more by formal uniformity
and technical procedures than by any profound consensus regarding human meaning
and values, is recognizably descended from the world he outlined a century ago. And
this remorseless continuity was something he predicted with absolute certainty.
In the partially disintegrated, partially constraining context presented by a
continuously evolving modern society, his primary focus was on ideas that stand
outside miscellaneous, infinite and inscrutable reality. Hence the central distinction
between formal and substantive categories of thought. Formally pure thought is
logical, seamless, systematic and coherent. Law is an outstanding (if peculiarly
German and Continental European) example, and here again we note the para-
doxical coincidence of formal thought with the forces of external cohesion and
constraint. By contrast, what is substantive is assumed to be miscellaneous. The
generic description for formally pure thought carried over into conduct is that
which is formally rational where, given the great miscellany of our values and first
assumptions, ‘One can . . . “rationalize” life according to the most varied ultimate
perspectives and in very different directions.’ Formally rational conduct is not good
or meritorious in itself. However, it serves a purposive function by definition, and in
the context of a modern Occidental or Western world that is rationalized to such a high
degree, it must be assumed to be the most efficient and well-adapted form of conduct.
Furthermore, formal rationality is accompanied by substantive categories that are
compatible with it: Sachlichkeit (the acceptance of unalterable external actuality); the
observance of “impersonality” within personal relations when in a public or “social”
context, which is rendered in more familiar terms as behaviour which is ‘cool’,
‘reserved’, ‘hard’, ‘sober’ and ‘self-controlled’; and then there is the institutional
embodiment of rational behaviour, bureaucracy. Standing next to these are historical
categories that are not purely rational, but contain a high rational quotient or have an
‘elective affinity’ (high probability of coincidence) with rational structures and proced-
ures: capitalism and the bourgeois city. Weber does not deny that his categories
are arbitrary, personal inventions: they are his attempts to create meaning. Yet he
implies that they are more than this. Historically these integrative categories are
primarily (though not exclusively) derived from religion, the only previous scheme of
comprehensive and integrative thought; furthermore, they respect the ‘iron facts’ and
‘realities’ bequeathed to modernity by rationalizing historical evolution. On both
counts they are appropriate categories by which to construe Occidental modernity.
Of course there is another world outside the fraction of reality that has been
reintegrated in this way. This is the world of specificity and infinite miscellany, of
what remains personal in a social context, and what is private. Even here Weber
offers us some categories such as mysticism and charisma with which to group
variety and evanescence, though they are much harder to hold onto, just as he notes
that there are some ‘life orders’ such as sexuality and art that are less susceptible to
formal analysis, and yet not entirely beyond it. A social science of empirical reality
must recognize this world too, just as Max Weber the man craved it even to the
extent of sometimes wishing to annihilate his ordering self—in musical ecstasy,
abandonment to a woman, exposure to the risk of death in war. But in ‘everyday
life’ (which is not to be sneered at because it is everyday) [XXI.26, etc.], one should
 Who was Max Weber? 391

begin with the rational and sachlich conception of modernity that history and
religion have bequeathed to us.
Max Weber is a historically dated figure in one obvious sense: that, like all
humanity, he has dates attached to him. However, as a product of the most
historically conscious era ever known to European Kultur, he had an exceptionally
acute and refined awareness of this fact, and reasoned accordingly. The proposition
that ‘Max Weber is not our contemporary’ is indeed a physiological truth, but it is
an evident intellectual falsehood.8 Never was there anyone more present on the
page, on the screen, and above all in our minds, than he is today.

8 Dirk Kaesler, Max Weber (Munich, 2014), 10.

 Index

accounting, book-keeping 164 Bayly (‘Bailey’), Lewis 30

acosmism 135, 253, 265n.80 Below, Georg von 149, 155, 178n.17, 180,
Adams, Douglas 278n.132 215n.56, 377n.117
Adorno, Theodor 249n.10 Bendix, Reinhard 182, 224, 230n.65, 248n.6
agrarian capitalism, agriculture, rural labour 34, Bentham, Jeremy 10
36, 57–62, 299, 301–2; see also Berlin libraries 42
Fideikommisse; Junkers Bernstein, Eduard 25n.45, 55, 151, 350n.30
Alberti, L. B. 214–5 Beruf (calling, vocation, job, occupation,
Althoff, Friedrich 36–7 profession) 5, 13–14, 22, 30,
America 32, 51, 54–5, 61, 80, 158, 167, 174, 70–2, 113, 119n.79, 135–7,
289, 296, 315, 340, 344, 348, 355, 141, 152, 239–40, 267, 287,
362, 370, 376–7; see also 289–90, 313, 320, 346, 350,
‘Europeanization’ 365, 388–9
Amsterdam 158 Betrieb, see enterprise
Anabaptists (Anabaptisten) 75, 155, 344 Bewährung (‘proof ’ of personal character,
‘anarchy of values’, see under values qualities) 28, 122, 309–10, 316,
Anglophilia, see under England 352–4, 362–4, 366, 376
anthropology 258 Bilbao 300n.28
anti-magic, magic 255, 257–64, 307; see also Bildung (literary culture) xiv, 93, 321
Entzauberung Bildung und Besitz ( . . . and property) 334
Aquinas, see Thomas Aquinas Bismarck, Otto von 82, 330n.153, 381
Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik Bloch, Marc 263n.72
9, 46–51, 53, 129, 152, 154–5, Bonn, Moritz 159, 176
157, 159, 170n.94, 172–3, 177, books, see ‘thick books’
181, 189, 202–3, 207–8, 211, 215, bourgeois, bourgeois idea, bourgeoisie 18, 100,
223, 282n.153, 286 166, 236, 263, 299, 319, 324, 332,
Argentina 61–2 372–86
aristocracy, aristocratism 54n.117, 81, 99, 273, petty bourgeoisie 85, 236, 238
310, 312, 349, 351, 353 Braun, Heinrich 46–50, 89
asceticism 25, 33, 38–40, 102–3, 129, 132, Brentano, Lujo 27, 35, 52–3, 83, 156, 176,
134–5, 138–42, 199, 222, 244, 210, 213, 215
275, 289, 297, 303–4, 313, 316, Breuer, Stefan 255n.78, 273n.117, 298n.21,
340, 353, 358, 381 309n.75, 372n.104
ascetic-mystic polarity 134–5, 196, 199, 203, brotherliness, fraternity 26–7, 266, 268, 281,
238, 245, 250–4 374; see also Nächstenliebe
ascetic Protestantism 20, 26–9, 42–3, 51, Bücher, Karl 18, 188, 206, 379n.126
55n.121, 80, 106, 120–3, 132, Buddhism 191–3, 229–30, 244–5, 265, 267,
134–6, 151–2, 199, 230, 233, 235, 276, 365, 367; see also under Max
238–9, 250, 252–3, 264–5, 268–9, Weber/works/Collected Essays
273–4, 276, 289, 312, 337, 346, Bunyan, John 39
349–50, 352, 355, 359, 368–9, Burckhardt, Jacob 38, 332n.160
372–3, 375, 380, 388 bureaucracy, bureaucratism 166–9, 302–3,
Ascona 389 317, 319–22, 324, 329–33,
Ashley, W. J. 203 377n.116

Babylon 242 Caesaropapism 77, 267

Bacon, Francis (Viscount St. Alban) 16 cage, iron, see housing, steel
Bailey, see Bayly calculation, propensity to calculate
Baptists xiv, 174, 357 (Rechenhaftigkeit) 15, 67, 141, 164
Barclay, Robert 39, 55, 154 calling, see Beruf
Barth, Karl 248n.5 Calvin, Jean 23–5, 32
Baumgarten, Otto 91, 95, 269n.100 Calvinism, Calvinist 10, 24, 32, 151–2, 157,
Baxter, Richard 20, 30, 39, 80, 110, 154, 172, 193, 264, 266, 285, 287–90,
186, 344 349–54, 360, 367–8
394 Index
capitalism 13–19, 57–75, 133–42, 162–9, 195, Comte, Auguste 45–6, 133
223, 234, 245, 273–4, 275n.125, conduct of life (Lebensführung) 25, 68, 77, 102,
294–305, 313–38, 373, 379–80, 135, 137, 140, 218–19, 227, 244,
382–3 253–5, 262, 267, 272, 293, 300,
ancient (and modern) capitalism 61, 162–4 360, 373
capitalism and rationalism 15–17, 102–3, confirmation (as member of the Lutheran
133–42, 166, 302–5, 313–6, 331 church) 72n.87, 90, 95, 347, 353
capitalist enterprise (Betrieb) 163–4, 303–4, Confucianism, see under Max Weber/works/
313–4, 319, 321, 328 Collected Essays
finance capitalism 63, 164 consistency, see logical consistency
modern (Occidental) capitalism 12–15, 29, Constantine, Emperor 344
61, 63, 122, 139, 163–5, 225, 276, cosmos 218, 274, 286; see also acosmism
299–300, 305, 317–9, 327, 337–8, Court, Pieter de la 24
372, 379–80 Cromwell, Oliver 20, 77, 82, 243, 254, 344,
political, adventure, booty capitalism 15, 164, 370, 376
315, 328, 337–8
satisfaction of mass needs 63, 139, 281 Delbrück, Hans 34n.18
“spirit” of 14–15, 27–8, 51–2, 59–60, 64–5, ‘demands of the day’, see under Goethe
67–9, 72, 74, 102–3, 132, 133, democracy, bourgeois democracy 26, 54n.117,
135, 138, 140–1, 164–5, 225–6, 81, 90, 101, 156, 332, 366, 370,
235, 256, 299, 301, 303–5, 315, 378; see also everyday
381–2 dervishes 243
Carlyle, Thomas 82, 203, 241 Descartes, René 16, 106
caste, caste system, see under Hinduism deus absconditus (the hidden god) 26, 288, 388
Catholic church, Catholicism 21, 104, 134, Deutung, see Verstehen
264, 267, 272, 276, 300, 306, Devonshire House, London 158
365–6; see also church Dilthey, Wilhelm 105, 278n.133
certitudo salutis (assurance of salvation) 191–2, disciplines, academic, see under specialization
227, 257, 289, 354; see also discipline in conduct 64, 67n.59, 69, 71, 81, 89,
salvation 135, 154, 253, 300, 312, 316, 321,
Channing, W. E. 90–1 349, 351–2, 357, 370, 390
charisma 61, 263, 279–80, 305–17, 354, 362, 390 disenchantment, see Entzauberung
Chinese mandarin 243–4 domination xiv, 298n.20; see instead Herrschaft
choral singing 362 Donatists 94, 308, 344, 348, 363
Christian Democracy 356 Dorpat 387n.2
Christianity: Durkheim, Emile, Durkheimian 133, 237, 239,
New Testament Christianity 245n.128, 290n.186, 350n.30, 388
265, 268 Dutch, see the Netherlands
Occidental Christianity 29, 76, 80, 145, 200,
222, 227, 231–2, 250, 293, 368 East Elbean labour, see agriculture
Christian-Social 26–7, 82, 88–9, 96–7, 100, economics 21, 36–7, 169, 273, 296, 329, 336,
266, 373 378–80
Christliche Welt, Die 155 economism 165, 379
church, churches 19–21, 25–6, 154, 306, 308, education 167, 321
340, 351, 364–5, 376; see also Egypt, ancient 168, 283, 319, 327, 332
Catholic church, Lutheran church Egypt, modern 243
city, city economy 14, 18, 165–6, 300, 372–86, Ehrlich, Eugen 117
387; see also Max Weber/works/The elective affinity 373, 390
City England, Britain 20, 24, 32, 62, 66, 73, 75, 76,
clan, tribe, kinship group 166, 240, 266, 374–6 99–100, 126–7, 148, 151, 220,
class and social groups 65–6, 185, 235–9, 298, 238, 254, 289, 296, 324, 330, 334,
358, 373 340–4, 348–9, 359, 362, 365,
cross-class constituency of the PE 25, 66, 82, 376–7, 380
85–6, 99–100, 314–15, 334 Anglophilia 77, 80–4
see also Stand “English problem” 107, 109, 123, 125–7, 324
clubs 349, 375 ‘English writers’ 38–9
Cobdenite 14, 62, 167, 239, 328 Enlightenment 121, 249, 269n.101, 345;
communion, holy (Christian sacrament) 349, see also under liberalism
353, 368, 375–6 enterprise (Betrieb), see under capitalism
 Index 395
entrepreneurs 300, 305, 314–16, 321–2, 332–5 Germany, German states 20, 24, 80, 82,
Entwicklung (historical evolution) 59–60, 100, 100, 167–8, 249, 327, 330, 332,
268, 327–30 343, 348–9, 356, 362, 373,
‘iron facts’ (ineluctable evolution) 119, 287, 380–1, 387
299, 390 German Revolution 1918–19: 211n.32,
Entzauberung (de-magification, the removal of 212–14, 327, 338
magic) 159, 215, 249–50, 255, Gibbon, Edward 112
257, 260–4, 271; see also anti-magic Gierke, Otto 36n.26
Eranos discussion group 56, 162 Gladstone, W. E. 82
ethics, ‘ethics’, ethical 26–7, 63–4, 69, 95, 97, god: alien or remote from god 218, 269, 284, 291
225–8, 249, 256, 271, 274, 283, ‘no god’ 93, 193, 252, 284
345, 359 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang 5n.10, 203
religious ethic of conviction 219–20, 226, ‘demands of the day’ 280
272, 291, 310n.78 Göhre, Paul 34n.18, 57, 88, 95, 97–100,
political ethic of responsibility 220–1, 333 282n.153
ethos 225–6 Goldschmidt, Levin 22, 63n.38
see also impersonal ethic; neo-Kantian ethics Gould, Jay 315–16
ethnography 258 grace 260, 263–4, 290n.185, 309–10
‘Europeanization’ 146n.5, 167, 355 ‘g/Graduates’ 238
Evangelisch-sozialer Kongress, see Protestant Social Graf, Friedrich Wilhelm ix, 170n.94
Congress Grafe, Eduard 91
everyday (Alltag) life, conduct 38, 248, 266, Great War, see World War
280, 307, 310, 312–15, 390 Greece, ancient 184, 279, 374, 378, 387
existentialism 277n.131, 281, 294, 388 words derived from Greek 119n.81,
135, 168
factory labour, owners 25, 73, 75, 300, 316, guilds (trade [Zunft], merchant [Gilde]) 81, 168,
321, 329, 334 365, 379, 383
family 53, 184–5, 188, 266, 276, 348, 361, 374 Guizot, François 83n.37
Feuerbach, Ludwig 90n.25, 91
Fideikommisse (landed estates held in trust) 53–4 Habermas, Jürgen 224, 249n.7, 277n.131, 278,
Fischer, H. Karl 157, 161, 171 280n.140, 295, 318n.111
‘fixed prices’ 15, 55, 151, 153 Haller, Johannes 38
formalism, see under law, rationality Hamburg 24, 177
Foucault, Michel 231n.70 Hanke, Edith ix, 23n.40, 38n.43, 39n.45,
Fox, George 274n.120 257n.43, 291–3, 298n.21, 367n.86
France, French 24, 106, 237, 269n.101, 332, happiness 72, 113n.50, 139, 281–2, 288
376–7, 380; see also Huguenots Harnack, Adolf 34n.18, 92–3, 98n.52,
Frankfurt School 295, 299, 337 116n.69, 237n.93, 248n.5, 255,
Frankfurter Zeitung 155 340, 387n.2
Franklin, Benjamin 27, 51, 54, 68, 137–8, 305 Hartmann, Ludo Moritz 79n.16, 210n.30
Frazer, James 258, 261 Hasbach, Wilhelm 83
freedom, “free” space 17, 61, 90, 264, 317, Hausrath, Adolf 373
331–2, 334, 371, 376, 389 Hegel, G. W. F. 4n.7, 10, 79, 83n.37, 114,
Freiburg 12, 37 132, 387
Freud, Sigmund 384n.146 Heidelberg 34–5, 40, 43, 46–7, 210,
Fugger, Jacob 96, 137, 305, 315–6, 333 213–14, 217
Heidelberg university library 42n.60
Gans, Eduard 114 Heligoland 52–3
Gehäuse, stahlhartes, see ‘steel housing’ Hennis, Wilhelm 46n.77, 77n.5, 146n.6,
Gemeinde (lay, lay religious community) 92, 176n.7, 178n.15, 279n.138, 296
94, 341–3, 347, 363, 365n.78, Henrich, Dieter 224, 249n.7
366, 370, 374–5 heroes, heroism 82, 103, 289, 310, 312–13, 315
geography 380–1 Herrschaft (rule) xiv, 25, 65, 166–9, 221, 248,
George, Stefan 308, 384n.146 298–322, 325–35, 362–3, 369–70,
Gerber, Carl 116 377–9; see also Max Weber/works/
German Sociological Society (Deutsche Economy and Society/Sociology of
Gesellschaft für Soziologie) 79n.16, Herrschaft
87n.10, 117, 131, 175, 185, 188, Hesse, Hermann 276
191, 361, 367, 369, 386 heteronymy of law, the economy 247, 273
396 Index
hierocracy 21, 33, 155, 188–9, 195, 233n.76, iron cage, see steel housing
298, 300, 367–72; see also under ‘iron facts’, see under Entwicklung (historical
Max Weber/ works/Economy and evolution)
Society/Sociology of Herrschaft Islam 190, 192, 195, 229n.60, 242–3, 267
Hindus, Hinduism 190, 207, 225, 227, 240, Italy, Italians 332, 376, 378, 380, 387
261, 267, 364–7, 372
caste, caste system 225n.40, 230, 239–40, Jaffé, Edgar 43, 46–50
242, 267, 365–6 Jaffé, Else née von Richthofen 46–7, 49,
see also Max Weber/works/Collected Essays 157n.35, 212n.42, 214, 216, 278
Hinneberg, Paul 179 Jainism 230, 240, 365
Hintze, Otto 221, 232, 269n.101, 311 Jaspers, Karl 5–6, 10, 78n.10, 193n.52, 257,
history, historical method, historicism 277n.131, 278 & n.136, 281, 296,
(Historismus) 15, 43–4, 94, 101, 387n.1
104, 116, 223, 241, 252, 254–5, Jellinek, Camilla 188
257, 263, 292, 296, 311–13, Jellinek, Georg 32–3, 117 n.72, 133, 188
336–7, 355–6, 371–2, 377–8, Jesuits 24, 38
383–4, 388–90; see also Jesus Christ 139, 233
Entwicklung (historical evolution) Jews, Judaism, Talmudic Judaism 190, 195, 241,
History of Religions School 245 283n.155, 374–6; see also under Max
Holl, Karl 156n.25, 176 Weber/works/Collected Essays
‘honesty is the best policy’ 69, 153, 328, 359 Jülicher, Adolf 91
Honigsheim, Paul 179, 269 Junker landlords 299, 302
Horkheimer, Max 249n.10
housing, see ‘steel housing’ Kamm, Maximilian 24
Huguenots 24n.44, 345, 380 Kantian, see neo-Kantian
human rights, see Rights of Man Kantorowicz, Hermann 116–17, 175n.3
Kapp, Friedrich 54, 95, 301
idealism 98, 100n.64, 112, 234, 271, 285, 323, Kelsen, Hans 116–17, 325n.132
360; see also neo-Kantian Keyserling, Hermann Graf von 191, 193
ideal-type 41, 115, 118, 130, 132, 286, 311, 318 Kracauer, Siegfried 278
Ideas of 1914: 330 Krupp, Gustav 96, 333–4
Ihering, Rudolf 111–5, 120 Kuenen, Abraham 256
impersonal/personal “ethics”, impersonal rule 4, Kultur xiv, 18, 21, 66, 79, 90, 92–4, 98–9, 104,
11, 25–6, 65, 96–7, 135, 266, 119–20, 141, 184–6, 232, 345, 362
275–6, 287, 299–300, 307, 390; material Kultur 19, 66, 94, 141, 235, 294, 371
see also Bewährung (‘proof ’ of the modern Kultur 14, 52, 94, 98, 102–3, 107–8,
person) 129, 140–1, 145, 151, 183, 222,
Independents (17th century England) 341–3, 224, 257, 294, 319, 325, 335–7, 360
345, 376 ‘transcendental presupposition’ 98, 235, 285
individualism 26–9, 152, 242, 251, 324, see also under values
332, 346, 363–4, 367, 374, Kulturkampf 104, 356n.38
382–3, 390 Kürnberger, Ferdinand 51
responsibility of the individual 28, 94 Kuyper, Abraham 291, 355–6, 363
see also mass-individual phenomena
Industrial (‘technical’) Revolution in Laband, Paul 116
England 228 Lamprecht, Karl 180
inflation, war and post-war 158, 210, 212 La Mettrie, Julien Offray de 121
innerworldly, see under “world” Landshut, Siegfried 295
intellectuals, intellectualism 206, 234, 236–8, law 36–7, 106–28, 169, 184–5, 273, 306–7,
275, 286–7, 293 322–5, 375, 390
intellectual history 11, 111n.35, 112 legal formalism 17, 106–13, 116–25, 127,
intellectualization 262 169, 184–5, 187, 247, 291n.189,
interdisciplinarity, see under specialization 307, 324
interests, material and ideal 18, 23, 25, natural law (lex naturae) 33, 77, 109, 123–6,
58, 65–6, 99, 112–13, 123, 139, 220, 322, 324, 365
185, 221, 235–7, 298, 312–13, private, commercial law 22, 37, 63, 107–10,
317–18, 322–3, 331, 336, 371; 114, 123–4, 138, 185, 187, 240,
see also utilitarianism 277n.130, 322
 Index 397
Roman law 93n.36, 107–13, 120–1, 124, Max Weber Gesamtausgabe (MWG) vii, 183,
124n.108, 187, 242, 254, 307, 187n.21, 201, 331n.158, 367n.86,
323–4 384–5
system in law, legal systems 68, 107, 110–12, Mayer, J. P. 296n.13
114–16, 120–2, 125, 324, 371 meaning in the world 3, 71, 92, 94, 191–2, 203,
see also Max Weber/works/Economy and 222, 236–7, 251, 255, 272, 274,
Society/Sociology of Law 276, 277–93, 325, 388–90
Lebensführung, see conduct of life Meinecke, Friedrich 78n.10, 94, 206, 220n.14,
Leibniz, G. W. 132, 387 278n.134
Leiden 158 Mennonites 357
Lenin, V. I. 294 mercantilism, neo-mercantilism 20, 22, 62,
Lepsius, Rainer ix, 23n.40 167, 358
Levenstein, Adolf 203, 282n.153 ‘method of resemblance’, see under intellectual
Levy, Hermann 83, 176, 179, 215 history
lex naturae, see natural law Methodenstreit (quarrel over method in
liberalism (European) 86, 100, 104–6, 169, economics) 105n.9
251, 310, 334, 336, 362, 373 Methodik (methodism, science of method) 103,
liberal enlightenment 72, 104, 137 110, 120
life orders (Lebensordnungen), life spheres 133, Methodism, Methodists 55n.121, 131, 152,
136–7, 141, 197, 218–19, 271, 273, 154, 343n.11, 357
277–8, 281, 284, 292, 323, 390 methodology 3, 40–1, 129–33, 148, 161,
literati 60, 119n.79, 180n.32, 287, 329–30, 187, 193, 207, 223, 258,
332, 334 282n.153, 285, 299, 318, 356; see
Loewenstein, Karl 4n.5 also history, ideal-type
logic, logical 17, 36, 40, 87, 104, 106–7, 110–2, Meyer, Eduard 162, 242n.116, 246n.131,
116–18, 120, 131, 140n.41, 154, 256n.39, 258–61
227, 230n.65, 285, 300, 310n.78, Michels, Robert 356
318, 323–4, 351, 353, 388, 390 Mill, J. S. 10, 62
logical consistency (Konsequenz) 80, 103, 118, Milton, John 39, 280
120, 135, 230, 253, 272–3, 305, 351 Mommsen, Theodor 95, 162–3
Loofs, Friedrich 343n.11 Mommsen, Wolfgang J. 183, 188n.27, 206n.5,
love, love of one’s neighbour (Nächstenliebe), 209n.21, 221, 234n.82, 295n.9
lovelessness 27, 214, 240, 265–8, monks, monasticism 38–40, 52–3, 244–5,
276, 281; see also brotherliness 372, 373
Löwith, Karl 277n.131, 278n.134, 295 Montesquieu, Baron de 38, 81
Lukács, Georg 8n.27, 193, 294–5, 337 Morgan, Pierpont 315
Luther, Martin 22, 134, 266, 341–2, 344 Müller, Bruno 70
Lutheranism, Lutheran church 22, 24, 26–7, Müller, Karl 91
30, 77, 80, 86–7, 94–5, 134, 136, multi-culturalism 105, 371
156, 166, 172, 251, 255, 263, multi-disciplinarity, see under specialization
265–8, 276, 285, 289, 293, 310, Munich 210, 212–4, 217
340–9, 353 Münsterberg, Hugo 42
Münzer, Thomas 345, 374n.109
magic, see anti-magic music 362
Manchester 73 mysticism 134–5, 186, 199, 203, 245, 250–4,
Mann, Thomas 207 265, 346–7, 360, 367, 390;
Marcuse, Herbert 66n.55, 318n.111 see also asceticism, ascetic-mystic
Marett, Ralph 258 polarity
marginalist economics, the ‘abstract
theory’ 17, 329 Nächstenliebe, see brotherliness; love
markets 13–14, 63–6, 71, 74, 151, 163–4, 240, national character 79–80
267, 300, 302, 304–5, 315–19, nationalism 78, 206, 328, 372, 387
321, 324, 328, 334, 379 nationality 77–84
Marx, Karl 4, 10, 14, 65, 132–3, 140, 164, 169, nature, naturalism 263, 290
239, 287, 294–6, 298–9, 313, scientific naturalism 274, 283
317–18, 334, 337, 378, 387 Naumann, Friedrich 26–7, 88, 96–8, 266,
Marxism 167, 234–5, 294–6, 322, 336 268, 306, 373
vulgar Marxism (base and superstructure) 29, neo-Kantian, Kantian, idealist ethics 25, 117,
50, 185, 235, 239, 358 119–20, 226, 249, 256, 271
mass-individual phenomena 23, 64–5, Netherlands (Holland), Dutch 20, 24, 80, 177,
276n.126, 287, 317n.106, 350 355–6, 376, 380
398 Index
Neurath, Otto 214 Protestant ethic “thesis” viii, 57, 129
New England 238 Protestant Social Congress (Evangelisch-sozialer
Nietzsche, Friedrich, Nietzschean 90, 104–5, Kongress) 34, 57–8, 87–9, 95–100,
134n.26, 283, 315–16, 388 306, 348n.22; see also Christian-
Nobbe, Moritz 34n.18 Social
Protestant work ethic 140
objectivity, see value-freedom Prussia 340, 343, 387
Occident, Orient 14–15, 17–18, 65, 79–80, 87, Prussian Historical Institute, Rome 38–9
139, 145, 215, 240, 242–5, 254, psychology, psychological component in
266, 270, 272, 276, 291–2, 327–8, behaviour 14–15, 58, 65, 85, 89,
364, 368, 373–4, 376–7, 380; see 163n.59, 181, 193n.52, 226, 244,
also under capitalism, Christianity, 251, 253, 289, 318, 353, 362
rationalization ‘vulgar psychology’ 11
Oerlinghausen 69–73, 146, 212n.43 Puchta, G. F. 111, 113–16, 124
Offenbacher, Martin 31–2 Puritans, Puritanism, Saints 4–5, 17, 27, 32, 55,
oikos (household) 28, 75, 298n.20 80–1, 83, 109, 121, 126–7, 137,
Oldenberg, Karl 299 203, 220, 236, 238, 251, 253, 273,
orders, see life orders 276, 289, 300, 309–10, 341, 351,
organic conception of society, state 267–8, 353–4, 369, 373, 382; see also
276n.126, 331, 374 ascetic Protestantism
Orient, see Occident putter-out (Verleger) 73–5, 316, 321, 379,
Ostrogorski, Moisei 82 380n.127

Palatinate 355 Quakers 55, 83, 120, 167, 252, 262, 341,
Palyi, Melchior 8 357–8, 368–70, 376; see also Robert
parliamentarism 82n.30, 329, 334–5 Barclay, ‘fixed prices’, Täufer
Parsons, Talcott 159n.43, 230n.65, 247n.8, 296
parties, political 329–30, 356, 362, 370, 378 Radbruch, Gustav 116
patrimonialism 320, 337, 377 Rachfahl, Felix 156, 176–81, 223
S. Paul, Pauline Christianity 219, 231, 233, 375 race, racism 24n.44, 258
peasants, peasantry 263 Rathenau, Walter 211n.32, 333
Persia 166, 242 ratio 105, 311, 316
personal ethic, relations, see impersonal rational and rationell 15–17, 103, 106, 140n.41,
‘personality’ 5, 179 303, 308, 360
‘perspectives which interest us’ 180, 252, rationalism, rationality, rationalization 15–17,
296n.17, 336 102–28, 131, 135–42, 224–5,
pessimism 27, 278n.136, 280, 288, 290 259–64, 272–4, 286, 297–8, 301,
petty bourgeoisie, see under bourgeoisie 307, 337, 389–90
Petty, William 177–9 formal rationality 16–17, 104–9, 119, 122–5,
pharisaism 288, 291n.189 135–41, 183, 186, 257, 274, 280,
Pietism 72, 131, 152, 177, 342, 346–7, 297, 307, 323–4, 360, 390
349–51, 357, 381 general (Occidental) rationalization 110, 128,
Plenge, Johann 331 184, 249–50, 274, 307, 323
politics, socio-politics 19–20, 76–84, 209, 212, material and substantive rationality 15–16,
219–21, 247–8, 273, 298–9, 122–5, 219n.2, 274
326–35, 376–9, 387 see also capitalism; rationalism
religious politics/anti-politics 28–9, 33, 77, reason (Vernunft) 17, 103, 116, 311
155, 195, 219–20, 254, 267–8, rebirth (Wiedergeburt) 310n.78
363, 367–72 Rechenhaftigkeit (propensity, ability to calculate),
praxis pietatis 135, 351 see under calculation
predestination 22, 26, 28–9, 121, 152, 226n.43, religion/religiosity 19–30, 85–101, 169–74,
233, 287–91, 309–10, 350–4 189–200, 218–93, 339–72, 375–6
press, inquiry into 190–1, 362n.67 religions of Kultur, 195, 205
prices, fixed, see ‘fixed prices’ ‘religiosity’ 94, 191, 194n.56, 197, 204, 226,
‘proof ’ of personal merit, qualities, 230, 236, 243n.120, 251, 255, 263,
see Bewährung 266, 272, 276, 289, 365n.78, 366–7
prophets, prophesying 218, 220, 227, 271, 274, religious anti-politics, see under politics
279, 310, 374 religiously musical, unmusical 7, 87, 218,
Protestant ethic, see under ethics 270–1, 279
 Index 399
‘religious root’ 20, 72, 82, 85, 98, 102, 118, Schmitt, Silke 39n.46
123, 186, 225, 246, 255, 274, Schmitz, Oscar 77n.8, 363n.68
284n.162, 290, 356, 360, 388 Schmoller, Gustav 27, 41, 57n.2, 329
salvation (ethical) religions 76, 134, 191–2, 197, Schneckenburger, Matthias 134n.38
218, 227, 230, 247, 255–6, 265–9, Schopenhauer, Arthur 90, 245
271–3, 276, 281, 310n.78, 371 Schulze-Gaevernitz, Gerhard von 83, 176
world religions 190, 195, 198, 225, 229, Scots, Scotland 81n.23, 345, 355
231–2, 245–6, 255, 366 sects, sectarianism 33, 55, 94, 151–6, 172–4,
see also under Max Weber/works/Economic 199, 307, 339–72
Ethics, Economy and Society secularization 87, 92n.32, 97, 222, 250, 257,
Renner, Karl 322 269–70, 274, 279, 284–5
rentiers 164, 210, 212, 334 self-control 147, 150, 243, 275, 300, 390
‘research programme’ 275 ‘self-evident truths’ 133
reserve (of manner) 5, 147, 222, 276, 390 seventeenth century (‘fateful epoch’) 20,
responsibility, see under individual 147–8, 155, 160, 241, 340,
revolution 126, 219–20, 253–4, 311–12, 313, 345–6, 355, 379
316, 324, 365, 376–7 sexuality (Erotik) 138, 214, 273
Ressentiment 283 sides (one or two) to Weberian analysis 64,
Rhodes, Cecil 81 164–5, 226, 234–41, 358, 372–5
Richthofen, Else von, see Else Jaffé Siebeck, Paul 49, 156–61, 171, 173, 184n.9,
Rickert, Heinrich 39n.48, 119 189, 194, 205–9, 211, 213–4,
Rights of Man 220, 370–1, 379 216–17, 359
Rilke, Rainer Maria 252n.20 Siebeck, Hermann 256n.40, 270n.110
Ritschl, Albrecht 30, 92, 134–7, 237–8, 340–1, Siebeck, Oskar 158, 173, 191
344n.13 Siebeck, Werner 216n.64
Ritschlians 91 Smith, Adam 14, 113, 136, 239, 289
Rockefeller, John D. 315, 333 Simmel, Georg 38, 42, 46, 133, 157n.35, 206,
Roman Empire, see Rome (ancient) 210, 255n.35, 257, 266, 270,
Roman law, see under law 274n.121, 276n.126, 278n.133,
romantics, see literati 282n.151, 283n.157
Rome (modern) 38–40, 44n.71, 245 slavery 60, 163–4, 348–9
Rome (ancient) 28, 43, 53, 60–1, 149, 162–4, sober, sobriety 4, 59, 70, 72, 89, 100, 222, 243,
242, 320, 328, 348, 378, 381n.135 275, 288, 315, 330, 390
Roth, Guenther ix, 47n.83, 84n.38, 182–3, Society for Ethical Kultur 27, 64
224, 295n.9 Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) 65,
Roundheads, see Cromwell 298, 333, 370
Russia, Russian 61, 146, 148, 167, 174n.113, socialization of the economy 332–3
268, 291–2, 338, 387 sociology, social science 45–6, 133, 210, 286,
309, 388–90
Saints, see Puritans Sohm, Rudolf 113, 306–8, 340
Salomon, Albert 277n.131, 281, 295, 305, 387 Solms, Max Graf zu 368n.88
salvation 97, 123, 134, 191–4, 227, 236, 251, Sombart, Werner 4, 12–13, 15n.11, 46–9, 52,
256–7, 266, 271–2, 276, 289, 352, 67, 96, 149, 156, 170, 176,
353, 364, 366–8 180n.33, 215, 269
salvation anxiety 288 specialization and its transcendence 13, 89, 136,
salvation religions, see under religion 262, 279–80, 304, 313, 320–1,
see also certitudo salutis (the assurance of 388–9
salvation) academic specialization 5–6, 34–7, 45, 132–3,
Savigny, Carl von 113–15, 124 150, 169, 178–81, 208, 320, 388–9
Scaff, Lawrence 54n.116, 55n.122, 56n.128, see also Beruf
329n.152, 389n.6 Spencer, Herbert 133
Schäfer, Dietrich 39n.48 Spener, Philipp Jakob 30, 110, 344
Schellhass, Karl 38 sport 54, 138, 317
Schelling, F. W. J. 114 Stammler, Rudolf 108–9, 117, 119,
Schleiermacher, Friedrich 343–4 157n.35, 259
Schluchter, Wolfgang ix, 9n.32, 23n.40, Stand (social group based on rank) 239, 267,
125n.110, 182n.4, 189n.32, 364, 366–7, 373
199nn.83–4, 201–2, 224, 225n.36, state, the 76, 166, 188, 221, 298, 327, 331,
230n.65, 233n.77, 249nn.7, 9, 335, 338, 361–3, 377–8; see also
265, 297n.18, 324n.131, 325n.132 Max Weber, works, Sociology of
Schmitt, Carl 220 the State
400 Index
Staudinger, Hans 78n.10, 279 unbrotherliness, see love, lovelessness
‘steel housing’ (stahlhartes Gehäuse), housing 59, universities 167, 321, 341; see also literati
62, 119, 121, 141, 274, 280, 307, usury 21–3, 67, 277n.130
312, 320, 323, 331–2, 389 utilitarianism 20, 25, 112–13, 123 125, 139,
St. Louis, see Max Weber/works/‘The Rural 199, 236, 275, 313, 316, 320
Community’
stock exchange, bourse 63–9 values xiv, 18, 26, 64, 66, 78–80, 85, 94, 98,
Strauss, D. F. 90 104–5, 116, 118–20, 141, 178,
Stumm, Carl Ferdinand Freiherr von, Stumm 194n.54, 219, 235, 239, 247,
era 34, 96 278–80, 283–4, 299, 344, 360,
sublimation 272–3 362, 390
‘switchmen’ 113n.49, 235, 244, 313 ‘anarchy of values’ 105, 172, 259n.54, 277,
systematic conduct 15, 24–5, 77n.5, 103, 283–4, 371, 388
107, 110–11, 120, 122, 135, 137, ‘value-free’, ‘value-freedom’ 16–17, 105–6,
140, 151, 190, 226–7, 244, 255, 118, 130–2, 140n.41, 222, 249,
260–2, 265, 267, 273, 291, 305, 257, 275, 288, 299, 360
325, 328, 390; see also conduct of value-judgements 105, 118n.79, 131, 326, 348
life (Lebensführung) value-systems 94, 99, 118, 283–4
see also Kultur
Täufer, Täufertum xiv, 30, 95, 131, 152–4, Veblen, Thorstein 69, 153
252–4, 264, 344–6, 350, 357–8, Verein für Sozialpolitik 27, 57–8, 61, 86, 88–9,
368–9, 371, 376 131, 161, 168–9, 194n.54
Tauler, Johannes 252 Verstehen (understanding), Deutung (mental
Tawney, R. H. 296n.17 construction), social science based
technique, technicality, technology on 3, 41–2, 130–1, 193n.52,
(Technik) 17, 62, 104, 116, 121, 208, 286
125, 139, 183, 228, 267, 320, Vienna 210–12, 326
389–90 Villard, Henry 301n.32, 315, 333
Tenbruck, Friedrich H. 224n.34, 258n.48 virtuosi 244n.126, 366–7, 372
theodicy, problem of 196, 230, 256n.40, vocation, see Beruf
282, 289 Voët, Gisbert 42, 135, 356
‘thick (or big) books’ 9, 88, 148, 229 Volk (people, nation), Volksgeist (national
S. Thomas Aquinas 22 spirit) 65, 79, 114–16
Tiele, Cornelis Petrus 190n.36, 259n.53 Voltaire, F. M. A. de 38
‘time is money’ 68, 137
Tocqueville, Alexis de 83n.37, 295–6 Wach, Joachim 248n.5
Toller, Ernst 214 Weber, Alfred 44, 47n.86, 48, 92–3, 209n.22,
Tolstoy, Leo 175, 268, 291–3 214, 279
Tönnies, Ferdinand 87, 124, 133, 352 Weber, Carl David 69–75, 158, 285, 288, 305,
traditionalism 15, 31–2, 58, 72, 74, 227, 248, 312, 316, 381
301–2, 316 Weber, Helene 7, 69, 89–91, 95–5, 214,
Treiber, Hubert ix, 107n.16, 111n.35, 265, 372
134n.26, 249n.7 Weber, Marianne, née Schnitger 3, 5–9,
Treitschke, Heinrich von 32–3, 38–9, 41, 43–5, 48n.90,
Troeltsch, Ernst 21n.35, 39n.48, 78, 88, 92, 69–72, 83, 86, 88, 90, 91n.27,
97–8, 105, 124, 139–40, 149–50, 95–6, 138, 157–8, 185n.15,
156, 163n.59, 169–74, 175n.3, 191n.46, 210, 213–4, 242, 265,
176, 178–9, 199–200, 206, 215, 268, 278n.136, 285, 368n.88,
232, 246n.131, 252, 255n.35, 384, 389n.6
256n.40, 257, 266, 269, 274n.121, Weber, Max Sr. 37, 70, 86, 95–6, 264,
278, 282n.151, 283n.157, 331, 285, 372
344–7, 359–61 Weber, Max:
‘Protestant Christianity and Church in the lecturing 31–2, 35, 43, 212–4
Modern Era’ (1905–6) 149–50, 170 medical condition 10, 34–5, 157n.35
Social Doctrines [or Teachings] of the Christian professorial status 43n.69, 44–5, 67
Churches (1908–12) 170–4, silence, secrecy, dislike of self-revelation vii,
199–200, 348, 360–1 4–5, 8–11, 12, 16, 42–3, 53, 162,
two-sided analysis, see under ‘sides’ 188, 201
Tyrell, Hartmann 225n.37, 226n.45, 265n.77, verbal larceny, borrowing 15n.11, 256–7,
270n.104, 291–3 259, 309
 Index 401
works: ‘Political and hierocratic Herrschaft’ 21,
Advertisement (Selbstanzeige) for Collected 33, 155, 188–9, 195, 233n.76,
Essays on the Sociology of Religion 363n.70, 367–72
(1919) 217, 231n.69, 232–3, 368, Sociology of Law (c.1910–14) 33,
384–5 106–7, 110, 113, 115–16, 120,
‘Agriculture in Antiquity [Agrarverhältnisse 122–5, 127–8, 187, 194, 221,
im Altertum]’1–2 (1897–8) 261n.61, 305, 319, 322–5, 386
‘Agriculture in Antiquity [Agrarverhältnisse Sociology of Religion (c.1913) 93,
im Altertum]’3 (1907–8) 145, 149, 189–200, 221, 226–7, 233, 236–8,
157n.35, 162–9, 184, 217, 258, 243, 248, 254, 260–4, 293, 305–6,
374, 385–6 319, 358, 363–4, 366, 373
“Anti-critical” writings (1907–10) 163, ‘Economy and Society’ (1919–20) 46,
171, 175–81 50, 196, 206, 208–11, 213–14,
‘Between two laws’ (1916) 268 217, 303–4, 327, 338, 363n.70,
The Bourse (1894–6) 65, 67, 69 378, 382
‘ “Churches” and “Sects” in North America’ ‘Class and social rank [Stand]’
(1906) 151, 155–6, 160, 355, (1919–20) 238n.99, 383–4
360–1, 364 ‘Fundamental Categories of Economic
‘The City’ (c.1908) 18, 145, 149, 160, Activity’ 304
166, 373–86 Sociology of Herrschaft (1919–20) 196,
Collected Essays on the Sociology of 210, 221, 248, 308, 312, 315–16,
Religion (1915–20) 145, 158, 177, 322, 326–7, 330, 338, 370, 378
200, 205, 207–8, 217, 223, 228, Sociology of the State (unwritten)
232, 384–6 19n.26, 326–7, 338, 363n.70,
‘Economic Ethics of the World 378n.123
Religions’ (1912, 1915–20) viii, 8, Freiburg Inaugural Lecture, see ‘The Nation
189–200, 205, 211, 214, 223, State and Economic Policy’
225–6, 228–32, 241, 245, 248, ‘General (“Theoretical”) Economics’
287, 385–6 (1894–8) 12–29, 34, 36, 67, 73–4,
‘Introduction’ to the ‘Economic 130, 165, 167–8, 241n.109,
Ethics’ 145, 196–8, 201–4, 207, 236 277n.130, 300, 303, 380n.127
‘Ancient Judaism’ (1912, Grundriss der Sozialökonomik (Handbuch
1916–18) 208, 211, 223n.28, 231, der politischen Oekonomie,
241, 261 c.1910–20) 161, 175, 183–4,
‘Confucianism’ (1912, 1915, 188–90, 206–7, 297, 321, 371
1919–20) 158, 190, 196–7, ‘Hausverband, Sippe und Nachbarschaft’
201–4, 207–8, 212n.39, 215n.57, (1906), 243n.19, 301
229, 243, 260–1 ‘Knies and the Irrationality Problem’
‘Hinduism and Buddhism’ (1912, (1905–6) 3, 41–2, 129–31
1915–16) 192, 196–7, 204, 208, ‘The meaning of “value-freedom” in the
229–30, 364–7, 384n.146 sociological and economic sciences’
The Condition of Rural Labour in East (1913, 1917) 194n.54
Elbean Germany (1892) 36, Music MS. (“Sociology of Music”,
47n.85, 61, 67, 72, 88, 301 1912) 191
‘The Course of Economic Development’ ‘The Nation State and Economic Policy’
(Mannheim lectures, 1897) 12–28 (Freiburg Inaugural Lecture,
‘Economy and Society’ viii, 123, 145, 161, 1895) 18, 78, 105n.9, 141, 221,
297, 310, 313, 340, 368, 371, 241n.109, 247n.1, 299, 326,
384–5 330n.153, 335, 381
‘Economy and Society’ (c.1910–14) 9, ‘The “Objectivity” of Knowledge in Social
77–8, 109, 160n.48, 175, 182–9, Science’ (1904) 3, 53, 105, 129–32,
193–9, 205, 297, 318, 325, 327, 148, 150, 280n.142, 285–6
335–6, 371, 382, 385–6 ‘On Some Categories of a Sociology of
‘Classes, social rank and parties’ Verstehen (understanding)’ 9n.31,
(c.1910–14) 238n.99, 383–4 42, 131, 193–4, 196n.67, 260
Sociology of Herrschaft On the History of Medieval Trading Societies
(c.1911–14) 128, 188–9, 221, (1889) 108, 303, 332n.160, 386
305, 308, 310, 312, 315–16, ‘On the situation of bourgeois democracy in
317–22, 325, 329, 351, 367, 386 Russia’ (1906), ‘Russia’s transition
402 Index
Weber, Max: (cont.) 215–17, 233–4, 240–1, 257, 297,
to pseudo-constitutionalism’ 305, 326, 336, 380n.127, 382–3
(1906) 146, 155n.22, 237 Zwischenbetrachtung (Interim Observations,
‘Outline of Universal Social and Economic 1915, 1919–20) 145, 196–8,
History’ (1919–20) 165, 201–4, 207, 271–3, 277n.130,
240n.107, 380n.127, 383n.143 281, 284, 376
Parliament and Government in a Weingarten, Hermann 30, 341–5
Restructured Germany welfare, welfare policy 358
(1917–18) 326–7 Wellhausen, Julius 256
‘Politics as a Vocation’ (1919) 146, 195, Weltanschauung, see world-views
219, 314 Wesley, John 203
The Position of Rural Labour in East Elbean Westphalia 73
Germany (1893) 61, 72, 88 Westphalia, Peace of (1648), 340
‘Practical National Economy’ Wilhelm II, Kaiser 86, 180n.29, 333
(1895–9) 23–5 Windelband, Wilhelm 119
‘Protestant Sects and the Spirit of Wissenschaft xiv, 5, 10–11, 23, 35, 44, 47,
Capitalism’ (1907, 1919) 145, 87n.10, 89, 92–3, 100, 105–6,
151–2, 160–1, 214, 216, 307, 114–16, 118, 131–2, 139, 150,
354–61, 369n.92, 382–3 178, 184, 208, 221–2, 238, 247n.1,
‘Psychophysics of Industrial Labour’ 273, 275, 278n.136, 283, 285–7,
(1908–9) 72–3, 75n.98, 145–6, 161 318, 326, 374n.109, 387–8; see also
Roman Agrarian History (1891) 60, 108 specialization, academic
‘Roscher and Knies’ (1903–6) 10n.38, Wissenschaftslehre 285
40–2 “world”, relation of religion to the 87, 105,
‘Knies and the Irrationality Problem’ 122–3, 134, 140, 191, 195, 197,
(1905–6) 3, 41–2 203, 215, 218–19, 222, 227, 236,
‘Roscher’s Historical Method’ 252–3, 260, 268, 271–3, 276–7,
(1902–3) 42, 148 280–93, 313, 324, 341, 351–3,
‘The Rural Community’ (St. Louis, 388–9
1904) 51, 53, 55, 167, 241 innerworldly (innerweltlich) conduct 138–9,
‘Science [Wissenschaft] as a Vocation’ (1917, 199, 245, 252, 264, 272, 280–1,
1919) 146, 150, 260, 278, 287, 289, 357, 369, 374
293, 321 flight from the world (mystical) 134, 203,
Sociology of Associations (Vereinswesen) 244–5, 272, 276
(1910) 361 rejection of the world (originally ascetic) 203,
‘Some Categories of a Sociology of 244, 271
Understanding [Verstehen]’ world-views (Weltanschauungen) 100, 104, 118,
(1913) 42, 130n.9, 131, 193–4, 244, 287, 370
196n.67, 260 World War (First) 83, 149, 202, 205–12,
‘State doctrine of Anabaptism’ (projected 326–35
essay, 1904) 76, 155 work ethic, see Protestant work ethic
Suffrage and Democracy in Germany Wuppertal 177
(1917) 146, 267, 326–7
‘Vorbemerkung’ (Preliminary Remarks, Zinzendorf, N. L. Count von 344, 347, 381
1919–20) 103, 159, 165–6, Zwingli, Ulrich 264