[BRIEF NOTE] Reflections on Weber
Mar. 22nd, 2006 06:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldI've just read Max Weber's famous 1905 tome The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. It's an impressive piece of scholarship; I can see why it's still so frequently cited.
The biggest problem with this The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, apart from Weber's unsupported assumption that the mass of capitalists actually behaved the way that they were supposed to behave, is that it is (ironically) historically uninformed. In one of his footnotes, Weber refers to the religious situation in Ireland as confirming his thesis about Protestantism's relative virtues. This judgement is, to say the least, historically naïve, not taking into account the way in which Irish Catholics were systematically deprived of any ability to enter capitalism, or the historically contingent nature of Irish Catholicism (imagine what could have been if Ireland followed the Welsh route towards vernacular Protestantism), or for that matter the traditionally dependent position of the island of Ireland upon larger, wealthier, and more powerful polities. I don't have the time or, frankly, the inclination to examine this book's theses in greater detail, but I think I could find a few more problems like this.
The biggest problem with this The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, apart from Weber's unsupported assumption that the mass of capitalists actually behaved the way that they were supposed to behave, is that it is (ironically) historically uninformed. In one of his footnotes, Weber refers to the religious situation in Ireland as confirming his thesis about Protestantism's relative virtues. This judgement is, to say the least, historically naïve, not taking into account the way in which Irish Catholics were systematically deprived of any ability to enter capitalism, or the historically contingent nature of Irish Catholicism (imagine what could have been if Ireland followed the Welsh route towards vernacular Protestantism), or for that matter the traditionally dependent position of the island of Ireland upon larger, wealthier, and more powerful polities. I don't have the time or, frankly, the inclination to examine this book's theses in greater detail, but I think I could find a few more problems like this.
