On the Place of Allegory in the Methodological Conventions of a Critical Sociology: A Case Study of Max Weber's Protestant Ethic

Abstract

This paper undertakes a critical reading of Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism in order to demonstrate how the moral impulses of allegory and social fiction insinuate themselves within the narrative strains of an ethnographic research that often imagines itself as simply reporting “the social facts.” This place of the allegorical within the social sciences, particularly sociology, is read in symptomatic fashion. However, rather than decrying or denying the appearance of such moral fictions, this paper advocates working with and from the insights — both conscious and not — that the appearances of the allegorical generates, in order to construct a more rigorous and critical form of social scientific knowledge that is attentive to the workings of social power.