The Ghosts of Max Weber in the Economic History of Preindustrial Europe

Abstract

Abstract: During the past fifty years, economic historians trained in economics have turned Max Weber into a champion of the cultural foundations of economic growth that he was not. The article examines the reasons and consequences of this misappropriation. It begins by highlighting Weber’s aversion to monocausal explanations and identifies two lines of argument in his voluminous writings on the historical development of Western capitalism: one stressing religious values and one focusing on political and legal institutions. While Weber never fully reconciled these two lines of argument, he considered them complementary rather than mutually exclusive. The article continues by tracing the engagement (or lack thereof) with Weber in the work of Douglass C. North and in a recent flurry of papers on the “economics of religion” that ostensibly tests the empirical validity of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905). It then discusses the return of interest in the coevolution of cultural and institutional processes of change among some economists and political scientists. Throughout, the article signals how this reception history went hand in hand with a decline in exchanges between economists and scholars in other disciplines. Ultimately, it argues for the importance of incorporating the history of disciplines in our disciplinary practices. More specifically, it stresses the continued relevance of Weber’s research agenda for the comparative and historical study of capitalisms (in the plural), in spite of the fact that many of his conclusions appear now outdated.