The Incredible Shrinking Protestant Ethic

Abstract

Max Weber's body of writings represents the most sophisticated effort in the classical sociological tradition to create an historical, comparative, and interpretive sociology. However, his book?more precisely, two lengthy articles?on The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism remains his most focused attempt to actually explain a particular historical transforma tion. Was he successful in demonstrating his main claims or even making them entirely clear? The two new volumes currently under review pro vide valuable evidence for the examination of this and a series of related questions. David Chalcraft and Austin Harrington have published a collection of English translations of Weber's replies between 1907-1910 to his early critics, Fischer and Rachfahl. The book contains indispensible summaries of the original critiques as well as an informative introduction which discusses the importance of Weber's "anticritical" writings and draws attention to Weber's language usages (Weber, 2001). Peter Baehr and Gordon Wells have given us the first English translation of Weber's original essays on The Protes tant Ethic, published in the Archiv f?r Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpoli tik in 1905.1 In addition to The Protestant Ethic of 1905, the Baehr-Wells volume also contains a variety of supplementary texts. These include trans lations of Weber's 1906 essay on " 'Churches' and 'Sects' in North America" and his replies to Fisher and Rachfahl. There are also selections from the 1920 edition's notes detailing Weber's responses to Brentano and Sombart, and a new translation of Weber's "Prefatory Remarks" to the three vol ume Gesammelte Aufs?tze zur Religionssoziologie of 1920 (Weber, 2002b). The addition of these later texts represents an editorial temptation which