The Spirit of Modernity

Abstract

In this article, I reconstruct the reception of Max Weber’s essays on The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism in 20th-century Japanese social sciences. I will show that even during Weber’s lifetime, Japanese economists responded to the so-called ‘Weber thesis’ and were aware of the ongoing debate on the origins of capitalism in European social sciences. Since the first Japanese translation of Weber’s essays appeared in 1938, interpretations depended very much on the political and social change of the country in the forthcoming decades. I attempt to prove that after 1945 the understanding of Weber in Japanese social sciences became interdisciplinary. Basically the response of Japanese social scientists was twofold: on the one hand, they looked for functional equivalents to the Protestant ethic in Japan, and, on the other hand (and even more importantly), they understood Weber’s text as a blueprint for a successful modernization of their country, more or less through economic means.