How and why does Weber try to seek a connection between the Spirit of Capitalism and the Protestant Ethic?

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How and why does Weber seek to establish a connection between the Spirit of Capitalism and the Protestant Ethic ?

“ A glance at the occupational statistics of any country of mixed religious composition brings to light…the fact that business leaders and owners of capital, as well as the higher grades of skilled labour, and even more the higher technically and commercially trained personnel enterprises, are overwhelmingly Protestant“ (Weber, 1974, p.35) In his essay The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism published in 1904-1905, Max Weber tries to find a connection between the development of Protestantism as a religion, with its new set of values and norms, and the emergence of this new “spirit of capitalism“ in Western Europe. In this essay, I will firstly define what Weber calls “ideal-types“ and which are central to understanding the sociological work undertaken in his demonstration. Secondly, I will define what Weber means by the “protestant ethic“ ; which includes the notions of predestination and `calling` in a Calvinist point of view and which is pivotal for him to link this particular ethic with this new “spirit of capitalism“ which I will then define in his own terms. My fourth argument will be devoted to showing how Weber succeeds in linking these two concepts together, highlighting the correlation existing between the two of them when we look at empirical facts. My last point will be to explain why Weber was so interested in establishing such a relation between the two factors and we will see that this eagerness is to be found in the socio-economic situation of Germany at the time of writing.

         

        The notion of “ideal-types“ in understanding the work of Weber is crucial. These sociological tools were created in order to simplify the reality of the world and of certain phenomenon to make explanations a bit easier. In his essay The Protestant Ethic Debate, Larry Ray defines these “ideal types“ as being “one-sided : they accentuate an aspect of social life that is relevant to the research at hand. They are analytical constructs that enable us to simplify a set of social relationships, to detail what is relevant and exclude misleading complexities“ (1987, p.98). Applied to this particular debate on the existence or not of a link between the spirit of capitalism and the protestant ethic, “ideal types“ are seen as clearly advantageous tools in the sense that they can analyse both a general, suprahistorical phenomena such as capitalism or moreover the “spirit“ of it in this case and historically unique phenomenon such as the protestant ethic which was very particular to the time of Weber’s thesis. Therefore, in order to construct a strong demonstration of his case, Weber needed these tools to organise and simplify his analysis of the rise of the spirit of capitalism in Western Europe in the end of the 19th Century.

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        The “Protestant Ethic“ in the Weberian sense is a set of values and norms specific to the Protestant religion that developed after the Reformation but more specifically in Calvinism as a branch of Protestantism. The idea of a ‘calling’ in Calvin’s doctrine is crucial to understand the ethic that derived from his thoughts. K. Morrison argues in his book that “In contrast to Catholic theology, Protestants interpreted the ‘calling’ to signify service to wordly rather than otherworldly duties“. This idea of ‘calling’ is closely linked to the other very important idea of predestination in Calvinism. Predestination means that God has already ...

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