Keywords (Next Week)

Durkheim: Sociology and the Moral Crisis

1. Sociological method

a) social fact

b) normal vs. pathological

2. Suicide

a) sociological explanation

b) anomie
 Week 4
Weber: The Protestant Ethic and Rationalization

1. Protestantism and the Protestant ethic

2. The Protestant ethic as the spirit of capitalism

3. Effects on modern society

4. Model of analysis of society

Max Weber
(1864-1920)
 Protestantism and the Protestant Ethic

1. Protestantism: branch of Christianity created in protest against

the perceived corruption and excesses of the Catholic Church
Martin Luther
(1483-1546)

Jean Calvin
(1509-1564)
 Protestantism and the Protestant Ethic

2. Protestant ethic: Protestant-derived moral principles and cultural

values applied to a person’s everyday ways of thinking and acting

cultural foundation of capitalism (spirit)

 Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)

Nicolaes Maes,
The Housekeeper (1656)

Warren Buffett
 The Protestant Ethic as the Spirit of Capitalism
1. Overcome traditional religious
attitudes toward money: profit
making and wealth as sin (greed)

2. New Protestant ethic: rational

pursuit of profit and wealth as
morally acceptable (serve God
and realize will on earth)
 The Protestant Ethic as the Spirit of Capitalism

3. Predestination: God has determined in advance the fate of

each person’s soul (heaven or hell)

• search for signs of salvation

• most visible signs: success through the rational

accumulation of wealth

• rational accumulation of wealth: realization of one’s

calling
 The Protestant Ethic as the Spirit of Capitalism

4. Asceticism: self-denial and abstinence from worldly

pleasures to avoid temptation and sin
idleness

conspicuous consumption
(‘bougie’/’boujee’)
 The Protestant Ethic as the Spirit of Capitalism

5. Rationalism

• disciplined and strict lifestyle (asceticism)

• calculation
• efficiency

6. Spirit of capitalism:

• rational pursuit of wealth: save and reinvest profits

• ethic and culture of the bourgeoisie

 Effects on Modern Society

1. Paradox

Protestantism: necessary for the birth of capitalism

over time, capitalism no longer needs Protestantism

 Effects on Modern Society: Rationalization

"The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so.

For when asceticism was carried out of monastic cells into everyday
life, and began to dominate worldly morality, it did its part in
building the tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order. This
order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of
machine production which today determine the lives of all the
individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly
concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force. Perhaps
it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt.
In Baxter's view the care for external goods should only lie on the
shoulders of the “saint like a light cloak, which can be thrown aside
at any moment.” But fate decreed that the cloak should become an
iron cage.”

(Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism)

Effects on Modern Society: Rationalization

cloak iron cage

 Effects on Modern Society

2. Iron cage of rationalization

a) spread and domination of rationalism

b) self-created imposition
 Effects on Modern Society

“No one knows who will live in this cage in the future, or
whether at the end of this tremendous development entirely new
prophets will arise, or there will be a great rebirth of old ideas
and ideals, or, if neither, mechanized petrification, embellished
with a sort of convulsive self-importance. For of the last stage of
this cultural development, it might well be truly said:
“Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity
imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before
achieved.””

(Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism)

 Model of Analysis of Society

1. Centrality of culture

a) ideas, beliefs, and values can guide action in the

material world

b) religious culture influences how actors behave in the

economic realm

2. Comparison to Marx

a) not completely reject historical materialism, but “one-

sided”

b) mutual influence of economic and cultural factors

 Marx Weber

superstructure non-
economic
(non-economic) economic

base
(economic)