The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Unwin Counterpoint Paperbacks)

The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Unwin Counterpoint Paperbacks)

By: Max Weber  

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Average Customer Rating: 4.5 out of 5

Publisher: Routledge

Customer Review: 5 out of 5
Weber: True in spirit, true in form - Max Weber's seminal articles on the spirit (if not the origin) of capitalism, first issued in 1904 and 1905 and then jointly published around 1920, have stirred as much debate as any other sociological texts save Marx. Indeed, this is a work weighted with rep, not all of it deserved. In and of itself, "Protestant Ethic" perhaps does not date undamaged, but it does retain considerable power, conceptually and theoretically if not statistically. Of greatest concern to many readers today, particularly students caught in the web of a professor assigning the text, is the ability of the steward of a given edition to craft a package that can be readily assimilated.

I give you: Talcott Parsons. Not only is Mr. Parsons a gifted translator (for this is a work which has frequently lost much in translation), he also has the presence of mind to give over the introduction to an equally gifted Weberian scholar. Mr. Anthony Giddens beautifully sets the table for the main course, the taste of which is much more pleasant (and identifiable) in the light of his prefacing. Now, scholars may wage wars over whether he sets the table correctly, but that's a debate for another forum. For our purposes here, this is as well-translated and accessible a package of this work as you're going to find. I certainly grasped it, well and enjoyably. And if I can, lord knows anyone can!

Customer Review: 4 out of 5
Complementary readings to Weber's classic book - There are already many good reviews to this book, so I will only suggest reading the following books in addition to Weber's work: 1) "The passions and the interests" by Albert Hirschman; 2) "The mind and the market: capitalism in Western thought" by Jerry Muller; 3) "The Spirit of Capitalism: Nationalism and Economic Growth" by Liah Greenfeld; 4) 4.1. and 4.2: "The world economy. A millennial perspective" (2001) plus "The world economy: Historical Statistics" (2003) by Angus Maddison; 5) "The Churching Of America, 1776-2005: Winners And Losers In Our Religious Economy" by Roger Finke and Rodney Stark ; and 6) "Power and Plenty: Trade, War, and the World Economy in the Second Millennium" by Ronald Findlay and Kevin H. O'Rourke.

Customer Review: 3 out of 5
Great argument, poor translation that needs freshening - While I cannot claim to be able to read this classic work in the original German, I share many of the other reviewers' frustrations with regard to Talcott Parson's English translation of it. First is all the passages from other authors which are left in the original French, Latin etc. and which the average anglophone reader today will be hard-pressed to decipher. Second is the shortage of explanatory notes pertaining to the various minutiae upon which Weber dwells. Contemporary readers can't be expected to know anything about Pietism, for example, so a few footnotes would have been helpful. Finally, there's the dated quality of Parsons' language which seems more redolent of the 19th century than the mid-20th. Every time he uses the word "to-day" complete with its archaic hyphen, it's hard not to be reminded of how musty this translation is and how the far the "to-day" he's writing about is removed from the "today" we live in.

For all the above reasons I would be reluctant to assign this book to an undergraduate class. Surely there's someone out there willing to take a shot at a new, fresher rendering of this book for the 21st century and fix some of the shortcomings of this rather flawed translation.

Customer Review: 5 out of 5
interesting - this book was somewhat difficult to get through because of the footnotes (i have trouble with footnotes), once you get that point though, it's a fantastic book. it discusses why the capitalist system we have now, and the morality we have now is the way it is. we have all heard of the protestant ethic yes? it is that you must work hard, without pleasuring yourself too much, for the sake of pleasing god. working as hard as you can allows a person to 'most effectively' utilize the gifts god has given them, but they cannot take pleasure in the fruits if this because too much pleasure would result in the breaking of some sin, greed or sloth or what have you, pretty much all of them can be connected i'm sure. but if you can't have fun with what you're working so hard to create, why work so hard? because you are pleasing god, setting yourself up for the next life if you will. well this is wonderful for a historical reference, but we're very much secularized in society today so why does any of this matter? well, weber contends that a man named calvin (yes calvinism) took the protestant ethic and tied it to capitalism. calvin took the protestant ethic, which was good because it got things done with little complaint from the workers, and connected it to the economic system by turning god into money. we can imagine the problems with this, if nothing else, there would be trouble behind the fact that what motivated people before was spiritual, and now we expect the same results because of different motivations. that's like using a car to float down a river instead of a boat. ya cars go forward wonderfully, on the medium they were designed for.

so now we all ascetically put ourselves into our work towards the end of making more money. i'm not a history buff so i don't know if this is true or was just used as an example of how religion effected capitalism, but i don't really care as i can see the connections between the protesant ethic and our capitalist morality.

weber calls where we are now the iron cage, kind of pessimistic, but he believes that now we're here, we're stuck here. we can't get out of the mental state we are in now, which i don't necessarily agree with, but can see how someone could. if you leave the economic system today, chances are you'll end up on the street. i think this is my favourite quote, it's right at the end of the book and sums up the final point quite well.

"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 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 achieved before "

an eye opener to say the least, but a really good read.

Customer Review: 5 out of 5
Anatomy of the Beast - A decisive intellectual victory over the numbing utilitarianism of the day -- as important now as it was a hundred years ago. In his masterpiece, Max Weber traces the development of the worldly Protestant ascetic spirit from its predecessor (medieval otherworldly asceticism) to its modern religious peak (Puritan social ethics) and beyond, to the current utilitarian economic thought (with no religious elements whatsoever).

Weber also reveals the development of the spirit of capitalism as a tautologous paradigm of thought that has a long time ago abandoned its original religious motives, leaving behind only a system -- a ghost of a ghost -- that everyone must reproduce in order to survive. This is the "iron cage of [capitalistic] modernity" which we inhabit, and as Weber says, it will not be gone before "the last load of coal has been burned"... A chilling remark in retrospect, as we have now found out that the ever-growing global economy -- a growth for the sake of growth in both communist countries (especially China) and Western democracies -- is cooking up the Globe.

I suggest you waste your money on this.

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