Max Weber's Views of Religious Traditions

According to Weber, the origins and development of various religious traditions in the creative human enterprise are relevant to the rationalization of social order. Whatever opinion one has of religion is irrelevant to the evidence that the religious response to found experience has to do with the deliberate attempts to make the cosmos increasingly thinkable. Religious consciousness, says Weber, is a method of organizing, or regulating, experience. In Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Weber stresses the rationalization dynamics that went to work after the Reformation, as the Protestant ethic of material enterprise and a life of work (or "life's work") spread throughout Europe to counter the Catholic ethic of doctrinal authority and preoccupation with matters spiritual. Indeed, he locates the dynamic in the personality and career of Luther and Calvin. In a broad sense Protestantism as a counter to Catholic otherworldliness made a project of finding an ethical theory of the material world. As Weber puts it:

Protestants (especially certain branches of the

. . .
ible hand" of market order and rationality held to be a feature of capitalism. In a footnote Weber (213) also quotes Smith's explanation of general acquiescence in capitalism in terms of "self-love," or the benefits derived by rational participants who exchange what they have of value in the capitalist marketplace. These are not sexual or psychological but material benefits. For the relationship between rational action and self-interest involves formulating the compulsions of individuals in economic rather than spiritual terms, i.e., in terms of cost and benefit instead of good and evil. It is important to recognize that Weber's approach to his topic is systematic to the point of being scientific. Despite the religious subject matter, Weber does not resort to polemical or moralistic rhetoric, except in so far as he valorizes and universalizes the concept of rationalism, or rationalization, that invisible force, process, and attitude whereby a society evolves away from a world explained by superstition, magic, and emotion toward social structure and organization that can be controlled (or, at any rate, explained). That does not mean that a rational attitude guarantees a perfectly reasonable and just social structure, still less ra
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