Max Weber interprets rational action not in terms of individual actors but rather in terms of macrostructure and social order. In Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Weber develops the argument that society itself is the result of successive application of rational action in the context of and a shared experience of community order and stability that enable social processes and organization to occur.
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 movement to be fully discussed later) both as ruling classes and as ruled, both as majority and as minority, have shown a special tendency to develop economic rationalism which cannot be observed to the same extent among Catholics either in the one situation or in the other (Weber, 1992, p. 12)
On the other hand, capitalism contained an element of irrationality; Weber cites "the devotion to labour in the calling [which] . . . has grown . . . so irrational fr...