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Western Capitalism & Max Weber

Max Weber, in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, is concerned with exploring elements of culture that laid the foundation for the emergence of modern Western capitalism. This exploration essentially focuses on the connection between the religious and the material. This concern is what makes the book crucially important for contemporary societies:

. . . It is, of course, not my aim to substitute for a one-sided materialistic an equally one-sided spiritualistic causal interpretation of culture and of history. Each is equally possible, but each, if it does not serve as the preparation, but as the conclusion of an investigation, accomplishes equally little in the interest of historical truth (Weber 183).

What Weber is after is a portrait of the development of Western civilization and capitalism as products of both religious and materialistic beliefs and practices. He wants to discover specifically how capitalism developed as a response to dramatic changes in religious beliefs. Capitalism, says Weber, is first and last the pursuit of profit. However, he argues that what matters is not a pursuit of profit for the mere sake of profit, but rather the pursuit of profit for what that profit symbolizes, for what profit says about the individual and the relationship of that individual's soul with God. With the coming of Protestantism came questions and doubts about each individual's salvation. The drive to acquire wealth and capital became a drive to prove that one was blessed by God and that one's soul was marked for salvation.

In the West, this capitalistic pursuit has developed into a system not experienced elsewhere in the world: "the rational capitalistic organization of (formally) free labor" (Weber 21). However, the specifics of the process of capitalism are only intermediate concerns of Weber. What he is primarily after is the relationship between capitalism and religion, specifically "business leaders and owner...

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Western Capitalism & Max Weber. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 16:54, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1704919.html