More by Max Weber
"Rationalism" is a historical concept that contains within itself a world of contradictions.
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905)
Only on the assumption of belief in the validity of values is the attempt to espouse value-judgments meaningful. However, to judge the validity of such values is a matter of faith.
Limitation to specialized work, with a renunciation of the Faustian universality of man which it involves, is a condition of any valuable work in the modern world.
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905)
Luther understands monasticism as a product of an egoistic lovelessness that withdraws from one's duties in the world. By contrast, this-worldly work in a vocation appears to him to be a visible expression of brotherly love, a notion he anchors in a highly unrealistic manner indeed and in contrast—almost grotesquely—to the well-known passages of Adam Smith.
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905)
Modern capitalism has as little use for liberum arbitrium [undisciplined] persons as laborers as it has for the businessman fully without scruples in the running of his company.
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905)
Social action is "such action as, according to its subjective meaning to the actor or actors, involves the attitudes and actions of others and is oriented to them in its course."
Talcott Parsons (1937)
The wide chasm separating the inevitabilities of economic life from the Christian ideal ... kept the most devout groups and all those with the most consistently developed ethics far from the life of trade.
No sociologist, for instance, should think himself too good, even in his old age, to make tens of thousands of quite trivial computations in his head and perhaps for months at a time
All Max Weber quotes →