|
COPYRIGHT 2004 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
In the fall of 1897, Max Weber suffered a nervous breakdown. He was thirty-three years old--still quite young, in the rigidly hierarchical world of German academia--and occupied a prestigious chair in political economics at the University of Heidelberg. Over the previous decade, routinely working until 1 a.m., he had assembled a list of publications that filled several pages and ranged from the agrarian history of Rome to the deficiencies of the German stock market. Following his breakdown, according to his wife, Marianne, who also happened to be his cousin, "everything was too much for him; he could not read, write, talk, walk or sleep without torment." A slight improvement in his condition was followed by a relapse, another improvement, and then an even more serious breakdown. By October, 1903, he had given up teaching altogether; apparently, the idea of having to prepare lectures and deliver them at a predetermined time was more than he could bear. The following year, he recovered sufficiently to write what would become his most celebrated work and one of the founding texts of the emergent discipline of sociology, "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism."
Originally published as a two-part essay in the scholarly journal Archiv fur Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, "The Protestant Ethic" is brief (at least by Weberian standards), dense, and completely idiosyncratic. Nominally, it is a work of cultural history; why, Weber asks, did the institutions of modern capitalism come into being in a particular region (northern Europe) at a particular time (the seventeenth century) even though "the auri sacra fames," as he puts it--the greed for gold--"is as old as the history of man?" Weber was not the first to pose this question; in German academic circles, it was the subject of running debate. Nor would he be the last. But the answer he came up with--in effect, that Donald Trump is the spiritual heir of Martin Luther--probably still ranks as the most perverse.
Almost immediately, "The Protestant Ethic" became a target of criticism, which Weber, alternately aggrieved and irascible, spent years trying to answer. (By the time he republished the work, shortly before his death, in 1920, the footnotes he had added had grown longer than the original essay.) In the century since then, there is hardly a claim made in "The Protestant Ethic," either about the history of religion or about the history of economics, that hasn't been challenged; one Weber scholar recently dubbed the ongoing debate "the academic Hundred Years' War." The reason that Weber's essay remains so compelling despite all the controversy is that it isn't really a work about the past; it's an allegory...
Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.
|
Bookmark this article
Print this article
Link to this article
Email this article
Digg It!
Add to del.icio.us
RSS
