The Protestant Ethic Debate: Weber’s Replies to His Critics, 1907-1910

Max Weber’s famous study of 1904-1905, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism , has been, and continues to be, an influential text in the sociology of modern Western societies. However the text was not originally meant to stand alone in the form which we know it today. Weber intended to extend the study with further installments in the journal he helped found in 1903, the Archiv fur Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik . Although he never produced these essays, he did, instead, complete four lengthy Replies or Antikritiken to reviews of the text by two German historians of the day, H. Karl Fischer and Felix Rachfahl. Writt en between 1907 and 1910, the Replies offer an insight into Weber’s intentions in the original study, with this volume offering all four Replies in English. Ranging across issues such as the differences between Lutheranism and Calvinism, the spirit of the Renaissance and the definition of capitalism, the Replies clarify the aspects of the hypothesis about an elective affinity between Protestant asceticism and rational economic conduct of life .