Considered one of the founders of modern sociology, German sociologist and historian MAX WEBER (1864-1920) long studied the impact of religion on culture-is most famous work is 1905’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism-but he was also renowned as a thinker on economic issues. Here, in this classic collection of lectures first published in English in 1927 and translated by American economist Frank Hyneman Knight (1885-1972), Weber brings his keen and lively sociological eye to the history of commerce, money, and industrial endeavor, discussing: . agricultural organization and the problem of agrarian communism . the house community and the clan . the evolution of the family as conditioned by economic factors . the condition of the peasants before the entrance of capitalism . capitalistic development of the manor . stages in the development of industry and mining . the origin of the European guilds . the factory and its forerunners . forms of organization of transportation and commerce . money and monetary history . the meaning of modern capitalism . the first great speculative crisis . citizenship as an economic concept . the evolution of the capitalistic spirit . and much more.