Dominant schools of sociological theory today tend to downplay, or even omit entirely, a consideration of ‘dynamically autonomous’ ideas. This investigation reconstructs a case study - Max Weber’s analysis of the rise of otherworldly salvation religions - in which just these ideas are discovered as capable of placing thrusts into motion toward the constitution of groups and social change. Does Weber’s argument regarding the causal impetus of ideas remain plausible in secularized societies? Tensions in the American world-view, it is argued, give birth to dynamically autonomous ideas that, in an analogous manner, call forth new groupings. Analyses of social change in American society that refer alone to political and economic interests, social networks, rational choices, power, interaction, resource mobilization, state authority and structural differentiation are seen to omit an important, if often amorphous, background causal force.
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