Max Weber and the ‘Spirit’ of The Protestant Ethic

Abstract

Weber’s account of the iron cage of capitalism, which once might have stirred readers to resist the alienation it describes, has by now lost much of its critical force, as if the metaphor itself had turned to steel. And yet, just as Weber thought there was in the notion of ‘duty in a calling’ a ghost of capitalism’s religious origins, I argue that there is in the language of The Protestant Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism a ghost of the text’s once critical nature. With this in mind, and following Weber’s lead as he conjures the ‘spirit’ of capitalism and traces its roots to the Reformation, this article finds in The Protestant Ethic evidence of a certain ‘spirit’ of Weber’s science — a science that decides on the meaning of its evidence in ways not always avowed, and finds its own antecedents in the hermeneutic practices it analyzes.