Weber's Protestant Ethic and the Impact of R eligion on Social Life

1) Major significances of Weber's work:

--a) What makes the West distinct?

--b) Ideas have a strong influence on the course of history

--c) Religious doctrines influence individual psychology, and thus affect economic action and structures

hence: Capitalism (the systematic pursuit of profit on the basis of formally free labor) emerges out of the Protestant ethic (the systematic pursuit of salvation on the basis of diligent labor in a calling)

--d) the use of ideal types as embodiments of large-scale social processes (e.g., Ben Franklin, John Calvin)

2) Question: why were Protestants disproportionately represented in large, profit-oriented industrial enterprise?

Answer: their religious beliefs pushed them there. Distinguish this cultural answer from a structural one about the economic goals of religious minorities.

Consider the relationship:

religious beliefs <-----> social position

3) Important terms in the sect of Calvinism:

--Predestination: the idea that god has chosen "the elect" independent of anything we can say or do

--Ad maiorem gloria dei: to the greater glory of god: we are put on earth to make manifest god's will

--calling: we have a specific vocation in life to follow systematically and diligently

4) Biblical parable of the talents and the story of Jacob and Esau. How is interpretation critical to what these stories mean?

5) Ben Franklin and the secularization of the Protestant Ethic

--"time is money"

--"the good paymaster is lord of another man's purse"

--"he that spends a groat a day idly, spends idly above six pounds a year, which is the price for the use of a hundred pounds"

6) The divorce of the spirit of capitalism from the Protestant Ethic

--does accumulation become an obsession on its own terms? or . . .

--do we lose all sense of purpose, of direction, and hence of any ethical aspect to life?