The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and Other Writings by Max Weber

Author:Max Weber [Weber, Max]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Non-Fiction, Classics, Politics, Academic (School), German Literature, Social Sciences, General, Religion; Politics & State, World, Religious Studies, Politics & Social Sciences, Religious, Sociology, Ethics & Moral Philosophy, Religion, Philosophy, Politics & State, Religion & Spirituality, Church & State, History, Religious Studies & Reference, Literary Fiction, British Literature, Ideology, Theology, Christianity, Protestantism
ISBN: 9781101098479
Google: 4MmligHndssC
Amazon: B002GJGIDQ
Goodreads: 9746298
Publisher: Penguin Group (USA)
Published: 2002-04-29T23:00:00+00:00

“Churches” and “Sects” in North America

An ecclesiastical and sociopolitical sketch

Editors’ Preface: “ ‘Churches’ and ‘Sects’ in North America” is one of Weber’s more exuberant essays. Composed shortly after he returned from America, it combines vivid firsthand observation—the evocative description of adult baptism in North Carolina is a memorable highlight—with the famous distinction between “churches” (inclusive, obligatory organizations which minister to all that have been born into them, faithful and reprobate alike) and “sects” (exclusive, voluntary communities of the religiously qualified). Weber argued that sects like the Quakers, with their insistence on the priority of God over man, and of individual conscience over state authority, were powerful vehicles of modern autonomy and freedom.

The essay appeared in Die Christliche Welt1 and reworked an earlier version that Weber penned for the German liberal newspaper, the Frankfurter Zeitung. In a final metamorphosis, the article became “The Protestant Sects and the Spirit of Capitalism” and was published in the first volume of his Collected Essays in the Sociology of Religion (1920). It can be found in the anthology, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, edited and translated by Hans H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills. We have chosen to translate the Christliche Welt version because of its close relationship to The Protestant Ethic of 1905 and because of its prominence in Weber’s rebuttals of Felix Rachfahl.

For the context of the essay translated below, and for the twist it gives to the more famous argument in The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism, see the Introduction, pp. xiiiff.

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