Abstract

Max Weber’s studies of the religions of China, India, and ancient Palestine and of the “Protestant ethic” were oriented toward illuminating their “economic ethics” – the ways, in other words, in which their doctrines did or did not conduce to birthing “modern rational capitalism,” as Weber identified the new economic order. Defining the explanandum in these terms was testimony to Weber’s preoccupation with questions raised about the modern world by Karl Marx; it is not too much to say that most of Weber’s scholarly efforts were in some sense a response to Marx’s historical materialism. But recent economic history has cast considerable doubt on the persuasiveness of Weber’s arguments about the importance of Protestantism in facilitating Western dominance of the world. Yet Weber’s preoccupation with “economic ethics” and their consequences -- understandable given his intellectual situation -- may have distracted us from a more solid, more defensible core of his writings on religion. Against this background, we may need to re-think fundamentally our “reception” of Weber’s oeuvre, de-emphasizing his analysis of the causes of the rise of capitalism and focusing instead on the tools with which he has supplied us for the purpose of social analysis generally. Here the debate on the Axial Age helps clarify Weber’s understanding of social analysis as against that of his heirs who defend the Axial Age thesis, which posits a kind of uniformity in the responses of several of the cultures of the ancient world to comparable problems of human development. In contrast, Weber was more inclined to stress the differences between these religious traditions and the consequences of those differences for social and economic order in the places where they took hold.