Abstract

Available from UMI in association with The British Library. Requires signed TDF. ;The thesis presents an analysis and re-interpretation of Max Weber's essay on Chinese religions and society, "Konfuzianismus und Taoismus" . It aims at an explication and clarification of the text through reference to its sinological context, and its sociological context in Weber's series of essays on the economic ethics of the world religions. In particular, it attempts to demonstrate the inappropriateness of reading the essay as an "idealist" or "culturalist" explanation of the absence of modern rational capitalism from traditional China. ;Part One identifies the essay's lack of an explicit and integral analytical structure as a key problem of interpretation, and reconstructs the one originally advanced by Weber in his general introduction to the essays on the "Economic Ethics of the World Religions". This identifies the three problematics of KuT as: a configurational comparison of Confucianism, Taoism, and Puritanism as forms of practical rationalism; a causal analysis of the historical development of the distinctive characteristics of Chinese religions, with particular reference to the dialectical influence of material and ideal interests; a consequential analysis of the significance of Chinese religions for the formation of economic mentalities, and the non-development of a rational capitalist economy. ;Parts Two and Three analyse and reconstruct the text in relation to these three problematics. Part Four reappraises Weber's conclusions in the light of the foregoing and considers the extent to which KuT advances Weber's theses on the relative autonomy of religious doctrines and their practical and economic ethics. ;The overall conclusion is that Weber found the institutional complex of non-religious phenomena in China to be unfavourable to the development of capitalism, but this has itself to be explained as a product of the historical interaction between political organisation and religious traditions which underpinned fundamentally the specific course of both Western and Chinese social and economic history