Abstract

In a well-known passage of the The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber declares his interest in analyzing the influence of those psychological sanctions which, originating in religious belief and the practice of religion, give a direction to practical conduct and held the individual to it. This paper investigates Max Weber’s vision of the psychology of worldviews, focusing on two related problems: how religious beliefs and the practice of religion originate psychological sanctions and impulses that motivate people to act in certain ways, and how such psychological sanctions and impulses can become organized in a more or less rationalized conduct of life. The paper suggests that the centrality of the sociology of religion in Weber’s thought is in part a consequence of the fact that the religious sphere makes it particularly evident that there is a deep interconnection among the human need for ordering empirical reality, the emergence of social and life-orders, and the formation of personality