Kirjahaku

Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic: Twin Histories presents an entirely new portrait of Max Weber, one of the most prestigious social theorists in recent history, using his most famous work, The Protestant Ethic and the "Spirit" of Capitalism, as its central point of reference. It offers an intellectual biography of Weber framed along historical lines -- something which has never been done before. It re-evaluates The Protestant Ethic -- a text surprisingly neglected by scholars -- supplying a missing intellectual and chronological centre to Weber's life and work. Peter Ghosh suggests that The Protestant Ethic is the link which unites the earlier (pre-1900) and later (post-1910) phases of his career. He offers a series of fresh perspectives on Weber's thought in various areas -- charisma, capitalism, law, politics, rationality, bourgeois life, and (not least) Weber's unusual religious thinking, which was 'remote from god' yet based on close dialogue with Christian theology. This approach produces a convincing view of Max Weber as a whole; while previously the sheer breadth of his intellectual interests has caused him to be read in a fragmentary way according to a series of specialized viewpoints, this volume seeks to put him back together again as a real individual.

Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic: Twin Histories presents an entirely new portrait of Max Weber, one of the most prestigious social theorists in recent history, using his most famous work, The Protestant Ethic and the "Spirit" of Capitalism, as its central point of reference. It offers an intellectual biography of Weber framed along historical lines - something which has never been done before. It re-evaluates The Protestant Ethic -- a text surprisingly neglected by scholars -- supplying a missing intellectual and chronological centre to Weber's life and work. Peter Ghosh suggests that The Protestant Ethic is the link which unites the earlier (pre-1900) and later (post-1910) phases of his career. He offers a series of fresh perspectives on Weber's thought in various areas -- charisma, capitalism, law, politics, rationality, bourgeois life, and (not least) Weber's unusual religious thinking, which was 'remote from god' yet based on close dialogue with Christian theology. This approach produces a convincing view of Max Weber as a whole; while previously the sheer breadth of his intellectual interests has caused him to be read in a fragmentary way according to a series of specialized viewpoints, this volume seeks to put him back together again as a real individual.

In his later life, Max Weber's work focused on ideas about rule and hierarchy encapsulated in the German word Herrschaft. These ideas are unique in the canon of Western political theory in that they derive almost exclusively from social categories (agency, power, hierarchy), rather than more conventional political ones (constitutions, democracy). This produces a picture of 'political' life which is self-evident to us today, yet it is theoretically novel. Weber was passionately committed to the idea of human agency: that all people contained within them the potential for ordering their lives in ways they found meaningful. But he also accepted the presence of powerful external constraints on agency, created by the exercise of agency itself--the unequal outcomes of free competition--or impersonal forces, such as technology and bureaucracy. So free societies and polities revolve around two opposite poles: freedom and hierarchy. Weber developed these ideas in parallel with what he now began to call his 'sociology'. The foundations of his thought go back to 1904-5, but engagement with political theory made him reflect more carefully on what one could say about social life in general, and how much this differed from conditions specific to politics or any other life-sphere. He evolved an original, 'federal' model of sociology: a small general core set alongside much larger special sociologies on (for example) politics, religion, law, the economy. This is unique amongst the classical sociologists. In this way, the book covers the major novelties of Weber's final decade and presents the first comprehensive historical portrait of Weber's political ideas. Weber has an immense variety of modern readers and users, but the perspective of the historian with no other commitment than to what he himself thought, is the nearest that we can come to a detached or neutral view of him.