History and theory in Max Weber’s ‘Protestant Ethic’

It is an old cliché that Weber’s ‘Protestant Ethic’ (PE) is historically wrong or deficient. Recent work by German sociologists has reinforced this view, with the aim of further demoting the text within Weber’s oeuvre: as if it was a work of bad history and nothing more. This paper takes a contrary view. It argues that the text is neither ‘wrong’ (to say so is a category error) nor is it confined to the past. Rather, it is much misunderstood, and a principal reason for this is our ignorance of Weber’s uniquely sophisticated historicism, an area of his thought that has hardly been examined hitherto. The PE must be read as a product of this historicism, and set within the comparative context of contemporary European historicism, which was then at its apogee. Seen in this light, it is not only a pre-eminent guide to Weber’s modern social theory, but one of the most carefully constructed and original historical works in all of European thought.