Programmable Mutter
neveragain.tech
El Postkeynesiano
There’s a weird disconnect between the most widely read of Max Weber’s works, and what I understand to be the most influential. Granted that I’m not a professional sociologist, but most of what I see cited among Weber’s works are “Politics as a Vocation,” containing Weber’s famous definition of a state as a human community claiming a monopoly over legitimate violence in a defined area; and “Bureaucracy,” which contains Weber’s description of the modern civil service and contrasts it with older forms of gove
All of which is to say that the works of Weber’s that people still care about are those which map out the functioning of modern government in industrial democracies, whereas the main work of Weber’s that everyone is expected to know is The Protestant Ethic . The thing about The Protestant Ethic is that it’s not very good. At best it feels like an observation about a historical curiosity: this particular thing (the Industrial Revolution) happened in these specific societies (Protestant ones), but not in thes
In any case, my sense is that Weber’s real long-lasting impact comes from his mapping the structure of modern bureaucratized industrial democracies, not from a (seems to me) rather fanciful story about the origins of the Industrial Revolution. Yet when I told a friend recently that I was reading the classic sociologists, including Weber, but that I was specifically not reading the Protestant Ethic (having read it previously), he arched his eyebrow and gave me a funny look. My hunch is that sociologists woul
Programmable Mutter
neveragain.tech
El Postkeynesiano