Table Of ContentThe Protestant Ethic Debate
STUDIES IN SOCIAL AND POLITICAL THOUGHT 3
STUDIES IN SOCIAL AND POLITICAL THOUGHT
Editor: Gerald Delanty, University of Liverpool
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edited by Robert Fine and Charles Turner
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The Protestant Ethic Debate: Max Weber’s Replies to his Critics, 1907–1910
edited by David Chalcraft and Austin Harrington
translated by Austin Harrington and Mary Shields
The Protestant Ethic Debate
Max Weber’s Replies to his Critics,
1907–1910
Edited by
DAVID J. CHALCRAFT
and AUSTIN HARRINGTON
Translated by
AUSTIN HARRINGTON
and MARY SHIELDS
LIVERPOOL UNIVERSITY PRESS
First published 2001 by
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Copyright © David J. Chalcraft, Austin Harrington and Mary Shields
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Contents
Acknowledgements pagevii
Introduction 1
Translators’ Note 21
Part I
1 Karl Fischer’s Review of The Protestant Ethic, 1907 27
2 Weber’s First Reply to Fischer, 1907 31
Part II
3 Karl Fischer’s Reply to Weber, 1908 41
4 Weber’s Second Reply to Fischer, 1908 43
Part III
5 Felix Rachfahl’s Review of The Protestant Ethic, 1909 55
6 Weber’s First Reply to Rachfahl, 1910 61
Part IV
7 Felix Rachfahl’s Reply to Weber, 1910 89
8 Weber’s Second Reply to Rachfahl, 1910 93
Bibliography 133
Index 141
v
Acknowledgements
This project began life in the Sociology Unit at Oxford Brookes University in
1994. Mary Shields was appointed Research Assistant to work alongside David
Chalcraft (Project Director and General Editor) on producing a translation and
critical edition of Weber’s replies to his critics. Mary and David would like
to thank the sociology staff at Oxford Brookes for their financial and moral
support for the project, in particular Frank Webster (now at the University of
Birmingham). The project then moved to the University of Derby in 1996 when
David Chalcraft was appointed Head of Sociology. Mary Shields continued to
work on the project on a freelance basis and we were joined in 1998 by Austin
Harrington (now at the University of Leeds) for the final two years of the work.
Austin Harrington and Mary Shields were funded by the School of Education
and Social Science at the University of Derby and we are grateful to the School
for its financial support and interest in the project. The responsibility for the
translation lies solely with Austin Harrington and Mary Shields, with the occa-
sional query and prompting from David Chalcraft. The Introduction was solely
written by David Chalcraft. Austin Harrington is responsible for the summaries
of the reviews of Weber’s text by Karl Fischer and Felix Rachfahl and for most
of the editors’ footnotes, as well as the translators’ note and other editorial mat-
ters. Mary Shields provided working translations of other important texts and
spent time in Oxford libraries researching literary, linguistic, bibliographical and
biographical details that have helped with the construction of parts of the Intro-
duction. We are grateful to Professor Gerard Delanty for offering to publish the
volume in his Studies in Social and Political Thought series and we want to
register our appreciation of his patient support in seeing the project through
to publication. Finally, we want to acknowledge the significant support and
Acknowledgements
encouragement of colleagues in the BSA Max Weber Study Group, particularly
Sam Whimster and Ralph Schroeder. We are especially grateful to Sam Whimster
for numerous useful comments and references and generous assistance.
David J. Chalcraft
Austin Harrington
Mary Shields
vii
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
DAVID J. CHALCRAFT
The obduracy with which the controversy over the ‘Weber thesis’ has failed to
take into account Weber’s Antikritikenis without parallel in recent scholarship.
(Hennis 1988:202, note 22)
It would be foolhardy to suggest that serious attention has yet to be paid to
Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. On the contrary, this text
is arguably the most famous and widely read in the classical canon of sociological
writing and has been extensively debated within the discipline ever since its first
appearance as a series of two articles in 1904–05. Karl Fischer, one of Weber’s first
critics, spoke of the ‘lamentable chain of misunderstanding’ as early as 1908
(Fischer 1908:38), and even though the work has been extensively studied, there
is the sense that ‘what Weber really meant’ has only rarely been grasped. The
‘academic “Thirty Years War”’ which was how Lynn White characterized the
Protestant Ethic (PE) debate (cited in Marshall 1982:11) has now almost become
worthy of the epithet of the ‘academic “Hundred Years War”’. In recent times,
scholars have extended the PE debate backwards in time before 1905 and looked
at the ‘Weber thesis before Weber’, at the cultural wars of the 1870s (Anderson
1986; Blackbourn 1988) and beyond into the wider culture where general stereo-
types of ‘northern Protestant energy’ and ‘southern Catholic indolence’ were
common (Münch 1993). We clearly are dealing with a thesis that confronts ques-
tions of overwhelming significance for the understanding of modernity and its
rise over more than four hundred years. Less charitably, it has been argued that
the reasons for the thesis’ continuing fascination are ‘largely a function of extra-
neous factors rooted deeply in the history of this century’ (Piccone, 1988:97)
to do with western imperialism and rationality and the West’s ethnocentric
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The Protestant Ethic Debate
justification for growing social inequality (Piccone 1988:107ff.). Not many com-
mentators, to be sure, would want to be as extreme as this, but we must not forget
a long tradition of Marxist encounters with the thesis (Marshall 1982:140–57;
Turner 1985).
When the literature produced by historians (e.g. Bouchard 1991; Gorski 1993;
Valeri 1997; Gellner 1988; Hughes 1986, Silber 1993; Schroeder 1995, Forster
1997), theologians (Volf 1991; Badcock 1998), psychologists (Furnham 1990), and
more recently by literary critics (e.g. Stachnieweski 1991; Goldman 1988, Jame-
son 1974; Hernes 1989; Malcolmson 1999) is added to the sociological discus-
sions, the extent of labour expended on the essay is indeed immense. Part of the
problem – in misunderstandings, disagreements and seeming ‘dialogues of the
deaf’ – is attributable to the fact that Weber was ‘bound to step on disciplinary
toes’ (Ray 1987:97), and many disciplines are affected by its methods and find-
ings. It is important to keep this interdisciplinarity in mind and not to close off
its interpretation from any direction, at the same time as recognising the fact that
it is sociology that claims the text as classic.
In sociology itself, the PE can serve as the point of departure in the sociology
of religion (see, Wilson 1982; Hamilton 1995), the sociology of development
(Harrison 1988, Barnett 1988; Roberts 1995), the sociology of work (Grint 1991),
sociology of organisations (Clegg 1990, Clegg 1994; du Gay 2000), and, more
recently, as a significant contribution to the analysis of the cultural significance
of modernity (Whimster and Lash 1987). Every year sees new contributions in
various fields and it would undoubtedly take a lifetime to become fully conver-
sant with all the literature germane to the PE. And yet, much of the history of the
PE debate has been preoccupied with countering ‘popular misconceptions’ of
Weber’s thesis, through more historically and philologically based accounts.
These contributions do not necessarily lead to refutations of the supposed ‘real’
thesis (Piccone 1988), but they certainly help to correct important misunder-
standings of Weber’s text. Returning to the sources may lead to the questioning
of the ways in which these sub-disciplines in sociology actually do trace their ori-
gins to Weber and to the PE, and the effect of this, in turn, may be to reorient
their concerns and provide new data that need to be engaged with.
Naturally, it is not possible to do justice to this debate in the short space avail-
able to me here. What I can do is highlight some key features to contextualise the
first stage of the debate and the ways in which the Replies, or Antikritikenas they
are known in German, have been received at different times. The Replies are
made up of two essays responding to Karl Fischer’s two reviews (Fischer 1907,
1908) and two essays responding to Rachfahl’s two reviews (Rachfahl 1909, 1910).
Sociology has recently entered a more historical phase in the approach to the
study of the classical tradition and the decision to publish Weber’s Replies to his
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