Weber, Capitalism, and Asia Cortney A. Pruden Course: Honors Seminar in the Social Sciences Professor: Neil Kressel, Psychology Student: Cortney A. Pruden Essay: Weber, Capitalism, and Asia
Assignment: Students were asked to pick one of the major social scientific thinkers listed on the syllabus and write
a 5-10-page essay reacting to one or more of the thinker’s ideas.
Max Weber has been described as “. . . the most important sociologist of the twentieth century” (Curtis, p.423). Though deeply involved in German politics, his ground-breaking scholarly work always stressed the need for objectivity and value-free empirical analysis in the examination of social problems. Moreover, he saw passion, responsibility and objectivity as desirable traits for all who wished to contribute importantly to politics and economics.
Weber felt that the most desirable way to understand sociopolitical phenomena was through the identification of “ideal” types. These were not wholly realistic descriptions of particular cases, but rather conceptual tools to clarify important social phenomena. Weber used this method to clarify the power of politics and the forms of authority that stem from it, for example, traditional hereditary authority, legal authority, and charismatic leadership.
Most of Weber’s work concentrated on topics that lay at the juncture of ideology, social structure, and material interests. Famously, he focused his intellectual energies on Calvinism and the spirit of capitalism. More generally, he was interested in the close study of religion, both Eastern and Western, and how they had their power over local economics and government. Weber believed, as political scientist Michael Curtis writes, “Rationality was the basis of and distinguishing characteristic of modern civilization, illustrated in capitalist economics, the application of science to human affairs and to bureaucracy” (Curtis, p.423).
Many of these theories are discussed in Weber’s 1919 essay Politics as a Vocation. Weber, a philosopher, economist, and sociologist, considered studying philosophy and religious life to be a crucial skill for identifying the distinctive development of societies worldwide and the climb of globalizing capitalism, largely in western Europe. “Why”, Weber asked, “did the highly rationalized, systemized, and industrial form of capitalism emerge in Europe and not in another part of the world (Guest, p.377, 2018)”? From a political standpoint, “Weber writes that vanity creates unique problems for politicians because they 67
