14 - Historical Viability, Sociological Significance, and Personal Judgment

Summary

Some years ago, in a footnote to his Injustice, The Social Bases of Obedience and Revolt, Barrington Moore, Jr., casually delivered himself of the following statement: “It is by no means clear whether Max Weber's famous The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism [PE] constituted an important breakthrough or a blind alley.” It would be nice to be able to say that the conference from which this volume originated has at least clarified that matter, but I for one have the feeling that this show will run and run. On the other hand, it is not clear that the alternative posed by Moore in his footnotes - breakthrough versus blind alley - is quite as stringently posed as it may seem. But let us assume for the moment that it is meaningful, and that it hangs on whether PE makes its case (thus becoming “a breakthrough”) or fails to (thus becoming “a blind alley”).

One major difficulty in assessing, then, whether Weber made his case in PE lies in the particular nature of the case to be made, which as I construe it ultimately rests on the assertion that there are causal relationships between four sets of ideas.