8 - The Protestant Ethic versus the “New Ethic”

Summary

In his methodological essays, Max Weber declared that one of the main prerequisites of historical interpretation and explanation are the scholar's own value commitments (Wertbeziehungen) and the main cultural issues of his period. Weber shared this insight with men such as the philosopher and sociologist Georg Simmel, who first elaborated a kindred theory of interpretation in a systematic way in 1892, as Weber freely acknowledged. In 1908, Simmel refined his argument by saying that all individuals are only fragments who need a glimpse of the “general other” to complete the picture of their own selves. But if another human being appears as a generalization and typification of our own self, he or she is also a fragment that we shape into a whole. Thus we interpret our inner world with reference to the outer world and symbolize them both as if in a mirror image.

Rather than discussing this core problem of the hermeneutic process of “interpretation” (Verstehen) in general, I first ask what the main problems of Max Weber and his period were at the time when he wrote his study about the religious background of the modern capitalist professional ethics. This involves the modern gender issues, that is, the crucial development of the modern family structure and the “sexual question” at the turn of the century.