Lecture Series on Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and The Philosophy of Social Science by Hesam Salamat

"The Protestant Ethic" is usually understood as one of the most serious theoretical endeavors to provide a non-Marxist explanation of capitalism. If Marx sought to offer a materialist account of history, explaining its progression through the internal dynamism of material forces, and spoke of the extent to which ideas are rooted in the historical context—in a word, that it is social being that determines consciousness—Weber, in "The Protestant Ethic," attempted to reverse this process and speak of the determining power of ideas and the constitutive role that a particular type of worldview and its attendant practices play in the emergence of a social formation—or at least in preparing the conditions of its possibility. As Weber himself stated in "The Protestant Ethic," the book is in fact "a contribution to the understanding of how ideas become effective forces in history." Nevertheless, presenting such a narrative that places Weber in fundamental opposition to Marx and reduces their work to a confrontation between an idealist explanation of capitalism and a materialist stance on it ultimately leads astray. Weber himself repeatedly and explicitly declared that he did not intend, in opposition to the materialist approach to history—which places its emphasis solely or primarily on the role of the economic base and material forces—to turn the gaze toward the constitutive power of ideas and offer an equally one-sided, deterministic, and idealist account of the genesis of capitalism. By virtue of his neo-Kantian heritage, he believed that every theoretical model is related to the subjective approach of the researcher and the values to which they are committed, and in this respect, every researcher acts in explaining their subject matter according to this "value relevance." From this perspective, the Marxist materialist model in explaining capitalism is "scientifically" just as legitimate as Weber's idealist theoretical framework. The matter is simply one of differences in emphasis and accentuation. In explaining the genesis of capitalism, the Marxist tradition emphasizes material forces and the economic base, while the Weberian tradition highlights the importance of worldview and ethics. These two approaches, through ongoing critical dialogue, continually expose each other's inadequacies and insufficiencies, without either being able to "scientifically" and permanently "refute" the other.

Audio files of the reading of Max Weber's "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism"; Iranian Sociological Association, Fall 2017:

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Audio of Session One

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Audio of Session Two

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Audio of Session Three

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Audio of Session Four

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Among the classics of sociology, Max Weber engaged more seriously than others with the “philosophy” of this newly emerging science. His interventions in the philosophy of social science must be understood in the historical context of the disputes that had arisen earlier, from the early 1880s, between Carl Menger (the leader of the Austrian School of economics) and Gustav Schmoller (the most important representative of the German historical school in economics and law), which, given its decisive importance, was referred to as the “Methodenstreit” (battle of methods). The most central problematic of the “Methodenstreit” revolved around the question of the universality or historical relativity of social science itself. Menger thought of a universal science, and Schmoller of a German one. More or less simultaneously with these discussions, within the newly invigorated tradition of Neo-Kantianism, there were also serious debates about the conditions of possibility for establishing “Geisteswissenschaft” (science of spirit), that is, the human and social sciences. From Hermann Cohen, Paul Natorp, and Ernst Cassirer in the Marburg School, to Wilhelm Windelband and Heinrich Rickert in the Heidelberg School, the debate was about how, through a “return to Kant,” one could conceive the logic of the human sciences as sciences independent of the natural sciences. Max Weber’s discussions in the book “The Philosophy of Social Science” (which includes articles he wrote in the first two decades of the twentieth century) constitute his creative contribution to the disputes that had previously arisen, both through the “Methodenstreit” and through Neo-Kantianism. Weber sought, through critical dialogue with these intellectual traditions, to take a new path for establishing the social sciences. In the files that I will gradually publish here, I have discussed in detail Weber’s main positions in “The Philosophy of Social Science.”

Audio files for the reading class on Max Weber’s book “The Philosophy of Social Science”; Iranian Sociological Association; Fall 2017:

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Audio of Session One

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Audio of Session Two

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Audio of Session Three

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Audio of Session Four

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Audio of Session Five

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Audio of Session Six

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