SOCY 151: Foundations of Modern Social Theory
Lecture 16 - Weber on Protestantism and Capitalism. Max Weber wrote his best-known work after he recovered from a period of serious mental illness near the turn of the twentieth century. After he recovered, his work transitioned
from enthusiastically capitalist and liberal in the tradition of Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill to much more skeptical of the down-sides of modernization, more similar to the thinking of Nietzsche and Freud. In his first major work,
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Weber argues that the Protestant faith, especially Luther's notion of "calling" and the Calvinist belief in predestination set the stage for the emergence of the capitalist spirit.
With his more complex understanding of the causes of capitalism, Weber accounts for the motivations of capitalists and the spirit of capitalism and rationalization in ways that Marx does not.
(from oyc.yale.edu)
Lecture 16 - Weber on Protestantism and Capitalism |
Time | Lecture Chapters |
[00:00:00] | 1. Similarities and Differences Among Marx, Nietzsche, Freud and Weber |
[00:10:22] | 2. Weber in a Historical Context |
[00:26:37] | 3. "The Protestant Ethic and The Spirit of Capitalism": The Marx-Weber Debate |
[00:32:23] | 4. The Correlation between Capitalism and Protestantism |
[00:34:11] | 5. What is the Spirit of Capitalism? |
[00:39:21] | 6. Luther's Conception of Calling |
[00:43:31] | 7. Religious Foundation of Worldly Asceticism |
[00:46:59] | 8. Asceticism and the Spirit of Capitalism |
References |
Lecture 16 - Weber on Protestantism and Capitalism Instructor: Professor Ivan Szelenyi. Transcript [html]. Audio [mp3]. Download Video [mov]. |
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