ABSTRACT
This chapter aims at making a small contribution to our understanding of western civilization and its consequences for human social life. Some people even take a denigrating attitude towards it. They diagnose that western civilization has exhausted its dynamics for promoting human welfare. Weber goes beyond many other social theorists in understanding the nature of western civilization. Weber also rejects any determinist account of western civilization such as those given by Marx and other nineteenth-century evolutionary social thinkers. For him, human agency plays a part in history. History is essentially open. The pressures felt by people to re-adjust their behaviour patterns, their patterns of social interaction and their personality to such social structural changes spread more and more beyond the ruling and noble classes, into the bourgeois classes which are not yet integrated into the courts, and then other social classes.
