ABSTRACT

Weber suggests that rationalization can arise from different directions and take different patterns. How far different value spheres undergo processes of rationalization and how long they take for these processes depend on diverse historical factors. Depersonalization has occurred hand in hand with the destruction of traditions and the leveling of personal differences. As more and more value spheres have become more and more rationalized, human social life becomes more and more coordinated by formal rationality and more and more separated from value and ethical contents. Weber’s distinction between idea and interest is rather controversial. Weber has not made clear to what extent this distinction stands. Ascetic Protestantism has moved further towards world rejection and transformed the universalist religious ethics of early Christianity into an ethic of unbrotherly aristocracy. For some sociologists, secularization is a process in which religion gradually fades away and is replaced by secular beliefs.