ABSTRACT
The relationship between Max Weber’s sociology and the development of economic theory has received a rather uneven and episodic treatment in the literature. Best known perhaps are Weber’s comments on the late nineteenth-century Methodenstreit in German economics and history. These debates provided many of the reference points for his early work on the epistemology and methodology of the social sciences (Weber 1949a, 1949b, 1975). Another familiar focus is the substantive affinity between Weber’s work on purposive rationality, the Protestant ethic, and the spirit of capitalism, on the one hand, and neo-classical marginal utility theory, on the other. For Weber, the ‘this worldly’ Quaker ascetics of the seventeenth century represented a ‘living law of marginal utility’ (Weber 1930:277).
