ABSTRACT

In his article on the reception of Kierkegaard in Germany and Austria, Heiko Schulz distinguishes various modes of receptions ranging from productive receptions to unproductive receptions. In what follows, I will place Max Weber’s (1864-1920) reception of Kierkegaard under what Schulz termed an “unproductive reception.” Schulz describes this form of reception as follows: “author A has evidently been taken note of by author B (be it ever so sporadically or briefly),” and that “this reception has left at best marginal (explicit or implicit) traces in B’s writings (of course, such traces can be of the affirmative or of the critical sort).”1 In the case of Weber’s reception, A’s writings (that is, Kierkegaard’s) are never specifically referenced or used, rather author B (Weber) merely cites Kierkegaard as representative of the conflict between the individual and ethics in his revisions to The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism which was reprinted in 1920: “The conflict between the individual and the ethic (in Søren Kierkegaard’s sense) did not exist for Calvinism, although it placed the individual entirely on his own responsibility in religious matters.”2 With this one brief remark aside, another quotation may be more promising regarding the extent of Kierkegaard’s influence on Weber.