ABSTRACT
Max Weber's scheme for the classification and analysis of the world's religions was based on his extensive research on Christianity, Ancient Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism and Chinese religion. One of the more surprising omissions in Weber's otherwise subtle and revealing discussion is his failure to bring his analysis up to modern times, preferring to stop with the Calvinist theodicy that he seems to have regarded as the culmination of the process of theodical rationalisation in the West. Weber seems to have believed that the busyness of modern life precluded preoccupation with the ultimate questions of life and death; arguing that only those people whose 'essential earthly needs' have been met are likely to be concerned with their destiny after death. Indeed an analysis employing essentially Weberian assumptions can be continued well into the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
