Introduction

The global level of analysis represented by all of these interpretations, it is argued, finds scarcely an echo in Weber’s sociological writings: Economy and Society, General Economic History, The Agrarian Sociology of Ancient Civilizations, and the three-volume Economic Ethics of the World Religions series (see Chapter 1, note 4). Rooted in detailed empirical research, these texts emphasize the patterned action of persons in a vast variety of groups, a multitude of ideal types that capture this regular action, an array of societal spheres (such as the religion, economy, law, and rulership domains), a broad-ranging multicausality, a perpetual embedding of groups in contexts of multiple groups, and conjuncturalor dynamic-interactions of patterns of action.