ABSTRACT
Weber’s writing of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism overlapped his work on his essay “‘Objectivity’ in Social Science and Social Policy.” According to Marianne Weber’s biography of her husband, Weber began work on part one of The Protestant Ethic in 1903, before he wrote “‘Objectivity’ in Social Science,” and finished it in the late spring of 1904, in the months following completion of the essay; and he completed part two the following year. 1 The finished work, moreover, is marked even more deeply than “‘Objectivity’ in Social Science” by the major psychic conflicts that lay at the root of his mental collapse. As is attested to by Marianne Weber’s comment about her husband’s deep psychological involvement in the work, “this work is connected with the deepest roots of his personality,” The Protestant Ethic provided a way for Weber to come to grips with his inner conflicts. 2 As we will see, The Protestant Ethic represents, psychoanalytically, something of a “working-through” of these conflicts, an element of which involved, as Arthur Mitzman has argued, a partial purgation of his own tyrannic, puritanical superego. 3
