ABSTRACT
In light of Max Weber's insights, Mrinal Miri detects a major problem characteristic of the predicament of modern man. For Mahatma Gandhi the ideal of service, seva, was a matter of both social responsibility and good conscience. Between 1904 and 1906 Weber published three essays on the emergence of what he called 'the spirit of capitalism' in the West. By the twentieth century, capitalism had emerged, Weber noted, as an external milieu, a coercive force that drove individuals and groups in the West mindlessly forward, and became the core of a new industrial, capitalist civilisation. The appeal to one's conscience entails the unremitting exercise of critical self- examination, which was an inalienable art of Gandhi's life, in the hope of self-knowledge. Weber was deeply interested in the comparative study of the ethical traditions of the West, on the one hand, and India and China on the other.
