ABSTRACT
There is near universal agreement among sociologists, a group not known for consensus, that Maximillian Karl Emil Weber is one of the field's three most important classical theorists. Social theorist Max Weber was born in 1864 and died in 1920 at the age of 56, without having yet attained the stature of being an eminent sociologist. A central part of Weber's argument is Protestantism's encouragement of a form of asceticism in the world, distinct from Catholicism's form of asceticism practiced apart from the world, as in monasteries. Weber asserts that Protestants were strongly motivated to work as a response to their appreciation of receiving the gift of grace; any capital accumulation was simply a consequence of that work. Weber depicts modern capitalism as a rationalized way of organizing economic life because it is directed by calculations about efficiency in production.
