ABSTRACT
At first sight, it is perhaps puzzling why Weber’s Protestant Ethic essay has stimulated so much debate in sociology. It was of course a bold claim that he made, namely that the development of that type of economic system which he called rational capitalism, which has come to dominate by far the greater part of the globe and which has stimulated such a remarkable growth in technology and production, is rooted partly in religious developments at the time of the Reformation. But the intensity of the debate probably has much to do with the fact that, in the eyes of many, Weber seemed to be providing a counter to the materialist conception of history and thereby to Marx in emphasising a religious factor in the process of historical development and change. Many would argue that such an assumption is false on the grounds that Marx’s understanding of the materialist conception of history is not of the crude form that Weber took it to be. Such disputes in the history of ideas cannot be resolved here but Marshall (1982) has shown that if Weber had anyone in mind that he was concerned to refute, it was not Marx but Sombart, who had argued that capitalism owed its development to the Jews.
