ABSTRACT
First published just over a century ago in the spring 1904 and 1905 issues of Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, Weber’s Protestant Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism brilliantly captures the complex mutually constitutive relationships that play out between a scholar’s interpretive framework, the object of that scholar’s research and the socio-historical context within which the research is conducted. In this case, Weber’s Protestant Ethic illustrated how an object of social scientific research, the ‘spirit’ of capitalism, could help constitute the very social and historical conditions that made that research, including the selection of this object, possible in the first place. As we will see, what this meant practically was that Weber saw the social and historical conditions created by the ‘spirit’ of capitalism and by capitalism itself as preconditions for his own methodological isolation of this ‘spirit’ from the endless variety of other ‘historical individuals’ that also presented themselves as possible objects of social scientific research. In other words, Weber came to view capitalism not only as the object of his research, but, since capitalism was responsible for isolating religious asceticism from the material forms in which religious practitioners had formerly placed their trust, Weber also came to view capitalism as the precondition for his own research.
