Weber's own writings on the other great world religions and their impact on modernization serve as warnings. There is indeed reason to be cautious about using culture to explain economic and political outcomes. Many maintain that culture is a residual category in which lazy social scientists take refuge when they can't develop a more rigorous theory. It is safe to say that most contemporary economists do not take Weber's hypothesis, or any other culturalist theory of economic growth, seriously. The German economist Werner Sombart claimed to have found the functional equivalent of the Protestant ethic in Judaism Robert Bellah discovered it in Japan's Tokugawa Buddhism. Various scholars stated that it was empirically wrong about the superior economic performance of Protestants over Catholics that Catholic societies had started to develop modern capitalism long before the Reformation and that it was the Counter-Reformation rather than Catholicism itself that had led to economic backwardness. The Weber thesis was controversial from the moment it was published. In addition, Protestantism admonished its believers to behave morally outside the boundaries of the family, which was crucial in creating a system of social trust. In this way, Protestantism created a work ethic - that is, the valuing of work for its own sake rather than for its results - and demolished the older Aristotelian-Roman Catholic doctrine that one should acquire only as much wealth as one needed to live well. He said that the Calvinist doctrine of predestination led believers to seek to demonstrate their elect status, which they did by engaging in commerce and worldly accumulation. Weber's argument centered on ascetic Protestantism.

In the present decade, when cultures seem to be clashing and religion is frequently blamed for the failures of modernization and democracy in the Muslim world, Weber's book and ideas deserve a fresh look. Religion, according to Weber, was not an ideology produced by economic interests (the 'opiate of the masses,' as Marx had put it) rather, it was what had made the modern capitalist world possible. It was a book that stood Karl Marx on his head.

THIS year is the 100th anniversary of the most famous sociological tract ever written, 'The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism,' by Max Weber.

Weber the protestant ethic