Max Weber and 'The Protestant Ethic': Twin Histories

Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic: Twin Histories presents an entirely new portrait of Max Weber, one of the most prestigious social theorists in recent history, using his most famous work, The Protestant Ethic and the "Spirit" of Capitalism, as its central point of reference. It offers an intellectual biography of Weber framed along historical lines - something which has never been done before. It re-evaluates The Protestant Ethic -- a text surprisingly neglected by scholars -- supplying a missing intellectual and chronological centre to Weber's life and work. Peter Ghosh suggests that The Protestant Ethic is the link which unites the earlier (pre-1900) and later (post-1910) phases of his career. He offers a series of fresh perspectives on Weber's thought in various areas -- charisma, capitalism, law, politics, rationality, bourgeois life, and (not least) Weber's unusual religious thinking, which was 'remote from god' yet based on close dialogue with Christian theology. This approach produces a convincing view of Max Weber as a whole; while previously the sheer breadth of his intellectual interests has caused him to be read in a fragmentary way according to a series of specialized viewpoints, this volume seeks to put him back together again as a real individual.

Table of Contents:
Part I. The Genesis of The Protestant Ethic - and the History of Max Weber c.1884-1905 1: A Problem 2: A Situation Report c.1897 3: A Narrative 1898-1905 4: Capitalism 5: Politics and Nationality 6: Religion 7: Rationality and Law 8: A Whole Text? Part II. The Second History of The Protestant Ethic - and of Max Weber, 1905-1920 1: 1905-8: Going into Hibernation 2: The "Anti-critical" Essays 3: Recalled to Life: from the 'Protestant Ethic' to 'Economy and Society' and the World Religions 4: War and Peace: 1914-20 5: Religiosity and Modernity (I) 6: Religiosity and Modernity (II) 7: Capitalism and Herrschaft 8: From the Sects to 'The City': Max Weber the 'fairly pure bourgeois' Envoi: Who was Max Weber?

About the Author :
Peter Ghosh was a Junior Research Fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford (1980-1), and has been a Fellow in History at St. Anne's College, Oxford since 1981.

Review :
in this stylish and extraordinarily detailed new intellectual history ... Ghosh's answer to Weber's uniqueness is beguilingly simple, and gloriously revisionist in overturning most established scholarship Let it be said at once: this breath-taking book is a really great success -- rewarding and obligatory reading not only for anyone who is interested in the Protestant Ethic or Max Weber, but for everyone who grapples with the theory of the project of (Western) modernity ... It is already clear that in future there can be no avoiding Ghosh's brilliant "twin history", both because of its exact textual labour and also because of its truly Teutonic erudition ... Yet this book is not only extraordinary because of the overwhelming wealth of the material it draws upon. In the exactitude of the textual analysis, which lays bare [Weber's] anticipations and backward glances, allusions and references, intellectual dependency and cross-connections, it is a brilliant achievement in terms of method, while at the same time taking us into the deepest strata of intellectual development. superb and eminently scholarly the most comprehensive and illuminating work on Max Weber ever published. A review like this cannot sum up the wealth of food for thought and for debate Ghosh offers. His book's final words about Weber make an excellent case for studying him: 'Never was there anyone more present on the page, on the screen, and above all in our minds, than he is today'. [a] stunning work of intellectual archaeology Ghosh demonstrates an encyclopaedic knowledge of all relevant materials in a way that could only be matched by very few Weber specialists. Ghosh's superb mastery of the relevant texts and sources, his determined avoidance of any psychological speculation and his close attention to the ways in which Weber absorbed contemporary scholarship pays very rich dividends ... everybody who has an intellectual interest in the historical development and the inherent contradictions of modernity should read Peter Ghosh's magnificent book. Ghosh offers new and illuminating explanations for why historical and typological approaches were commingled in Weber's wartime writings ... Ghosh's book sets itself apart by virtue of its ability to lend coherence to 'Max Weber' as both a historical individual, struggling along the path of intellectual discovery and frustration, and as a set of claims and theories about the world that transcended his personal standpoint. In this stunning work of intellectual archaeology, Peter Ghosh presents a new reading of Weber's thought through the vanishing-point of the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905) ... Ghosh should now be the first point of call for arranging a new encounter with the man himself. Peter Ghosh stands alone in the Anglophone world as the most knowledgeable expert on Max Weber's work and person in the context of Anglo and Continental intellectual history. He has succeeded in writing an intellectual biography of Max Weber which has never been attempted before in this depth and breadth. As an intellectual history which comprises the wider cultural context of the early twentieth century, it will be of interest to historians and social scientists beyond the circle of Weberian specialists