Quotes About Max weber

specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved.

In California in general, and its northwest corner in particular, the central role of money in indigenous societies was combined with a cultural emphasis on thrift and simplicity, a disapproval of wasteful pleasures, and a glorification of work that – according to Goldschmidt – bore an uncanny resemblance to the Puritan attitudes described by Max Weber in his famous 1905 essay, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.

In an analogy that would prove all too apt, Max Weber likened the city to "a human being with his skin removed.

Max Weber was right in subscribing to the view that one need not be Caesar in order to understand Caesar. But there is a temptation for us theoretical sociologists to act sometimes as though it is not necessary even to study Caesar in order to understand him. Yet we know that the interplay of theory and research makes both for understanding of the specific case and expansion of the general rule.

Although many sociologists still echo Max Weber's (1864–1920) claim that capitalism originated in the Protestant Reformation, capitalism actually originated in the "depths" of the "Dark Ages.

I think, if people actually read Calvin, rather than read Max Weber, he would be rebranded. He is a very respectable thinker. And one of the crucial things he brings to me, is that the encounter with another being is an . . . occasion in which you can, to the best of your ability, honour the other person as being someone sent to you by God.

'Culture' is a finite segment of the meaningless infinity of the world process, a segment on which human beings confer meaning and significance.

If, as Max Weber contended, science, modernity and rationalism have disenchanted the world and swept it clean of gods, spirits and magic (or, at least, problematised believing in them), then psychedelics offer a potential way out of the ensuing existential impasse. -Andy Letcher

A highly developed stock exchange cannot be a club for the cult of ethics.

Laws are important and valuable in the exact natural sciences, in the measure that those sciences are universally valid.

The ethic of conviction and the ethic of responsibility are not opposites. They are complementary to one another.

The purely emotional form of Pietism is, as Ritschl has pointed out, a religious dilettantism for the leisure class.

The experience of the irrationality of the world has been the driving force of all religious revolution.

The radical elimination of magic from the world allowed no other psychological course than the practice of worldly asceticism. Since

For bourgeois classes as such have seldom before and never since displayed heroism. It was "the last of our heroisms", as Carlyle, not without reason, has said. 

Now the history of philosophy shows that religious belief which is primarily mystical may very well be compatible with a pronounced sense of reality in the field of empirical fact; it may even support it directly on account of the repudiation of dialectic doctrines. Furthermore, mysticism may indirectly even further the interests of rational conduct.

St. Paul's "He who will not work shall not eat" holds

In [Richard] Baxter's view, concern for outward possessions should sit lightly on the shoulders of his saints 'like a thin cloak which can be thrown off at any time.' But fate decreed that the cloak should become a shell as hard as steel.

Weber,... argues that... personal bias should not preclude the scientific ascertainment of objective historical facts.

Calvinism, in comparison, appears to be more closely related to the hard legalism and the active enterprise of bourgeois-capitalistic entrepreneurs. Finally

Wesley's anti-Calvinistic faction within the movement with its doctrine that grace could be lost. The

Politik« würde für uns also heißen: Streben nach Machtanteil oder nach Beeinflussung der Machtverteilung, sei es zwischen Staaten, sei es innerhalb eines Staates zwischen den Menschengruppen, die er umschließt.

Wealth is thus bad ethically only in so far as it is a temptation to idleness and sinful enjoyment of life, and its acquisition is bad only when it is with the purpose of later living merrily and without care. But

Especially begging, on the part of one able to work, is not only the sin of slothfulness, but a violation of the duty of brotherly love according to the Apostle's own word.