Summary Of The Protestant Ethic And The Spirit Of Capitalism

The strength of an essay’s argument is determined by its paragraphs, its contents. Similarly, a book’s reasoning can be judged by the substance of its chapters – the ability of each to justify and explain the themes introduced by the book. In “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism”, Weber does not fulfill the requirements of a strong argument, because his reasoning behind challenging that capitalism is not natural and not inevitable is rather weak, unsupported by proper facts and including many flaws and contradictions. His attempts to authenticate his argument, through traditionalism, Lutheranism, in particular Calvinism, and asceticism, are poorly backed by evidence and sometimes even unrelated to his other claims. By these definitions, Weber’s argument is unconvincing and uninfluential, and his delivery of it is unpersuasive. In Weber’s first claims about capitalism being not natural, meaning that it had to “originate from some time”, he argues that traditionalism was an opponent to

He says that asceticism opposed enjoyment of life and its opportunities, which results in capitalism because of uniformity. However, this once again contradicts his claims in earlier chapters, which says that the spirit of capitalism of increasing capital (earning more and more money) is an end in itself. He argued that capitalism is achieved when individuals pursued utility, to own and indulge as much as one could. This is exactly what asceticism opposed, and to argue that asceticism is a catalyst for capitalism is paradoxical. Moreover, he attempts to elaborate his ideas, but decides to use convoluted metaphors to explain himself. By using phrases such as “iron cage” to refer to the spirit of capitalism as a whole, instead of explaining his claim with coherent analysis and reason, Weber takes away from the clarity of his