Földvári Books

First Edition of the Protestant Ethic

Weber, Max

[Caption title:] Die protestantische Ethik und der “Geist” des Kapitalismus. I. Das Problem. [II. Die Berufsidee des asketischen Protestantismus.]

[Tübingen]: [J. C. B. Mohr], [1905]. First edition. In later black buckram, with gilt title on spine. From the “Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik” (1905, vol. 20 and 21). 1–54; 1–110 p. Annotated and underlined in pencil. Otherwise in very good condition.

First edition of Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic, the founding text of economic sociology and one of the most important texts of general sociology.

Max Weber (1864–1920) was a German sociologist and political economist, considered as one of the founders of sociology besides Émile Durkheim and Karl Marx. He studied law in Heidelberg and Berlin and after earning his law doctorate he started to teach commercial law in Berlin, and economics in Freiburg and Heidelberg, until 1903. Later he became the associate editor of the academic journal of social sciences, the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, where the present work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, was first published in two parts in 1905.

The Protestant Ethic is Weber’s seminal and most famous essay in which he locates the origins of capitalism in the lifestyle characterized by ascetic Protestantism and opposes the Marxist concept of dialectical materialism and relates the rise of the capitalist economy to the Calvinist belief in the moral value of hard work. To this day this essay is considered one of the most important texts in sociology and economic history.

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Price: €4,500.00