The Protestant Ethic And The S

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ideas(2), Weber put forward a different analysis to describe the development of Western capitalism. Weber instead put forward an idea which did not seek to replace Marx’s idea as a spiritual alternative(ibid), but was to give a different angle of how capitalism may have developed in the West. This idea was based on a coincidence which Weber believed exhisted between the owners of capital and Protestantism, as explained below;
“Business leaders and owners of capital, as well as the higher grades of skilled labour, and even more the higher technically and commercially trained personnel of modern enterprises, are overwhelmingly Protestant.”(ibid)
Therefore Weber set out an investigation to find why most business men were Protestant, and thus possessed a large amount of capital, which Weber describes as the “elective affinity” (3); as shown in his following statement;
“We are dealing with the connection of modern economic life(Occidental ...

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Thirdly, Weber identified occidental capitalism; which he believed first developed in western Europe and North America. Weber saw this being encouraged by the cultural and social thought of the time, which was based around the idea of “rationalism”. This is described through examples of the type of science(method of investigation), art, architecture, jurisprudence, and bureaucratic government the West in general had(ibid). Therefore western capitalism was just another link to this chain.

Weber found “Occidental” capitalism to be different from the “other” forms in many respects, as I am now going to show. Firstly there was a ...

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