The majority of people were peasants who worked hard not because of some ideology equating hard work with moral goodness but because they went hungry if they didn't
no offense, but that's badly misrepresenting Weber. The generic notion of “work ethic” that's passed into popular culture is, unfortunately, rather different from what he meant by it. it's not about simply working
harder, but the rational (rigorous and systematic) organization of one's life in pursuit of, not just profit for its own sake but the fruits of being industrious – i.e. the spirit of capitalism – for some purpose logically following from one of several theological tenets found in Calvinism a/o in some later, mostly Puritan strands of Protestantism – i.e. the Protestant ethic (or more accurately the Calvinist-Puritan ethic). Specifically, Weber wasn’t interested theology for its own sake but its pragmatic effects on the personal economic attitudes and activity of the faithful and in the consequences of that for the development of rational bourgeois capitalism. I won't try to sum up all his arguments b/c I don't think I could do them justice in a few sentences.
More generally, Weber's the kind of thinker, like Foucault, where even if you don't agree w/all his outcomes there's enormous value in his thinking and approach to problems. He was enormously influential on social sciences and it's not hard to see why. He really stressed value-neutral inquiry; recognized the impossibility of objectivity in non-hard science except as an unobtainable ideal to strive toward; wrote extensively and penetratingly on rationalization, disenchantment, technocracy and so on, all things that only increased, massively, since his writing.
I enjoy reading him on capitalism b/c unlike Marxists, he's ultimately interested in pragmatic effects, outcomes rather than fitting his ideas into a system. He doesn't view capitalism as
a priori bad or good of itself, neither as a stage in an inevitable historical development nor the pinnacle of human achievement. He's also very good on how ideas (in this case theological) can have long-ranging, enormous and totally unexpected consequences unrelated or even totally opposed to the original intent. Several times in
The Protestant Ethic... he makes the point that the theological roots of these economic attitudes are usually rapidly jettisoned and eventually forgotten, which among other things explains why the influence he's talking about can be hard to initially discern. he's also, unlike Marx, a fairly quick and engaging read. oh and he has a dry German sense of humor that pops every so often.
anyway, I highly recommend
The Protestant Ethic... and "Politics as Vocation".
Economy and Society is on my to-read list, and I'd also like to read his book on ancient Judaism.
