“…other enjoyments, of a purer, more lasting, and more exquisite nature.” A defense of Weber’s Protestant Ethic thesis from the 1940s by Ephraim Fischoff makes the plausible argument that critics — and many supporters — of Weber’s essay attached unwarranted causality to it, as if “Calvinism caused capitalism.” Instead, Fischoff explained: Weber’s thesis must be construed not according to the usual interpretation, as an effort to trace the...
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