David Chalcraft

Reading Weber’s Patterns of Response to Critics of The Protestant Ethic Some ‘Affinities’ in and between Replies to Felix Rachfahl and Werner Sombart

A close concentration on Weber’s replies to Felix Rachfahl (in 1910) and to Werner Sombart (in 1920) shows that whilst Weber seeks to create an ‘interpretative community’ for the reception of the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (through an appeal to ‘common knowledge’ and ‘expert witnesses’), it is clear that Rachfahl is an outsider. It is also possible to trace developments in Weber’s articulation of his thesis across time relating to the importance of the psychological dimension in accounting for motivations to vocation, the relation between monastic asceticism and ascetic Protestantism, and the utilization of notions of affinity. During the dispute with Rachfahl, Weber utilized not only the notion of affinity but also the notion of a ‘corresponding soul’ created by asceticism for adaptation to the capitalist culture; however, the latter does not reappear in 1920.

Love and Death. Weber, Wagner and Max Klinger

In his eulogy for Weber of 1920 Troeltsch attempts to answer ‘what was at the core of this man, whose virtually magic influence radiated far and wide?’ One of the things he tells us is that ‘He was an admirer of Max Klinger.’2 This statement is confirmed by visitors to the Weber household in Freiburg who were provoked into comment by the conspicuous display of a large collection of Klinger’s etchings and drawings. As Marianne recorded, And on their walls there were Klinger etchings, some of them showing nudes. Was it really possible to sit down on the sofa under a little Eve meditating by a dusky forest pond? Or could one take an unembarrassed look at the nude figure of a male stretching toward the light from a dark ground, which the artist had called ‘Und dennoch’?3

Reviews : Brian Stock, Listening for the Text: on the uses of the past. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990. x + 197 pp. hardback

I approached this volume of eight individual essays from an interest in Weber interpretation and in the sociological study of ancient Judaism. Both of these subjects need to engage with the relationship between the historical and sociological imaginations and the pursuit of literary-textual studies. Stock’s book provides some interesting suggestions and questions for those endeavours. These questions are shared across the cultural sciences as a whole, and the fact that this book is written by a medievalist is ample testimony to the growth of interdisciplinary concerns in the wake of the linguistic and cultural turn in academic discourse.