Modern Capitalism - Volume 1: The Pre-Capitalist Economy: A Systematic Historical Depiction of Pan-European Economic Life from Its Origins to the Pr

Modern Capitalism - Volume 1: The Pre-Capitalist Economy: A Systematic Historical Depiction of Pan-European Economic Life from Its Origins to the Pr
Author: Werner Sombart
Publisher:
Total Pages: 412
Release: 2019-11-29
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780473496500

Werner Sombart (1863-1941) was one of the leading German economists and social scientists of the late 19thand early 20thcenturies. The son of an industrialist, his academic career was hampered by his early reputation as a Marxist economist. However, Sombart in his own work reversed Marx's primacy of base over superstructure and emphasised the role of Geistor spirit. This focus on the psychological foundations of capitalism was to be a constant for Sombart throughout his career and became more pronounced after he became disillusioned with socialism. Max Weber himself, co-editor with Sombart and Edgar Jaffé of the important journal Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, wrote the following in his most famous work: In general I do not need specially to point out, although the following studies go back in their most important points of view to much older work, how much they owe in their development to the mere existence of Sombart's important works, with their pointed formulations and this even, perhaps especially, where they take a different road. Even those who feel themselves continually and decisively disagreeing with Sombart's views, and who reject many of his theses, have the duty to do so only after a thorough study of his work. (Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 198) Sombart's contribution to economic thought as one of the leading figures in the later German Historical School was extremely wide ranging. All of these contributions were brought together by Sombart in his magnum opus of some 3,000 pages (in 193 chapters): Der moderne Kapitalismus: Historisch-systematische Darstellung des gesamt-europäischen Wirtschaftslebens von seinen Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart, the first part of which - concerning pre-capitalist economic life - is translated into English for the first time in this volume.

Origins of Capitalism and Jewish Ethics

Origins of Capitalism and Jewish Ethics
Author: Ilaria Iannuzzi
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 190
Release: 2022-02-02
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1527580210

This book focuses on the religious origins of the spirit of capitalism through the thought of Werner Sombart. It offers a critical analysis of the link he makes between Jewish ethics and the spirit of capitalism. Sombart’s exploration of this topic has not found, to this day, adequate representation in the literature. As such, this book analyses the origins of capitalism through a materialistic and spiritual approach, thus offering an unprecedented methodological and epistemological path. It brings to light a different, little-investigated, avenue of exploration followed by the social processes that have governed the relationship between economy and religion, in the belief that this can generate new cognitive and development perspectives for contemporary capitalism.

Capitalism and the Jews

Capitalism and the Jews
Author: Jerry Z. Muller
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 279
Release: 2010-01-04
Genre: History
ISBN: 1400834368

How the fate of the Jews has been shaped by the development of capitalism The unique historical relationship between capitalism and the Jews is crucial to understanding modern European and Jewish history. But the subject has been addressed less often by mainstream historians than by anti-Semites or apologists. In this book Jerry Muller, a leading historian of capitalism, separates myth from reality to explain why the Jewish experience with capitalism has been so important and complex—and so ambivalent. Drawing on economic, social, political, and intellectual history from medieval Europe through contemporary America and Israel, Capitalism and the Jews examines the ways in which thinking about capitalism and thinking about the Jews have gone hand in hand in European thought, and why anticapitalism and anti-Semitism have frequently been linked. The book explains why Jews have tended to be disproportionately successful in capitalist societies, but also why Jews have numbered among the fiercest anticapitalists and Communists. The book shows how the ancient idea that money was unproductive led from the stigmatization of usury and the Jews to the stigmatization of finance and, ultimately, in Marxism, the stigmatization of capitalism itself. Finally, the book traces how the traditional status of the Jews as a diasporic merchant minority both encouraged their economic success and made them particularly vulnerable to the ethnic nationalism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Providing a fresh look at an important but frequently misunderstood subject, Capitalism and the Jews will interest anyone who wants to understand the Jewish role in the development of capitalism, the role of capitalism in the modern fate of the Jews, or the ways in which the story of capitalism and the Jews has affected the history of Europe and beyond, from the medieval period to our own.

Werner Sombart and the 'Spirit' of Modern Capitalism

Werner Sombart and the 'Spirit' of Modern Capitalism
Author: Christopher Adair-Toteff
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2024-05-05
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9783031544224

This book illuminates the work of Werner Sombart, a key contemporary of Max Weber, showing how his writing and thinking laid the groundwork for concepts of modern capitalism. Although the notion of the ‘spirit’ of modern capitalism is most associated with Weber, it was Sombart who first used this phrase, with Weber focusing mainly on socioeconomics while Sombart continued to develop his ideas around modern capitalism. This book critically analyses Sombart’s groundbreaking work, “Der moderne Kapitalismus” among his other writings to demonstrate how they may be read as a complementary alternative to Weber, providing a more detailed, sustained, and a comprehensive account of the genesis and nature of modern capitalism. This book will be of interest to a scholarly audience including students and researchers of the history of economic thought, as well as areas of sociology, politics, and political economy.

The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
Author: Max Weber
Publisher: Courier Corporation
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2012-04-19
Genre: History
ISBN: 0486122379

Author's best-known and most controversial study relates the rise of a capitalist economy to the Puritan belief that hard work and good deeds were outward signs of faith and salvation.

The Jews and Modern Capitalism

The Jews and Modern Capitalism
Author: Werner Sombart
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 529
Release: 2017-09-04
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 135148043X

Since its first appearance in Germany in 1911, Jews and Modern Capitalism has provoked vehement criticism. As Samuel Z. Klausner emphasizes, the lasting value of Sombart's work rests not in his results-most of which have long since been disproved-but in his point of departure. Openly acknowledging his debt to Max Weber, Sombart set out to prove the double thesis of the Jewish foundation of capitalism and the capitalist foundation of Judaism. Klausner, placing Sombart's work in its historical and societal context, examines the weaknesses and strengths of Jews and Modern Capitalism.

Economic Life in the Modern Age

Economic Life in the Modern Age
Author: Werner Sombart
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 528
Release: 2018-02-06
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1351326589

Werner Sombart (1863-1941) may well have been the most famous and controversial social scientist in Germany during the early twentieth century. Highly influential, his work and reputation have been indelibly tainted by his embrace of National Socialism in the last decade of his life. Although Sombart left an enormous opus spanning disciplinary boundaries, intellectual reaction to his work inside and outside of Germany is divided and ambivalent. Sombart consistently responded to the social and political developments that have shaped the twentieth century. Economic Life in the Modern Age provides a representative sampling of those portions of Sombart's work that have stood the test of time.The volume opens with a substantial introduction reviewing Sombart's life and career, the evolution of his major intellectual concerns, his relation to Marx and Weber, and his political affiliation with the Nazis. The editors' selection of texts emphasizes areas of Sombart's economic and cultural thought that remain relevant, particularly to those intellectual trends that seek a more broadly based, cross-disciplinary approach to culture and economics. Sombart's writings on capitalism are represented by essays on the nature and origin of the market system and the diversity of motives among the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Also included is an excerpt from Sombart's controversial The Jews and Modern Capitalism, exploring the widely perceived relation between economic life and Judaism as a religion. In essays on the economics of cultural processes, Sombart's comprehensive and expansive idea of cultural science yields prophetic insights into the nature of urbanism, luxury consumption, fashion, and the cultural secularization of love. The volume's final section consists of Sombart's reflections on the social influences of technology, the economic life of the future, and on socialism, including the influential essay "Why is there no Socialism in the United States."Encapsulating the most valuable aspects of his work, Economic Life in the Modern Age provides clear demonstration of Sombart's sense for fine cultural distinctions and broad cultural developments and the predictive power of his analyses. It will be of interest to sociologists, economists, political scientists, and specialists in cultural studies.Nico Stehr is professor at the Max Planck-Instit3t f3r Meteorologie in Hamburg. Reiner Grundmann is professor at the Aston Business School of Aston University in Birmingham, U.K.

Max Weber in Politics and Social Thought

Max Weber in Politics and Social Thought
Author: Joshua Derman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 299
Release: 2012-10-18
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1139577077

Max Weber is widely regarded as one of the foundational thinkers of the twentieth century. But how did this reclusive German scholar manage to leave such an indelible mark on modern political and social thought? Max Weber in Politics and Social Thought is the first comprehensive account of Weber's wide-ranging impact on both German and American intellectuals. Drawing on a wide range of sources, Joshua Derman illuminates what Weber meant to contemporaries in the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany and analyzes why they reached for his concepts to articulate such widely divergent understandings of modern life. The book also accounts for the transformations that Weber's concepts underwent at the hands of émigré and American scholars, and in doing so, elucidates one of the major intellectual movements of the mid-twentieth century: the transatlantic migration of German thought.

Max Weber in America

Max Weber in America
Author: Lawrence A. Scaff
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 330
Release: 2011-01-30
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0691147795

Lawrence Scaff provides new details about Weber's visit to the United States---what he did, what he saw, whom he met and why and how these experiences profoundly influenced Weber's thought an immigration, capitalism, science and culture, Romanticism, race diversity, Protestantism, and modernity. Scaff traces Weber's impact on the development of the social sciences in the United States following his death in 1920, examining how We ber's ideas were interpreted, translated, and disseminated by American scholars such as Talcott Parsons and Frank Knight, and how the Weberian canon, codified in America, was reintroduced into Europe after World War II. --