Abstract

The sociology of religion Max Weber pursued in the last years of his life was inspired and initiated by the critiques of his 1905 study, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. His study of Confucianism and Taoism (The Religion of China) was first published in 1915 and in an expanded form in 1920 as part of his comparative studies on the economic ethics of world religions: Hinduism and Buddhism (The Religion of India) and Ancient Judaism. He had become convinced of the uniqueness of the development of Western culture and “occidental rationalism,” as expressed in the introduction to the sociology of religion he wrote in 1920, and all these studies were conceived primarily to illustrate those cultural phenomena which occurred “only in the Occident.”