Journal of China in Global and Comparative Perspectives

Abstract: Max Weber’s interest in East Asia started as early as 1898, but it came to fruition only after 1910. Instead of continuing his essays on ascetic Protestantism, as promised to the public, he embarked on a comparison of world religions, in which he included Confucianism, although he did not regard it as a religion in the strict sense of the term. As a matter of expediency, however, he used Confucianism as the most pronounced counter-example to ascetic Protestantism, seemingly similar from the outside, but totally different from the inside. So Confucianism is included in his attempt to provide a sociology and typology of religious rationalism. Confucianism is also used as a backdrop to understand the singularity of Western development. The sketch, as he calls it, is not meant as a full-fledged analysis of this intellectual and social movement nor of Imperial China at large. Therefore, it is very dangerous to apply Weber’s analysis to the current situation in China (after the Cultural Revolution and the one-child policy). I call this the fallacy of misplaced application. This does not rule out, however, using Weber’s methodology and conceptual tools to a certain extent for such an analysis. How this can be done is shown in the last section of this article.

Keywords: Max Weber, Confucianism, world affirmation, religious rationalism, Chinese capitalism, emerging middle class