Thank you for downloading this episode of In Our Time, for more details about in our time, and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.uk.

I hope you enjoy the program.

Hello, in 1905 the German sociologist Max Weber published an essay suggesting a connection

between religion and the spread of capitalism.

Weber had noticed that the countries in which capitalism had been most successful tended to be mainly Protestant.

He believed that this was not a coincidence, and he argued that certain types of religious belief had created a particular ethic giving rise to a society in which hard

work was celebrated and whether wealthy invested their money rather than spending it on luxuries.

Weber called his essay the Protestant ethic and Spirit of Capitalism, and a century later it's still

seen as one of the founding works of modern sociology.

The idea of the Protestant work ethic has been enormously influential, although many later thinkers have disputed Weber's basic arguments.

With me to discuss Max Weber as the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

are Peter Gosh, fellow in history at Hans College Hans College, Oxford, Sam Wimster, Honorary Professor

at the University of New South Wales, and Ninder Woodhead, Professor of Sociology of

Religion at Lancaster University.

Peter Gosh, can you tell us a bit more about

Mike's Weber's background and early life? Well, so Weber is born in

1864 and that's a slightly symbolic date because it's just before the

unification, the political unification of Germany in 186671. And the reason I

draw attention to this is that I think we today tend to think that modern German history is heavily dominated by politics and that it's a story from Bismarck to Hitler.

Now that is obviously there's a story from Bismarck to Hitler.

Now that is, obviously there's a lot of mileage in that, of course.

But when that politically unified state was created,

...