Weber’s Comparative Religious Ethic Analysis

Max Weber, as the son of European civilization, is known to be an encyclopedicscholar. His religious ethic thought has been the focus of the study of Weber thought,and the research of Weber’s comparative religious ethic is an important angle to studyhis religious ethic thought. By sorting out and discussing the origin, content andfeature of Weber’s comparative religious ethics as well as the analysis of rationalityand limitation of this theory, this paper tends to explore the practical significance ofthis theory and its application.Max Weber was well-educated in his early years and became a politician whenhe grew up. However, the physical disease and twist and turn in his career finally ledWeber to his way of academic study. And his interest of study also turned frompolitics and law system to economic development, and then to social movement, andfinally to the study of relations between culture and society. Viewed from histheoretical foundation and methodology principle, Weber was clearly a New Kantian,who insisted to face the positivist trend in the19thcentury from a historical andsubjective angle, criticize and absorb any deficiencies found in the positivism. MaxWeber published considerable works in his late years such as “Proceedings of theSociology of Religion” and “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, inwhich he elaborated his views in embryology and comparative method, and finallyformed the “Weber Proposition”.The internal particularity in Max Weber’s comparative method offered aclassified comparison on the huge and complicated religion and religious ethic.Weber insisted the reasonable and universal general principle, adopted the value-freeanalytical method and the comparative model of creating ideal ethic. Religion wasclassified into different types according to its overall characteristics, after the typebeing determined, it would integrate with the main characteristics of certain religionto establish an ideal research model. This was a binary classification which could befurther divided to make it more detailed on the original basis, in this way, a religion orreligious behavior could be compared, no matter how complicated it was. In order to prove the proposition that protestant ethic prompted the emergence ofcapitalism in the West, Max Weber had compared the religious ethic of someimportant humanistic religions in the world, with the help of model method, he madea major comparison and classification of the “undertaker”, ethical prophet, salvationethic as well as responsibility and conviction of the religious object, and then on basisof the function and analysis of religious ethic and the order of reality, he finallydetermined that protestant ethic was the ideology conforming to the developmentrequirement of capitalism.While the comparative religious ethic is featured by innovative and modernrationality, it certainly has its limitation, but, its essence should be analyzedobjectively and precisely so as to apply the value of this set of theory to the spiritualcivilization construction in China.