MAX WEBER AND ASIAN CIVILIZATION

ERNEST WOLF-GAZO

ABSTRACT

The following presentation explores the possibility of renewing and completing Max Weber’s
project which he called “Economic Ethics of World Religions”. These were studies that he started
at the beginning of the twenty-first century and whose results were published, partly at the time of
his untimely death in 1920, partly posthumously by his wife Marianne Weber. The studies spanned
an enormously rich aggregate of academic fields (some still in the early stages of professional
development), such as cultural history, international law, economic history, religious traditions,
political stratification, as well as philosophical aspects of specific cultural forms known in Weber’s
time as “Kulturkreis”. His project of studying the effects of economic ethics and ethos upon the
world religions encompassed Confucianism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
Unfortunately, the publications on Christianity and Islam were left incomplete due to his untimely
death. The independent studies on India and China that dealt with the Kulturkreis (cultural circle) of
Confucianism, Buddhism and Hinduism had enormous influence in the field what became known as
sociology of religion. However, his work on Christianity, especially Protestantism, attained world fame
with his monograph “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism”. The subsequent volumes on
India and China were published in the early 1920, but translated into English in the early 1950s. His
work on Islam was published, despite the incomplete manuscript. Our study will focus specifically on
Asian Civilization that includes India, China, Korea, the Malay Peninsula, Indonesia, as well as Japan.
From a Weberian point of view, we are focusing on Asia not on the political unit called nation state, but
on the cultural community (Kulturkreis), especially of the interaction of economic forces and religious
community life. This should be of great interest in the new century, since Asia in general, is appearing
on the global stage of world history, to use a Hegelian metaphor, that is provoking many questions, still
unanswered. What was the hidden secret of the economic upsurge of Japan, Korea, India, and China,
and lately Indonesia, not to mention Malaysia? There have been specialized studies made on religion,
on technology, or aesthetics, of Asian civilization, but it was Max Weber who seriously investigated the
subtle interplay, not to say dialectic, between economic ethos and religious communities, or members
and followers of belief systems. This presentation suggests that we are now, during the process of global
communications possibility, in a position that we can start strategic researches for each Kulturkreis
making up the panorama called Asian Civilization, to ask Weberian questions which Weber himself
was not able to investigate empirically.