The Protestant Ethic. A Work in Translation

What would have American sociology been like without Talcott Parsons’s translation of Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism? To try to answer such a question inevitable takes us to the domain of counter-factual thinking, so pervasive and profound was the impact of that work of translation. If we are to remain within the realm of social-scientific inquiry, however, one should pose a different question. Assuming that Parsons’s rendering of Weber’s words into American English created “world images” of Weber and his sociological significance that were to act “like switchmen” on a railroad, changing irrevocably the course of history (Weber, 1946: 280), how is this “cyclopean moment” (Foucault 1991: 77) to be explained? This is why this chapter is as much about Weber and his ideas as it is about Parsons’s mediation of those ideas through the translation of the “sacred text” (Scaff 2005) of Weberian scholarship.