Sociology

Weber sees the central threat to modern Western society, and to the wellbeing of its individuals, coming from within the logic of the Protestant Ethic. Discuss.
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  * The restorative characteristics of the theology of the Protestant Reformation, and its secular spawn; socio-economic liberalism, include hard work, frugality and individual self-reliance. Modern materialism was developed around these principles, which   favoured   production over consumption and the interests of the individual over that of the collective community. The Protestant dogma of personal judgment advanced the concept of democratic governmental systems based on representing the preference of a majority or a plurality of individual voters. The destruction of the medieval system of authority removed traditional religious restrictions on trade and banking, especially proscriptions against usury, which had inhibited the development of modern capitalism.  
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  * In his remarkably prescient conclusion to his book the Protestant Work Ethic , Weber lamented that the loss of religious underpinning to capitalism's spirit had led to a kind of involuntary servitude to mechanized industry. “The Puritan wanted to work in calling; we are forced to do so. For when asceticism was carried out of monastic cells into everyday life, and began to dominate worldly morality, it did its part in building the tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order. This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which today determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force. Perhaps it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt. In Baxter’s view the care for external goods should only lie on the shoulders of the 'saint like a light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment.’ But fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron...