Max Weber and China : Imperial scholarship, its background and findings

[Extract] In order to confirm his argument that capitalism necessarily originated in Europe as a result of a rationalizing tendency inherent only in early Calvinism,1 the eminent German sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920) undertook a study of the history of Chinese institutions and reflective traditions. The resulting work was first published in 1915 as Konfuzianismus und Taoismus. An expanded version appeared in 1920, translated into English as The Religion of China: Confucianism and Taoism.2 At the time that Weber commenced his research, Germany held a number of concessions and leases in China, incrementally acquired beginning in 1861; by the time of the work’s publication, however, Germany’s imperial and colonial ambitions—which Weber had enthusiastically supported—were halted through the military defeat in 1918 that ended the First World War. Additionally, the collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1911 and the inauguration of the Republic of China began a process that undermined practically every aspect of Chinese society discussed in Weber’s monograph. J. Barbalet

The Religion of China attempts to demonstrate that Chinese institutions and the characteristically Chinese thought traditions of Confucianism (Kong jiao) and Daoism (Daojiao) prevented existing commercial and market practices from developing into modern industrial capitalism. At the time of his writing, Weber had access to most of the standard texts of the Chinese classics and large numbers of historical documents and analyses as well as reports written by missionaries, diplomats and travelers. By the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, sinology flourished in a number of German university departments, including in Berlin, Hamburg, Frankfurt and Leipzig. The historical and social science interest in China among German scholars, including Weber, was informed by both German missionary activity in China and by imperial economic and political interests at home, both of which Weber was associated with.