In a well-known passage of the The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism,
Max Weber declares his interest in analyzing the influence of those psychological
sanctions which, originating in religious belief and the practice of religion, give a
direction to practical conduct and held the individual to it. This paper investigates
Max Weber’s vision of the psychology (and sociology) of worldviews, focusing on
two related problems: (1) how religious beliefs and the practice of religion originate
psychological sanctions and impulses that motivate people to act in certain ways,
and (2) how such psychological sanctions and impulses can become organized in a
more or less rationalized conduct of life.
The paper suggests that the centrality of the sociology of religion in Weber’s
thought is in part a consequence of the fact that the religious sphere makes it
particularly evident that there is a deep interconnection among the human need for
ordering empirical reality, the emergence of social and life-orders, and the
formation of personality (through dualistic self-representations).
