SSSR Presidential Address, 2004: Putting an End to Ancestor Worship

Several years ago a well-known member of this organization asked a young Ph.D. candidate at the start of his oral examination whether he was a Durkheimian, Weberian, or a Marxist.When the candidate said that none of those terms really fit him, he was told that he couldn't qualify as a mature scholar until he had made a choice.Now, suppose that this young scholar had been a neophyte astronomer.Is it conceivable that he would have been asked whether he was a disciple of Ptolemy or of Copernicus?Surely not, if for no other reason than virtually everything these famous historical figures had to say about the universe is known to have been absolutely wrong!Ptolemy believed that the heavenly bodies circled the earth, having elaborate loops in their orbits.Copernicus put the sun in the center, but kept the loops in the orbits of the planets.Only the scientifically illiterate editors of the Great Books series think anyone ought to be reading Copernicus today.In similar fashion, you can look in every university catalogue and fail to find even one physics course devoted to the thought of Isaac Newton, or even to that of Albert Einstein.Sciences honor their great figures, but they do not study them, knowing that their work is very out of date.In what follows I will demonstrate that the "big three" in the sociology of religion are as out of date as Ptolemy and Copernicus and that their work is filled with social scientific equivalents of loops in their orbits.Thirty years ago I would have needed to address the "big four," but fortunately since then Freud has been recognized for the charlatan that he was.I am mindful of the fact that many of you have been so well socialized into ancestor worship that you will not grasp my message and will leave this session confiding in one another that Stark is a philistine, sadly unable to appreciate the classics.But I do appreciate Weber, Durkheim, and Marx.I have even read them.What I don't do is believe in them, and I will attempt to convince you not to believe in them either. WEBERFor precisely a century, sociologists have been paying homage to The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904Capitalism ( -1905)).In this, his most famous work, Max Weber proposed that capitalism originated only in Europe because, of all the world's religions, only Protestantism provided a moral vision that led people to restrain their material consumption while vigorously seeking wealth.Weber argued that prior to the Reformation, restraint on consumption was invariably linked to asceticism and hence to condemnations of commerce.Conversely, the pursuit of wealth was linked to profligate consumption.Either cultural pattern was inimical to capitalism.According to Weber, the Protestant ethic shattered these traditional linkages, creating a culture of frugal entrepreneurs content to systematically reinvest profits in order to pursue ever greater wealth, and therein lies the key to capitalism and the ascendancy of the West.Perhaps because it was such an elegant thesis, it was widely embraced despite the fact that it was obviously wrong.Even today, The Protestant Ethic enjoys such a sacred status among sociologists that, as both Jacques Delacroix and Randall Collins discovered quite independently,