ABSTRACT
Max Weber had many intellectual interests, and there has been considerable debate over the question of what constitutes the central theme of his life work. The argument that the Calvinist doctrine of predestination gave the psychological impetus for rationalized, entrepreneurial capitalism is only a fragment of Weber's full theory. Property systems frequently tied land ownership to aristocratic status, while commercial occupations were often prohibited to certain groups and monopolized by others. For the large-scale and economically predominant capitalism, the key is the "rational permanent enterprise" characterized by "rational capital accounting." The legal system is both an ongoing prop for all of these features and a causal link backward to their social preconditions. Weber's account of the rise of capitalism, then, is in a sense not a theory at all, in that it is not a set of universal generalizations about economic change.
