Notes
1Another recently published book argues that Russian emigrants played an important role in promoting economic theory and mathematical modeling in a Germany dominated by the historic school—Janssen, Hauke, Russische Oekonomen in Deutschland (1910-1933) (Marburg: Metropolis Verlag 2004).
2L. I. Abalkin (Ed) Ocherki istorii rossiyskoy ekonomicheskoy mysli (Moscow: Nauka, 2003).
3A reader of Russian, may find more comprehensive lists in THESIS: theory and history of economic and social institutions and systems, Moscow, 1994 N4,6 and the newest one (since 1996) on the web-site http://hse.ru/science/igiti/economics.shtml.
1Agevall Citation(2005) reports that, since the mid-1960s, Weber has been mentioned in about one in twenty sociology journal articles (the rate is substantially higher when concepts clearly attributable to him are included). In the same special journal issue in which Agevall's article appears (also in honor of the centennial of the Protestant Ethic), other scholars stress Weber's continued influence across disciplinary borders in the social sciences and the humanities. The New York Public Library lists the Protestant Ethic in its very select list of “Books of the [Twentieth] Century.”
2Although appearing earlier than the Protestant Ethic, Frank H. Knight's translation of Weber's General Economic History (Citation1927) had less impact. The General Economic History was reconstructed from Weber's fragmentary notes and his former students' notes of his lectures on the topic.
3Parsons claimed that his postwar modernization theory, which portrayed the U.S. as the “lead society” in evolutionary progress, was inspired by Weber's Protestant Ethic and his related views about cultural rationalization. Pitting Weber's alleged idealism against Marx's materialism, Parsons distorted Weber's methodology and exaggerated the differences with Marx.
4Recently, the original Protestant Ethic has been translated into English (Weber Citation[1904–1905] 2002a), and Weber's 1907–1910 “anticritical” exchanges also have appeared in full English translation for the first time (Weber Citation2001). And recently, Stephen Kalberg has provided a new, significantly different (from Parsons's) translation of Weber's original Protestant Ethic (Weber Citation1920, 2002b). Parsons's version is still in-print, and, likely, still the most widely read current version of the classic.