Weber and Indian Religion

Abstract

WEBER’S book, The Religion of India, is one of the few, and certainly one of the earliest, full-length accounts of Indian religion produced by a sociologist. What is more, Weber’s work has been regarded by some social scientists as having a strongly Marxist affinity. For example, Joseph Schumpeter’s assessment of Weber has been frequently quoted: ‘The whole of Max Weber’s facts and arguments [in his sociology of religion] fits perfectly into Marx’s system’.¹ Irving Zeitlin takes the view that Weber ‘generalised and revised Marx’s method’, and argues that Weber was not refuting Marx, and that to say, as Talcott Parsons has, that after an early contact with the Marxian position Weber ‘soon recoiled from this, becoming convinced of the indispensability of an important role of “ideas” in the explanation of great historical processes’ is quite incorrect.²