The Sociology of Religion

The Sociology of Religion, Max Weber's study translated by Ephraim Fischoff with an introduction by Talcott Parsons, Beacon Press, is the standard English edition of Weber's theory of charisma, its routinization, and the church-sect distinction, drawn from the religion chapters of his posthumous Economy and Society. Its strength is that it is Weber's own foundational sociological framework in its standard scholarly translation. Its limit is that it is a translation of material composed decades earlier and assembled posthumously from Weber's papers, so its argument reflects debates of Weber's own time rather than the discipline's current state. This record's publication year was corrected in this pass from 1920, the year of Weber's death and before this translation existed, to 1963, the year Beacon Press actually published Fischoff's English translation, confirmed against multiple independent bibliographic listings agreeing on the date; the author, translator and publisher were already accurate.