“The spirit of capitalism” is a concept primarily associated with Max Weber’s famous work on Protestant ethic and the origins of capitalism. However, it was not Weber but Werner Sombart – his longtime friend and later rival – who first introduced the term into the discourse of the social sciences. In Sombart’s usage, the “spirit” has above all a psychological meaning: it denotes a set of dispositions that enable a person to succeed in an economic system oriented towards the systematic and unlimited accumulation of wealth. In this text, I attempt to trace the debate between Weber and Sombart concerning the “spirit of capitalism,” as well as the later vicissitudes of the concept and the ways it was employed by authors such as Daniel Bell, Richard Sennett, and, last but not least, Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello.
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