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Max Weber's Protestant Ethic remains a text whose analysis and central arguments are still being debated. Here, I examine the historical and cultural hermeneutic underpinning Weber's analysis of the Calvinist roots of the capitalist spirit. Drawing upon the writings of Weber's student Benjamin Nelson, I show how his work provides persuasive evidence of the richness and durability of Calvin's religious revolution and influence in Europe and beyond. The chapter places this revolution within a broad framework of scientific and industrial-technological revolutions that also contributed to the genesis and shaping of modernity. It develops an operational definition of what Weber called a uniquely Western "way of life," influencing all facets that Nelson termed a central intellectual (or cultural) paradigm. The next section places Weber's studies of Calvinism within his more far-reaching studies of economic ethics and world religions. I explore what Habermas has called the project of modernity and then the global repercussions of the rationalization processes that Weber investigated and interpreted. The next section speculates on the shape of a new ecologically-grounded paradigm beyond the flawed project of modernity driven by the dialectic of the Enlightenment. The chapter closes with an outline that contests Habermas' call for a completion of the modernity project and offers instead potential avenues for theory and practice that explores the institutionalization of alternative modernities and the possibility of a sustainability paradigm that transcends the Enlightenment legacy that still drives twenty-first century tendencies toward national-global inequities and ecological catastrophe.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-017-9376-6_7

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