SOURCE: "American Apocalypse: Max Weber," in The Iron Melancholy: Structures of Spiritual Conversion in America from the Puritan Conscience to Victorian Neurosis, Wesleyan University Press, 1983, pp. 289-322.

In the following essay, King discusses Weber's struggle with the alienation and moral stringency of Puritanism as evidenced in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.

If my own activity does not belong to me, if it is an alien compulsive activity, to whom does it belong? To a being other than myself. Who is this being? The gods?

[Karl Marx, from the "economic-philosophic manuscripts" of 1844, in the translation of Norman O. Brown]

The religious root of modern economic humanity is dead; today the concept of the calling is a caput mortuum in the world.

[Weber, General Economic History (1919-20)]

Puritanism gave expression to a struggle of soul so wide-spread within the writings of even ordinary men and women that...