Iván Szelényi lectures on Max Weber for Yale's Foundations of Modern Social Theory (SOCY 151). He opens by placing Weber alongside Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, then traces Weber's turn after a period of mental illness from a liberal, Adam Smith style optimism toward a more skeptical view of modernization. The core of the lecture works through The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism: Luther's concept of calling, Calvinist predestination, and how these religious ideas generated the discipline and worldly asceticism that Weber calls the spirit of capitalism. Szelényi contrasts Weber's account of capitalist motivation with Marx's materialist explanation, arguing Weber captures psychological and cultural causes Marx leaves out. Chapter markers move from historical context into the Marx-Weber debate, the correlation between Protestantism and capitalism, and the religious foundations of asceticism, closing on how ascetic discipline becomes economic rationalization.