Abstract:
The view that bizarre mistakes can lead to great achievements is not unfamiliar to the historians of science. This paper examines Wolfgang Schluchter's efforts towards showing that a certain mistake by Max Weber ended up by leading to a great achievement - on account of coming up out of a meta-theoretical perspective which allegedly turns mistakes into achievements, namely, so-called historical-developmental perspective (Entwicklungsgeschichte). The mistake: applying the concept of "pariah-people" to the Jews of Antiquity. Schluchter's argument: the historians have shown that the concept of "pariah-people" does not apply to the Jews of Antiquity but even though it is worthwhile to insist in this mistake because it has led Weber to a great achievement: showing the importance of the rupture accomplished by Pauline missions (against Jewish particularism) in the rise of Western rationalism. Argument of this paper: what Schluchter considers to be one of Weber's greatest achievements is just another mistake; a reverberation of the protestant theological thinking of the XIXth century.
Keywords:
Sociology of religion; Max Weber; Western rationalism; Jewish; Protestantism