Reconsidering Max Weber's journey to the United States: Sociological connections between race relations and American capitalism.

This article sets out to investigate Weber's major sources of interest in his American journey, namely, rampant capitalism as most evident in some large cities, the presence of Calvinism and of a bourgeois ethos in some Northern areas of the United States, and the persisting relevance of a precapitalist status order in the South. As Weber argued, in these distinct settings different status groups and anthropological types were all connected, each in its own way, with modern formally rational capitalism. The significance of Weber's journey in the Unites States lied in the opportunity this journey offered him to delineate in ideal-typical terms a number of status groups and anthropological types to which he paid attention in the course of this travel.