Not Elective but Selective Affinities

Max Weber’s ambivalent attitude to the application of the concepts of selection and adaptation to the study of cultural and social evolution is readily understandable in view of his scepticism about the reducibility of sociology to biology and his suspicion that selectionist explanations will turn out on close inspection to be either value-laden or circular. His concerns can be dispelled with the help of developments in evolutionary theory which he could not have anticipated in his lifetime but which enable the basic agenda of his sociology of religion to be reformulated in more rather than less persuasive terms. That, however, requires his metaphor of ‘elective affinities’ between religious ideas and the behaviour of ideal-typical agents to be replaced by empirically testable hypotheses linking the adaptiveness of specific religious memes to the adaptiveness of specific economic practices.