This brilliant study--the author's best-known and most controversial work--opposes the Marxist concept of dialectical materialism and its view that change takes place through the conflict of opposites. Instead, Weber relates the rise of a capitalist economy to the Puritan determination to work out anxiety over salvation or damnation by performing good deeds--an effort that ultimately discouraged belief in predestination and encouraged capitalism. Weber's classic has long been required reading in college and advanced high school social studies classrooms.