这篇论文是集中于讨论马克思·韦伯80年代和90年代初的思想史，即思想大量转变和意识形态破裂的一个时段。在该时段，韦伯的写作扮演了重要的角色，成为后社会时期自由改制思想的奠基石。通过仔细阅读《新教伦理与资本主义精神》一书的翻译（四川人民出版社，1986年；三联书店，1987年），中国的学者迅速地辨认出两个不同的“韦伯”，一个是美国化的韦伯——以社会学家怕森斯（Talcott Parsons）对韦伯的研究和翻译为主；第二个韦伯是“德国的韦伯”，更忠实地表现了韦伯的历史背景和政治状况，类似于苏国勋、甘阳、于晓、王容芬、魏章玲、徐鸿宾等学者所拥护的韦伯思想。学者们认为韦伯的思想与中国的未来有着重要关系。通过这些学者的研究，80年代产生了所谓的“韦伯热”。这篇论文将试图通过仔细阅读这些学者的写作分析韦伯对改革开放以后的中国知识界的影响，特别是在重新思考文化、资本主义和政治经济之间的关系方面会做重点分析。同时，这篇文章会探讨韦伯对文化在资本主义社会的兴起过程中扮演的角色具有反马克思含意，并最终成为能够代表今天的政治经济的资本主义现代化的意识形态工具。

This thesis is an intellectual history focusing on the mainland Chinese reception of Max Weber’s works in the 1980s and early 1990s, a period of great historical transition and ideological rupture in which Weber’s writings came to function as a cornerstone in the emergent post-socialist rhetoric of liberal reform. Focusing on two Chinese translations of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Sichuan People’s Press, 1986; Sanlian Publisher, 1987), Chinese scholars quickly identified “two Webers,” one an Americanized version promoted by Talcott Parsons, the prominent sociologist and first English translator of The Protestant Ethic; the second a “German Weber” truer to Weber as a historical figure and political creature of his times. Believing Weber’s work to be intimately relevant to the future of China’s development, scholars such as Su Guoxun, Gan Yang, Yu Xiao, Wang Rongfen, Wei Zhangling, and Xu Hongbin championed the German thinker to academic audiences, inspiring an eponymous passion for his works (Weibo re, or Weber fever). Through close analysis of their writings and translations, this paper will define and examine Weber’s influence in Reform-era re-evaluations of the relationship between culture, capitalism, and political economy, while also arguing that Weber’s anti-Marxist view of the role that culture plays in the rise of capitalist societies ultimately came to function as a vehicle for the ideologies of capitalist modernization that characterize China’s political economy today.