Sociology of Religion as Theory of Social Order. To Commemorate Russian-Language Version of Max Weber's "Confucianism and Taoism"

O.Kildyushov acknowledges that the book under review is more of a monument to the socio-theoretical thought than an up-to-date study of discursive forms of particular religious rationality. At the same time, he is convinced that its appearance in the Russian-language scientific and cultural space will be useful not only for historians of sociology, but also for sinologists and researchers of religion, because the book offers an interesting framework for macrosociological interpretation of the world history of the spirit that is still of high heuristic value today. Although modern theoretical Sinology has revised several provisions of Weber's analysis, the way Weber reconstructed Confucianism as rational secular ethics on the other side of the transcendent remains a powerful concept for explaining the specifics of the Chinese spiritual composition and Chinese people's ideas about themselves and the world.