The City (Weber book)

The City is a

The analysis of city consists of many different subjects—including study of religion (especially Protestantism), history of development of democracy in Western Europe.

Weber argues that the development of cities in European

• the religion of Christianity
• the privileged legal position of the
  citizens
  (based upon citizen's obligation for military service)
• the decline of religious sanctions of kinship solidarity that facilitated creation of unified urban community

That made the city's population easily influenced by later ideas of the Reformers.

In Weber's own words:

The origin of a rational and inner-worldly ethic is associated in the Occident with the appearance of thinkers and prophets [...] who developed in a social context which was alien to the Asiatic cultures. This context consisted of the political problems engendered by the bourgeois status-group of the city, without which neither Judaism, nor Christianity, nor the development of Hellenistic thinking are conceivable.

References