Two central concepts of the sociology of religions of Max Weber are examined here: the “Western rationalisation” and the “disenchantment of the world”. As regards the first, one contests the argument, suggested by Marianne Weber and taken up by some commentators, that Weber’s general problem changed fundamentally between the Protestant Ethics and the spirit of capitalism (1904-1905) and the post-1910 work (to which the work under the title belongs: Economic ethics and the world’s major religions). On the contrary, it is argued that the conditions for the formation of the capitalist economy have remained throughout his work the main theme of its reflection, despite the expansion of the historical material used for the purposes of comparison. With regard to the concept of ‘disenchantment of the world’, which too often serves as a convenient summary of the relationship between religion and modernity (equated with a theory of secularisation), we are opposed here to a reading of Wéberian thinking: Weber does not refer to the social function of religions to their ability to give meaning to the world, and the withdrawal of the religion he diagnoses from modern western societies is not the result of a erasing of transcendance, but of the marginalisation of ethical determinations in shaping social conduct.