Once again - I read only the Introduction of a book -

So, the other day i picked up a copy of Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.
Besides being once again astounded at the punctilious nature of german thinking, I was struck by a way of thinking he offered:
Weber begins by defining his terms, the first of which is 'capitalism'. To my great satisfaction - for I have been wondering this for a while - he makes very clear that wanting to accumulate as much wealth as possible, and to turn a profit from business exchanges, is NOT unique to the ideology of capitalism, but is in fact a sentiment found across almost all peoples and times. To have such a stalwart name as Weber lay this out clearly was a salve to the irritation i have felt when surface-liberals tirade against the nebulous, evil beast whose name is the C-word. Weber goes on to say though - and this is what I mean to highlight in this post - that although the desire for wealth is not unique to capitalism, the degree to which we see this ideology infiltrating every facet of both public and private life today in the West, renders the phenomenon different than the hitherto seen desire. I.e. we call it differently: capitalism. And what struck me is the form of this thinking: that as a thing changes by degrees, eventually it can change so much it changes into a different thing.
For instance, a moped is just a small motorbike, but is small enough that we give it a different name. It is different from a motorbike, even though it shares all the same characteristics. A tangentially related example that set this whole idea rolling in my head: A friend of mine was relaying to me the events of a party the night before, and said how he had been hung over that morning, but had just "turned the corner" and was now better. This struck me: how often I think of progression happening in a single direction, but the truth is: sometimes things 'turn the corner'. It is just one step past where one was one step ago, and yet - it is an entirely new direction. To awkwardly force it into the language i just a moment ago established: after 'turning a corner', one has only progressed one degree further than one has before, and yet one is upon an entirely new "thing".

This seems less profound in writing than it does in my head, but i have a sense that this concept will be useful to me as i analyze things in the future.