Hence in the right area of the curve corresponds to the major religions, such as Christianity, Islam, Communism, etc. The main feature characterizing these religions is asceticism. It may appear strange to group together primitive society and a modern form of religion such as Communism, but I must stress that the criterion of the classification used here is the degree of integration. The term Gemeinschaft indicates an exceedingly knit society. The entropy curve Most religions of the antiquity, and among them Judaism, fit into the central part of the curve, which I call Gesellschaft or commercial society .
Protestant religion belongs here.
Both Protestant and Jewish religions condemn asceticism and the Jewish religion even prohibits it. The curve plotted in Figure I-1 is the entropy curve, well known from physics. I shall not go into details for relating entropy to the degree of social cohesion. Suffice it to say that morals are for society what entropy is for physics. It is morals that determine the number of degrees of freedom in the behavior of people.