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53 | Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism: Anti-Materialist Sociology (Patreon)

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2022-11-28 11:00:09
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Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism is probably the most important foundational text for modern sociology, and we think that’s kind of a downer, actually. We talk about how we are thoroughly unconvinced about his central historical claim in the book, which seems to be that the Protestant reformation created the subjective conditions for the emergence of capitalism somehow. We also take him to task for his weak criticism of historical materialism and for his own sorely lacking methodology. The book’s definitely got some interesting stuff in it, but it’s mostly a swing and a miss for us! Sorry, Weberians!

leftofphilosophy.com | @leftofphil

References:

Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism, trans. Peter Baehr and Gordon C. Wells (New York: Penguin, 2002).

Music: Vintage Memories by Schematist | schematist.bandcamp.com

Comments

Alan Rudy

So, about Weber… A few things that may help with and deepen the magnificent critique you all generated, one that nails so much of what’s infuriating about sociologists’ love of this work. (Some of my fury may come from never having quite recovered from having to read his two volume tome - Economy and Society - written in outline form all the way down to the footnotes, in grad school.) First, whatever the limits of his theoretical program, what Weber cares about isn’t actually rationalization or capitalism or Protestantism but meaningful social interaction. One of you asked whether he sees how terribly bleak Calvinism is and the answer is, yes, but what matters to him about it is that it’s meaningful rather than meaningless and he believes – rightly? – that the intensifying secular/instrumental spread of a) the structural market mandate that – if the nutbag Calvinists are non-stop plowing their profits back into expanded and/or more efficient production – everyone has to plow their profits back into the expanded reproduction of capital and b) the ever more professionalized rule-based state and business bureaucracies necessary to manage nations and markets that what’s happening is the secular, instrumental, professional, bureaucratic destruction of meaningful social interactions, feelings that any of us matter in any way to anyone else, ever. From charisma to Calvinism, the content maybe pure, hellish shit but at least there’s meaning – for Weber - I think. The key, though, as you all also discuss, is that the Calvinist straw that breaks the feudal back – more on this in a moment – doesn’t last. At the end of the text, he is very clear that the religious ethic in that straw becomes secular/structural spirit pretty quickly. By extension, as you all discuss near the end, this means that appeals to the religious ethic are simply legitimation, they’re about the reproduction of class discipline… In this light, I think it’s the individualized instrumental rationality that’s the real vestige, not the religious ethic/insecurity. Here, retail management and even the academy doesn’t speak much of a calling anymore, it’s all about one’s profession/career… as you note, no one is called to manage a Kohl’s, and how many people “called” to teach and research don’t get tenure at neoliberal universities because they think the quality of the work matters more than the quantity of publications? Second, and expanding on that last point, the introduction – I think – got it wrong and Lillian has it right. Weber isn’t writing about the so-called Protestant work ethic among the proletarianized, he’s writing about the bourgeoisie. As you all point out, there’s no joy in Mudville for the proletariat to start with, they’re already disciplined by their employer, they have no capital to reinvest, their religious commitments – as Lillian stresses – don’t fucking matter to Weber, the small business class does. For that matter, I don’t think Benjamin Franklin was really writing about proletarians, I’m pretty sure he’s writing about frontier individualists and independent commodity producers. Time isn’t money (M’) for workers, it’s subsistence (C). In fact, good bourgeois historian that he was, he pays no attention to labor relations/production… whether it is premodern or modern capitalism, he defines capitalism as markets. Third, one of the huge problems with Weber – and you all discussed this in the totally appropriate sneering about theories of the middle range – is he has exactly no capacity to conceptualize quantity-quality transformations except by means of historical contingency. Relations and types shift from form to form more or less by accident, even if there is a universal and ineluctable secular trend towards expanding and intensifying rationalization. So, for capitalism, Protestantism isn’t a precondition as Marxists would understand it, its accidentally the final aspect of the rationalization of increasing numbers of social institutions that changes pre-modern capitalism, dominated by use-value, into modern capitalism, dominated by exchange/surplus value (not that he believes in social labor or other abstractions.) For Weber, a) the separation of productive enterprises from the household, b) the development of the western city, c) an inherited tradition of calculable Roman law, d) the development of the nation-state, e) double-entry book-keeping, and f) the formation of a free mass of wage laborers (formally voluntary/free, actually involuntary/compulsive), which are bound up in 1) the appropriation of all physical means of production, 2) freedom of market, 3) rational technology (mechanization), 4) the commercialization of economic life, and 5) speculative investment are all floating around and he suggests that Calvinism might have been the element that binds them all together into a thing. But, as you note, there’s no theory, there are simply lists of relations that have been rationalized which contribute to the pile to stuff that sets the stage for the change. His is a basically stochastic model of relations, causality is always contingent since you never can tell which variables are going to have the greatest relative impact or even which things are going to be variables. Sigh. Last, in terms of Weber’s pissiness about Marxism… it is quite possible that you all read the second edition of the book and an old translation – I don’t know. Twenty years ago or so, a new translation of the first edition came out and in the reviews it was pointed out that the first edition hedged it’s bets, was extra careful about putting too much weight on Protestantism, wrote more about elective affinities, etc…. and then the book got savaged by Marxists/historical materialists. What I read, back then, was that when the second edition came out, Weber reworked the text to add the attack on Marxists and, in an “Oh yeah? Fuck you then!” moment, yanked a bunch of the nuance and more baldly connected the cultural/ideal to the material/economic. BTW: in the introduction to the Weber reader I used to use when I taught Classical Theory in the Soc dept at Michigan State, Wolf Heydebrand – a renowned Weber scholar – out and out says that Weber’s not a theorist… not that sociologists pay any attention to the insights of their own kind when it would force them to think differently. (I was a biologist who should have been a geographer but accidentally landed in the then-Marxist sociology program at UCSC...)

Maggie Hu

What happened to episode 5 in Beauvoir!!!

O

How is this so good. Thank you to the team for doing this podcast, it's so enjoyable to follow your conversations.

John Shaeffer

Enjoyed this episode but was surprised that no one responded to Weber's assertion that protestantism caused capitalism with the inverse that capitalism caused protestantism? If you look at most religious orthodoxies, they are culturally specific, with power using religion to further political ends. One could argue Judaism was created to join landless tribes into an organized political unit. Just finished reading Creating the Qur'an, which suggests the same for Islam with the Qur'an being standardized and enforced to solify power of I believe the third caliphate And Constantine's Sword basically says the same for the Roman Catholic Church. Many have argued that the King James Bible was translated so as to justify a monarchy. Finally Buddhism constantly morphed culturally, which you can see by comparing Buddhism in Tibet against Buddhism in Japan.