Max Weber

The Birth of Capitalism from the Spirit of Protestantism is a good read, although it's heavier on the Spirit of Protestantism than the Birth of Capitalism, if that makes sense...

The equation of idleness with immorality is a very pervading thing in western society, I think, although IIRC Weber argues that once you've got capitalism running, that becomes self sustaining without the religious element.

There's quite a lot of interesting stuff about early Protestant settlers in North America trying to get Indian converts to lead "rational" lives - essentially to move over to European farming methods which were significantly less efficient than the semi-nomadic way of life they'd been following up to then, because sitting around chilling rather than working your fingers to the bone to stay alive was clearly a bit morally suspect...

It's an interesting idea and I'm sure there's something in it but I find it all bit too neat and tidy. It may have been true historically but these days we're a nation of slackers and sickie-pullers, aren't we? I mean here I am, Dissensussing in the middle of the working day and nothing bad is happening to me. Just got back from a leisurely pub lunch, in fact. Now how many people in China/Korea/Japan could have done that? East Asian work ethic >>> "Protestant" work ethic.

Having said that, the current government's equation of unemployment with moral turpitude when there are simply more jobs that people is certainly noteworthy and worrying. But I don't know if this has much to do with residual cultural Protestantism or just general meanness and authoritarianism.

Edit: fewer jobs than people, durr.

Does that mean everyone in China just sat around doing whatever before the wicked influence of Capitalism crept in and turned everyone into workaholics? It's hardly as if communist movements and regimes haven't fetishized work as a social, even spiritual good, in contrast to the idle classes who own wealth but don't produce it.

In premodern times (and indeed early modern times, up to the 20th century in many places) much of the world was feudal, just as it was in Europe prior to the agricultural and industrial revolutions. The majority of people were peasants who worked hard not because of some ideology equating hard work with moral goodness but because they got a beating/went hungry if they didn't.

Woebot said:

funny.

i'm really intrigued to check him discussing other religions.

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That's not direct from Weber - it's something I've picked up from my girlfriend being an Early Americanist. I'll see if I can get a good source from her.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03yqj31

In Our Time on Max Weber must be the show you heard?

Woebot said:

also great to hear capitalism talked about in a more nuanced way than one hears from marxists.

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Actually, Weber's thesis on capitalism can be viewed as an inversion of classical marxist materialism. Instead of the material basis shaping and determining thought, religion, etc., the roles are inversed. As Mr. Tea said, though, this central hypothesis has never been really proven in a hard way.

He has written a whole book on Confucianism and Taoism, where the question why capitalism didn't develop in China is posed. Short answer: their cultural framework did not contain all elements necessary for the birth of capitalism.

If you like Weber, you should read up his lecture on politics as a vocation. It's still very relevant.

Mr. Tea said:

The majority of people were peasants who worked hard not because of some ideology equating hard work with moral goodness but because they went hungry if they didn't

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no offense, but that's badly misrepresenting Weber. The generic notion of “work ethic” that's passed into popular culture is, unfortunately, rather different from what he meant by it. it's not about simply working harder, but the rational (rigorous and systematic) organization of one's life in pursuit of, not just profit for its own sake but the fruits of being industrious – i.e. the spirit of capitalism – for some purpose logically following from one of several theological tenets found in Calvinism a/o in some later, mostly Puritan strands of Protestantism – i.e. the Protestant ethic (or more accurately the Calvinist-Puritan ethic). Specifically, Weber wasn’t interested theology for its own sake but its pragmatic effects on the personal economic attitudes and activity of the faithful and in the consequences of that for the development of rational bourgeois capitalism. I won't try to sum up all his arguments b/c I don't think I could do them justice in a few sentences.

More generally, Weber's the kind of thinker, like Foucault, where even if you don't agree w/all his outcomes there's enormous value in his thinking and approach to problems. He was enormously influential on social sciences and it's not hard to see why. He really stressed value-neutral inquiry; recognized the impossibility of objectivity in non-hard science except as an unobtainable ideal to strive toward; wrote extensively and penetratingly on rationalization, disenchantment, technocracy and so on, all things that only increased, massively, since his writing.

I enjoy reading him on capitalism b/c unlike Marxists, he's ultimately interested in pragmatic effects, outcomes rather than fitting his ideas into a system. He doesn't view capitalism as a priori bad or good of itself, neither as a stage in an inevitable historical development nor the pinnacle of human achievement. He's also very good on how ideas (in this case theological) can have long-ranging, enormous and totally unexpected consequences unrelated or even totally opposed to the original intent. Several times in The Protestant Ethic... he makes the point that the theological roots of these economic attitudes are usually rapidly jettisoned and eventually forgotten, which among other things explains why the influence he's talking about can be hard to initially discern. he's also, unlike Marx, a fairly quick and engaging read. oh and he has a dry German sense of humor that pops every so often.

anyway, I highly recommend The Protestant Ethic... and "Politics as Vocation". Economy and Society is on my to-read list, and I'd also like to read his book on ancient Judaism.

also, here's a quote that may shed some light on why it's hard to discern the theological influences he was discussing in modern capitalist economic relations

Max Weber said:

But in any case asceticism certainly deprived all labor of this worldly attractiveness, today forever destroyed by capitalism, and oriented it to the beyond. Labor in a calling as such is willed by God. The impersonality of present day labor, what, from the standpoint of the individual, is its joyless lack of meaning, still has a religious justification here. Capitalism at the time of its development needed laborers who were available for economic exploitation for conscience's sake. Today it is in the saddle, and hence able to force people to labor without transcendental sanctions.

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also, on China etc - Weber is very clear that capitalistic enterprise has existed in many societies at many times in the form of things like tax farming, adventure capitalism (i.e. the funding of sea expeditions or war profiteering). Capitalism, the system as we know it, is distinguished by rationality, specifically the rational organization of labor. the "East Asian work ethic" or whatever, I would speculate is rather about cultural values on obedience, identifying one's one self of worth w/the company's, etc.

also, Weber was hardly unfamiliar w/Marxism - I mean he was a German sociologist who's life overlapped w/Marx's. I think if anything he would point that Marxism is in many ways a furtherance of the Protestant ethic, the Puritans minus God.

padraig (u.s.) said:

no offense, but that's badly misrepresenting Weber.

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Oh for sure, I mean it wasn't meant to represent him as anything because I'm not directly familiar with his ideas - it was more a comment on things I've seen people write here/elsewhere online. I'll listen to that programme, it sounds interesting.

Marxism as "Puritanism minus God" is certainly a neat idea - fits in very well with the way hard-socialist states have often loved to slander capitalist societies as "decadent". Not that we aren't very decadent, in many ways, but I'd say that's probably preferable to a joyless, worthy cult of Labour.

Has anyone done an analysis on residual cultural Puritanism in the way chocolates, desserts and so on are often marketed as "sinful" or (Marx help us) "naughty"?

HMGovt said:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03yqj31

In Our Time on Max Weber must be the show you heard?

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Listened to this last night, thanks for the link. Very interesting I thought, especially with regard to how (modern) capitalism and modernity generally somehow failed to occur in China first, when China was socially/technologically well in advance of Europe for hundreds of years.

(I also liked the bit where the woman mentions Martin Luther and Bragg interrupts with "That's Martin Luther, the 16th-century theologian and reformer" for the benefit of the terminally ignorant listener-at-home, and there's a pause and she goes "er, yeees...", as if he'd just said "That's Barack Obama, the incumbent President of the Unites States".)

Mr. Tea said:

have often loved to slander capitalist societies as "decadent"

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Puritans also despised the idle, noble landed classes, but for sloth and waste rather than specifically parasitism.

and there many, many other similarities; untethering of production from personal pecuniary gain (at least as a primary motive), predication on rational organization of labor (a bourgeois invention), the asceticism practiced by adherents, to name a few. i it's not a perfect comparison I'm sure but generally, I mean, replace "glory of God" w/"dictatorship of the proletariat" and there you go. someone somewhere must have written a book or dissertation on the subject.

also, I haven't listened to that program so I don't know the arguments she puts forth on China, but generally on why capitalism did and didn't develop in places, Weber cites some examples. one is early America - i.e. Puritan New England became a capitalist stronghold while the South, despite equally if not more favorable environmental conditions, was dominated by seigneurial plantations. could dig out the relevant quotations if someone's interested.

also speaking of early America

Slothrop said:

move over to European farming methods which were significantly less efficient than the semi-nomadic way of life

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there is no way farming is less efficient, production-wise, than hunting-gathering. one of the hallmarks of h-g is that it requires much lower population densities. long-term sustainability is another thing, but simply production per area, no. the imposition of moral values by one culture on another is, of course, a different topic.

but this doesn't really have anything to do w/Weber, just wanted to note.

padraig (u.s.) said:

Puritan New England became a capitalist stronghold while the South, despite equally if not more favorable environmental conditions, was dominated by seigneurial plantations.

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Which could almost be seen as a late form of feudalism, right? I mean, bonded serfs in mediaeval Europe* were essentially slaves - probably not, in general, treated as badly as black slaves were in the pre-war South, but nonetheless the property of the local landowners.

padraig (u.s.) said:

one of the hallmarks of h-g is that it requires much lower population densities.

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Yeah, the relative inefficiency of hunter-gathering is surely evidenced by the fact that 99% of the world's population doesn't follow that lifestyle any more. But this is a topic we've done to death more times than I can be bothered to count...

*and Russia until the 19th century

Mr. Tea said:

Which could almost be seen as a late form of feudalism

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"feudalism" is a historically load word (i.e., medievalists use it to mean something much more narrow and specific) but, basically, yes. here's Weber:

Max Weber said:

Similarly, the early history of the North American colonies is dominated by the sharp contrast of the adventurers, who wanted to set up plantations with the labor of indentured servants [and later slaves], and live as feudal lords, and the specifically middle-class outlook of the Puritans

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and there's more in that vein

Mr. Tea said:

we've done to death more times than I be bothered to count...

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absolutely, and sustainability (let alone superiority) is another matter. I just wanted to make the distinction.

On the point raised in the programme about how capitalism took off in some countries with no history of Protestantism (e.g. Japan), and (apparently, this goes a bit beyond my history knowledge) only developed very late in Scotland, which was traditionally one of the most Protestant parts of Protestant Europe, far moreso than England:

Is there anything to say about how different kinds of capitalism arose? I mean, the heartland of German industrial capitalism is Bavaria which is traditionally Catholic, isn't it? Whereas the Protestant Hanseatic port towns in the north of the country, along with their Dutch counterparts, developed a form of capitalism based mainly around trade rather than agricultural or industrial production.

In fact, come to that, didn't what we might call finance capitalism (or even just capitalism, full stop) first evolve in mediaeval Venice, a couple of centuries before the Reformation and in an area that remained Catholic in any case? At least that's the history-textbook view but it's still regarded as broadly correct, I think.