>kelley wrote:
>
> >
> > no, i'm talking about Weber's study of the rise of capitalism. the
> > conditions were, largely, there for the chinese to have been the place
> > where a proto-capitalist economic organization took off, not all the
> > conditions, but many. nonetheless, various places in the west took off and
> > were more successful and this was about the development of accounting
> > techniques, in part, that aided people in conceptualizing symbolically
> > rational planning of projections based on past, present, future.
>
>Kelley, you are way out on a limb. Have you any idea what storms have
>raged around this on the pen-l and marxism lists?
>
>The story about double-entry accounting belongs as much to urban legend
>as does the 400 names for snow. "Take-Off" is a very loaded term. And
>Weber held to an absolutely indefensible "stagist" and linear view of
>history.
no, he didn't, that's a misreading. he largely abjured such accounts of history and he saw himself as elaborating marx's framework, in some ways. but it was precisely the grand theory of history as developing in some logical progression that weber was on about.
you have no reason to jump to conclusions about my use of take off or weber. you've got a biased view of weber, as far as i've ever seen. if you've read him and read carefully, marxist who draw on his work, i will take the time to pay attention. otherwise, you are simply spouting off about something you've come to believe b/c you like the people who've said the things you are repeating here and trust them. that's fine as far as it goes. but i'm not blowing smoke rings at you. i read marx and weber in a course on "Culture" as a second year undergrad. no, i didn't just read a chapter, i read Economy and Society and the Eighteenth Brumaire and the German Ideology. I went to a weird undergrad school where we read primary works, along with secondary interps and usually read at least 15 boosk for a course. Consequently, I've read it all since then, partly because i'm just like that. i read a scholar and i want to understand the entirety of their work
weber's attitude toward marx was, in General Economic History, critically respectful. The book begins and ends by addressing marx's work. he says, for example, about Engels-Bebel that "although it is untenable in detail..taken as a whole, a valuable contribution to the solution of the problem. here again is the old truth exemplified that an ingenious error is more fruitful for science than stupid accuracy."
weber asked about the "preconditions" needed for the rise of capitalism. he didn't ask how capitalism worked, but how a proto capitalism came about in some places and not others. he anticipated many of Wallerstein's major arguments as well.
Weber follows Marx in this, except for two components. Both argued that capitalism requires a pool of formally free but economically propertyless labor; the sale of factors of production on the market; and the concentration of factors of prod in the hands of entrepreneurs.
Where weber departs, and this is a highly important point for understanding contemporary capitalism, is on the development of rational, calculable technologies and methods and rules for the social organization of work and the economy.
marx's discussions are focused on primitive accumulation and revolution.
Weber goes on to develop an analysis of the various ways in which material and financial means were appropriated. Weber rejects the idea that there must be a specific accumulation of surplus for a capitalist take off.
if contemporary marxists are increasingly interested in the role of the state in the rise of capitalism, then Weber was among the first to pursue this line of research.
> I won't go beyond that. My Netscape folders on "Eurocentrism"
>and related topics total over 900 posts -- and that doesn't include the
>first round or two on the topic. Some of those posts are over 30k in
>length and a large number of them are between 10 and 30k. Just the
>bibliography from them makes up a longer reading list than any Ph.D.
>candidate has ever had to go through for her comps.
that's nice carrol. for someone who is fond of assuming that one can never really know anyone online, you make a lot of assumptions about the focus of my research and what i may or may not have read.
if it troubles you to think that i can have a speciality in this field, then i guess that's your problem, not mine. also, i didn't say a thing about double entry book keeping, but mechanism of rational accounting. that's not the same thing.
weber, contrary to your repeated assertions, wasn't an idealist. a methodological individualist in terms of some questions, yes, but that's not the same thing as idealism.
kelley