Max Weber's Genteel Racism (was Re: weber)

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Wed Dec 6 09:03:23 PST 2000


Wojtek:


>Kelley: Contrary to some opinions, Max Weber' theories pretty much in line
>with Karl Marx's view of capitalism, excpet that Weber focuses on the role
>of state in capitalist development, which btw latter-day-marxists also
>recognize.
>
>Yoshie: You do not understand, comrade. Weber was a racist pig who used
>the word "negro." We must condemn his blasphemous theories.

The problem is that Max Weber argues that rationality peculiar to the so-called "Occident" gave rise to the modern state: "[One who is] a product of modern European civilization, studying any problem of universal history, is bound to ask himself to what combination of circumstances the fact should be attributed that in Western civilization, and in Western civilization only, cultural phenomena have appeared which (as we like to think) lie in a line of development having _universal_ significance and value....[The] feudal state...has only been known to our culture...In fact the State itself...is known [in the full sense] only in the Occident. And the same is true of the most fateful force in our modern life, capitalism" (Weber, _The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism_).

It is anachronistic & culturalist to make capitalist rationality -- racialized into "European rationality" by Weber & Co. -- the cause of capitalism. It is likewise anachronistic & culturalist to make an idea -- rationality -- the cause of the modern state.

The "East" used to be a career, as Disraeli said. Now, the "West" is a fetish of intellectual investors in the Blessings-of-the-Civilization Trust.

Yoshie

P.S. The role of the state in capitalist development is well recognized by our contemporary Marxists such as Robert Brenner (_Merchants & Revolution_), Michael Perelman (_The Invention of Capitalism_), & Doug Henwood (_Wall Street_) and variously studied in a non-Eurocentric fashion.



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