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

kelley kwalker2 at gte.net
Wed Dec 6 11:13:32 PST 2000


At 01:48 PM 12/6/00 -0500, Doug Henwood wrote:
>Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
>>It is anachronistic & culturalist to make capitalist rationality --
>>racialized into "European rationality" by Weber & Co. -- the cause of
>>capitalism.
>
>So do you buy Blaut's "prevailing winds" theory of the rise of European
>imperialism? Or did something happen internally in Europe that made
>primitive accumulation on a global scale possible?
>
>Doug

oh my fucking god. i didn't read the whole thing she posted b/c all her posts go into the trash. the fickle finger of fate stepped in and, of course, she posted to pen-l which meant that i saw the idiotic post.. yes, yoshie, weber did speak of occidental rationality. yeah, he was eurocentric. but if you think that his concept of rationality was eurocentric, then i ask: what exactly do you think he meant by that? if you think he meant some sort of capacity for rational thought unique to westerners you're clearly ignorant of weber's work. why should anyone take you seriously if you can even interpret second hand accounts properly. weber shows over and over again that the components of rationality of which he speaks--exhibited by organizational forms that encourage or are based on standardization, calculability, predictability, efficiency, and control,--can be found anywhere. but it is this combination and under other conditions of varying degrees of importance that rationalized capitalism emerges. rationality in this case has nothing to do with intellet or modes of thinking.

if you miss that in weber, then you aren't reading weber.



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