> >>> cbcox at ilstu.edu 12/05/00 05:22PM >>>
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>
>kelley wrote:
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> >
> > 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.
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>(((((((((((
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>CB: That and a new level of propensity and willingness to use deadly force
>and violence, state power.
yes, and weber does a great deal to examine the rise of the state, but, at the time, gordon and i were talking about the sources of the human capacity to think in terms of past/present/future. there was no need to elaborate the entirety of webe's theory, beyond a simple reference to the measurement of time. this is be/c i read gordon as asserting that language hindered or encouraged thinking in terms of p/p/f. i was pointing out that it wasn't language that mysteriously did this, but that i suspected that language developed and was systemized in response to the need to meet practical developments, in this case the use of rationalized accounting techniques, which carrol misinterpreted as a reference to double-entry book-keeping. true, weber addresses this, but book keeping is only one aspect of his discussions of rationalized mechanisms of accounting that were developed so that people could increasingly engage in discrete measurements for the purposes of trade: standardized weights, measures, time are also among those practices that become important. efficient methods of calculating figures and record keeping are still other examples.
again, the reading of weber as an idealist is seriously misplaced since weber focuses on concrete social relations and practices which meet human needs, what marxists call the social relations of production, but which marx and marxists often fall to theorize adequately.
none of this means that class struggle isn't important. no one here is advancing weber as superior to marx but, rather, arguing that he can be used as a complement to marx.
let me put it in terms that make it more clear that carrol's hostility to this approach is unwarranted. carrol often complains that the conditions aren't right for radical revolutionary struggle. he often talks about how the 60s were different. what weber can be used for is to show how revolutionary struggles become decisive precisely when many other conditions are present. weber concentrated on the social organization of production/consumption in his analysis of the rise of capitalism, showing how political revolutions put groups in power who were then in a position to take advantage of these conditions and advance the transformative aspects of capitalism.