Weber, in his later work, tries to elaborate the organizational forms that made capitalism a transformative force in the West but not elsewhere. This is an important point. Weber was trying, not to explain why capitalism could only emerge in the West, but why it became a transformative force that took root more tenaciously than elsewhere. For Weber, it is rationalized capitalism that was the object of inquiry.
He does so through a series of comparisons in which he demonstrates that the factors set forth by others to explain the Western takeoff were inadequate. What he is doing is two things. First, he sets out to describe what he sees as the components of rationalized capitalism: the entrepreneurial organization of capital, rational technology, formally free labor, unrestricted markets and calculable law. Then he elaborates a complex concatenation of events and quasi-causal conditions for the rise of rationalized capitalism, conditions that are intermediate, background, and ultimate. The intermediate conditions are calculable law and a non-dualistic, standardized economic ethos. These are the instrument-effect of background conditions found in the bureaucratic state and in the institution of citizenship conceived of as membership in a state which confers rights on membership. Finally, there are, ultimate conditions elaborated in terms of forms of social organization found in, especially, the state, but also in religious institutions: literate administration, monetary coinage, central supply of weapons (the means of state power), transportation and communications technology bridging long-distances and used for pacifying larger and larger territories, a system for regular record-keeping (requiring standardized weights, measures, time, etc)
Rationalized capitalism is a complex of organizational forms that Weber elaborates as working as follows, albeit a simplistic account that does not do justice to his more extensive discussion. Markets for goods, labor and capital circulate around entrepreneurial property which uses mass production technologies. together these factors encourage further rationalization of technological processes, expanding each of the market factors and distributing wealth unevenly so as to further demand.
Weber asks about the social organization of production in terms of the stability and predictability encourages by certain state formations. The legal system operates in two ways: it is both a prop supporting these features and a link to their social preconditions. It is, for Weber, an intermediate or meso-level of causality, acting as both a push and pull to the development of rationalized capitalism.
He views cultural ideals and beliefs in the same way. Culture is not, for Weber, some mysterious force of disembodied ideas. Instead, he argues that culture is really that which is expressed through institutionalized patterns of behavior and expectations which are inscribed and reinscribed through concrete rewards and sanctions for fulfilling institutional norms and rules that proscribe, prescribe and circumscribe behavior. Weber is examining, in other words, the social organization of the economy.
Here, Weber argues that societies which operated according to a dualistic economic ethics which differed because they prescribed different rules for the treatment of "insiders" and "outsiders" were hampered in the development of rationalized capitalism. An internal ethic that, for example, encouraged ritualized exchange among specific kin relations and prevented those exchanges among others. Similarly, required contributions to the support of church or manor properties operated to encourage certain types of exchanges, but not others. External ethics of exchange, however, operated often by condoning what we would otherwise consider "cheating" or unfairness in exchange relations with outsiders: high interest rates on loans and price-gouging, for example.
Weber argues that this dualistic system regulating exchange internal and external to the group were impediments to the development of rationalized capitalism. The internal ethos was hostile to the commercialization of economic life; the external ethos too often rendered trade relations episodic and participants were not seen as trustworthy. Custom bound internal ethics and predatory external ethics were barriers to the development of a rationalized--standardized, calculable, predictable, commercialized--capitalist economic system that expanded by virtue of innumerable everyday repetitions where small, regular profits would increasingly add up to more and more massive economic transactions.
Often overlooked, but a factor which Weber devoted the most attention to, was the role of a rationalized, calculable legal system. Weber maintains that it was the emergence of a bureaucratized state composed of specialized professional administrators and a juridical system based on laws adjudicated and administered by full-time professional jurists applying those laws to citizens. Such a system, in part, broke down patrimonial and feudal systems by freeing labor and land for the market. A bureaucratic state also played a role in standardizing currency and taxation, provided a reliable system for banking and investments, and provide the framework through which regulated contracts, contractual relations and property. It also expanded and pacified ever larger territories, challenging the taken-for-grantedness of internal ethics restricting exchange relations. <...>
Weber goes on to elaborate specific characteristics of the rationalized bureaucratic state in terms of the characteristics of this juridical-legal system emerged, the reasons why it emerged as it did, as well as its association with the emergence of a notion of citizens as rights-bearers.
Weber asserts, perhaps too simplistically, that the rationalized bureaucratic state emerges as the most efficacious method of organizing, administering and pacifying large territories. His discussions of the sources of the states are well-known, drawing on the following features that make such a state possible: technologies enable long-distance communication and transportation; literate, record-keeping administrators; monetary coinage. But, he was clear that, although these factors existed in many places, geographical conditions could encourage or discourage their development. Bureaucratization, moreover, must be thoroughgoing, penetrating society in more than a superficial way. It is not enough, for example, to have a thin strata of bureaucratic administrators who simply rule of a society that, in terms of its everyday relations of exchange, are still largely operating according to patrimonial norms of social life.
Weber also pays attention to the rise of a notion of citizens as bearers of rights conferred by their membership in a state. In a patrimonial state, political office is a form of personal delegation or private property. Moreover, citizens were largely seen as subject to the sate, not as having rights by virtue of membership. Here, Weber finds that historical forms of citizenships emerging out of the need for bands of warriors to pool their defensive resources often conferred the status of formal equality on its citizens in its efforts at developing an adequate defensive strategy. In doing so, they created practices and relations of ruling in which citizens themselves administered the laws and courts of the cities and city-states and these organizational forms were historically important legacies. That is, while these formal rights of participatory citizenship were often only extended to an elite, when cities were incorporated in larger bureaucratic states, their customs of self-organization and self-rule were the basis for a more inclusive system of administration and adjudication.
<...> ----------------- There is much more to Weber's arguments about the conditions that made for the rise of rationalized capitalism. A particularly interest issue is his later work where he departs from or, rather, improves claims advanced in The Protestant Ethic, which seriously undermine the facile claims made here by those enamored of the facile claims about Weber's idealism. But, this post is long enough. In short, Weber is a contribution to Marxist thought on this topic because he fleshes out the organizational and institutional factors that comprise what Marxists call the social organization of production. nothing to sneeze at or dismiss, in my view, because they are very important to understanding the operations of capitalism, as Roger Odisio continually reminds us when he explains why Marx's theories haven't quite panned out, but claims that the circumstances are devastating for Marx's theory aren't really that devastating at all.
Now, what of revolution? Contrary to some assertions, Weber argued that it was likely, given the evidence he was working with, that the revolutions of the 17th century were decisive because they meant that the state was under the control of political groups favorable to a capitalist market economy. For Weber, revolutions were important in so far as they could encourage the establish a framework through which legal activities were increasingly calculable and predictable, encouraging the spread of a complex of daily practices and norms/expectations that ensured the advancement of those interests in real, material ways.
Why didn't he focus on class struggle as the motive force behind the rise of capitalism? Because he was interested in defining the features of *rationalized capitalism* and because he wanted to locate the various conditions that lead to the instantiation and continuation of those features, and not others. In other words, it wasn't just a generalized capitalist organization of the economy, but a specifically rationalized capitalist economic organization and the sources and conditions that made for the components that comprise that system.
kelley
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