Yoshie Furuhashi said on Wed Dec 06 2000:
> Weber committed an irredeemable intellectual crime of putting the cart
> before the horse: he essentially argued that capitalist rationality
> caused capitalism.
No. Weber argued the opposite, that cultural rationalism did not cause capitalism. If it did, he argued, it would have broken out first in Renaissance Italy or France, both far more rational as cultures than Reformation England. And the same of course holds for the double bookkeeping argument. The Protestant Ethic monograph was an attempt to answer precisely that puzzle: why did capitalism break past the crucial turning point, where labor becomes a commodity, in England rather than somewhere else -- given that numerous other places had been richer, freer, less disapproving and more rational to start with?
> Capitalist rationality was, of course, a _result_ of capitalism
Weber completely agrees.
As for race, although Weber certainly partook of the prejudices and ways of expression rife in his time -- he discussed national stereotypes as if they were data, and used the terms race, nation and ethnic group interchangeably -- his theoretical stance on race was far ahead of its time and not so bad even by today's standards. He argued that race was entirely socially constructed. He defined it as "a politically effective belief in a common ancestry" and maintained that no such division had ever been made where one could not find people outside the group who had more of the ancestry in question than people inside the group. And he argued that race was fundamentally political and historical, because there was no ethnic division that did not originate in a political event, such as a tribal division, a war of conquest or a large-scale emmigration.
See Economy and Society, Vol. 1, p. 385, "V. Ethnic Groups."
Michael
__________________________________________________________________________ Michael Pollak................New York City..............mpollak at panix.com