On Thu, 7 Dec 2000, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
> Not quite. As Frank Parkin argues below, Weber oscillates between
> the strong and the weak thesis:
>
> ***** Parkin suggests that Weber has two thesis which he never
> clearly distinguishes, what Parkin calls the 'strong' and the 'weak'
> thesis. The 'strong' thesis is that Calvinism caused capitalism, the
> weak thesis is that Calvinism did not (like other religions) obstruct
> the development of capitalism.
Actually neither of these is quite right. Weber's thesis was right in between these positions: that Calvinism was a sine non qua. He did not believe Calvinism would work without preconditions (who would) but he also did not believe it did something so simple as get out of the way. In fact he argued (perhaps incorrectly) that Calvinism was doctrinally more averse to commerce than Catholicism had been. His argument (which I do not endorse) was rather that it produced a new kind of personality, one that was wholely directed towards one end in every detail of its striving -- that sought in this sense to rationalize everything it did -- and that was driven by the merciless logic of preterition and election. As Weber put it, nobody could help the Puritan -- no priest, no sacrament, no church and finally no god. And out of this drive to rationalize one's life and the mad need for proof of election came the final shove that drove capitalism into a self-perpetuating system, with itself, rather than consumption, as an end. Doctrinally, he argues, this was not only completely misguided but downright blasphemous. Calvinism was completely clear that success in the world had absolutely no relation to election. But unenjoyed success, growth for its own sake, rationalized madness, became taken as a visible sign of election because something had to -- because no one but Calvin (and Luther, and Knox and Wesley) could live without it.
And this, Weber thought, was the final element, added to a configuration that had occurred countless times, that enabled capitalism to crack the cake of resisting custom and contrary interests and combust into a self-perpetuating system. Because these Puritans didn't care what people thought of them who weren't Puritans. And they were possessed of a diabolical energy. And they tore the old protections apart. After capitalism became systemic -- after labor truly became a commodity -- it no longer needed such props. It generated its own justifications: workers had to work capitalistically, and capitalists to act capitalistically, or they would perish -- the famous "iron cage."
So in the end, Calvinism causes capitalism so indirectly and ass-backwardly that his essay should be subtitled "A Study in Irony."
As I said, I don't endorse this argument. But, as you say, it has more nuances than it is usually given credit for. (And Marx himself, in the Grundrisse, notes that Puritan capitalists drove themselves like crazy men -- it was not an usual idea.) I think the real explanation for its appeal to Weber was more personal. He had just come out of a two year depression which was mixed in his mind with the meaningless of modern life -- relativism and rationalization, don't you know. His personal solution was an idealization of the very German idea of "personality," a weird neokantian combo of Beruf and Bildung. And in seems to me that in this essay, he has a vision of how his personal solution changes the fate of the world, and he gets out of bed to write it. As Barbara Kruger once said, your manias become science. In a similar manner, Freud decided his castration complex was the font of civilization.
BTW, an clear explication of the German ideal of personality (which is more interesting than it sounds at first sight) is Harvey Goldman's _Max Weber and Thomas Mann: Calling and the Shaping of the Self._ And a beautiful and funny one is Mann's Doktor Faustus.
Michael
__________________________________________________________________________ Michael Pollak................New York City..............mpollak at panix.com