> > Capitalist rationality was, of course, a _result_ of capitalism
>
>Weber completely agrees.
>
>Not quite. As Frank Parkin argues below, Weber oscillates between the
>strong and the weak thesis:
ahhhh. see, now, if you'd paid attention to what i'd typed under "weber", you would have been aware that weber reformulated his work in General Economic History, his later work, where he renounced the claims in Protestant Ethic. it's okay to do that--to alter or change or even renounce your earlier positions?
now, perhaps you and carrol will give up the facile and ignorant "weber is an idealist" argument since it is simply not true. if you are going to critique, do so on the basis of something resembling reality--that is, do so in terms of something other than the claim that he's an idealist or theorist of a evolutionary, stagist great chain of rationality working its way through history, or an unrepentant eurocentric theorist claiming that the west was somehow naturally rational and that accounted for capitalism. he did not advance those positions. and, moreover, don't look for a causal *theory* of the origins of capitalism in Weber; do look for an *account of the conditions* that meant that capitalism took root more tenaciously in some places, rather than in others. there is plenty to critique in weber, but the above aren't it!
no one is saying that weber's work is an advance over marx or contemporary marxists on the origins of capitalism. that is your and carrol's symptom. what i have been arguing is that your and carrol's dismissals of Weber are based on bad interpretations and some weird insistence that i have advanced weber as a superior theorists of the origins of capitalism. no one here in this convo has claimed that.
now, i realize you think you and carrol seem to think you have a bee up your respective bonnets, and have engaged in a public display of attempts to dislodge it. but do yourself favors and realize that you merely needs to remove your thumbs.
kelley