On Thu, 7 Dec 2000, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
> However, Weber fails to explain _how_ the ideas of a calling &
> election, asceticism, "diabolical" drive to rationalize one's life,
> etc. _originated_.
Perhaps I wasn't clear. For Weber, the diabolical energy comes from the hell of loneliness induced by the doctrine of election in its pure form. To a Calvinist, only one thing matters in existence, to be one of the elect, and there is absoluteley nothing he can either to influence this outcome or even to know how its already come out. Massively frustrated need and desire, massively focused -- that's where the energy comes from.
As for where the doctrine came from, Weber thought it was the ultimate and most rational solution to the contradiction between justification by works and justification by faith that lay at the origin of the Christian religion -- that it was an inevitable working out of a logical tension, the only shortcoming of which was that it was inhuman.
Remember that for Weber there are two kinds of interests, material interests and ideal interests. Ideal interests are interests in salvation. His reasoning is that if someone believes in an afterlife, then it is rational for that person to subordinate material interests if he believes such action will gain him salvation. It as normal for such interests to come into conflict with each other, or with material interests, as it is for different material interests to come into conflict. He believes that ideal interests, thus defined, have their own specific gravity, that they cannot be reduced without remainder to material interests, either theoretically or historically. It was part of the purpose of his monograph to assert that point.
Naturally, as a historical materialist, he would expect you to completely disagree with him. But not because he didn't address the point.
> The Reformation was not a one-sided affairs of Puritanical capitalists
> self-fashioning themselves, out of nowhere, with no reference to the
> class from whom they expropriated surplus.
There is no way Weber can be accused of ignoring the economic context of religion. In pure extent, his writings on the sociology of religion dwarf every other writer of the 19th century, and he always made it a special concern to focus on the economic, political and social characteristics of the religion's leading stratum. He always argued that the virtues a religion espoused furthered the class interests of that stratum. And that social context gave very different concrete meanings to principles that in the abstract might sound the same.
As for their religion with the exploited class, the doctrine of the elect and the preterite fits that relation to a T. You can still hear it in the American ideology today.
Michael
__________________________________________________________________________ Michael Pollak................New York City..............mpollak at panix.com