<html>
Yoshie sez:<br>
<br>
<blockquote type=cite class=cite cite>However, Weber fails to explain
_how_ the ideas of a calling & election, asceticism,
"diabolical" drive to rationalize one's life, etc.
_originated_. 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. Have you
read, for instance, Frederick Engels on the Peasant War in
Germany?</blockquote><br>
rut ro! you didn't heed my advice. it's simply not a bee
buzzing around up there yosh!<br>
<br>
have you read TPE? obviously not. funny that he mentions in
the intro, which is filled with qualifications and specifications about
what he's up to that "this is only one side of the chain of
events"<br>
<br>
"these peculiarities of Western capitalism have derived their
significance in the last analysis only from their association with the
organization of labour. Even what is generally called
commercialization, the development of negotiable securities and the
rationalization of speculation, the exchanges, etc is connected with
it. For without the rational capitalistic organization of labour,
all this, so far as it was possible at all, would have nothing like the
same significance, above all for the social structure and all the
specific problems of the modern Occident connected with it. Exact
calculation--the basis of everything else--is only possible on the basis
of free labour. (p 22. TPE)
<dl>
<dd>Free labor is elaborated also in essays on Charisma and Institution
building, p 142: "Persons must be present who are not only
legally in the position, but are also economically compelled, to sell
their labor on the market without restriction. It is in
contradiction to the essence of capitalism, and the development of
capitalism is impossible, if such a propertyless stratum is absent, a
class compelled to sell its labor services to live; and it is likewise
impossible if only unfree labor is at hand. Rational capitalistic
calculation is possible only on the basis of free labor; only where in
consequences of the existence of workers who in the formal sense
voluntarily, but actually under the compulsion of whip of hunger, offer
themselves, the costs of products may be determined by agreement in
advance." <br>
<br>
</dl>"...the central problem is for us not, in the last analysis,
even from a purely economic viewpoint, the development of capitalistic
activity as such...It is rather the origin of this sober bourgeois
capitalism with its rational organization of free labour. Or in
terms of cultural history, the problem is that of the original of the
Western bourgeois class and of its peculiarities, a problem which is
certainly closely connected with that of the origin of the capitalistic
organization of labour; but is not quite the same thing. For the
bourgeois as a class existed prior to the development of the peculiar
modern form of capitalism... <snip discussion of how rationality
exists in all cultures. Two older essays have been placed at the
beginning which attempt, at one point, to approach the side of the
problem which is generally most difficult to grasp: the influence
of certain religious ideas on the development of an *economic spirit* or
ethos of an economic system. In this case we are dealing with the
connection of the spirit of modern economic life with the rational ethics
of ascetic Protestantism. *THus we treat here only one side of
the chain of events.* (p 24-7 PTE, trans parson's)<br>
<br>
*(my emph--here he means the norms that dominant an institution; e.g., in
the US the norm that dominates the institution of the family is that the
relationships therein should be based on love, not on, say, marrying for
money or having children to support you in your old age or vice
versa),</html>