Wojtek wrote:
> I think this is a misrepresentation of Weber - which is probably
> intentional on this side of the pond (Talcott Parsons influence, I
> suppose).
> I do not think that Weber argued that religious beliefs "cause" economic
> development. His views are more sophisticated than that.
>
> In a nutshell, Weber argued that religion legitimizes economic
> developments
> rather than causing them. Thus, the bourgeoisie who grew rich thanks to
> the
> expanding global influence of Western Europe found Catholicism too
> constraining to their newly acquired social status, and thus adopted
> "heresies" - which have always been a dime a dozen in the Christian
> world -
> to legitimate their own status. In other world, the relationship between
> Protestantism and capitalism was more symbiotic, Protestantism gained
> recognition as the religion of choice of the economically ascending class,
> and in turn provided legitimacy for the economic interests of that class.
> Stated differently, there is "elective affinity" between religion and
> class
> interests - those beliefs that can effectively legitimate economic
> interests
> of a dominant class become the dominant religion whose main function is to
> legitimate economic interests of the dominant class.
>
> I do not think that it is that much different from Marx's position on the
> subject, but it is free of primitive economic determinism that often
> plagues
> Marxist thought. The "superstructure" is not a mere byproduct of property
> relations but an active ingredient in the legitimation and social
> reproduction of those relations.
>
> This view does a fairly good job explaining why some people "voluntarily"
> opt for what seems to be against their own economic interests, which
> vulgar
> economic determinism cannot do without falling into primitive psychologism
> attributing some form of "false consciousness" to human actors.
===================================== It's been a long while since I read Weber and Parsons. I recall how they were invoked in the ideological struggle against Marxism at the height of the Cold War. Weber was said to have "spent his life having a posthumous dialogue with the ghost of Karl Marx", but I agree his ideas and those of others may still be read as complementary rather than opposed to Marx, whatever their intent.
I don't agree, though, that traditional Marxist thought did not appreciate the interplay between ideas and interests, and that Weber and others were in this respect closer to Marx than his "vulgar materialist" disciples who were presumed to have ignored the relatively autonomous role of superstructural elements. This now fashionable vew reflected a postwar idealist retreat by intellectuals frustrated by the apparent failure of the working class to act in accordance with the materialist precepts of classical Marxism, a retreat which was well described by Perry Anderson in his Considerations on Western Marxism.
Everyone acknowledges in the abstract that structure and agency are dialectically related, so that debate is not much worth having, but primacy is invariably given to one above the other. I don't think there's much doubt that Weber and the other writers I mentioned "privileged" political culture over political economy, as the academy does today, and they did so in reaction to Marxism which took the latter as its starting point.