>
> Well many of the more serious
> thinkers on the right will concede
> that the free market is destructive
> of tradition and traditional values.
> Yes, many of them look to religion
> to religion to provide a check
> on the destructive effects of the market.
> The problem is that capitalism does
> seem to promote tendencies towards
> secularism: religion being one of
> the traditions that capitalism undermines.
> That's one example of what Daniel
> Bell, many years ago, called the
> "cultural contradictions of capitalism."
> Capitalism, in his view, depended on
> the cultural inheritance of religion
> and other cultural traditions in
> order to maintain the values and
> attitudes (like the work ethic)
> that are necessary to capitalism to
> thrive.
>
This just shows that Bell was incapable of a careful reading of Weber and fell back on the vulgar one. Even if Weber was wrong about the centrally additive effect of the rationalization of religion and life due to Calvinist insecurities about the possibility of signs of predistination, mainstream sociologists, lousy readers and theory-phobic academics that they tend to be, still read and teach Weber as if he argued that Protestantism caused capitalism... oy.