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Prot Work Ethic

How religion, in the form of a practical ethic, affects the development of capitalism – plus some injunctions against bad sociological method

Intro/Method

• Was a two-part article
  • Revised for later publication, new introduction added
  • Tried to clear up many misunderstandings
• Written after he recovered from severe depression
  • Former works were historical/descriptive
  • But now he has a more ambitious and broader scope and theoretical bent
• Influenced by “historical school” of German economics
  • Unlike British political economy
  • Economic life is a part of a larger cultural whole
• Germany versus England
  • England: Utilitarian
    • Example: John Stuart Mill System of Logic (1843)
    • Was positivist: followed Comte to marry natural and human sciences
  • Germany: Idealist
    • Later, Marxist
    • In hermeneutic tradition
• Hermeneutics
  • Begun in mid-18th century as particular strand of Idealism
  • Study of man should be differentiated from natural sciences
  • Not just about causal laws
  • Human activity inherently meaningful and situated within an accumulating history of cultural values (historical accretion of cultural meaning)
  • Cares about history b/c it tells you about the evolution of cultural values within which economics must be studied
• Weber’s POV: not so universally knowing as positivists
  • “free of preconceptions” = beware of thesis that positivism tells you to have (48)
  • “provisional descriptions” are what he offers, not laws (48)
  • Believes in studying facts, but maintaining separate spheres for human action and natural science
    • Believes in the force of the “irrational” in the human (ie, religion)
    • Don’t use General Laws of positivism, but hermeneutics: “not to grasp historical reality in abstract general formulae, but in concrete genetic sets of relations which are inevitably of a specifically unique and individual character” (48)
    • “Interpretation” goes within a “cultural whole”
  • Cares about history of cultural values
  • Also looks at material foundation of historical change
  • Hence, not only materialist, but idealist as well
• Relation to Marx
  • Has his reservations
  • Says you can’t understand economic conditions without understanding the corresponding culture
• Mixture of Idealism and Materialism
  • “not my aim to substitute for a one-sided materialistic an equally one-sided spiritualistic causal interpretation of culture and of history” (183)
  • Against economic determinism of some brands of Marxism
    • “naive” to think ideas are superstructure of economic base (55)
  • Ideas do have a constructive force in history
    • Asks, “what are the ideas” behind new spirit of capitalism? (75)
    • “ideas become effective forces in history” (90)
    • “religious ideas have taken part in the qualitative formation and quantitative expansion of that spirit in the world” (91)
• Holistic Idea of Culture
  • Spirit of capitalism is “historical individual, ie, a complex of elements associated in a historical reality which we unite into a conceptual whole from the standpoint of cultural significance” (47)
• Suspicious of “intuition” (ie, Bergson’s influence?)
  • He says it’s a lack of perspective towards the object you study
• Instead, glorifies the Specialist
  • Not the dilettante or theories who cover everything
  • It’s not glamorous, but it’s very important
• Against writing a sermon or value judgments
  • Refuses to “preach” at people
  • Refuses to use race biology to explain differences (but instead talks about historical and political development of culture)
  • Refuses to “judge” relative value of one culture or another
    • Does not glorify the West here!
    • Progressive
• Style
  • Careful: “battery of qualifications” for most of the book
  • Every once in awhile, bitter denunciations = surprising
  • Eclectic, put together tons of methods: causation, history, comparative religion, etc

Defining Capitalism

• Capital: “estimated value of the material means production used for acquisition in exchange” (18)
• Capitalism not characterized by the wish for gain
  • Every economic system oriented to produce gain, not just capitalism
• Capitalism is when gain occurs through profit by (legal, nonviolent) exchange of goods
  • Traditionally, they are a series of individual ventures
• Modern Capitalism
  • Renewed pursuit of profit “by means of continuous, rational, capitalist enterprise”
    • ie, permanent firms
  • Whereas old capitalism has a leisurely pace, new capitalism has a fast and organized pace
    • “leisureliness was suddenly destroyed” (67)
  • Distinguished from other forms of capitalism (ie Babylon, ancient Egypt, medieval Europe) by the “rational organization of (formally) free labor”
  • Defining Rational Organization: Sober
    • “Attuned to regular market” (22), beyond State or speculation adventure
    • Routine
    • Calculated carefully (no spontaneous or adventurous spirit)
    • Disciplined workforce
      • Especially a surplus of them (to pay little)
      • Separated workplace from home
    • Systematic reinvestment
      • Use of science and technology for developments
      • Putting money back in business, not to consume
    • Supported by organized system of law and administration (ie, State and legal apparatus)
    • End goal: balance at end of day higher than your initial capital
• The Worker
  • People don’t inherently want to earn as much as they possibly could
  • They really just want material needs and desires satisfied
  • You have to have some specific reason to want to work and work and work
• Hence, “continual accumulation of wealth for its own sake, rather than the material rewards that it served to bring.” (xii)
  • In modern capitalism, you work to accumulate, not to buy things or support yourself
    • That’s not how workers think (they just want to support traditional lifestyle)
    • Religion would make you think that’s immoral, but that you acquire to show the will of God and prove your grace, not so that you enjoy the stuff
• Accumulation for its own sake is moral
  • Not about enjoying or being indolent or luxurious
  • Instead, you must be—and look how these qualities make a good middle class or lower class worker, or a good parvenu (a climber from lower class)
    • Honest
    • Precise
    • Cautious
    • Diligent
    • Disciplined
    • Punctual
    • Modest
    • Rational
    • Calculating
    • Foresight
    • Utilitarian: judge behavior by usefulness
    • Dutiful
    • Frugal (limit consumption)
• These people are not…
  • Aristocratic (they waste)
  • Social climbers (Weber leaves these flimsy folks out of the equation)
    • These people are given to ostentation and spectacle, and he don’t mean them
    • We should leave this to Veblen to explain.
• Other preconditions for development of modern Western capitalism
  • Household and workplace separation
  • Development of the autonomous city
  • Heritage of Roman law: juridical practice
  • Development of nation-state
    • To coordinate economic development
  • Double-entry bookkeeping
  • “Free” mass of wage laborers
• Iron Cage
  • Extinguishing all enjoyment in life: no “spontaneous enjoyment of life”
  • Bureaucratic organization of life
  • Mundane, routine
  • Context: our enjoyment of goods is putting us in the cage
    • Enjoyment of goods that should (accdg to religious leaders) lie like a light “cloak” on your shoulders (removable at will), but now it’s like an iron cage
      • That’s where he uses the term first
    • “Material goods have gained an increasing and finally an inexorable power over the lives of men as at no previous period in history.” (181)

Religion’s Part

• Even after controlling for historical and cultural difference, Protestants tend to lead other religions in biz
• Salient figure here: the creation of a spirit of capitalism wherein a sober, calculating person feels that it is his duty to work diligently in a specific field
• Traditionally, people don’t trust business
  • Before, people suspicious of trade and of making money (esp that isn’t land based)
    • At best, accept it as a necessary evil, or indifferent to it
  • Protestants make biz look flashy, or at least good, because you have to show that you work hard to glorify God
• Traditionally, people don’t care to work hard: Protestant religion overcomes traditional barriers to growth of capitalism
  • Example: traditional weaving culture, allows you a nice break from work to go to the pub and socialize for awhile, work about 6 hours a day from your home
  • They only want enough money to maintain previous, traditional standard of living
  • Can’t bribe them with more money or pay by piece
    • They’ll only work enough to maintain standard of living
    • Can’t understand the bribe of making more money
  • Capitalism has no choice but to sell work as its own end
• Where does that perception of work come from? Protestantism
  • Your religious behavior should and will reflect in your daily life
    • Unlike monasteries: built to transcend everyday life
  • Especially Calvinism, through the “calling”
  • Predestination: you are either in or out of heaven; it’s preordained
    • Makes people depressed, “unprecedented inner loneliness”
  • How do you prove that you are the chosen?
    • By succeeding in your work, which will be a sign that you are one of the elect
    • Your duty in continual work proves your salvation: be active (missionary sensibility)
    • Work hard, save your soul.
  • “highest form of the moral obligation of the individual is to fulfill his duty in worldly affairs” (xii)
  • Hence, discipline comes in the lower and middle rungs of capitalist system: “official, clerk, laborer, or domestic worker”
• Irony
  • Once religious dogma has affected capitalism, and once capitalism stands on its own feet, it helps to erode religious feeling
  • Doesn’t need it anymore!
• End of Religion in Capitalism
  • By end of 18th century, religious bent has disappeared, “religious roots have died out”
    • As John Wesley himself showed, if you are a good religious man, you will earn tons o’ money (you are thrifty and industrious, you will earn money), but money itself has secularizing influence: love of the world, pride, and anger result
    • Continual acquisition, with harsh brakes set on consumption and an injunction not to enjoy your wealth, will end in lots o’ money—which is the beginning of capital accumulation that will fund capitalist expansion
  • Yet the duty to work, to prove your worth to society by working, still kind of exists
    • “the idea of duty in one’s calling prowls about in our lives like the ghost of dead religious beliefs” (182)
  • Death of the spirit
    • “Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved” (182)
      • He doesn’t lock himself into that cynical interp, but he does state it!
• Calling
  • First used by Luther in as duty in secular world
    • Where religious duty comes out of the monastery and comes into the material world
  • Adopted by Protestants as a practical ethic that reflects your state of grace (but doesn’t cause your state of grace)
    • “Life-work:” you have a definite field of work
    • Specializing lets you be systematic and therefore shows your conscientiousness
    • Anti-Catholic belief that worldly duties are more important than purely ascetic, other-worldly values (not so much about transcendence)
  • Calvinism and predestination tenderized people for it
    • “Spiritual isolation” of predestination makes you want to prove that you are one of the elect (cf Pilgrims Progress, where hero leaves family for his soul-journey)
    • By being successful through excelling at your worldly tasks, you prove that you are one of the Elect
      • You must promote God’s will in the social world through your work
    • If you are unsuccessful, then you don’t have grace
  • If you work hard enough, you can save your soul!
• Making money glorifies God, reflects the will of God
  • Prove your proficiency to prove your good soul
  • It shows that you have accepting mortal life, were conscientious, and weren’t frivolous
• Asceticism
  • You aren’t supposed to make money to make yourself happy, idle, or sensuous
    • Going after money is only bad if you do it to make your life more fun
  • Must be ascetic to prove you aren’t frivolous
• Ultimately, this asceticism and calling give business a good conscience
  • This ethos helps overcome traditional distrust of engaging in capitalism
  • Now, engaging in manufacture or trade helps you fulfill God’s will
  • The test is whether you have good form, ie, whether you look correct, like you’re following the rules
    • If you follow the rules and be honest, you are allowed to earn money
• Growth of middle class
  • Protestantism of this time helps to create the ideology of the glory of the middle-class home: comfort, cleanliness, and safety are the best you can get
• Of course, religion doesn’t by itself create modern capitalism, he realizes, not does it understand that it has advanced capitalism, nor does it try to advance capitalism itself

Objections/Reflections

• Common Objections to Weber
  • The “calling” isn’t a Protestant invention
  • Catholicism not actually anti-capitalist
  • Protestant ethic didn’t do anything to capitalism (rejection of causal narr)
  • Not the right kind of material evidence to support the theories
• Literary Parallels
  • Buddenbrooks
    • New capitalism more about an ethos change than about change in material conditions
    • The first generation biz was completely “traditionalist,” lazy, not asking for too much from the workers, not ruthless
    • The second generation biz was already getting flack for its lack of organization and discipline (example: not so worried about farmers paying back all their debts) (not enough complying with need for discipline, double book-keeping)
    • The third generation changes and gets more like modern capitalism
      • Getting a tighter and tighter squeeze over the workers and suppliers
      • Getting more about the end balance
      • More willing to be deceitful if it looks like you’re still morally upright
      • Formerly, business was literally continuous with the home, as the buildings were connected, but now Tom moves his house to other side of town, creating autonomous business space
    • In the end, Tom is not willing to go far enough into modern methods to survive. Just like Weber warned, people not adapting fast enough to capitalism will be pushed away—the masters as well as the workers.
    • Mann’s judgment: the family has compromised itself frightfully to adapt to modern conditions, pushing itself into a decadence, but it refuses to go far enough, and the sacrifices are horrific (Hanno, collapse of family, premature deaths)
  • Women in Love
    • Presentation of Gerald Crich as an innovator parallels Weber’s presentation of the industrialist
    • His new technologies are first not accepted: Weber’s “mistrust, hatred, moral indignation” occurs when Gerald’s father judges him terrible
    • Crich Senior had been paternalist, but like Weber notes, this new generation believes that your position at the bottom is ultimately your fault (whatever Lawrentian pagan equivalent of not having saving grace is)
  • Mary Barton
    • Religious interpretation of spirit of capitalism completely annihilates the critical force of this novel
    • Gaskell’s options: fulfill your duty, whatever it may be, or you can die or emigrate.
    • These options are heavily tinge with religion, which makes you accept your duty without rebelling
      • Note how she presents the union as evil (it provokes cold-blooded murder; as also she does in N&S, where it leads to animal-like mass mobs), so it’s not an option
      • If you aren’t supporting your family, it’s probably because you’re lazy or a drunkard (ie Boucher in N&S), and if it’s because of bad health, you’d better submit
    • As a result, any claim that religion can provide a panacea or respite or amelioration of capitalism is false: religion is inside capitalism, so supporting religion also supports capitalism
      • It’s why you end Gaskell’s book with a funny feeling that she didn’t even try to solve the problems she exhibited
    • Ultimately, Gaskell hangs on to the original Lutheran understanding of the calling, where you humbly accept the God-given lot you were born into
  • North and South
    • Thornton as the ideal capitalist, a middle class man who worked up from the lower classes, a self-made man
    • Clear vision, strength, temperance, self-control are exactly what he has
    • Not an adventurer: doesn’t accept brother-in-law’s offer at a crazy wild speculation
  • A Christmas Carol
    • I wanted some way to show that Dickens’ solution doesn’t really do anything
    • Cf his preface, where he says he doesn’t want to upset anyone! Geez
    • Well, the book combats avarice and asceticism, so it ignores the true root of exploitation and shows a new cultural motive for working hard for the machine
      • Collapse of Avarice: You are actually going after the wrong people if you assume they are avaricious: combating avarice is not the same as combating the true spirit of capitalism
      • Collapse of Asceticism: You need to spend money, esp on consumable goods like food, which is part of the growth of the “iron cage” wherein in the collapse of religious fervor the love of stuff keeps you working hard

Miscellany

• Stuff about monasteries: shows how I can interpret monasteries as a different kind of labor from regular labor in world
  • xii: they want to transcend the regular world
  • 80-1: contrasted w/Protestant calling to do work in world
    • Now, withdrawing is seen as selfish
    • Can’t even save your soul anymore
  • 158: Unlike other Western churches, doesn’t advocate continuous hard labor
  • 174: monasteries have always had to combat “secularizing influence” of money
• His exceptions are kind of mysterious and I think unwise
  • He doesn’t include goods got by violence, stealing, piracy, forced labor
    • But colonialism and other vicious activities did happen
    • So how can they not be a part of spirit of capitalism somehow?
• Underestimates position of lower-class worker
  • They do work because they need material goods
  • Of course, he just wants to talk about lower and middle classes, as well as entrepreneurial classes, so I’m deliberately asking him to address something he doesn’t want to address
  • So instead of seeing capitalism from the workers’ POV (which Marx does), Weber goes to the ideology side, goes to the less exploited folks…
• Benjamin Franklin
  • He’s the model of the product of this spirit of capitalism derived from the Protestant “calling,” except without the religion part
  • Quotes Benjamin a lot, but the ones I like are credit
    • Emphasizes floating social nature of credit, which can disappear, pouf!, if you act bad socially (ie, are seen drinking in middle of day)
    • Credit not as owning the capital, but as having the use of it for a certain fee
    • Superfluous waste if you actually are honest when you could have settled on merely appearing to be!
      • This is the far end of utilitarianism
• Domestic labor
  • Not like the old putting-out system (66) except in form
  • Disagrees with Haraway?
• Sameness of people (standardization of identity) is helpful for standardization of production (169)
• 173: English character
  • Mixture of childish joy in life (inherited from aristocratic notions of life) and self-control (from middle-class bourgeois form of life)