Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
* Book: The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism by Max Weber, 1905.
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Discussion
Benjamin Suriano:
"In his influential work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Weber famously spells out how the modern valorization of labor was made possible by a unique belief system around predestination peculiar to Calvinism and its 18th century Puritanical forms of religious asceticism.73 For Calvinism the idea that God has already predetermined within his inscrutable will the eternal fate of every member of humanity left the religious believer with an anxious psychological state of uncertainty. Rather than waiver in their faith and despair over unknowing, Calvinists sought to divert the turmoil of their inner spirit and its unproductive energies through an obsessive asceticism of hard work, diligence, and abstemiousness. Refocusing the inner spirit toward a greater interest in and valuation of the external world of work, these virtues of dutifulness not only helped avoid the sins of slothfulness and idleness wherein doubts and anxieties often needlessly fester, but through their frugality and orderliness they also helped yield great commercial profit. Labor then was not only valorized as an arena for keeping the inner spirit preoccupied with methodical activity, but its methodically organized form, which efficiently brought about commercially successful results, now supplied the inner spirit with a tangible means of proving one’s salvation.
For Weber, however, this inner spirituality, which manifested itself outwardly through a methodical control of its laboring body toward rigorously efficient applications, was not unprecedented within Western civilization. He finds a precedent within the medieval monastic institutions of Western Christianity insofar as they developed successful commercial practices according to a conception of “industria” oriented around “a systematic method of rational conduct with the purpose of overcoming the status naturae, to free man from the power of irrational impulses and his dependence on the world and on nature.” With the arrival of modernity, however, and the dissolution of the social import of monastic institutions, “the Reformation took rational Christian asceticism and its methodical habits out of the monasteries and placed them in the service of active life in the world.” Thus the transference of labor’s rationalization from monasticism to its wider social import through Calvinism took place at the level of transferring a spirituality of “innerworldly asceticism,” once practiced only by a narrow segment of the population for otherworldly ends, to now its practice by an entire lay population within and for everyday life.
While Weber was never able to provide a more complete assessment of the medieval valorization itself he nonetheless provided an influential lens by which later interpreters extended his analysis."
Why Max Weber's Interpretation is Wrong
Benjamin Suriano:
"Characteristic of these extensions is a tendency to read a modern Puritanical asceticism back into the monastic asceticism of the Middle Ages and thus to read every possible valorization of labor’s rationality as leading to and culminating in the modern bourgeois ethos of capitalism. Hence Lynn White Jr. can read the Christian belief system and its ascetic practices manifest in Western medieval monasticism as simply authorizing and implementing a proto-capitalist rationalization of the labor process for the domination and exploitation of nature. The problem here is not simply that a Protestant and bourgeois ethos is anachronistically read into medieval asceticism, but more so that the meaning of labor in itself is predetermined as a brute secular fact whose valorization can only be commanded from and for a detached spirit as it exploits nature. For the Weberian, therefore, insofar as labor is rationally valorized within the medieval West, this is always to be attributed to a line of ancestry culminating in the bourgeois entrepreneur who effectively commands labor as a tool of mastery over nature.
While there are of course bourgeois threads that extend back into the medieval period, showing up even within certain monastic organizations, the point is that these are neither total nor the dominant form by which the rationality internal to labor itself was distinctively understood and valued. The rationalization assumed within the Weberian understanding of the valorization of labor, which retrojects its bourgeois assumptions and their Calvinist reflex, is one that exclusively regards only the efficient means by which labor can be instrumentally disposed to external ends set by an alien will—labor is not then understood as the creator of value but only an object of values set arbitrarily outside of its own good. The worldly application of a methodical instrumentalism given from a certain religious asceticism, which Weber is so keen to describe as a “rationalization” of labor, is therefore only a partial form of rationality being reified as rationality itself. Thus, in rightly seeing a connection between Protestant spirituality and the rise of capitalism, he is nevertheless only describing a process and ideology that serves the irrational subsumption of labor to arbitrarily external ends. This is a fundamentally irrationalizing process because a real rationalization process implies a ratio to a final cause that substantively perfects the thing being rationally ordered; but here in Weber’s instrumental rationality, there is only the bare efficient causality of ordering an object to be disposable to whatever external end, even if this end destroys rather than comprehends and perfects the thing being materially organized and so ordered.
The Weberian valorization therefore speaks not of an emancipatory change in the forces and conditions of labor, or of a radical reorientation of the ends for which the laboring body’s activity might be perfected according to its own creative potentials, but only an irrational process of decomposing the laboring body’s orientation to its own perfection so as to make it more available to an external spirit. He thus describes primarily a change in attitude toward the given bourgeois institution of wage labor, an ethos to remain in one’s vocation but to work harder and more efficiently."
Excerpts
Religious Affiliation and Social Stratification
Max Weber:
"A glance at the occupational statistics of any country of mixed religious composition brings to light with remarkable frequency a situation which has several times provoked discussion in the Catholic press and literature [editors note: as far back as the 17th century in fact]... , namely, the fact that business leaders and owners of capital, as well as the higher grads of skilled labour, and even more the higher technically and commercially trained personnel of modern enterprises, are overwhelmingly Protestant.
....what has often been forgotten, that the Reformation meant not the elimination of the Church’s control over everyday life, but rather the substitution of a new form of control for the previous one. It meant the repudiation of a control which was very lax, at that time scarcely perceptible in practice, and hardly more than formal, in favour of a regulation of the whole of conduct which, penetrating to all departments of private and public life, was infinitely burdensome and earnestly enforced.
On superficial analysis... one might be tempted to express the differrence by saying that the greater other-wordliness of Catholicism, the ascetic character of its highest ideals, must have brought up its adherents to a greater indifference toward the good things of this world. Such an explanation fits the popular tendency in the judgement of both religions. On the Protestant side it is used as a basis of criticism of those... ascetic ideals of the Catholic way of life, while the Catholics answer with the accusation that materialism results from the secularization of all ideals through Protestantism.
...the supposed conflict between other-worldliness, asceticism, and ecclesiastical piety on the one side, and participation in capitalistic acquisition on the other, might actually turn out to be an intimate relationship.
If any inner relationship between certain expressions of the old Protestant spirit and modern capitalistic culture is to be found, we must attempt to find it, for better or worse, not in its alleged more or less materialistic or at least anti-ascetic joy of living, but in its purely religious characteristics. Montesquieu says (Esprit des Lois, Book XX, chap. 7) of the English that they "had progressed the farthest of all peoples of the world in three important things: in piety, in commerce, and in freedom."
(http://ahistoryofthepresentananthology.blogspot.com/search/label/Weber)
More information
Alfred Keiser working within an explicitly Weberian framework, for example, claims that monks within medieval monasteries “created” a “puritan work ethic” in their rational organization of work, which inevitably led to an “iron cage of bureaucracies” prior to the capitalist age of bureaucratization. See “From Asceticism to Administration of Wealth: Medieval Monasteries and the Pitfalls of Rationalization,” in Organization Studies, 8.2 (1987): 103–123.
Lynn White Jr., “What Accelerated Technological Progress in the Western Middle Ages?” in Scientific
Change. Historical Studies in the Intellectual, Social and Technical Conditions for Scientific Discovery and
Technical Invention from Antiquity to the Present, ed. Alistair C. Crombie (London: Heinemann, 1963), pp.
272–91.