Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire, and the Globalization of the New South (America in the World) by Andrew Zimmerman

Author:Andrew Zimmerman [Zimmerman, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2010-03-28T16:00:00+00:00

FROM “TEACHING THE NEGRO TO WORK” TO THE “PROTESTANT ETHIC”

The example of black labor allowed Weber, like Gustav Schmoller and other German economists, to develop the politics of internal colonization into a global sociology of race and labor. Weber adapted the German colonial policy of “educating the Negro to work” (Erziehung des Negers zur Arbeit) not only for politically and economically subordinate groups, such as Polish migrant laborers, but also for European Protestants. He showed, in his “Protestant Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism,” how Protestants compelled themselves to work and suggested, especially in his later Sociology of Religion, that other racial or civilizational groups work in fundamentally different and, at least when left to their own devices, necessarily inferior, ways. The inner compulsion of European Protestants, in Weber’s model, suggests the necessity of—although Weber did not state this explicitly—an external compulsion for all others. The “Protestant Ethic,” originally published in two parts on either side of his 1904 visit to the United States, treats a problem similar to that addressed by Tuskegee Institute, namely, what makes people work?

Like Schmoller, Weber rejected the abstract models of classical economics and sought instead cultural explanations of economic behavior. “The Protestant Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism” proposed an economic theory based on collective ethnic or cultural behavior rather than on the individual rationality of classical economics.27 While popular understandings of “The Protestant Ethic” take it for a theory of savings and investment, it is, in fact, a theory of devotion to profession, a theory of labor. Weber’s text thus provides an answer to the questions about the control of free labor that the Verein für Sozialpolitik had been asking since the 1870s. Weber identified as the central feature of capitalism the unquestioning, even irrational, commitment to profession (Berufspflicht), whether as a worker or investor.28 This irrationally rational economy began, as Weber famously argued, from a typically Protestant drive to “penetrate all spheres of private and public life to the greatest conceivable extent with endless burdensome and earnest regimentation of all of life.”29 This ascetic, worldly rationalism was accentuated by Luther’s emphasis on the divine calling to profession (Beruf), and given further power by a popular misinterpretation of Calvinist doctrines of predestination, whereby success in career was thought to indicate salvation in the afterlife.

In “The Protestant Ethic,” Weber formulated a theory of economic motivation that rejected the individual calculating rationality fundamental to the laissez-faire, classical political economy that the Verein für Sozialpolitik opposed. In perhaps the only piece of strictly economic theorizing in the book, Weber cautioned against correlating individual wages with labor productivity. Raising wages, Weber pointed out, had the paradoxical effect of decreasing the productivity of workers who are motivated solely by economic gain, for workers will quickly realize they can work less to achieve the standard of living to which they are accustomed. Low wages are effective means to achieve increased productivity among such workers for a brief period, for they will have to work harder to maintain their standard of living.

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