Autobiologies by Harley Alexis

Author:Harley, Alexis.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
Published: 2012-04-05T04:00:00+00:00

Capitalism, says Weber, is now chugging along well enough without a regular religious oiling. But the discourse he uses to say as much—with its talk of “adaptation,” “conditions of survival,” an “economic struggle for existence”—suggests that it is a capitalism steered, if not by any single Weltanschauung, then predominantly, at least, by an evolutionary one. Weber implies, moreover, that if capitalism is still in need of a patron, then evolutionism will supply the vacancy.

If Weber is deliberately suggesting that late nineteenth-century capitalism has come to owe as much to evolutionary theory as to Calvinism, then he must have Spencer (more widely read in Europe than Britain) in mind. In The Man Versus the State Spencer encapsulates the transition from religious to secular justifications for capitalism. Invoking St. Paul’s gospel of labor, Spencer writes:

Well, the command “if any would not work neither should he eat,” is simply a Christian enunciation of that universal law of Nature under which life has reached its present height—the law that a creature not energetic enough to maintain itself must die: the sole difference being that the law which in the one case is to be artificially enforced, is, in the other case, a natural necessity. And yet this particular tenet of their religion which science so manifestly justifies, is the one which Christians seem least inclined to accept. The current assumption is that there should be no suffering, and that society is to blame for that which exists.[15]

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