Democracy Against Capitalism by Ellen Meiksins Wood

Author:Ellen Meiksins Wood
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2016-02-08T16:00:00+00:00

WEBER ON WORK AND THE SPIRIT OF CAPITALISM: THE CONFLATION OF PRODUCTION AND EXCHANGE

In Max Weber, the bourgeois teleology takes a much more subtle form. Perhaps more than any other thinker in the canon of Western social science, Weber displays a global range of interests and knowledge, from antiquity to modernity, from East to West. The typologies for which he is famous acknowledge a broad spectrum of social forms, varieties of social action, political leadership and domination. On the face of it, these typologies argue strongly against the proposition that Weber, like so many before him, was inclined to generalize from the experience of Western Europe and to read into all times and places the social logic of modern Western capitalism. If anything, his life-long project was to identify the specificity of Western civilization as one among many historical patterns. He was even critical of Western conceptions of progress. And yet, if the critique of political economy and a transcendence of capitalism’s own self-validating categories was Marx’s first methodological principle, the opposite is true of Weber; for at the heart of his historical sociology is a conceptual framework that filters all history through the prism of the modern capitalist economy.

The point is best illustrated by Weber’s account of the origins of capitalism. His most famous explanation has to do with the ‘Protestant ethic’, the ways in which the growth of European capitalism was spurred on by the Reformation and the encouragement it gave to the ethic of hard work and economic rationality. The idea of the ‘calling’, the values of asceticism, the glorification of hard work associated with Calvinism – the psychological effects of the doctrine of pre-destination – were all conducive to the ‘spirit of capitalism’. This, however, was only part of Weber’s explanation and must be read against the background of his other work, especially on the distinctive character of the Western city. The Reformation had its particular effects because its influences acted upon a civilization in which the principles of economic rationality were already well developed, where a bourgeoisie imbued with a commercial ethic had already become especially powerful in the context of the urban autonomy that was a unique characteristic of the Western city. The emergence of Protestantism in this distinctive urban context facilitated the union of economic rationality with the ‘work ethic’, against the grain of traditional conceptions of labour as a curse rather than a virtue and a moral obligation. And out of that union was born modern capitalism.

Attempts to characterize Weber in relation to Marx have generally concerned the extent to which Weber intended to treat religious ideas, together with political forms, as autonomous and primary, as against material determinants in the Marxist manner. But the critical issue here is not whether Weber was an idealist rather than a materialist, or whether he subordinated economic interests to other motives. Underlying his ‘Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism’ there are assumptions that have little to do with the primacy or autonomy of non-economic determinants and that reveal not so much his idealism as his bourgeois teleology.

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