Max Weber on Capitalism, Bureaucracy and Religion by Stanislav Andreski

Author:Stanislav Andreski [Andreski, Stanislav]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780415489539
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2008-10-10T00:00:00+00:00

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Hindu Religion, Caste and Bureaucratic Despotism as Factors of Economic Stagnation: the Caste and the Tribe

In contrast to China, India has been, and remains, a land of villages and of immutable hereditary organisation. At the same time, however, it was a land of commerce: foreign, particularly with the Occident, as well as internal. Trade, credit and usury have existed in India since ancient Babylonian times. In the north-west Indian commerce received considerable Hellenic influence. At an early period the Jews settled in the south. Zarathustrians from Persia settled in the north-west, constituting a group wholly devoted to wholesale trade. Into this situation came the influence of Islam and the rationalistic enlightenment of the Great Mogul Akbar. Under the Great Moguls, and also during several periods before them, all or almost all of India formed one political unit. Such periods of unity were interrupted, however, by long periods of distintegration when the country was divided into numerous, constantly warring, states.

The methods of warfare, politics and finance of the princes were rationalised and became the subject of theorising — in the case of politics, of a quite Machiavellian kind. Knightly combat as well as the disciplined army equipped by the prince appeared. Although the use of artillery did not develop here earlier than elsewhere, as is occasionally maintained, it appeared early. State creditors, tax farming, state contracting, trade and transport monopolies, and so on, developed along lines parallel to the Occidental patrimonial pattern. For centuries urban development in India resembled that of the Occident on many points. Our contemporary rational number system, the technical basis of all 'calculability', is of Indian origin. The zero was invented sometime in the fifth or sixth century ad. Arithmetic and algebra are considered to have been independently developed in India. For negative magnitudes the term 'ksaya' (debts) was used. In contrast to the Chinese, the Indians cultivated rational science (including mathematics and grammar). They developed numerous philosophic schools and religious sects of almost all possible sociological types . . . For long periods tolerance towards religious and philosophic doctrines was almost absolute; at least it was infinitely greater than anywhere in the Occident until very recent times.

Indian justice developed numerous procedures which could have served capitalistic purposes as easily and well as corresponding institutions of our own medieval law. The legislative autonomy of the merchant class was at least as wide as that of our medieval merchants. Indian handicrafts and occupational specialisation were highly developed. The acquisitiveness of Indians of all strata left little to be improved upon and nowhere is there to be found so little condemnation of and such high regard for wealth. Yet no indigenous modern capitalism developed either before or during English rule. It was taken over as a finished artefact without independent beginnings. We shall inquire here how Indian religion may have prevented capitalistic development as one factor among many . . .

Usually the spread of Hinduism occurs in more or less the following way. The leading group of an 'animistic'

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