Max Weber's Sociology of Civilizations: A Reconstruction by Stephen Kalberg

Author:Stephen Kalberg [Kalberg, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, General, Sociology
ISBN: 9781000414219
Google: ujkyEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2021-07-29T03:57:33+00:00

The intensification of avarice

A number of German scholars at the end of the nineteenth century argued that, in earlier times, the “acquisitive instinct” (PE, p. 82) was less developed or even nonexistent. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, however, they saw avarice and greed as becoming stronger. They believed that modern capitalism resulted from an intensification of the “acquisitive instinct [and the] pursuit of gain” (“PR,” p. 237). This characterization of more recent centuries as ones in which the “striving for…the greatest profit” (“PR,” p. 237) has been more widespread, Weber contends, does not bear up once experimental comparisons are undertaken.

The “greed for gain” can be found among “all sorts and conditions of men at all times and in all countries of the earth, wherever the objective possibility of it is or has been given” (“PR,” p. 237). To him, the “greed of mandarins in China, of the aristocrats in ancient Rome, or the modern peasant is second to none” (PE, p. 82). Because such an auri sacra fames (greed for gold) has existed universally and is “as old as the history of man,” it fails to offer a causal explanation for his specific problem: the rise of a spirit of capitalism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in the West and, eventually, of the expansion of modern capitalism. Finally, Weber will argue that the rise of modern capitalism involves a “tempering” of all acquisitive desires; indeed, such a “restraining” of avarice, and its channeling into a methodical orientation toward work, is indispensable for the systematic organization of work and production in permanent businesses (PE, pp. 81–83; GEH, pp. 355–56). As Weber notes in the conclusion to his book on China: “…by themselves neither ‘acquisitiveness,’ nor high and even exclusive esteem for wealth, nor utilitarian ‘rationalism’ have any connection as yet with modern capitalism” (RofC, p. 243).

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