Capital is a man-made factor of production. Capitalism is the economic regime where capital is allocated on the basis of market prices. The spirit of Capitalism is that of efficiency as arising out of commercial competition. However, where different sources of 'market failure' arise, Capitalism has to be mofidied. It will have a different ethos or 'spirit'.
This does not mean any particular Capitalist will have a particular ethos or spirit. There is no 'calling' or sense of vocation to being a Capitalist. Unlike ordination as a priest, anybody at all can invest capital. Some may like doing it. Others may find it a time-suck. Unlike a Cardinal, a Capitalist doesn't have to pretend that he feels he has been called to do God's work. He can say, in all candour, that he'd rather be a gigolo.
Weber took a different view-
THE SPIRIT OF CAPITALISM In the title of this study is used the somewhat pretentious phrase, the spirit of capitalism. What is to be understood by it? The attempt to give anything like a definition of it brings out certain difficulties which are in the very nature of this type of investigation. If any object can be found to which this term can be applied with any understandable meaning, it can only be an historical individual, i.e. a complex of elements associated in historical reality which we unite into a conceptual whole from the standpoint of their cultural significance.
The reverse is the case. Capitalism is an ideal or pure type which would only obtain under very restricted conditions. Historically, Societies have had to defend themselves from invasion or insurrection and this necessitates a mixed economy with some Capitalist features and some mechanisms of a Command Economy.
Such an historical concept, however, since it refers in its content to a phenomenon significant for its unique individuality,
nothing phenomenal corresponds to a 'historical concept'. Reality is messy.
cannot be defined according to the formula genus proximum, differentia specifica,
nothing wrong with that. You start with a pure theory of Capitalism and then say how it changes because of various types of market failure- non-convexity, information asymmetry, externality, repugnancy, etc..
but it must be gradually put together out of the individual parts which are taken from historical reality to make it up.
We don't have acccess to 'individual parts'. We merely have some hazy, but wrong, idea as to what they might be.
Thus the final and definitive concept cannot stand at the beginning of the investigation, but must come at the end.
No. The concept comes first and then, at the end of the investigation, the judgment is made 'this concept applies to this limited extent'.
We must, in other words, work out in the course of the discussion, as its most important result, the best conceptual formulation of what we here understand by the spirit of capitalism, that is the best from the point of view which interests us here.
The problem is that Capitalism doesn't really have a spirit or a shadow or a sister-in-law in San Fransisco. We may say that competition is the essence of Capitalism but if there are 'non-convexities' the opposite may appear to be the case. Monopoly or Cartelization may appear to be the true spirit of Capitalism. This could be linked to the notion that Imperialism- seen as the search for new markets- was the 'final stage' of Capitalism and this would inevitably lead to a world war.
... if we try to determine the object, the analysis and historical explanation of which we are attempting, it cannot be in the form of a conceptual definition, but at least in the beginning only a provisional description of what is here meant by the spirit of capitalism.
You are welcome to say 'for me, such and such document best summarises what I think is the spirit of capitalism'. But this is purely subjective.
Such a description is, however, indispensable in order clearly to understand the object of the investigation. For this purpose we turn to a document of that spirit which contains what we are looking for in almost classical purity, and at the same time has the advantage of being free from all direct relationship to religion, being thus, for our purposes, free of preconceptions.
Weber is quoting Ben Franklin who identified as a Deist—believing in a creator God who governed the universe through natural laws—while moving away from the strict Calvinist Puritanism of his Boston upbringing
Remember, that time is money. He that can earn ten shillings a day by his labour, and goes abroad, or sits idle, one half of that day, though he spends but sixpence during his diversion or idleness, ought not to reckon that the only expense; he has really spent, or rather thrown away, five shillings besides.
This is the notion of 'opportunity cost' fundamental to Economics. Time, like money, is scarce. Use both wisely.
Remember, that credit is money.
Which is why the Money Supply is 'endogenous' or, at least, affected by Expectations.
If a man lets his money lie in my hands after it is due, he gives me the interest, or so much as I can make of it during that time. This amounts to a considerable sum where a man has good and large credit, and makes good use of it.
Moreover, goldsmiths can go in for credit-creation through 'fractional reserve' banking. Ben Franklin is expressing economic theories in plain language.
Remember, that money is of the prolific, generating nature. Money can beget money, and its offspring can beget more, and so on. Five shillings turned is six, turned again it is seven and threepence, and so on, till it becomes a hundred pounds. The more there is of it, the more it produces every turning, so that the profits rise quicker and quicker.Franklin championed credit and paper money creation as a vital tool for economic growth. He himself invented a new way of printing money to protect against counterfeiting.
He that kills a breedingsow, destroys all her offspring to the thousandth generation. He that murders a crown, destroys all that it might have produced, even scores of pounds.
Let's stop giving away our money to Mad King George.
Remember this saying, The good paymaster is lord of another man’s purse. He that is known to pay punctually and exactly to the time he promises, may at any time, and on any occasion, raise all the money his friends can spare. This is sometimes of great use. After industry and frugality, nothing contributes more to the raising of a young man in the world than punctuality and justice in all his dealings; therefore never keep borrowed money an hour beyond the time you promised, lest a disappointment shut up your friend’s purse for ever. The most trifling actions that affect a man’s credit are to be regarded. The sound of your hammer at five in the morning, or eight at night, heard by a creditor, makes him easy six months longer; but if he sees you at a billiard-table, or hears your voice at a tavern, when you should be at work, he sends for his money the next day; demands it, before he can receive it, in a lump. It shows, besides, that you are mindful of what you owe; it makes you appear a careful as well as an honest man, and that still increases your credit. Beware of thinking all your own that you possess, and of living accordingly. It is a mistake that many people who have the credit fall into. To prevent this, keep an exact account for some time both of your expenses and your income. If you take the pains at first to mention particulars, it will have this good effect: you will discover how wonderfully small, trifling expenses mount up to large sums; and will discern what might have been, and may for the future be saved, without occasioning any great inconvenience. For six pounds a year you may have the use of one hundred pounds, provided you are a man of known prudence and honesty. He that spends a groat a day idly, spends idly above six pounds a year, which is the price for the use of one hundred pounds. He that wastes idly a groat’s worth of his time per day, one day with another, wastes the privilege of using one hundred pounds each day. He that idly loses five shillings’ worth of time; loses five shillings, and might as prudently throw five shillings into the sea. He that loses five shillings, not only loses that sum, but all the advantage that might be made by turning it in dealing, which by the time that a young man becomes old, will amount to a considerable sum of money.
Franklin points out that Credit is linked to Expectations which in turn are based on rational calculation & the use of observable 'proxies' for what (by reason of information asymmetry) is otherwise invisible. We may say 'screening' and 'signalling' devices arise in such cases. However, once you have professional auditors and well regulated financial markets, you don't need to display 'outward and visible' signs of frugality and hard work.
It is Benjamin Franklin who preaches to us in these sentences, the same which Ferdinand Kürnberger satirizes in his clever and malicious Picture of American Culture as the supposed confession of faith of the Yankee.
By then, German princes were using professional 'actuaries' and engineers to raise the productivity of their estates. This in turn affected their credit-worthiness. German re-unification had a fiscal and monetary aspect such that a class of professional accountants and investment analysts came into being. Franklin's America was more pastoral but his insights can be directly translated into contemporary Economic theory. I may mention, Austrian Capitalism, too, had taken off by the time Kurnberger died.
That it is the spirit of capitalism
No. This is the spirit of a rising class of farmers and artisans diversifying their portfolios. But Princes and Prelates could hire professionals to embrace capitalistic methods on their behalf. They didn't have to pretend to have turned into bourgeois gentlemen- like Louis Phillipe.
which here speaks in characteristic fashion, no one will doubt, however little we may wish to claim that everything which could be understood as pertaining to that spirit is contained in it. Let us pause a moment to consider this passage, the philosophy of which Kürnberger sums up in the words, “They make tallow out of cattle and money out of men”.
What did the Austrians make tallow or money out of?
The peculiarity of this philosophy of avarice
Ben Franklin wasn't saying you should hoard money. Set it to work for you. Moreover, the Americans- as a young nation- should raise money to pay for guns and swords so as to get Mad King George to fuck the fuck off.
appears to be the ideal of the honest man of recognized credit, and above all the idea of a duty of the individual toward the increase of his capital, which is assumed as an end in itself.
It really isn't. Franklin wanted his people to be independent and to pursue scientific research with a view to making themselves more comfortable and more secure.
Truly what is here preached is not simply a means of making one’s way in the world, but a peculiar ethic.
No. The ethic is presupposed. Franklin was writing for people like himself- not Dukes or Bishops.
The infraction of its rules is treated not as foolishness but as forgetfulness of duty.
No. It is treated as myopic and lazy.
That is the essence of the matter. It is not mere business astuteness, that sort of thing is common enough, it is an ethos.
It is a political program, not an ethos. To be fair, Ben did his best to avoid a rupture with the Crown for the excellent reason that he was English in point of blood and was as patriotic as the next man.
This is the quality which interests us. When Jacob Fugger, in speaking to a business associate who had retired and who wanted to persuade him to do the same, since he had made enough money and should let others have a chance, rejected that as pusillanimity and answered that “he (Fugger) thought otherwise, he wanted to make money as long as he could”,
German psychologist Karl Bühler in 1924, termed this 'funktionslust'- i.e. the deep sense of joy, satisfaction, or wellbeing an animal or human gets from simply doing an activity they are naturally built or suited to do, purely for the sake of the process itself.
the spirit of his statement is evidently quite different from that of Franklin.
Because he was a banker to Princes and Prelates. Franklin was the representative of a young nation of farmers and tradesmen.
What in the former case was an expression of commercial daring and a personal inclination morally neutral, in the latter takes on the character of an ethically coloured maxim for the conduct of life. -
No. England had been rising in trade and industry for centuries. Franklin's ancestors had been free men earning their living by their skill as black-smiths. The Fuckers (original spelling of Fugger) had been weavers who rose through commerce in a still essentially feudal world. Augsburg only got rid of serfdom in 1808.
The concept spirit of capitalism is here used in this specific sense, it is the spirit of modern capitalism.
There is a big difference between JP Morgan & Ben Franklin.
For that we are here dealing only with Western European and American capitalism is obvious from the way in which the problem was stated. Capitalism existed in China, India, Babylon, in the classic world, and in the Middle Ages. But in all these cases, as we shall see, this particular ethos was lacking.
Franklin's father arrived in America a few years before the Glorious Revolution. The American Revolution was more egalitarian.
Now, all Franklin’s moral attitudes are coloured with utilitarianism. Honesty is useful, because it assures credit; so are punctuality, industry, frugality, and that is the reason they are virtues.
Theologians have always recognised that the practice of a virtue for an instrumental purpose gradually becomes habitual or 'second nature'. Franklin's 13 step self-improvement program is similar to that which arises out of the Catholic concept of synderesis. His 'ledger' resembles the Jesuit method of self-examination.
A logical deduction from this would be that where, for instance, the appearance of honesty serves the same purpose, that would suffice, and an unnecessary surplus of this virtue would evidently appear to Franklin’s eyes as unproductive waste.
Fair point. But a thing which is habitual is more easily performed.
And as a matter of fact, the story in his autobiography of his conversion to those virtues, or the discussion of the value of a strict maintenance of the appearance of modesty, the assiduous belittlement of one’s own deserts in order to gain general recognition later, confirms this impression.
Nothing wrong with that. The truth is, most people don't like being a lazy drunken cunt. I'm rather special in that respect.
According to Franklin, those virtues, like all others, are only in so far virtues as they are actually useful to the individual, and the surrogate of mere appearance is always sufficient when it accomplishes the end in view.
But keeping up appearances is costly. Habit, on the other hand, has low cognitive cost. Get into the habit of being polite & you are less likely to keep getting beaten up.
It is a conclusion which is inevitable for strict utilitarianism. The impression of many Germans that the virtues professed by Americanism are pure hypocrisy seems to have been confirmed by this striking case.
Sadly, German virtue was already expressing itself as genocide. Nobody minded when it was Chinks or darkies who were at the receiving end but, sooner or later, Germans would turn upon their neighbours.
But in fact the matter is not by any means so simple. Benjamin Franklin’s own character, as it appears in the really unusual candidness of his autobiography, belies that suspicion. The circumstance that he ascribes his recognition of the utility of virtue to a divine revelation
of a rational, Deist, sort. Incidentally, James Watt was a Deist.
which was intended to lead him in the path of righteousness, shows that something more than mere garnishing for purely egocentric motives is involved. In fact, the summum bonum of this ethic, the earning of more and more money, combined with the strict avoidance of all spontaneous enjoyment of life, is above all completely devoid of any eudæmonistic, not to say hedonistic, admixture.
This is nonsense. Ben was a bon viveur. The French loved him. True, he didn't get drunk and rape the chamber-maid but the result was that he lived a long, mainly healthy, life.
It is thought of so purely as an end in itself,
No. Ben is talking only about the middling sort. Neither the plantation slave nor the Pope or Sovereign could or should follow his code.
that from the point of view of the happiness of, or utility to, the single individual, it appears entirely transcendental and absolutely irrational.
Deism is rational and empirical, not irrational or transcendental.
Man is dominated by the making of money,
No. Some people have bills to pay. Others don't.
by acquisition as the ultimate purpose of his life.
If your business isn't growing, it is likely to begin to decline. Competition has that effect. On the other hand, if you have a fixed income and few expenses, you can devote yourself to Science or Literature or Gossip.
Economic acquisition is no longer subordinated to man as the means for the satisfaction of his material needs.
Men need security. Acquiring productive assets tends to reduce the likelihood of sudden impoverishment. But, some assets may turn out to be White Elephants.
This reversal of what we should call the natural relationship, so irrational from a naïve point of view, is evidently as definitely a leading principle of capitalism as it is foreign to all peoples not under capitalistic influence.
No. If you have no access to markets and can't acquire assets, you invest in relationships or diversify into non-monetized activities which produce utility of various sorts.
At the same time it expresses a type of feeling which is closely connected with certain religious ideas.
But religious ideas are closely connected to economic ideas. God's mysterious economy constitutes the Katechon which holds the Eschaton at bay.
If we thus ask, why should “money be made out of men”, Benjamin Franklin himself, although he was a colourless deist, answers in his autobiography with a quotation from the Bible, which his strict Calvinistic father drummed into him again and again in his youth: “Seest thou a man diligent in his business? He shall stand before kings” (Prov. xxii. 29).
A King who is diligent in his business, permits the diligence of his subjects to raise their material, psychological and spiritual state. If the King is crap, an invasion or insurrection will destroy livelihoods.
The earning of money within the modern economic order is, so long as it is done legally, the result and the expression of virtue and proficiency in a calling;
No. It may be rent, interest payments or dividend income.
and this virtue and proficiency are, as it is now not difficult to see, the real Alpha and Omega of Franklin’s ethic, as expressed in the passages we have quoted, as well as in all his works without exception.
Why put words in the mouth of a guy who wrote really well?
And in truth this peculiar idea, so familiar to us to-day, but in reality so little a matter of course, of one’s duty in a calling, is what is most characteristic of the social ethic of capitalistic culture, and is in a sense the fundamental basis of it.
This is nonsense. Capitalism allows one to diversify one's portfolio. You are then welcome to have any sort of hobby or vocation or vacation.
It is an obligation which the individual is supposed to feel and does feel towards the content of his professional activity, no matter in what it consists, in particular no matter whether it appears on the surface as a utilization of his personal powers, or only of his material possessions (as capital).
All Societies try to get the lumpen element to stop drinking and whoring and get a fucking job for fuck's sake. This has nothing to do with Capitalism or Feudalism or Lesbian Eco-Feminism.
Of course, this conception has not appeared only under capitalistic conditions. On the contrary, we shall later trace its origins back to a time previous to the advent of capitalism.
We can trace it back to the first amoeba or virus. Evolutionary Game Theory of a Hannan-consistent sort may underlie all ethology (through replicator dynamics) and economics.
Still less, naturally, do we maintain that a conscious acceptance of these ethical maxims on the part of the individuals, entrepreneurs or labourers, in modern capitalistic enterprises, is a condition of the further existence of present-day capitalism.
I suppose, if you believe in 'spirits' or ghosts, then 'conscious acceptance' will be severely lacking.
The capitalistic economy of the present day is an immense cosmos into which the individual is born, and which presents itself to him, at least as an individual, as an unalterable order of things in which he must live.
There were plenty of anti-Capitalists on both the Right and the Left. Fighting a total war may mean saying goodbye to Capitalism and the Rule of Law.
It forces the individual, in so far as he is involved in the system of market relationships, to conform to capitalistic rules of action, The manufacturer who in the long run acts counter to these norms, will just as inevitably be eliminated from the economic scene as the worker who cannot or will not adapt himself to them will be thrown into the streets without a job.
No. Paternalistic manufacturers may end up doing a lot better than those who 'sweat' labour.
Thus the capitalism of to-day, which has come to dominate economic life, educates and selects the economic subjects which it needs through a process of economic survival of the fittest.
European nations were abandoning this 'Social Darwinian' view. Herbert Spencer vainly fulmined at "The Coming Slavery" in his 1884 work The Man Versus the State.
But here one can easily see the limits of the concept of selection as a means of historical explanation.
One really can't. Instead, we see 'convergent evolution'.
In order that a manner of life so well adapted to the peculiarities of capitalism could be selected at all, i.e. should come to dominate others, it had to originate somewhere,
No. There are marsupials which look like placental mammals. But this is 'convergent evolution'.
and not in isolated individuals alone, but as a way of life common to whole groups of men. This origin is what really needs explanation.
No. What matters is the fitness landscape.
Concerning the doctrine of the more naïve historical materialism, that such ideas originate as a reflection or superstructure of economic situations, we shall speak more in detail below. At this point it will suffice for our purpose to call attention to the fact that without doubt, in the country of Benjamin Franklin’s birth (Massachusetts), the spirit of capitalism (in the sense we have attached to it) was present before the capitalistic order.
As was the spirit of Communism, Lesbian Eco-Feminism & Trangender Trotskyite Technopunk.
There were complaints of a peculiarly calculating sort of profit-seeking in New England, as distinguished from other parts of America, as early as 1632. It is further undoubted that capitalism remained far less developed in some of the neighbouring colonies, the later Southern States of the United States of America, in spite of the fact that these latter were founded by large capitalists for business motives, while the New England colonies were founded by preachers and seminary graduates with the help of small bourgeois, craftsmen and yoemen, for religious reasons.
The South was 'Cavalier'. The North was 'Roundhead'.
In this case the causal relation is certainly the reverse of that suggested by the materialistic standpoint.
The small farmer or tradesman is not as polished as the big landlord or banker. So what? Some small farmers became big landlords and some tradesmen became great industrialists.
But the origin and history of such ideas is much more complex than the theorists of the superstructure suppose. The spirit of capitalism, in the sense in which we are using the term, had to fight its way to supremacy against a whole world of hostile forces.
People have to fight to keep their property. In America, guys with guns prevailed over those with Tomahawks.
A state of mind such as that expressed in the passages we have quoted from Franklin, and which called forth the applause of a whole people, would both in ancient times and in the Middle Ages have been proscribed as the lowest sort of avarice and as an attitude entirely lacking in self-respect.
It is, in fact, still regularly thus looked upon by all those social groups which are least involved in or adapted to modern capitalistic conditions. This is not wholly because the instinct of acquisition was in those times unknown or undeveloped, as has often been said.
There is little point acquiring stuff if others will grab it.
Nor because the auri sacra fames, the greed for gold, was then, or now, less powerful outside of bourgeois capitalism than within its peculiar sphere, as the illusions of modern romanticists are wont to believe. The difference between the capitalistic and precapitalistic spirits is not to be found at this point. The greed of the Chinese Mandarin, the old Roman aristocrat, or the modern peasant, can stand up to any comparison. And the auri sacra fames of a Neapolitan cab-driver or barcaiuolo, and certainly of Asiatic representatives of similar trades, as well as of the craftsmen of southern European or Asiatic countries, is, as anyone can find out for himself, very much more intense, and especially more unscrupulous than that of, say, an Englishman in similar circumstances.
Weber is speaking of sharp practice or the shaking down of a foreigner.
The universal reign of absolute unscrupulousness in the pursuit of selfish interests by the making of money has been a specific characteristic of precisely those countries whose bourgeois-capitalistic development, measured according to Occidental standards, has remained backward. As every employer knows, the lack of coscienziosità of the labourers of such countries, for instance Italy as compared with Germany, has been, and to a certain extent still is, one of the principal obstacles to their capitalistic development.
Catholics are always either having a siesta or gadding about at a fiesta. Protestants do all the work yet people say they are boring and stupid. So-ooo unfair!
Capitalism cannot make use of the labour of those who practise the doctrine of undisciplined liberum arbitrium,
Sure it can. Pay him for piece-work. If he doesn't show up, he gets nothing.
any more than it can make use of the business man who seems absolutely unscrupulous in his dealings with others, as we can learn from Franklin.
Again, just pay by results. If he fucks up, he gets nothing. The whole point about open markets is nobody can tell the difference between the potato dug up by the scoundrel and the potato dug up by a pious leprechaun.
Hence the difference does not lie in the degree of development of any impulse to make money. The auri sacra fames is as old as the history of man. But we shall see that those who submitted to it without reserve as an uncontrolled impulse, such as the Dutch seacaptain who “would go through hell for gain, even though he scorched his sails”, were by no means the representatives of that attitude of mind from which the specifically modern capitalistic spirit as a mass phenomenon is derived, and that is what matters.
The Bank robber has a different ethos to the Banker. Even Weber understood this. What he didn't understand was that the spirit of Capitalism is that of efficiency in response to competitive pressure.
At all periods of history, wherever it was possible, there has been ruthless acquisition, bound to no ethical norms whatever.
The opposite, too, has been true. This is because where there is nothing but 'ruthless acquisition', there will be nothing to acquire.
Like war and piracy, trade has often been unrestrained in its relations with foreigners and those outside the group.
It has always been restrained by fear of 'ruthless acquisition'. You generally have to pay for protection from the guys running the market or controlling the entrepot or caravan route.
The double ethic has permitted here what was forbidden in dealings among brothers.
Unless there is an Imperial homonoia or something similar enforced by a Merchant League.
Capitalistic acquisition as an adventure has been at home in all types of economic society which have known trade with the use of money and which have offered it opportunities, through commenda, farming of taxes, State loans, financing of wars, ducal courts and office-holders. Likewise the inner attitude of the adventurer, which laughs at all ethical limitations, has been universal.
Sociopaths do exist in all societies but 'adventurers' may have a strong ethical code.
The most important opponent with which the spirit of capitalism, in the sense of a definite standard of life claiming ethical sanction, has had to struggle, was that type of attitude and reaction to new situations which we may designate as traditionalism.
Modernity had to struggle with tradition. But Capitalism is pre-modern.
In this case also every attempt at a final definition must be held in abeyance. On the other hand, we must try to make the provisional meaning clear by citing a few cases. We will begin from below, with the labourers. One of the technical means which the modern employer uses in order to secure the greatest possible amount of work from his men is the device of piece-rates.
They have pretty much disappeared. I think piece-rates were standard in most industries in Germany at that time.
In agriculture, for instance, the gathering of the harvest is a case where the greatest possible intensity of labour is called for, since, the weather being uncertain, the difference between high profit and heavy loss may depend on the speed with which the harvesting can be done. Hence a system of piece-rates is almost universal in this case. And since the interest of the employer in a speeding-up of harvesting increases with the increase of the results and the intensity of the work, the attempt has again and again been made, by increasing the piece-rates of the workmen, thereby giving them an opportunity to earn what is for them a very high wage, to interest them in increasing their own efficiency. But a peculiar difficulty has been met with surprising frequency: raising the piece-rates has often had the result that not more but less has been accomplished in the same time, because the worker reacted to the increase not by increasing but by decreasing the amount of his work.
i.e. the 'income effect' swamped the 'substitution effect' leading to a backward bending supply curve. The obvious solution is to bring in migrant labour who live in temporary camps.
A man, for instance, who at the rate of 1 mark per acre mowed 2½ acres per day and earned 2½ marks, when the rate was raised to 1.25 marks per acre mowed, not 3 acres, as he the spirit of capitalism 23 might easily have done, thus earning 3.75 marks, but only 2 acres, so that he could still earn the 2½ marks to which he was accustomed. The opportunity of earning more was less attractive than that of working less. He did not ask: how much can I earn in a day if I do as much work as possible? but: how much must I work in order to earn the wage, 2½ marks, which I earned before and which takes care of my traditional needs? This is an example of what is here meant by traditionalism.
To be fair, Slutsky hadn't yet invented indifference curves and thus explained the phenomenon. The traditional remedy was always to bring in migrant labour.
A man does not “by nature” wish to earn more and more money, but simply to live as he is accustomed to live and to earn as much as is necessary for that purpose. Wherever modern capitalism has begun its work of increasing the productivity of human labour by increasing its intensity, it has encountered the immensely stubborn resistance of this leading trait of pre-capitalistic labour.
Capitalistic labour- e.g. that of the guys who run hedge funds- is exactly the same. Slutsky explained the thing.
And to-day it encounters it the more, the more backward (from a capitalistic point of view) the labouring forces are with which it has to deal.
A different problem was that of work effort where it was common for a man's extended family to share in anything he earned. Why slave away so your cousins can eat the bread of idleness?
Another obvious possibility, to return to our example, since the appeal to the acquisitive instinct through higher wage-rates failed, would have been to try the opposite policy, to force the worker by reduction of his wage-rates to work harder to earn the same amount than he did before. Low wages and high profits seem even to-day to a superficial observer to stand in correlation; everything which is paid out in wages seems to involve a corresponding reduction of profits. That road capitalism has taken again and again since its beginning.
The good news is that it drove automation. Only unskilled labour was cheap. Interestingly, in England there appears to have been a 'reswitching paradox' whereby skilled labour substituted for capital.
For centuries it was an article of faith, that low wages were productive, i.e. that they increased the material results of labour so that, as Pieter de la Cour, on this point, as we shall see, quite in the spirit of the old Calvinism, said long ago, the people only work because and so long as they are poor.
If they are rich, they can hire others to work.
But the effectiveness of this apparently so efficient method has its limits. Of course the presence of a surplus population which it can hire cheaply in the labour market is a necessity for the development of capitalism.
No. A tight labour market entails 'capital deepening'. Agricultural involution of a Malthusian sort is likely to go hand in hand with a very low Capital to Labour ratio.
But though too large a reserve army may in certain cases favour its quantitative expansion, it checks its qualitative development, especially the transition to types of enterprise which make more intensive use of labour.
Not if there is quality competition. Skilled labour make better quality goods.
Low wages are by no means identical with cheap labour. From a purely quantitative point of view the efficiency of labour decreases with a wage which is physiologically insufficient, which may in the long run even mean a survival of the unfit. The present-day average Silesian mows, when he exerts himself to the full, little more than two-thirds as much land as the better paid and nourished Pomeranian or Mecklenburger, and the Pole, the further East he comes from, accomplishes progressively less than the German.
Feed them better and they will produce more. Here marginal product is itself a function of the wage. This type of 'impredicativity' can create the 'virtuous circle' of higher wages leading to higher productivity which then allows wages to rise yet again.
Low wages fail even from a purely business point of view wherever it is a question of producing goods which require any sort of skilled labour, or the use of expensive machinery which is easily damaged, or in general wherever any great amount of sharp attention or of initiative is required. Here low wages do not pay, and their effect is the opposite of what was intended. For not only is a developed sense of responsibility absolutely indispensable, but in general also an attitude which, at least during working hours, is freed from continual calculations of how the customary wage may be earned with a maximum of comfort and a minimum of exertion. Labour must, on the contrary, be performed as if it were an absolute end in itself, a calling.
That is going too far. It is enough to have an 'efficiency wage'. which is above the market-clearing equilibrium rate, to boost worker productivity and lower total labor costs per unit of output. This promotes 'loyalty' though there may still be 'exit' if the 'replacement rate' (benefits to wage ratio) rises.
But such an attitude is by no means a product of nature. It cannot be evoked by low wages or high ones alone, but can only be the product of a long and arduous process of education.
That is wholly useless. Only incentives matter. It is a different matter that 'disutility' from work can be reduced by improving working conditions or increasing worker participation in decision making. This can be by way of 'job enrichment'.
Today, capitalism, once in the saddle, can recruit its labouring force in all industrial countries with comparative ease. In the past this was in every case an extremely difficult problem.
I suppose Weber means that the 'habitus' of the rustic made the transition to urban factory work psychologically traumatic. The solution was to get in village girls and house them in giant factory dormitories. The less spirited males, too, could be recruited in this way provided their homes were at some distance away.
And even today it could probably not get along without the support of a powerful ally along the way, which, as we shall see below, was at hand at the time of its development. What is meant can again best be explained by means of an example. The type of backward traditional form of labour is today very often exemplified by women workers, especially unmarried ones. An almost universal complaint of employers of girls, for instance German girls, is that they are almost entirely unable and unwilling to give up methods of work inherited or once learned in favour of more efficient ones, to adapt themselves to new methods, to learn and to concentrate their intelligence, or even to use it at all.
That was changing. It must be said, in the UK, women workers in the textile industry, at that time, were highly productive.
Explanations of the possibility of making work easier, above all more profitable to themselves, generally encounter a complete lack of understanding. Increases of piece-rates are without avail against the stone wall of habit. In general it is otherwise, and that is a point of no little importance from our view-point, only with girls having a specifically religious, especially a Pietistic, background.
Recent scholarship suggests that Weber was wrong. Educational investment did matter and was somewhat greater in some Protestant areas. However, Catholic girls from the Rhineland, Silesia & Bavaria possessed high levels of industrial skill. They formed a core, stable backbone of the textile, manufacturing, and eventually armaments industries during the World Wars.
One often hears, and statistical investigation confirms it, that by far the best chances of economic education are found among this group. The ability of mental concentration, as well as the absolutely essential feeling of obligation to one’s job, are here most often combined with a strict economy which calculates the possibility of high earnings, and a cool self-control and frugality which enormously increase performance. This provides the most favourable foundation for the conception of labour as an end in itself, as a calling which is necessary to capitalism: the chances of overcoming traditionalism are greatest on account of the religious upbringing.
Apparently Weber's Mum was a rigid Calvinist & worked harder than she needed to. Her psychological problems seem to have affected Weber whose father was more easy going.
This observation of present-day capitalism in itself suggests that it is worth while to ask how this connection of adaptability to capitalism with religious factors may have come about in the days of the early development of capitalism.
Protestants said they were hard working. Catholics were drunken scum. It wasn't true, but it felt good saying it.
For that they were even then present in much the same form can be inferred from numerous facts. For instance, the dislike and the persecution which Methodist workmen in the eighteenth century met at the hands of their comrades were not solely nor even principally the result of their religious eccentricities,
it was because they didn't buy a round at the pub. Also, they were considered to be 'brown nosers' sucking up to the boss.
England had seen many of those and more striking ones.
A bloke who buys a round is a comrade. One who doesn't is a great big misery-guts.
It rested rather, as the destruction of their tools, repeatedly mentioned in the reports, suggests, upon their specific willingness to work as we should say to-day.
The dude who raises output causes the boss to set higher targets. Let's beat the fucker up.
However, let us again return to the present, and this time to the entrepreneur, in order to clarify the meaning of traditionalism in his case. Sombart, in his discussions of the genesis of capitalism, has distinguished between the satisfaction of needs and acquisition as the two great leading principles in economic history.
There is only one principle- viz. competition to gain control of factors of production.
In the former case the attainment of the goods necessary to meet personal needs,
as with hunter-gatherers
in the latter a struggle for profit free from the limits set by needs,
as happens once the agricultural revolution takes off
have been the ends controlling the form and direction of economic activity.
No. Only competition matters. If there is none, nothing is scarce or, more correctly, only if there is scarcity will there be competition.
What he calls the economy of needs seems at first glance to be identical with what is here described as economic traditionalism.
Sadly, traditional economies get invaded. The territory passes to those better able to exploit it or else reverts to barbarism.
That may be the case if the concept of needs is limited to traditional needs. But if that is not done, a number of economic types which must be considered capitalistic according to the definition of capital which Sombart gives in another part of his work, would be excluded from the category of acquisitive economy and put into that of needs economy. Enterprises, namely, which are carried on by private entrepreneurs by utilizing capital (money or goods with a money value) to make a profit, purchasing the means of production and selling the product, i.e. undoubted capitalistic enterprises, may at the same time have a traditionalistic character.
And vice versa. Traditions turn out to have rational, economic, explanations. The Asiatic or African peasant, turned out to be perfectly rational. The reason economists couldn't see this is because they were ignoring Knightian Uncertainty and the regret minimizing strategies it gives rise to.
...we provisionally use the expression spirit of (modern) capitalism to describe that attitude which seeks profit rationally and systematically
it should do so in a regret minimizing, not profit maximising, manner. This is because Uncertainty is ubiquitous.
in the the spirit of capitalism manner which we have illustrated by the example of Benjamin Franklin. This, however, is justified by the historical fact that that attitude of mind has on the one hand found its most suitable expression in capitalistic enterprise, while on the other the enterprise has derived its most suitable motive force from the spirit of capitalism.
Spirits and ghosts don't have any motive force. On the other hand, gremlins work hard to keep aeroplanes aloft.
But the two may very well occur separately. Benjamin Franklin was filled with the spirit of capitalism at a time when his printing business did not differ in form from any handicraft enterprise.
He built up a publishing empire and diversified his portfolio with his profits.
And we shall see that at the beginning of modern times it was by no means the capitalistic entrepreneurs of the commercial aristocracy, who were either the sole or the predominant bearers of the attitude we have here called the spirit of capitalism.
Weber had got it into his head that, because Mummy was a Calvinist, spirit of Capitalism must be Calvinism.
It was much more the rising strata of the lower industrial middle classes. Even in the nineteenth century its classical representatives were not the elegant gentlemen of Liverpool and Hamburg,
which saw some local 'de-industrialization' in favour of port development
with their commercial fortunes handed down for generations, but the self-made parvenus of Manchester and Westphalia,
who handed down fortunes to their descendants.
who often rose from very modest circumstances.
Some fell back into poverty. 'Clogs to clogs in three generations'.
As early as the sixteenth century the situation was similar; the industries which arose at that time were mostly created by parvenus. The management, for instance, of a bank, a wholesale export business, a large retail establishment, or of a large putting-out enterprise dealing with goods produced in homes, is certainly only possible in the form of a capitalistic enterprise.
Such things existed, in one shape or another, in Hindu India or the Islamic or Chinese Empire.
Nevertheless, they may all be carried on in a traditionalistic spirit. In fact, the business of a large bank of issue cannot be carried on in any other way.
Sure it can. Citibank, even in 1905, was a financial titan. There was nothing traditionalistic about it.
The foreign trade of whole epochs has rested on the basis of monopolies and legal privileges of strictly traditional character.
But those monopolies were easily broken.
In retail trade—and we are not here talking of the small men without capital who are continually crying out for Government aid—the revolution which is making an end of the old traditionalism is still in full swing.
That 'traditionalism' only appeared old.
It is the same development which broke up the old putting-out system,
which sought to circumvent urban guilds. It became dominant in the eighteenth century and was declining in the nineteenth century
to which modern domestic labour is related only in form. How this revolution takes place and what is its significance may, in spite of the fact these things are so familiar, be again brought out by a concrete example. Until about the middle of the past century the life of a putterout was, at least in many of the branches of the Continental textile industry, what we should to-day consider very comfortable.
It was doomed. The factories had economies of scope and scale. They could substitute fossil fuel for muscle power.
We may imagine its routine somewhat as follows: The peasants came with their cloth, often (in the case of linen) principally or entirely made from raw material which the peasant himself had produced, to the town in which the putter-out lived, and after a careful, often official, appraisal of the quality, received the customary price for it. The putter-out’s customers, for markets any appreciable distance away, were middlemen, who also came to him, generally not yet following samples, but seeking traditional qualities, and bought from his warehouse, or, long before delivery, placed orders which were probably in turn passed on to the peasants. Personal canvassing of customers took place, if at all, only at long intervals. Otherwise correspondence sufficed, though the sending of samples slowly gained ground. The number of business hours was very moderate, perhaps five to six a day, sometimes considerably less; in the rush season, where there was one, more. Earnings were moderate; enough to lead a respectable life and in good times to put away a little. On the whole, relations among competitors were relatively good, with a large degree of agreement on the fundamentals of business. A long daily visit to the tavern, with often plenty to drink, and a congenial circle of friends, made life comfortable and leisurely. The form of organization was in every respect capitalistic; the entrepreneur’s activity was of a purely business character; the use of capital, turned over in the business, was indispensable; and finally, the objective aspect of the economic process, the book-keeping, was rational. But it was traditionalistic business, if one considers the spirit which animated the entrepreneur: the traditional manner of life, the traditional rate of profit, the traditional amount of work, the traditional manner of regulating the relationships with labour, and the essentially traditional circle of customers and the manner of attracting new ones.
The same thing could be said of other declining ways of life. The life of an Oxford don, at that time, was even more bibulous and idle. Then, the English woke up to the fact that the industrious German pedant had left them in the dust.
It must be said, the spirit of modern Capitalism is Darwinian. Calvin and Luther were wrong. Christ was just a nice guy whom the Romans, for some reason, decided to crucify.
All these dominated the conduct of the business, were at the basis, one may say, of the ethos of this group of business men.
Their business was in decline just as the philology of the Oxford don was in decline relative to that of Germany.
Now at some time this leisureliness was suddenly destroyed, and often entirely without any essential change in the form of organization, such as the transition to a unified factory, to mechanical weaving, etc. What happened was, on the contrary, often no more than this: some young man from one of the puttingout families went out into the country, carefully chose weavers for his employ, greatly increased the rigour of his supervision of their work, and thus turned them from peasants into labourers. On the other hand, he would begin to change his marketing methods by so far as possible going directly to the final consumer, would take the details into his own hands, would personally solicit customers, visiting them every year, and above all would adapt the quality of the product directly to their needs and wishes. At the same time he began to introduce the principle of low prices and large turnover. There was repeated what everywhere and always is the result of such a process of rationalization: those who would not follow suit had to go out of business.
Unless they found a niche- e.g. intricate ribbon weaving (Bandweberei), lace-making in the Erzgebirge, and tailored garment assembly—where small-scale home labor remained cheaper than investing in specialized factory machinery. Apparently, the system only vanished after the Second World War.
The idyllic state collapsed under the pressure of a bitter competitive struggle, respectable fortunes were made, and not lent out at interest, but always reinvested in the business. The old leisurely and comfortable attitude toward life gave way to a hard frugality in which some participated and came to the top, because they did not wish to consume but to earn, while others who wished to keep on with the old ways were forced to curtail their consumption.
Those who owned property probably benefitted from rising rents. I imagine, they tried to get their kids settled in the professions or the army. This had nothing to do with Religion. Weber seems to have forgotten that the spirit motivating the new industriousness had nothing to do with Religion. It was a case of technology having moved on.
And, what is most important in this connection, it was not generally in such cases a stream of new money invested in the industry which brought about this revolution—in several cases known to me the whole revolutionary process was set in motion with a few thousands of capital borrowed from relations—but the new spirit, the spirit of modern capitalism, had set to work.
Without any fucking religious element supervening.
The question of the motive forces in the expansion of modern capitalism is not in the first instance a question of the origin of the capital sums which were available for capitalistic uses, but, above all, of the development of the spirit of capitalism.
The spirit of not wanting to decline in class and social standing.
Where it appears and is able to work itself out, it produces its own capital and monetary supplies as the means to its ends, but the reverse is not true.
If the means appear, the end appears- though it may be foreigners who own the new factories.
Its entry on the scene was not generally peaceful. A flood of mistrust, sometimes of hatred, above all of moral indignation, regularly opposed itself to the first innovator. Often—I know of several cases of the sort—regular legends of mysterious shady spots in his previous life have been produced. It is very easy not to recognize that only an unusually strong character could save an entrepreneur of this new type from the loss of his temperate self-control and from both moral and economic shipwreck.
Working is hard. Drinking is easy. If you stay off the booze, you can control your temper easily enough.
Furthermore, along with clarity of vision and ability to act, it is only by virtue of very definite and highly developed ethical qualities that it has been possible for him to command the absolutely indispensable confidence of his customers and workmen.
No. Solvency, not character, is what mattered. High trust networks based on religion- e.g. Jews in the ready-to-wear German market- increased solvency. But so did mortgages. As 'universal' German banks took off, in the 1850s, more an more industrial expansion was on the basis of bank loans.
Nothing else could have given him the strength to overcome the innumerable obstacles, above all the infinitely more intensive work which is demanded of the modern entrepreneur.
But he could be a believer in Darwin, not Dueteronomy.
But these are ethical qualities of quite a different sort from those adapted to the traditionalism of the past.
This is like the rosy picture of Merrie England were people spent most of their time dancing around May Poles and shagging in the cornfields.
And, as a rule, it has been neither dare-devil and unscrupulous speculators, economic adventurers such as we meet at all periods of economic history, nor simply great financiers who have earned through this change, outwardly so inconspicuous, but nevertheless so decisive for the penetration of economic life with the new spirit.
Which was as much Jewish as Protestant or Catholic or, in the case of Fredrich Engels, Marxist.
On the contrary, they were men who had grown up in the hard school of life, calculating and daring at the same time, above all temperate and reliable, shrewd and completely devoted to their business, with strictly bourgeois opinions and principles.
Engel's father was a Pietist. But his life doesn't seem to have been particularly hard.
One is tempted to think that these personal moral qualities have not the slightest relation to any ethical maxims, to say nothing of religious ideas, but that the essential relation between them is negative. The ability to free oneself from the common tradition, a sort of liberal enlightenment, seems likely to be the most suitable basis for such a business man’s success.
It is wholly immaterial. Not being a drunkard or gambling addict is helpful, but that could be said of any type of person in any station in life.
And to-day that is generally precisely the case. Any relationship between religious beliefs and conduct is generally absent, and where any exists, at least in Germany, it tends to be of the negative sort.
So, Capitalism has zero to do with Protestant religion- unless you believe that all Proddy bastids are fucking atheists.
The people filled with the spirit of capitalism to-day tend to be indifferent, if not hostile, to the Church. The thought of the pious boredom of paradise has little attraction for their active natures; religion appears to them as a means of drawing people away from labour in this world. If you ask them what is the meaning of their restless activity, why they are never satisfied with what they have, thus appearing so senseless to any purely worldly view of life, they would perhaps give the answer, if they know any at all: “to provide for my children and grandchildren”. But more often and, since that motive is not peculiar to them, but was just as effective for the traditionalist, more correctly, simply: that business with its continuous work has become a necessary part of their lives.
The German industrialist knew that if his country didn't grow more rapidly in economic terms, its enemies would get the upper hand. Perhaps the country would be divided again or, at the least, it would lose Alsace Lorraine & former Polish territory to its East.
That is in fact the only possible motivation, but it at the same time expresses what is, seen from the view-point of personal happiness, so irrational about this sort of life, where a man exists for the sake of his business, instead of the reverse.
If he loses his edge, his brother or cousin or son might take over. He'd have nothing to do but pay social calls.
Of course, the desire for the power and recognition which the mere fact of wealth brings plays its part. When the imagination of a whole people has once been turned toward purely quantitative bigness, as in the United States, this romanticism of numbers exercises an irresistible appeal to the poets among business men.
Weber doesn't seem to have understood 'non-convexity' (economies of scope and scale) and the manner in which it can entrench itself as 'acquired advantage' such that more of the gains from trade are appropriated.
Otherwise it is in general not the real leaders, and especially not the permanently successful entrepreneurs, who are taken in by it. In particular, the resort to entailed estates and the nobility, with sons whose conduct at the university and in the officers’ corps tries to cover up their social origin, as has been the typical history of German capitalistic parvenu families, is a product of later decadence.
No. It is a type or reinsurance. Social status is a hedge. It is regret minimizing to acquire them when the going is good.
The ideal type of the capitalistic entrepreneur,
Bertha Krupp? Rathenau & Siemens?
as it has been represented even in Germany by occasional outstanding examples, has no relation to such more or less refined climbers.
But did have a relation to Germany's capacity for war
He avoids ostentation and unnecessary expenditure, as well as conscious enjoyment of his power, and is embarrassed by the outward signs of the social recognition which he receives.
The Kaiser personally found Bertha a suitable husband. Germany understood that its big industrialists were vital for national security.
His manner of life is, in other words, often, and we shall have to investigate the historical significance of just this important fact, distinguished by a certain ascetic tendency, as appears clearly enough in the sermon of Franklin which we have quoted. It is, namely, by no means exceptional, but rather the rule, for him to have a sort of modesty which is essentially more honest than the reserve which Franklin so shrewdly recommends. He gets nothing out of his wealth for himself, except the irrational sense of having done his job well. But it is just that which seems to the pre-capitalistic man so incomprehensible and mysterious, so unworthy and contemptible. That anyone should be able to make it the sole purpose of his life-work, to sink into the grave weighed down with a great material load of money and goods, seems to him explicable only as the product of a perverse instinct, the auri sacra fames.
Popes and prelates can be very fond of gold and precious jewels.
At present under our individualistic political, legal, and economic institutions,
There were none such. Germany was preparing for war. What no one expected was that it would be as long and as destructive as the American Civil War.
with the forms of organization and general structure which are peculiar to our economic order, this spirit of capitalism might be understandable, as has been said, purely as a result of adaptation.
German Capitalism was in the sprit of Fredrick the Great not John fucking Calvin.
The capitalistic system so needs this devotion to the calling of making money,
making steel and canons and submarines
it is an attitude toward material goods which is so well suited to that system, so the spirit of capitalism intimately bound up with the conditions of survival in the economic struggle for existence, that there can to-day no longer be any question of a necessary connection of that acquisitive manner of life with any single Weltanschauung.
Sadly, it was the Weltanschauung of the Kaiser & his General Staff.
...the conception of money-making as an end in itself to which people were bound, as a calling, was contrary to the ethical feelings of whole epochs, it is hardly necessary to prove.
But we can prove the opposite re. the Papacy which had an inordinate appetite for gold. Obviously, it had to pretend that everything to do with getting money was wicked. The good news was you could now buy an indulgence for a low, low, price.
The dogma Deo placere vix potestHomo mercator vix aut numquam potest Deo placere- the merchant can never please God. But he can buy an indulgence. God likes to see the Pope get yet more gold.
which was incorporated into the canon law and applied to the activities of the merchant, and which at that time (like the passage in the gospel about interest) was considered genuine, as well as St. Thomas’s characterization of the desire for gain as turpitudo (which term even included unavoidable and hence ethically justified profit-making), already contained a high degree of concession on the part of the Catholic doctrine to the financial powers with which the Church had such intimate political relations in the Italian cities, as compared with the much more radically anti-chrematistic views of comparatively wide circles.
Killing and robbing Jews is pleasing to God. Strangely, this was the creed Germany embraced. To their credit, Weber's wife and brother had no truck with Hitler.
But even where the doctrine was still better accommodated to the facts, as for instance with Anthony of Florence, the feeling was never quite overcome, that activity directed to acquisition for its own sake was at bottom a pudendum which was to be tolerated only because of the unalterable necessities of life in this world.
If you get paid for scolding people, you may as well scold the rich because they alone can pay you.
...The rationalization of private law, for instance, if it is thought of as a logical simplification and rearrangement of the content of the law, was achieved in the highest hitherto known degree in the Roman law of late antiquity.
England never had it. That doesn't seem to have hurt it in any manner.
But it remained most backward in some of the countries with the highest degree of economic rationalization, notably in England, where the Renaissance of Roman Law was overcome by the power of the great legal corporations,
The Common Law was seen as a better defence for the Third Estate. When King James came down from Scotland, Lord Coke told him the law was 'artificial reason'.
while it has always retained its supremacy in the Catholic countries of Southern Europe.
Spain had a problem to do with Mesta & Mortmain but these arose out of feudal, not Roman, law.
The worldly rational philosophy of the eighteenth century did not find favour alone or even principally in the countries of highest capitalistic development. The doctrines of Voltaire are even to-day the common property of broad upper, and what is practically more important, middle-class groups in the Romance Catholic countries.
Because they were only relevant where the Catholic Church held a lot of power.
Finally, if under practical rationalism is understood the type of attitude which sees and judges the world consciously in terms of the worldly interests of the individual ego, then this view of life was and is the special peculiarity of the peoples of the liberum arbitrium, such as the Italians and the French are in very flesh and blood.
This is mere bigotry. Still, Weber was a man of his time. What he little suspected was that the times would get even worse.
But we have already convinced ourselves that this is by no means the soil in which that relationship of a man to his calling as a task, which is necessary to capitalism, has pre-eminently grown.
I may convince myself that I am as beautiful as Beyonce, but it can't change the fact that I'm as ugly as shit.
In fact, one may—this simple proposition, which is often forgotten should be placed at the beginning of every study which essays to deal with rationalism—rationalize life from fundamentally different basic points of view and in very different directions.
i.e. explain why I am as beautiful as Beyonce
Rationalism is an historical concept which covers a whole world of different things.
like why I my booty shake is better than Beyonce's.
It will be our task to find out whose intellectual child the particular concrete form of rational thought was, from which the idea of a calling and the devotion to labour in the calling has grown, which is, as we have seen, so irrational from the standpoint of purely eudæmonistic self-interest, but which has been and still is one of the most characteristic elements of our capitalistic culture.
My task will be find out what happened to the baby I had with Beyonce. Was it Donald Trump?
We are here particularly interested in the origin of precisely the irrational element which lies in this, as in every conception of a calling.
Perhaps Weber's Calvinist mum- who had psychological problems- was at the root of the irrational element in Weber. He had stopped writing and had given up his professorship because of a mental breakdown. Perhaps, he realised, deep down, that he was as stupid as shit & his style of Econ was worthless drivel. Then he took to doing 'Sociology of Religion' in a spirit of impartial ignorance of both Social Science and the nature of Religious experiences or states of mind.
