Game theory alone explains the behaviour of all living things. This is because games are competitions and all life has to compete for resources.
I suppose there is an evolutionary reason why people enjoy competing with certain people in certain fields, not others. Sometimes, such competitions can be carried on down generations or, indeed, in a collective fashion between nations. Humans are strongly mimetic and competition and mimetics are deeply interlinked. The most extreme form of mimicry aims to usurp its object but there are many shades to mimetics.
Competiton can be wasteful or counterproductive just as mimetics may increase or decrease efficiency (achievement). Still, in England, both were seen as potentially benign provided one played by the rules.
Even in Germany, from about the 1870s onward competitive team sports were gaining in popularity. Sadly, German pedagogues were too stupid to understand that competition is what drove Capitalism & Parliamentary Politics & Sporting or Artistic or Scientific achievement.
Instead, such German pedants, by reason of their Idealistic or Hermeneutic tradition, sought to link particular types of activity to 'Spirit' (Geist) which, like the Ghost in Hamlet, is causes much bilious soliloquising on the shores of the Baltic
Prof. Peter Ghosh writes in Aeon
Max Weber’s famous text The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905)
was a product of ignorance. Mercantile Capitalism had always existed. In 12th Century France, the Bazacle Milling Company was a private firm with tradable shares which used water-power for processing wheat. Their rival was the Daurade Milling Company.
Steam power, however, was an eighteenth century invention. One may say that technologically innovative, Industrial Capitalism with economies of scope & scale & a global market, starts in Protestant Britain but Catholic Belgium, not Holland, was the second European country to follow suit. But, by the time Weber wrote this, Japan had overtaken Belgium.
is surely one of the most misunderstood of all the canonical works regularly taught, mangled and revered in universities across the globe.
If you read Weber at Uni, you are studying shit. True, I had to read Weber in my first year at LSE, back in 1979, but that was because our Professor was a Japanese Marxist- Michio Morishima. But, because I knew some European history, I knew Weber was wrong about everything and stupider, not to say crazier, than shit.
This is not to say that teachers and students are stupid,
I have been both. Take it from me- they are.
but that this is an exceptionally compact text that ranges across a very broad subject area, written by an out-and-out intellectual
shithead
at the top of his game.
he was recovering from some type of mental illness. I think his wife had money. He was a professor of Economics- a subject of which he knew nothing.
He would have been dumbfounded to find that it was being used as an elementary introduction to sociology for undergraduate students, or even schoolchildren.
Fair point. One could say it was speculative rather than scholarly.
We use the word ‘capitalism’ today as if its meaning were self-evident, or else as if it came from Marx, but this casualness must be set aside. ‘Capitalism’ was Weber’s own word and he defined it as he saw fit.
He defined it as the 'rational organisation of formally free labour'. By this he meant that a significant portion of the labour force was employed by private firms- i.e. enterprises with a 'routinised, calculated administration' which might, in Germany, appear 'bureaucratic'. But, that was because everything in that shithole appeared bureaucratic when it didn't appear to be the product of too much beer and bellicosity.
Its most general meaning was quite simply modernity itself: capitalism was ‘the most fateful power in our modern life’.
Sadly it was the Kaiser & his crazy General Staff who were the most fateful force in Germany's life.
More specifically, it controlled and generated ‘modern Kultur’, the code of values by which people lived in the 20th-century West,
Actually, two World Wars- started by the German General Staff- created modern mass culture.
and now live, we may add, in much of the 21st-century globe. So the ‘spirit’ of capitalism is also an ‘ethic’, though no doubt the title would have sounded a bit flat if it had been called The Protestant Ethic and the Ethic of Capitalism.
Competition for territory depends, at least in part, on productivity. The relative productivity of Industrial Capitalism- more particularly under State direction- did determine the outcome of both Wars.
This modern ‘ethic’ or code of values was unlike any other that had gone before.
Values change from decade to decade. What Weber got wrong was his notion of a calling (vocation). What the Bible actually says is 'many are called few are chosen'. You may think yourself called to the Ministry, but the Church may refuse your ordination. By contrast, anybody at all can get a job or set up a business or invest capital and live off dividend income. That's why you may hear a banker say 'I only do this job for the money. What I really want to do is play the violin.' By contrast, you won't hear a bishop saying 'I only got into this line of work because of all the moolah and free pussy that comes with the job. Personally, I don't give a shit about Christ.'
Weber supposed that all previous ethics – that is, socially accepted codes of behaviour rather than the more abstract propositions made by theologians and philosophers – were religious.
He was wrong. At the time, people with the same religion had different 'codes' depending on whether they were aristocratic/ thymotic, or mercantile/capitalist or egalitarian/socialist, etc.
Religions supplied clear messages about how to behave in society in straightforward human terms, messages that were taken to be moral absolutes binding on all people.
This was more honoured in the breach.
In the West this meant Christianity, and its most important social and ethical prescription came out of the Bible: ‘Love thy neighbour.’ Weber was not against love, but his idea of love was a private one – a realm of intimacy and sexuality.
He couldn't consummate his marriage.
As a guide to social behaviour in public places ‘love thy neighbour’ was obviously nonsense,
most people are on pretty friendly terms with their neighbours.
and this was a principal reason why the claims of churches to speak to modern society in authentically religious terms were marginal.
Going to Church gets us into Heaven where we will be reunited with Mummy & Daddy & woofy the dog.
He would not have been surprised at the long innings enjoyed by the slogan ‘God is love’ in the 20th-century West – its career was already launched in his own day – nor that its social consequences should have been so limited.
Western Europe did implement Social Insurance & a Welfare State. That is perfectly in accordance with Christianity. However, it was rising productivity that made this possible.
The ethic or code that dominated public life in the modern world
Germany wasn't modern. America was. University students duelling each other with sabres with the aim of getting a nice scar on their face wasn't modern. It was fucking barbaric.
was very different. Above all it was impersonal rather than personal:
Roman law is impersonal. Germany was a successor state to the Holy Roman Empire.
by Weber’s day, agreement on what was right and wrong for the individual was breaking down.
No. It was being reinforced by false scientific theories regarding the supposed unnaturalness of Homosexuality or Women becoming Mathematicians. Also, darkies are as stupid as shit. As for Jews, don't fuckin' get me started, mate.
Weber was amazed that W.E.B Du Bois wasn't a fucking cannibal. The truth is, he was bright and an actual Social Scientist (Comtean/Utilitarian Sociologist) producing very useful research. Could Kant have been wrong?
The truths of religion
were known to be purely imperative, not alethic. Sadly, false scientific theories- or philosophies, like that of Kant,- were reinforcing vulgar prejudices.
– the basis of ethics –
was game-theoretic. In decentralised Thymotic societies there is a duty of retaliation. Once a 'stationary bandit' emerges, the sovereign 'nets out' weregild claims before becoming the universal Hlaford, or Loaf Lord, enforcing, for a profit, homonoia.
were now contested,
When were they not? That's why law suits were a feature of ancient Greek & Roman & Catholic Europe.
and other time-honoured norms – such as those pertaining to sexuality, marriage and beauty – were also breaking down.
They change from cohort to cohort.
(Here is a blast from the past: who today would think to uphold a binding idea of beauty?)
Sadly, people who don't have a 'six-pack' are now considered ugly.
Values were increasingly the property of the individual, not society.
Sadly, the Kaiser's values- which involved conquering more territory- were shared by Weber & almost all Germans.
So instead of humanly warm contact, based on a shared, intuitively obvious understanding of right and wrong, public behaviour was cool, reserved, hard and sober, governed by strict personal self-control.
In the past, people were nice and played nice games with elves and fairies. Now they are all selfish bastards and tell elves and fairies to fuck off.
Correct behaviour lay in the observance of correct procedures. Most obviously, it obeyed the letter of the law (for who could say what its spirit was?) and it was rational. It was logical, consistent, and coherent; or else it obeyed unquestioned modern realities such as the power of numbers, market forces and technology.
Also, it refused to play nice games with elves and fairies.
There was another kind of disintegration besides that of traditional ethics. The proliferation of knowledge and reflection on knowledge had made it impossible for any one person to know and survey it all.
This was always the case. There were mathematicians who were also good at medicine and music but they might know nothing about horse rearing or farming or navigation.
In Europe, the priest, the lawyer, the soldier, the sailor, the farmer etc. was a specialist.
In a world which could not be grasped as a whole,
it can be better grasped as such than ever before
and where there were no universally shared values,
which society thought theft and homicide were good things?
most people clung to the particular niche to which they were most committed: their job or profession. They treated their work as a post-religious calling, ‘an absolute end in itself’,
a hobby is an end in itself. There may be some people who get paid for what they love doing but they are rare birds. For most, work is 'disutility'- it is something you endure so as to get paid. No doubt, you may become habituated to it and miss it when it is gone.
and if the modern ‘ethic’ or ‘spirit’ had an ultimate foundation, this was it.
If so it existed six thousand years ago in Sumer.
One of the most widespread clichés about Weber’s thought is to say that he preached a work ethic. This is a mistake. He personally saw no particular virtue in sweat – he thought his best ideas came to him when relaxing on a sofa with a cigar – and had he known he would be misunderstood in this way, he would have pointed out that a capacity for hard work was something that did not distinguish the modern West from previous societies and their value systems. However, the idea that people were being ever more defined by the blinkered focus of their employment was one he regarded as profoundly modern and characteristic.
Actually, industrial capitalism allowed successful entrepreneurs to reduce the time they spent in the office and increase the time they spent playing the country squire or giddy man about town.
The blinkered professional ethic was common to entrepreneurs and an increasingly high-wage, skilled labour force, and it was this combination that produced a situation where the ‘highest good’ was the making of money and ever more money, without any limit.
But you could hire professional managers to do this for you. Plenty of capitalists gave away vast sums of money.
This is what is most readily recognisable as the ‘spirit’ of capitalism, but it should be stressed that it was not a simple ethic of greed which, as Weber recognised, was age-old and eternal. In fact there are two sets of ideas here, though they overlap. There is one about potentially universal rational procedures – specialisation, logic, and formally consistent behaviour – and another that is closer to the modern economy, of which the central part is the professional ethic.
Both had always existed.
The modern situation was the product of narrow-minded adhesion to one’s particular function under a set of conditions where the attempt to understand modernity as a whole had been abandoned by most people. As a result they were not in control of their own destiny, but were governed by the set of rational and impersonal procedures which he likened to an iron cage, or ‘steel housing’.
This is because they weren't taking the time to play nice games with elves and fairies.
Given its rational and impersonal foundations, the housing fell far short of any human ideal of warmth, spontaneity or breadth of outlook; yet rationality, technology and legality also produced material goods for mass consumption in unprecedented amounts.
Sadly, Germany would turn into a machine for total war in a manner hugely destructive to its people. Two million were killed while several hundred thousand perished of disease and malnutrition. There was plenty of warmth and camraderie in the barracks but the Germans were bound to lose in the end. Weber welcomed the war. He truly had shit for brains.
For this reason, though they could always do so if they chose to, people were unlikely to leave the housing ‘until the last hundredweight of fossil fuel is burned up’.
After that, they would play nice games with elves and fairies.
It is an extremely powerful analysis,
it was nonsense. Still, by about 1916, all countries realised that national security was linked to industrialization. If you spent your time playing nice games with elves and fairies, invaders with modern weapons would take over your territory and literally enslave you.
which tells us a great deal about the 20th-century West and a set of Western ideas and priorities that the rest of the world has been increasingly happy to take up since 1945. It derives its power not simply from what it says, but because Weber sought to place understanding before judgment, and to see the world as a whole.
This was the hermeneutic strain in German thinking. Sadly the 'verstehen' of stupid pedants isn't worth shit.
If we wish to go beyond him, we must do the same.
We can be stupider pedants than Weber but who will employ us? If students study worthless shite, they won't be able to repay their student loans. Sooner or later, that type of finance will dry up.
Anthony Giddens in his introduction to Weber's 'Protestant Ethic' wrote-
In his study of India, Weber placed particular emphasis upon the period when Hinduism became first established (about four or five centuries before the birth of Christ). The beliefs and practices grouped together as ‘Hinduism’ vary considerably. Weber singles out as especially important for his purposes the doctrines of reincarnation and compensation (Karma), each tied in closely to the caste system.
You can do what you like and keep your caste status by spending a little money on expiation (prayaschitham). You can also change your caste, by bullying or buying Brahmins.
The conduct of an individual in any one incarnation, in terms of the enactment of his caste obligations, determines his fate in his next life;
unless he cancels it out with karma kanda- i.e. performance of rituals.
the faithful can contemplate the possibility of moving up a hierarchy towards divinity in the course of successive incarnations.
Unless, like Trishanku, he has enough money to take the direct route by some complicated ritual.
There is an important emphasis upon asceticism in Hinduism, but it is, in Weber’s term, ‘other-worldly’: that is to say, it is directed towards escaping the encumbrances of the material world rather than, as in Puritanism, towards the rational mastery of that world itself.
Puritans want to get to Heaven just as much as Hindus want to get to Swarga.
During the same period at which Hinduism became systematised, trade and manufacture reached a peak in India. But the influence of Hinduism, and of the emergent caste system which interlaced with it, effectively inhibited any economic development comparable to modern European capitalism.
No. What inhibited economic development was getting conquered. The Hindu warrior class lacked cohesiveness. They were constantly fighting each other rather than unititing against invaders.
‘A ritual law,’ Weber remarks, ‘in which every change of occupation, every change in work technique, may result in ritual degradation is certainly not capable of giving birth to economic and technical revolutions from within itself . . .’
Sure it is. Just do the 'prayaschitham' ritual- i.e. have a bath and chant some mantras- when you return home. Alternatively, just do it once a year when you change your sacred thread. Religion is a service industry and Brahmins were cheap.
The phrase ‘from within itself’ is a vital one: Weber’s concerns were with the first origins of modern capitalism in Europe, not with its subsequent adoption elsewhere.
There were large private firms in ancient and medieval India. Relative naval and military decline was the impeding factor on the size and continuity of such enterprises. Commerce declines if the 'stationary bandit' (State) confiscates the gains from trade.
As in India, in China at certain periods trade and manufacture reached a fairly high level of evolution; trade and craft guilds flourished; there was a monetary system; there existed a developed framework of law. All of these elements Weber regards as preconditions for the development of rational capitalism in Europe. While the character of Confucianism, as Weber portrays it, is very different from Hinduism, it no more provided for ‘the incorporation of the acquisitive drive in a this worldly ethic of conduct’ than did Hinduism.
Weber did not know the Vyadha Gita which depicts a wealthy butcher/meat vendor living a luxurious life. Yet he possesses the honeyed wisdom of the Chandogya. Confucianism upheld the traditional Chinese religion. Jian Li Si Yi- Making money through ethical, honest, and legal means, is nothing to be ashamed of. But, it is a basic principle of commerce that doing the right thing creates 'goodwill'- a invisible item on your balance sheet which may be worth more than all of your material assets put together.
Confucianism is, in an important sense, a ‘this-worldly’ religion,
Confucius, like Moh Tzu, was concerned with improving governance and thus increasing the well-being of the people. Moh Tzu has been called the first utilitarian.
but not one which embodies ascetic values. The Calvinist ethic introduced an activism into the believer’s approach to worldly affairs,
It was always there. Interestingly, queitist or pietistic or ecstatic sects were just as good at producing thrifty, enterprising, communities.
a drive to mastery in a quest for virtue in the eyes of God, that are altogether lacking in Confucianism.
Calvin was a bit hysterical, but there were similar Taoist sects which called for public confession and expiation of sin.
Confucian values do not promote such a rational instrumentalism,
Yet China possessed this at a time when it was commercially and technologically ahead of Europe.
nor do they sanctify the transcendence of mundane affairs in the manner of Hinduism;
You were welcome to be a Taoist/Buddhist as well as a Confucian.
instead they set as an ideal the harmonious adjustment of the individual to the established order of things.
Nobody's ideal is disharmony between the individual and the Universe.
The religiously cultivated man is one who makes his behaviour coherent with the intrinsic harmony of the cosmos.
This is also true of a sensible bloke.
An ethic which stresses rational adjustment to the world ‘as it is’ could not have generated a moral dynamism in economic activity comparable to that characteristic of the spirit of European capitalism.
During the Tang and Song dynasties, (618–1279 CE), China achieved a level of commercial, agricultural, and technological advancement that far surpassed that of fragmented, feudal medieval Europe. Did Mongol invasions set it back? Yes. The Song proto-industrial golden age came to an end. Europe, itself escaping invasion, gained by the import of Chinese goods and technology through the reopened Silk road. Ming conservatism- in particular the 'Haijin' sea-ban- is considered a reaction to suffering under the Mongols. Had China got to the Americas first, we'd all be writing in Chinese.
Weber’s other completed study of the ‘world religions’, that of ancient Judaism, is also an important element of his overall project. For the first origins of Judaism in ancient Palestine mark the nexus of circumstances in which certain fundamental differences between the religions of the Near and Far East became elaborated.
Christianity could flourish in the Far East- if the rulers approved of it. There was a time when it looked as though the Mongols would embrace Nestorian Christianity.
The distinctive doctrines forged in Judaism were perpetuated in Christianity, and hence incorporated into Western Culture as a whole. Judaism introduced a tradition of ‘ethical prophecy’, involving
the fate of one of the smaller nations in the Fertile Crescent. Paradoxically, its rebellions against the Romans played a role in Jerusalem replacing Athens as Europe's axis mundi.
the active propagation of a Divine mission, that contrasts with the ‘exemplary prophecy’ more characteristic of India and China.
Both had Court astrologers and soothsayers rather than Prophets. But that was also true of Rome. Greece had its famoulsy ambiguous Delphic oracles.
In the latter type, the prophet offers the introduction example of his own life as a model for his followers to strive after: the active missionary zeal characteristic of ethical prophecy is lacking in the teachings of the exemplary prophets.
Nonsense! Indic religions spread through proselytization- including, by the time Weber wrote this, missionary activity in Euorpe and America.
Judaism and Christianity rest on the tension between sin and salvation
all religions do. There are rituals for expiation.
and that gives them a basic transformative capacity which the Far Eastern religions lack,
Yet Japan beat Russia around this time. Their Emperor was divine. The Tzar was merely the 'little father'. Weber doesn't seem to have been aware that the Ethiopians had beaten the Italians. They, not the Japanese, were the first non-white country to defeat a White colonial power.
being more contemplative in orientation. The opposition between the imperfections of the world and the perfection of God, in Christian theodicy, enjoins the believer to achieve his salvation through refashioning the world in accordance with Divine purpose.
No. You can't refashion the world. You can refashion yourself. Interestingly, the Jews arrived at a doctrine (tikkun) similar to that of the Christians on their own. But Islam had it as well. It is also a big part of the Yoga-Samkhya tradition.
Calvinism, for Weber, both maximises the moral impulsion deriving from the active commitment to the achievement of salvation and focuses it upon economic activity.
Calvinism wasn't so different from Lutheranism or Anglicanism etc. The School of Salamanca was little known in Weber's time. Currently, we see it as having played a leading role in the foundation of modern economic thinking. I suppose Weber had inherited a prejudice against 'magical' Catholicism without realising that there was a time when Spain and Portugal were once economically more advanced than the rest of Europe.
The Protestant Ethic, Weber says, traces ‘only one side of the causal chain’ connecting Puritanism to modern capitalism (p. xxxix). He certainly does not claim that differences in the rationalisation of religious ethics he identifies are the only significant influences that separate economic development in the West from that of the Eastern civilisations.
The Reformation tended to lead to Church land passing into private hands which boosted economic activity and reduced the rewards for a life of clerical celibacy.
On the contrary, he specifies a number of fundamental socio-economic factors which distinguish the European experience from that of India and of China,
both came under Turko/Mongol/Manchu rule. Western Europe did not.
and which were of crucial importance to the emergence of modern capitalism.
These include the following: 1. The separation of the productive enterprise from the household
a characteristic of slave or serf societies
which, prior to the development of industrial capitalism,
which was always developing unless invaders or insurrections caused economic dislocation & a retreat to subsistence farming.
was much more advanced in the West than it ever became elsewhere.
Only with mechanization did factory production take over from household production.
In China, for example, extended kinship units provided the major forms of economic co-operation, thus limiting the influence both of the guilds and of individual entrepreneurial activity.
Prior to about 1100, hereditary aristocratic clans dominated the administration. The introduction of a rigorous civil service examination (keju) during the Song Dynasty effectively broke the power of the old aristocrats. Because positions were no longer hereditary, a new class of commoner lineages (zongzu) emerged. To protect their long-term survival and pooling of assets, these newly formed commoner clans began adopting structural innovations: They created extensive written genealogies and family trees They purchased common clan lands to fund the education of promising youth for state exams The Southern Song government actively encouraged these common-surname lineages to foster grass-roots community cohesion and loyalty to the state. Under the Ming & Qing dynasties, local government was in the hands of such clans.
Did this inhibit guild activity or individual entrepreneurship? No. Guilds (gongsuo or huiguan) were urban & part of geographically dispersed networks. Clans were local. People working for a guild might send money home to support the clan's school in the hope that a clan member would become a mandarin.
An entrepreneur who wished to expand his operations might recruit young men from his own clan to come and work for him. Such entrepreneurs often came together so as to gain scope and scale economies. Famous merchant coalitions- e.g. those of Huizhou and Shanxi- operated like massive macro-clans.
2. The development of the Western city. In postmediaeval Europe, urban communities reached a high level of political autonomy, thus setting off ‘bourgeois’ society from agrarian feudalism.
'City air makes you free' (i.e. you are no longer a serf). Moreover, the City might purchase 'liberties' from feudal lords. This was not the case in Imperial China. Still, magistrates tended to turn a blind eye to local guilds running things in a sensible manner.
In the Eastern civilisations, however, partly because of the influence of kinship connections that cut across the urban-rural differentiation, cities remained more embedded in the local agrarian economy
That was always the case unless food could be brought in by ship.
. The existence, in Europe, of an inherited tradition of Roman law, providing a more integrated and developed rationalisation of juridical practice than came into being elsewhere.Imperial China tended to take a hostile view of Songshi (讼师 - Litigation Masters): private individuals—often literate scholars who had failed the imperial civil service exams—who provided paid advice, drafted legal complaints (shu), and coached litigants on how to present their cases.
This in turn was one factor making possible the development of the nation-state, administered by full-time bureaucratic officials, beyond anything achieved in the Eastern civilisations.
The reverse is the case. China had plenty of 'full-time bureaucratic officials' who conducted inquisitorial trials. Western Europe tended to have a much smaller bureaucracy and a much larger class of lawyers. The advantage of 'stare decisis' was that once a case was decided, its ratio governed a host of other cases and this was known to legal professionals.
The rational-legal system of the Western state was in some degree adapted within business organisations themselves, as well as providing an overall framework for the co-ordination of the capitalist economy.
Actually, as Adam Smith pointed out, business enterprises conspired to get around the law re. restraint of trade.
The development of double-entry bookkeeping in Europe.
Something similar existed in India (Bahi-khata) in the 13th century. It may have originated in the 4th century BC.
In Weber’s view, this was a phenomenon of major importance in opening the way for the regularising of capitalistic enterprise.
Cash flow is more important. Economists don't understand that 'accounting identities' are fudged after the fact.
That series of changes which, as Marx emphasised, prepared the way for the formation of a ‘free’ mass of wage-labourers, whose livelihood depends upon the sale of labour-power in the market. This presupposes the prior erosion of the monopolies over the disposal of labour which existed in the form of feudal obligations (and were maximised in the East in the form of the caste system).
The caste system was about saying you couldn't be made to do certain types of work. It was a type of trade-unionism.
Taken together, these represent a mixture of necessary and precipitating conditions which, in conjunction with the moral energy of the Puritans, brought about the rise of modern Western capitalism.
It rose first in 14th century City States in Catholic Italy.
But if Puritanism provided that vital spark igniting the sequence of change creating industrial capitalism,
it didn't. English Puritans played a big role in colonization, farming & cottage industries, but industrial capitalism came later. Instead of 'covenants'- (complete contracts)- you had incomplete contracts with sophisticated risk pooling & separation of control from beneficial rights. Interestingly, James Watt, born a Covenanter, became a Deist. Arkwright was a High Church Anglican.
the latter order, once established, eradicates the specifically religious elements in the ethic which helped to produce it:
the specifically religious element was the belief that the Pope was the Whore of Babylon.
When asceticism was carried out of monastic cells into everyday life,
The Puritans were fighters, not ascetics. They fucked over the Cavaliers but good.
and began to dominate worldly morality,
e.g. by chopping off the head of a Catholic King
it did its part in building the tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order . . .
as did American Tobacco and African slaves and Dacca's weavers of Muslin.
victorious capitalism, since it rests on mechanical foundations, needs its support no longer . . .
Sadly, the Japanese victory over the Russians meant that, a dozen years later, Capitalism in Russia would be fucked in the ass. The support any economic regime needs is military. If you can't defend the economic order, it disappears. The guys who are better at killing decide how resources are to be allocated.
the idea of duty in one’s calling prowls about in our lives like the ghost of dead religious beliefs.
No. It is written into your contract or your code of professional ethics. It is a justiciable matter not Casper the fucking ghost.
Here , concerned above all with the origins of modern capitalism, connects up with Weber’s sombre indictment of the latter-day progression of contemporary industrial culture as a whole.
Industrial Culture was better than the shite purveyed by Professors of non-STEM subjects.
Puritanism has played a part in creating the ‘iron cage’ in which modern man has to exist – an increasingly bureaucratic order from which the ‘spontaneous enjoyment of life’ is ruthlessly expunged.
We should be spontaneously playing with elves and fairies and jizzing all over the greensward.
‘The Puritan’, Weber concludes, ‘wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so’
The Puritan wanted to fuck up Catlicks. True, he might have to stick to mending boots because he was a cobbler by profession. Still, what got him hard was the thought of sticking a pitchfork up the arse of Pope.
