Posted on 11/10/2008 5:57:48 AM PST by Alex Murphy
The spirit of capitalism is not greed and consumption but the creation of order and the best use of resources.
Have you ever thought much about the economic system into which you were born? Would you say there was a ‘spirit’ that moves it? Sociologist Max Weber was fascinated by the influence of thoughts and beliefs in history, and particularly why religion seemed to be a significant factor in determining levels of wealth.
Weber noticed that in the Germany of his time, the business leaders and owners of capital, not to mention the majority of higher-skilled workers and managers, were Protestant as opposed to Catholic. Protestants also had higher levels of educational achievement. The conventional explanation was that in the 16th and 17th centuries, particular towns and regions in Germany had thrown off the rule of the Catholic church and, in the sudden freedom from a repressive regime controlling every aspect of their lives, they were able to pursue their economic interests and become prosperous.
In fact, Weber notes, it was the very laxness of the Catholic Church in terms of moral and societal rules that turned the bourgeois middle classes against it. These burghers welcomed the tyranny of Protestant control that would tightly regulate their attitudes and behaviour.
Weber’s question was: why did the richer classes in Germany, the Netherlands, Geneva and Scotland, and also the groups that became the American Puritans, want to move in this direction? Surely freedom and prosperity come about when there is less, not more, religious control?
At the outset of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Weber admits that discussing the ‘spirit’ of capitalism seems pretentious. Forms of capitalism had, after all, existed in China, India, Babylon and the classical world, and they had had no special ethos driving them aside from trade and exchange.
It was only with the emergence of modern capitalism, he suggests, that a certain ethic grew linking moral righteousness with making money. It was not just that Protestants sought wealth more purposefully than Catholics, but that Protestants showed ‘a special tendency to develop economic rationalism’; that is, a particular approach to creating wealth that was less focused on the gain of comfort than on the pursuit of profit itself. The particular satisfaction was not in the money extracted to buy things (which had always driven money making in the past), but in wealth creation based on increased productivity and better use of resources.
Weber had studied non-Christian religions and their relationship to economics. He observed that Hinduism’s caste system, for instance, would always be a big obstacle to the development of capitalism because people were not free to be professionally or socially mobile. The Hindu spiritual ethic was to attempt to transcend the world, an outlook not dissimilar to Catholicism’s creation of monasteries and convents to remove holy people from the sins and temptations of the world outside. The Protestant ethic, in contrast, involved living with your eyes on God but fully in the world. Instead of being told that business was an inferior quest compared with the holy life, one could be holy through one’s work. This gave believers a tremendous economic advantage.
Weber is careful not to say that there was anything intrinsically better about the theology of Protestantism. Rather, the general outlook on life and work that the early Protestant sects – Calvinists, Methodists, Pietists, Baptists, Quakers – drew from their beliefs made them singularly well adapted to modern capitalism. They brought to it:
Many Calvinist writers had the same contempt for wealth that the Catholic ascetics did, but when looking more closely at their writings, Weber noted, their contempt was for the enjoyment of wealth and the physical temptations that came with it. Constant activity could drive out such temptations, therefore work could be made holy. If it was where your spiritual energies could be expressed, then work could be your salvation. This combination of ‘intense piety with business acumen’, as Weber describes it, became the cornerstone of many great fortunes.
Today we criticise ourselves for being too much of a consumerist society, buying and using instead of saving and creating. Weber is worth reading to be reminded of the true spirit of capitalism: that it is not about a mad rush to spend and consume, but the creation of wealth through good use of resources, including our own talents.
There is always a gulf between people who are little concerned with the nature of the work they do as long as it brings in the money and gives them some social standing, and those who feel that their work must be fulfilling their potential. It is this latter group who continually breathe new life into economies and societies. If you have a ‘calling’ or a sense of duty in the work you do, then your performance naturally gains an extra, powerful dimension. With a calling, Weber tells us, there is no problem at all in reconciling the economic and spiritual aspects of life.
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism showed how character traits, strongly shaped by religion, could play a massive role in the creation of wealth. Yet these traits do not necessarily depend on a particular religion for their flowering, and can be witnessed the world over where economies have taken off. The Asian economies that have had such a spectacular rise in the past 20 years have only minor Protestant populations, but their industrious, conscientious citizens have much in common with the dutiful and self-denying burghers of 17th-century Germany.
Andrew Carnegie The Gospel of Wealth
Peter Drucker Innovation and Entrepreneurship
Adam Smith The Wealth of Nations
Weber was born in 1864 in Erfurt (then Prussia). His father was a liberal politician and bureaucrat whose family was wealthy from linen weaving. His mother was a devout Calvinist.
In 1882, Weber enrolled at the University of Heidelberg to study law, and two years later he transferred to the University of Berlin, where in 1889 he obtained a doctorate with a thesis on Roman agrarian history. His wide-ranging interests in history, economics and philosophy, plus a willingness to comment on German politics made him a leading intellectual. In 1896 his father died and he entered a long period of depression. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism was one of his first writings to emerge from this time.
After the First World War, Weber helped to draft Germany’s new constitution and played a role in the founding of the German Democratic Party. He died in 1920.
Weber’s other writings include The Theory of Social and Economic Organisation, The Religion of China: Confucianism and Taoism, and Economy and Society.
The spirit of Capitalism is service. Nobody voluntarily parts with money unless they get something they value more. I want your money, I have to make you happy.
>...certain ethic grew linking moral righteousness with making money. It was not just that Protestants sought wealth more purposefully than Catholics, but that Protestants showed ‘a special tendency to develop economic rationalism’; that is, a particular approach to creating wealth that was less focused on the gain of comfort than on the pursuit of profit itself. The particular satisfaction was not in the money extracted to buy things (which had always driven money making in the past), but in wealth creation based on increased productivity and better use of resources.<
thanks. i’d forgotten about this book.
you could not get through the university when i was an undergrad w/o reading weber, especially leftist profs required it.
I am sure that this is no longer required reading for college ‘students’
Too bad. It is the bedrock for understanding anything about our economy-and how our system really works.
In other words, better stewardship of what God has given to mankind.
The way we learned it was:
The Puritans believed –
• An idle mind is the devil’s workshop.
• Idle hands = idle mind = poverty.
• So…Poverty = evil
That’s probably the aspect of the Protestant Ethic that really sticks in the craw of most Liberals who hate the concept of wealth and honest labor. Liberals refuse to see the majority of the perennially poor for the slothful losers they actually are...the ones who are generation after generation of idle, indolent, surly and ungrateful wards of the state… who no amount of largesse, no matter how adroitly administered (and NO government give-away ever is) will elevate above their condition.
When our people came here from Europe at the beginning of the century, they had nothing (literally) and struggled for a whole generation, really struggled…most of them with the added disadvantage of not knowing the English language. They WERE isolated and kept out of the social mainstream because they were foreigners. Did they sit down and whine?….. NO! Did they ask for handouts? NO! They went to work. They worked in factories and mills and in the most dangerous, filthy and degrading jobs. BUT....their children had it a little easier and their grandchildren all went to college - there were NO assistance programs, no social aid … nothing!!!! There were not even any social ‘agencies’ set up to watchdog the rights of the disadvantaged… NOTHING!
But, now after 4 decades of affirmative action, we still have a whole class of people standing around in this country with their hand out and making unreasonable demands for themselves just as if they were entitled to cradle to grave assistance and support….just as if it were not possible to apply themselves and succeed. I am really sick of them!
i grew up on a remote dairy farm
and my father could have passed for a puritan!
idle we were not, poor we started out, but later did ok.
my brother and i had no childhood nor dating in high school.
my father was happy that we would not get into trouble!
You have a wonderful tagline in there...
Books by modern Weberians are ‘Trust’ by Francis Fukuyama and ‘The Central Liberal Truth’ by Lawrence Harrison. The title from the second book comes from a quote by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, it is actually a pretty conservative book. You don’t find many secular intellectuals who speak approvingly of Pentecostalism (which modern day Weber’s identify as the third great Protestant revival. Calvinism was the first, Methodism was the second, along with the Baptists).
read later
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