by Max Weber
Weber argues that the American Baptists, Quakers, Pietists, Methodists, and other denominations with a Puritan background approximate to “sects” rather than to “churches” and that American professional and business life has been effectively modeled on a sectarian basis. Although the old religious convictions of the Puritans are replaced increasingly by the instrumental manners and attitudes typical of the “association,” the sectarian emphasis on public respectability and exclusiveness survives in American business clubs and professional life. The thread that connects Puritan denominations and modern business associations is the common requirement of members that they prove their worth; in both, social acceptance by one’s peers is deemed the sine qua non of success and advancement. Moreover, the struggle to prove oneself is of a highly personal, individual kind, albeit conducted within the context of a tightly controlled social group. As such, Weber argues, it facilitates and promotes the antiauthoritarian thrust of Puritan societies. American democracy is the beneficiary of a movement that puts obedience to God ahead of obedience to the state, freeing the individual of deference to traditional office and encouraging personal dynamism and initiative.
IV
Who would have guessed when The Protestant Ethic first appeared in 1905 that it would eventually come to be ranked as one of the great texts of the twentieth century, selling several hundred thousand copies in the process? Certainly not its English publisher, who, in 1934, doubted the translation would sell as many as two and a half thousand.42 To explain why such pessimism was misplaced, it is worth briefly examining the interaction between the text and its critical reception.43
Consider first The Protestant Ethic’s cultural resonance. Weber’s essay deals with some of the most intriguing and pressing issues of modern times: the nature of capitalism, the character of religion, the future of humanity encased in a “shell as hard as steel.” Moreover, as Guenther Roth and others have argued, Weber’s enthusiasm for Puritanism and British and American democracy was particularly congruent with, and flattering to, the self-image of Anglophone countries. His analysis “helped reinforce the American orthodox understanding of an inherent connection between Protestantism and liberal democracy.”44 At the same time, the essay’s strongly counterintuitive propositions on the affinity between Protestantism (a religious movement) and capitalism (an ostensibly secular and godless economic order) offered much to chew on, inviting repudiation as much as acceptance. Indeed, without such a critical reception, the Protestant ethic “thesis” would have simply degenerated into a platitude, a social science museum piece, unread because uninteresting. Instead, it became a nodal point in a network of competing arguments about capitalism, the greatest economic and cultural force of modern times. Located in a prestigious German journal of social science, Weber’s analysis was well placed to provoke criticism and thus attention.
And so it did. From the beginning, The Protestant Ethic was attacked as theoretically confused, imaginatively fanciful, and historically wrong; furthermore, the dissent aired in Weber’s lifetime—notably, by Fischer, Rachfahl, Sombart, and Brentano45—dilated on themes that have haunted the essay ever since.46 The essay was criticized for overestimating the importance of religious motives and of the Protestant petite bourgeoisie in the emergence of capitalism; conversely, for underestimating the significance of Catholic, pre-Reformation merchants and bankers as vehicles of capitalism; relatedly, for failing to see that the matrix of attitudes, habits, and motivations that Weber labeled the “spirit” of capitalism, and hence of a modern capitalist calling, preceded the likes of Benjamin Franklin by four centuries—for instance, in the shape of the Catholic Florentine merchant Leon Battista Alberti. Further objections concerned Weber’s one-sided etymology and interpretation of Beruf (calling, vocation) and the theoretical weight he accorded it; his failure to reconcile convincingly the strongly antimammonistic attitudes of the Puritans with what he claimed to be their role as an unwitting capitalist vanguard; and his inability to see the striking parallels between Jewish and Puritan asceticism and to acknowledge more generally that it is the status of being socially and politically marginal, more than the existence of peculiar religious or ethical beliefs, that explains why some groups are bearers of innovation while others cling to tradition.
Weber contested vigorously all these objections, asserting either that they represented a caricature of his position47 or attested to the critics’ own incompetence as historians; often he claimed both simultaneously. Since his answers appear at length in this volume, readers can make up their own minds as to their plausibility or otherwise. As they do so, it will immediately become apparent that the Weber ritually evoked in textbooks of social science has experienced a remarkable metamorphosis. Gone is the apostle of restraint, sobriety, and value freedom. In his place glowers an entirely different being: a pugnacious literary street fighter who seems to have flourished in an epoch before the social contract was signed. Weber’s polemical replies—nasty, brutish, though none too short—take no hostages. Felix Rachfahl is not simply mistaken, in Weber’s view; he is benighted, pathetic, dishonest, and wrong in every way, a charlatan egregiously seeking to misrepresent Weber’s analysis. Granted, Weber’s interlocutor has a fine line in sarcasm himself, relishing the fact that the “bubble on the Neckar has burst.”48 Even so, a perusal of Rachfahl’s own essays shows that Weber’s damning indictment of his scholarship is absurd and unfair. Weber’s scathing responses raised considerably the temperature of the debate, and his subsequent replies to Sombart and Brentano, though more civil, are just as apodictic. Henceforth, authors who wanted to propose their own distinctive theories of the origins of modern capitalism could do no better than to confront the Weber “thesis” and, by so doing, locate themselves in a major intellectual controversy. Weber’s argument became both a totem to which scholars paid deference every time they attacked it, thereby acknowledging its stature, and a medium through which they could argue against each other, helping to promote a value-added spiral of information, theory, and nuance. The same applies to Weber’s later claims about the unique genesis of Western institutions, which have provoked both dissent and qualified support from those concerned to debate “Orientalism” and Asian values.49
Disputes over a text, then, are vital for its discursive longevity. Simple endorsement would place The Protestant Ethic in the mausoleum of social science, not at its commanding heights. So long as it is argued over, particularly by some of the best minds in contemporary social science, the essay emerges perennially revitalized. Reports of its death are seriously exaggerated.50 Still, cultural resonance will only take a text so far. To join the pantheon of literary works that are commonly called classics, Weber’s essay also had to possess qualities of fruitful ambiguity, or textual suppleness, which allow multiple readings and adoptions. And such creative engagement was greatly facilitated in the case of The Protestant Ethic,51 both by the fact that the essay exists in two versions, interspersed by the polemical rejoinders to Fischer and Rachfahl, and by its complex relationship to the totality of Weber’s mature writings on capitalism and religion. In addition, the work contains an intriguing metaphor—stahlhartes Gehäuse (or “shell as hard as steel”)—that Talcott Parsons rendered as “the iron cage.” The translation is questionable; its impact undeniable. For the “iron cage” has become one of the key topoi of the human sciences, versatile enough to animate investigations ranging from scientific management52 to the men’s movement53 or to invite literary pun (as in Michael Roth’s The Ironist’s Cage) and oxymoron (as in Ian Gamble’s Hayek: The Iron Cage of Liberty).
More generally, such tropes, and the complex arguments in which they are embedded, allow commentators to interpret The Protestant Ethic from radically different perspectives. For instance, is the essay primarily a contribution to a universal history of rationality54 or a study of the genesis of modern Western humanity and the specialized modes of life peculiar to it?55 Is it advancing a strong thesis in which Calvinist ideas were a nec
essary, though not sufficient, condition of the outlook of modern capitalism or a weak thesis in which Calvinism was simply consistent with the capitalist spirit and did nothing to impede it?56 Is the text less about the origins of the capitalist mentality than about the manner in which strata that were already capitalist adopted ideas and attitudes that lent their activity a spectacular dynamism?57
Questions and arguments like these are not arbitrary impositions on Weber’s texts but rather derive from properties central to them. Consider, for instance, Weber’s much debated description of the link between the Protestant ethic and the capitalist “spirit” (or at least of one of its “components”). Sometimes that connection appears causal (a relationship between an independent and dependent variable); at other times, logical; while on still other occasions, Weber describes the relationship as one of adequacy, elective affinity, meaningful congruence, or correspondence. Then again, it is difficult to know what historical weight Weber actually accords the Protestant ethic in the development of capitalism. When critics point to ambiguities in one text, Weber claims indignantly that he has clarified those problems in another. When the same critics charge him with philosophical “idealism,” Weber reminds them of his distinction between the “spirit” of capitalism (its moral attitudes and motivations) and the capitalist institutional “form” or “system” that encompasses economic, political, juridical, and scientific conditions. Such causal pluralism may be admirable as a methodological postulate, but, rhetorically, it allows Weber to constantly elude refutation.58 Little wonder that critics have charged him with evasion and considered his use of ideal types to be a kind of “mental alchemy.”59
What we have been calling the textual suppleness of The Protestant Ethic directs an audience toward questions about the narrative itself. Attention is focused on what the text “really” means, how it is related to other works of Weber’s oeuvre, what its author was seeking to do in composing them. But for Weber’s writings on Protestantism to have become seminal, they needed to do more than raise her-meneutical questions; they needed also to invite creative application to a host of issues beyond their immediate purview. We have already noted an example of such reader appropriation: the tendency of writers on themes such as the “iron cage” or Orientalism and Asian values to pick up, even if polemically, Weber’s arguments. In addition, Weber’s writings on Protestantism and capitalism have been employed to examine such diverse phenomena as the nature of social action, the character of trust relationships, the clash of civilizations, and the dangers of mass consumption; and to explain why some nations became wealthy while others remained poor.60 Such applications, engagements, and creative misreadings of Weber’s essay testify to its continuing hold over the scholarly imagination.
This is not the place for an extended analysis of The Protestant Ethic’s national reception—its trajectory in Britain, for instance, was very different from that in Japan61—but one understudied case is particularly instructive. We have seen how Weber sought to understand the United States during his sojourn of 1904. How has the United States sought to understand him?62 To some degree, the reception of The Protestant Ethic in America parallels that in other Anglophone countries. Historians and economists have in general been the least sympathetic to its argument; sociologists, the most enthusiastic. But the American case is especially interesting because of its pioneering character and the diversity of its interlocutors. To be sure, The Protestant Ethic was already a topic of discussion of British historians in the interwar years (as it was among French luminaries, such as Maurice Halbwachs, Henri Pirenne, and Henri Sée). In 1926, R. H. Tawney’s Religion and the Rise of Capitalism criticized Weber’s argument, among other things, for conflating Calvinism and Puritanism; while in 1933, H. M. Robertson’s Aspects of the Rise of Economic Individualism: A Criticism of Max Weber and His School taxed Weber for misunderstanding Reformed attitudes toward economic activity and for failing to see that Catholicism, particularly its Jesuit inflection, was more conducive to the capitalist spirit than Calvinism was. Yet the “American” contribution was distinctive in a number of important ways.
To begin with, it was two Americans—the University of Chicago economist Frank H. Knight and Talcott Parsons63 (an economics instructor at Amherst College and at Harvard University before assuming the persona of a sociologist)—who first translated Weber’s work on Protestantism and capitalism, thereby making it accessible to a growing Anglophone public.64 Of particular significance was Parsons’s translation of The Protestant Ethic, published in 1930,65 which, until 2001,66 was the only version available for English-language readers to peruse. In consequence, Weber was refracted through a peculiarly Parsonian lens. Parsons, it is true, was the very opposite of a parochial thinker. As an undergraduate at Amherst College, he majored in biology and philosophy before proceeding in the mid-1920s to study economics and sociology, first at the London School of Economics, then in Weber’s home city, Heidelberg, where he became personally acquainted with Karl Mannheim, Alfred Weber (Max Weber’s brother), Marianne Weber, and Karl Jaspers. Of all American sociologists of the twentieth century, few have known European Continental traditions better than Parsons. At the same time, his translation of The Protestant Ethic entailed a domestication of Max Weber’s ideas with far-reaching outcomes. Gisela Hinkle has remarked on the “Americanization of Max Weber” to which Parsons contributed, by which she means “an interpretive transformation of Weber’s writings through the process of translation. Translation from one language to another,” she adds, “and more specifically from one intellectual and linguistic context to another, entails not merely a substitution of words but a transformation of ideas, styles of thinking, modes of expression, indeed a whole context of mental imagery and assumptions.”67 Her concern is that a clash of philosophical perspectives between translators and authors can have major consequences for the latter, pulling a work into an interpretive orbit that disturbs the original constellation of themes, idioms, and emphases. A salient example occurs in The Protestant Ethic, where Parsons’s hostility to behaviorist psychology and his determination to enlist Weber in the pantheon of thinkers similarly averse to it lead him to downplay Weber’s emphasis on psychological Antriebe (drives, impulses), rendering this term as “sanctions.” Similarly, Parsons translates “elective affinities” (Wahlverwandtschaften) as “correlations,” a social-scientific idiom that extinguishes the compressed imagery of eroticism, attraction, and alchemy that pervade the Goethean evocation. Another instance occurs toward the end of The Protestant Ethic, where Parsons substitutes “last stage” (of cultural development) for “last men” (die “letzten Menschen”), thereby obliterating the Nietz-schean resonance of the original.
But Parsons did more than translate Weber’s key text on Protestantism. In The Structure of Social Action (1937),68 Weber, together with Alfred Marshall, Vilfredo Pareto, and Emile Durkheim, is employed in an ambitious project to reconstruct what Parsons claimed to be “a single body of systematic theoretical reasoning” on “social action.” Transcending “utilitarianism” and idealism alike, Parsons’s “voluntaristic theory of action” became the first stage of his evolution toward structural functionalism, the school of thought that dominated American sociology in the 1950s. As Parsons rose to fame in American sociology, so did Weber, a coupling reinforced by Parsons’s cotranslation of part one of Weber’s Economy and Society, first published in 1947 and again evincing a distinctly Parsonian theoretical bent.69 More significantly for our purposes, The Structure of Social Action represented Parsons’s attempt, only partially successful in the longer term, to reorganize, simplify, and distill the great diversity of sociological thought into a fundamental common core. In the process, Weber was elevated to one of sociology’s few canonical thinkers; The Protestant Ethic, to one of the discipline’s jewels.70
A contrast of Parsons’s approach with that of Pitirim A. Sorokin71 is telling. Sorokin, Parsons’s older rival at Harvard,72 not only divided sociological theory into a ple
thora of “schools” that scattered dozens of thinkers across a broad and heterogeneous horizon; the place afforded to Weber was respectful but comparatively small. In Sorokin’s Contemporary Sociological Theories (1928), Weber appears as a representative of “psychosociologistic theories of religion,” along with, for instance, the largely forgotten Benjamin Kidd. By contrast, Parsons’s stratagem was to raise Weber head and shoulders above the multitudes discussed by Sorokin by treating him as part of a “major revolution in the scientific analysis of social phenomena.” Parsons was not interested in an intellectual history of sociology that would explore its many precursors and branches. His approach was to move toward synthesis, omitting thinkers whose work was peripheral and integrating the insights of those who were taking the social sciences forward. “There is an elevated range” of thinkers, Parsons acknowledged in his preface to the second edition of Structure, “not just three peaks [Pareto, Durkheim, and Weber], but these peaks loom far higher than the lesser ones.”73 For Durkheim and Weber, at least, that judgment has been fully vindicated by the passing of time, and in some interpretations of twentieth-century thought, Parsons has replaced Pareto as one of sociology’s “classic” thinkers.74
Moreover, various cohorts of Parsons’s students played a major role in the American transmission of the Protestant Ethic “thesis”: Robert K. Merton pushed it further to examine the relationship between Puritanism and modern science; Robert Bellah used it to reevaluate the extent to which traditional Japanese institutions and religions were favorable to economic efficiency and development; Randall Collins sought to relocate it in Weber’s multicausal theory of capitalism and, more generally, placed Weber in the same “conflict tradition” as Marx.75 In all these cases, the authors did not seek to defend Weber’s original argument so much as to creatively adapt or extrapolate aspects of it to related problems. As such, whatever other problems their work raised, they were free of the anathema often attached to writers who, vaguely or otherwise, sought to apply Weber’s analysis to contemporary American society.76 Surveying a number of these attempts in a paper first delivered to the American Catholic Sociological Society in August 1963, Andrew Greeley claimed that all the evidence available offered not “the slightest confirmation for the theory that Protestants are more achievement-oriented than Catholics in American society.”77