by Max Weber
Yet if Weber’s intellectual framework had shifted by 1919, what are we to make of his insistence in the 1920 edition of The Protestant Ethic that “if anyone should be sufficiently interested to do so (an unlikely eventuality), they are welcome to compare the two editions of these essays and satisfy themselves that not one single sentence that contains any materially essential statement has been cut, reinterpreted, or moderated”?117 It is certainly true that, some additional illustrations118 and an expanded bibliographical apparatus notwithstanding, Weber left most of the essay intact and continued to defend its main argument with aggressive intransigence. To that extent, no essential point was changed. Readers of the 1905 version can thus rest assured that they are perusing a substantive essay, not a rough draft of something that only became “definitive” fifteen years later. At the same time, Weber’s revised essay does witness a sharpening of language and some conceptual developments that arose precisely from earlier critical encounters—an evolution that is only possible to trace if one knows the text of 1905 and the responses to Fischer and Rachfahl (their names have all but disappeared from the 1920 text) as well as to Sombart and Brentano that it triggered. Since Weber’s principal ripostes and “clarifications” to all these authors are included in our translation, we shall restrict our comments to some additions to—and one omission from—the 1920 text that are not so obvious.
Among the more subtle changes evident in the 1920 revision is a reformulation of language, as Weber attempts to employ a terminology that is more historically persuasive and more rigorously attuned to his argument. Accordingly, as Klaus Lichtblau and Johannes Weiβ point out, previous references to “capitalism,” the “capitalist spirit,” and the “capitalist enterprise” now witness the insertion of the prefix “modern” to establish Weber’s limited purview. Similarly, Weber replaces the expression “bürgerliche Klassen” with “bürgerliche Mittelklassen” to signal the “estate” or “status” location of the early social carriers of the modern capitalist spirit;119 he draws a sharper distinction between the Reformed Church and its sectarian offshoots; and, seeking decisively to distance himself from all Hegelian-like formulations, prefers to write of the “ethic” of the calling rather than its “idea.”120
Another characteristic of the 1920 revision is a conceptual development: Weber’s attempt to specify more clearly the psychological mechanism through which a religious faith is transmuted into actual, quotidian conduct. One of the more striking features of Weber’s writings on religion—and this includes The Protestant Ethic in both its narrative manifestations—is the importance they accord to psychological forces. Weber not only takes it for granted that human beings have psychological drives, or “impulses,” with social consequences; he also believes that the need to justify one’s standing in life—as privileged or dispossessed—is among the most basic psychological requirements of the human situation.121 Chaos, indeterminacy, and uncertainty are existential conditions too promiscuously senseless for most people to entertain willingly. As a result, humans seek reassurance that their fate in life is not arbitrary but meaningful; that salvation and redemption are not distant possibilities beyond their influence but states of being that can, at least in part, be achieved in the here and now by active intervention or mediation. “One must,” Weber insisted, “constantly put the psychological question . . . : How, through what medium, does the individual become certain of his relationship to the eternal?”122 It is erroneous, Weber says, to imagine that a deep attachment to the sacred is tantamount to immersion in a transcendental realm completely aloof from the world. Even those religious virtuosi who live, as it were, in and for the “beyond” and who eschew “such solid goods of this world, as health, wealth, and long life”123 are still seeking psychological compensation and gratification in their everyday lives. Indeed “[p]sychologically considered, man in quest of salvation has been primarily preoccupied by attitudes of the here and now. The Puritan certitudo salutis, the state of grace that rests in the feeling of ‘having proved oneself,’ was psychologically the only concrete object among the sacred values of this ascetic religion.”124 And, as Weber argued, it had important consequences for the formation of capitalist attitudes to work.
Yet in order for Weber to demonstrate a causal link between Protestantism and the spirit of capitalism (or, if one prefers, an affinity or congruence between them), he had to show that the Puritan lay following was sufficiently energized to confront traditional attitudes to everyday life and become the bearers of a radically different, ascetically inclined vocational culture. He also needed, relatedly, to show how the psychic dread that accompanied the doctrine of predestination could be sublimated into asceticism in the first place. In the 1905 version of The Protestant Ethic, Weber handles this knot of difficulties by invoking the somewhat amorphous concept of “psychological drives” or “impulses” (psychologische Antriebe) but, doubtless realizing that this was too blunt an instrument to do the theoretical work he required of it, he later adapted his terms accordingly. While retaining the notion of psychological Antriebe and asserting that religious ethics, however much subject to political and economic influences, derive “primarily from religious sources,”125 Weber’s work on religion in general, and Christianity in particular, increasingly emphasises how various types of faith hold out to believers differing kinds of “psychological rewards” or “premiums” (Prämien);126 and it is these premiums that the faithful are typically seeking, and are motivated by, in their devotional and worldly conduct. Psychological premiums or rewards, or what Weber describes as “premiums of salvation” (Heilsprämien),127 are thus the key mechanism in moving the believer from faith to consistent action.
Of course, as Weber acknowledges, the theology of Calvinism provided little, if any, justification for the belief that human beings could affect their own destiny; on the contrary, the weight of the doctrine pulled overwhelmingly against such a heretical notion, championing a God so transcendent as to have little interest in his creatures and so all-powerful as to confound any notion of significant human agency. Against this, however, Weber argues that the real issue for his “problematic” is not Calvinism as an abstract theological system but whether, how, and in what respects Calvinist doctrine furnished “practical, psychological” motives for real ethical conduct.128 Weber’s conclusion was that Calvinism promoted, despite itself, an emotional inducement in the faithful to look for “proof” of “election;” and that methodical, systematic work in a calling was the social product of this religious quest. The psychological premiums offered by Lutheranism and Catholicism were utterly different, Weber argued, rewarding in their own peculiar ways an adaptation to the world and providing pressure valves (e.g., through the confessional) to release the pent-up, agitated anxiety typical in Calvinism or among the Puritan sects. An early expression of Weber’s analysis of religious “premiums” can be found in the last of his polemics with Rachfahl—polemics that, ironically, he described as “unfruitful.” But perhaps the clearest formulation of what Weber means comes toward the end of his essay on “The Protestant Sects.” As he puts it, “it is not the ethical doctrine of a religion, but that form of ethical conduct upon which premiums are placed that matters. Such premiums operate through the form and the condition of the respective goods of salvation. . . . For Puritanism, that conduct was a certain methodical, rational way of life which—given certain conditions—paved the way for the ‘spirit’ of modern capitalism. The premiums were placed upon ‘proving’ oneself before God in the sense of attaining salvation—which is found in all Puritan denominations—and ‘proving’ oneself before men in the sense of socially holding one’s own within the Puritan sects. Both aspects were mutually supplementary and operated in the same direction: they helped to deliver the ‘spirit’ of modern capitalism, its specific ethos: the ethos of the modern bourgeois middle classes.”129
The previous discussion has focused principally on additions that Weber made to the 1920 text. Others include Weber’s re
ference to the “disenchantment” of the world that rationalization brings in its train. To describe refinements such as these as “clarifications” is tempting but somewhat tendentious: it assumes that Weber’s position was already thoroughly worked out in his own mind by 1905 and that it was only his critics’ incompetence and perversity that prompted the explications we sketched above. To avoid that impression, it is preferable to describe the additions as developments of a core position, adjustments that emerged from Weber’s tempestuous dialogue with the unpersuaded. A comparison of the 1905 and 1920 texts and the responses to Fischer and Rachfahl that punctuate them illuminates that intellectual trajectory. By the same token, the earlier document provides a clue, expunged from the revised version, to the stimulus that led Weber to turn his attention to Puritanism once again:130 Georg Jellinek’s Erklärung der Menschen und Bürgerrechte (1895).131
Weber was particularly impressed by Jellinek’s argument that the “idea of legally establishing inalienable, inherent, and sacred rights of the individual is not of political but religious origin. What has been held to be a work of the Revolution was in reality a fruit of the Reformation and its struggles. Its first apostle was not Lafayette but Roger Williams.”132 According to Jellinek, the template for the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, promulgated by the French Constituent Assembly of August 26, 1789, was not to be traced to Rousseau’s Contrat Social (1762)133 but to the various Bills of Rights that issued from Virginia and elsewhere in the 1770s and early 1780s. In turn, those documents bore the impress of the uncompromising struggles for freedom of conscience that characterized the northern European Puritan movement whose seeds had fallen on American shores.
For Jellinek, as for Weber, the Puritan sects were radical not only in their unconditional affirmation of freedom of conscience but also in asserting that such freedom applied to everyone irrespective of the denomination to which they belonged; the Quaker and Baptist sects helped establish a universal, as distinct from a local or contingent, concept of right. “Such freedom of conscience,” Weber remarked in Economy and Society, “may be the oldest Right of Man—as Jellinek has argued convincingly; at any rate, it is the most basic Right of Man because it comprises all ethically conditioned action and guarantees freedom from compulsion, especially from the power of the state. In this sense the concept was as unknown to Antiquity and the Middle Ages as it was to Rousseau’s social contract, with its power of religious compulsion. The other Rights of Man or civil rights were joined to this basic right,134 especially the right to pursue one’s own economic interests, which includes the inviolability of individual property, the freedom of contract, and vocational choice. . . . The basic Rights of Man made it possible for the capitalist to use things and men freely, just as this worldly asceticism—adopted with some dogmatic variations—and the specific discipline of the sects bred the capitalist spirit and the rational ‘professional’ (Berufsmensch) who was needed by capitalism.”135
In sum: both versions of The Protestant Ethic are valuable in their own right and need to be read historically.136 Each of them was saying something slightly different, and knowing this helps us not only to differentiate the texts themselves but also to trace the path from one to the other. For instance, as David Beetham observes, in the 1905 version of The Protestant Ethic, “it is the origins of capitalism that is central; in his anticritique of 1910 [the responses to Rachfahl], Weber insists that it is the effect of the Berufsethik on the character of modern man that is most important; in the revised edition of 1919, the argument is set firmly within the broader rationalization theme.”137 Conversely, a major flaw in many accounts of Weber’s mature oeuvre is the unreal assumption that it is an integrated whole, seamless and guided by a central problem: “rationalization,” “the heteronomy of purposes,” the refutation of Marx.138 Aside from the oddity of believing that a thinker of Weber’s range and sophistication was preoccupied by one overriding question or located within one “problematic,” it is psychologically bizarre to imagine that he did not have changes of heart—and of direction. Continuities in Weber’s thinking are evident and undeniable. But just as important are the departures and innovations. The Protestant Ethic of 1905 and the replies to critics that followed its publication help us to retrieve the Weber of history rather than of myth, the Weber whose ideas evolved through dialogue and argument rather than as the emanation of some primordial master plan.
NOTES
(Note: dates in square brackets denote original year of publication)
1. The two-part essay appeared as “Die protestantische Ethik und der ‘Geist’ des Kapitalismus,” in the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, 20 (1905), pp. 1–54, and 21 (1905), pp. 1–110. Early copies of part 1 were distributed by the publisher Siebeck in late 1904. This explains why some accounts of the full essay refer to 1904–05 as its date of publication. For the sake of simplicity, we follow the precedent of the Archiv, volume 20, whose title page gives the date of 1905.
2. Published as “Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus,” in Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie (Collected Essays in the Sociology of Religion) (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1920), vol. 1, pp. 17–206. Cited hereafter as Religionssoziologie. Note that in the transition from the 1905 to the 1920 version, the cautionary quotation marks around “Geist” (Spirit) have disappeared. Many other small changes were made to the 1920 edition, some of which we will discuss below. For a full concordance, see Die Protestantische Ethik und der ‘Geist’ des Kapitalismus, edited by Klaus Lichtblau and Johannes Weiβ (Bodenheim: Athenäum Hain Hanstein, 1993), pp. 158–202. Cited hereafter as Lichtblau and Weiβ.
3. See Randall Collins, The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998), p. 32.
4. In the first of his responses to Felix Rachfahl, Weber says that he lectured on the topic “twelve years ago,” see this volume, here. This is worth emphasizing since it is common in the secondary literature to assume that The Protestant Ethic was conceived as a response to Werner Sombart’s Der Moderne Kapitalismus (2 vols.) (Leipzig: Duncker and Humblot, 1902). For an early claim that “the most radical political innovators have been profoundly influenced by the Calvinist theory of predestination,” see Max Weber, “Roscher’s ‘Historical Method,’” in Roscher and Knies: The Logical Problems of Historical Economics (New York: Free Press, 1975 [1903]), translated by Guy Oakes, p. 223, note 54. For a useful collection of articles debating the relationship between Calvinism and democracy, see Robert M. Kingdom and Robert D. Linder (eds.), Calvin and Calvinism: Sources of Democracy? (Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath and Co., 1970), especially the contributions of Emile Doumergue (Weber’s contemporary, and a sharp critic of Troeltsch) and Hans Baron.
5. Marianne Weber, Max Weber: A Biography (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1988 [1975]), translated and edited by Harry Zohn, with a new introduction by Guenther Roth, pp. 325–26. Cited hereafter as Biography. For the German edition, see Marianne Weber, Max Weber: Ein Lebensbild (Heidelberg: Lambert Schneider, 1950 [1926]), p. 371. Cited hereafter as Lebensbild.
6. Marianne Weber, Biography, p. 335.
7. Weber’s contention is elaborated on in note 146 of The Protestant Ethic. The relevant section was expunged from the 1920 version of the essay and replaced by a passage on toleration that echoes Weber’s two critiques of Felix Rachfahl. The contribution of Puritanism to the freedom of women is explored in note 238.
8. Letter to Adolf von Harnack, February 5, 1906, in Briefe 1906–1908, Max Weber Gesamtausgabe II/5 (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1990), pp. 32–33. The sentiment is echoed in note 28 of Weber’s first rebuttal of Felix Rachfahl, p. 273–76, below. See also Roth’s comment that the “hatred [Weber] felt for his Lutheran heritage and the German authoritarian realities was so great that he modeled his notion of ethical personality and innerworldly asceticism to a considerable extent after an idealize
d image of English history, especially of Puritanism.” “Weber the Would-Be Englishman: Anglophilia and Family History,” in Hartmut Lehmann and Guenther Roth (eds.), Weber’s Protestant Ethic. Origins, Evidence, Contexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995 [1987]), pp. 83–121, p. 83; compare pp. 84–97.
9. For Weber’s analysis of Bismarck’s “Caesarism,” see Peter Baehr, Caesar and the Fading of the Roman World: A Study in Republicanism and Caesarism (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1998), pp. 165–221.