by Max Weber
10. The two outstanding studies of Weber’s political views and ideas are Wolfgang J. Mommsen’s Max Weber and German Politics 1890–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984 [1959]), translated by Michael S. Steinberg; and David Beetham, Max Weber and the Theory of Modern Politics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1985 [1974]).
11. The term was coined in 1872 by the scientist and left-liberal parliamentarian Rudolf Virchow. Bismarck’s real target was the Catholic Center Party, whose confessional orientation “seemed to stand for allegiance to an authority [the Curia] other than the national state.” More generally, antipapal feeling was strong among the middle classes and the German liberal parties. See Gordon A. Craig, Germany: 1866–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981 [1978]), pp. 69–78; the quote comes from p. 71. On the importance of the Kulturkampf for understanding Weber’s Protestant ethic thesis, and on Weber’s anti-Catholic bias, see George Becker, “Educational ‘Preference’ of German Protestants and Catholics: The Politics Behind Educational Specialization,” Review of Religious Research 41:3 (2000), pp. 311–27, at pp. 315–22.
12. Friedrich Wilhelm Graf, “The German Theological Sources and Pro-testant Church Politics,” in Lehmann and Roth, pp. 27–49, at p. 45. In this respect, as Graf points out, Weber echoed the views of Albrecht Ritschl, the Göttingen-based Protestant theologian whose ideas are in other respects frequently attacked in The Protestant Ethic.
13. Thomas Nipperdey, “Max Weber, Protestantism, and the Context of the Debate around 1900,” in Lehmann and Roth, pp. 73–81, at p. 74.
14. The tendentious statistical analysis on which Weber based his argument—Martin Offenbacher’s Konfession und soziale Schichtung: Eine Studie über die wirtschaftliche Lage der Katholiken und Protestanten in Baden (Tübingen and Leipzig: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1900)—the extrapolations he drew from it, and the curiously limited sample on which the whole edifice is based (data on the relationship between religion and schooling in Baden) are subject to a damning critique by Richard F. Hamilton in The Social Misconstruction of Reality: Validity and Verification in the Scholarly Community (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996), pp. 33–50. In turn, Hamilton refers to, but also corrects, Kurt Samuelsson’s statistical dissection of Offenbacher in Religion and Economic Action (London: William Heinemann, 1961 [1957]), translated by E. Geoffrey French, edited and with an introduction by D. C. Coleman, pp. 138–46). Samuelsson assumed that a “typographical or arithmetical error . . . put the proportion of Protestants in the Realgymnasien at 69 percent” (Weber actually italicizes the figure for emphasis) when it should have been 59 percent (Samuelsson, p. 140). However, even this lower figure is incorrect. Reassessing the raw Baden data on which Offenbacher drew, George Becker has recalculated the figure of Realgymnasien students (i.e., those attending a kind of school that was more “modern” and practically oriented than the humanistically inclined Gymnasien) at 52 percent. (It is important to note that for both Protestants and Catholics, the Gymnasium was typically the school of first choice because of its prestige and the career privileges it afforded; conversely, graduates of the more modern schools “were legally excluded, until the end of the century, from the faculties of law, theology, and medicine, and had only limited access to the faculty of arts and sciences”), George Becker, “Replication and Reanalysis of Offenbacher’s School Enrolment Study: Implications for the Weber and Merton Thesis,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 36 (4) 1997, pp. 483–96, at 488–89.) Further, even this numerical discrepancy may well be explained by the structure of opportunities obtaining in Wilhelmine Germany, post Kulturkampf, rather than by religious value orientations. See Becker, “Educational ‘Preference’ of German Protestants and Catholics,” cited in note 11 above.
Weber’s own calculations can be found in part 1 of The Protestant Ethic, note 7, p. 44, below.
15. This concept is explained in Section IV below.
16. Weber’s invidious contrast between Lutheranism and Calvinism, and his analysis of asceticism and “religious psychologies,” was shaped by the framework of German theological discussion, in particular the work of Matthias Schneckenburger: see especially Graf, “The German Theological Sources and Protestant Church Politics,” in Lehmann and Roth. Weber’s guide to the theological literature of the day was his friend and colleague Ernst Troeltsch whose major writings on Protestantism preceded Weber’s by fourteen years: See Friedrich Wilhelm Graf, “Friendship between Experts: Notes on Weber and Troeltsch,” in Wolfgang J. Mommsen and Jürgen Osterhammel (eds.), Max Weber and His Contemporaries (London: Unwin Hyman, 1987), pp. 215–33, especially at pp. 221–22. Cited hereafter as Mommsen and Osterhammel.
17. Marianne Weber, Biography, p. 19.
18. See Rita Aldenhoff, “Max Weber and the Evangelical-Social Congress,” in Mommsen and Osterhammel, pp. 193–202.
19. An important interlocutor for Weber on this project was the theologian Paul Göhre. On their relationship, see Rita Aldenhoff, in Mommsen and Osterhammel, pp. 197–98. Weber’s study of the situation of rural workers was a continuation of work he had pursued for the Verein für Sozialpolitik (Association for Social Policy). For a brief discussion of Weber’s conflicted position within the Verein, see Dieter Krüger, “Max Weber and the Younger Generation of the Verein für Sozialpolitik,” in Mommsen and Osterhammel, pp. 71–87.
20. Marianne Weber, Biography, p. 339.
21. Marianne Weber, Biography, p. 337.
22. See this volume, here.
23. We have concentrated above on the proximate relationships between The Protestant Ethic and Weber’s biography, but any detailed account would have to include many other aspects, both methodological and substantive. For instance, in Weber’s studies, in the early to mid-1890s, of German rural workers east of the Elbe, he had already dilated on the importance of cultural and psychological factors for economic development, particularly the desire for freedom and its consequences. See, for instance, Weber’s Freiburg Inaugural Address, “The Nation State and Economic Policy” (1895), in Weber: Political Writings, edited and translated by Peter Lassman and Ronald Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 1–28, at pp. 8–10.
For a helpful description of the wider context from which the Protestant Ethic essay sprang, see Gordon Marshall, In Search of the Spirit of Capitalism: An Essay on Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic Thesis (London: Hutchinson, 1982), pp. 17–40.
24. These remarks appear in the second of Weber’s counter critiques of the historian Felix Rachfahl, below pp. 244–338, at pp. 294–95.
25. The lecture, originally entitled “German Agrarian Conditions, Past and Present,” can be most conveniently read in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970 [1948], edited and with an introduction by Hans H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, pp. 363–85. Gerth and Mills redubbed the essay “Capitalism and Rural Society in Germany,” changing the earlier English title (“The Relations of the Rural Community to Other Branches of Social Science”), and reworking the translation that appeared in the official proceedings of the St. Louis Congress of Arts and Science. See Congress of Arts and Science, Universal Exposition, St. Louis (Boston and New York: Houghton-Mifflin, 1906), vol. 7, pp. 725–46, translated by C. W. Seidenadel. The German manuscript of Weber’s lecture has never been recovered.
26. Hans Rollmann, “‘Meet Me in St. Louis’: Troeltsch and Weber in America,” in Lehmann and Roth, pp. 357–83, at p. 373.
27. Letter to Marta Troeltsch, September 14–16, 1904. Quoted in Rollman, “‘Meet Me in St. Louis,’” p. 372.
28. Marianne Weber, Biography, p. 287.
29. That he conversed with William James, probably in German, is clear from a comment Weber makes in “The Protestant Sects and the Spirit of Capitalism,” [German edition, 1920] in H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, From Max Weber, pp. 302–22, at p. 308. On the meeting with Albion Small in Chicago, see Rollmann, “‘Meet Me in St. Louis,’” pp. 375–76.
30. Ma
rianne Weber, Biography, p. 295.
31. We are drawing on the fascinating paper by Lawrence A. Scaff, “The ‘cool objectivity of sociation’: Max Weber and Marianne Weber in America,” History of the Human Sciences 11:2 (1998), pp. 61–82. Scaff’s article not only examines the Weber-DuBois correspondence—DuBois, a student of Humboldt University between 1892 and 1894, had attended Weber’s lectures “probably on commercial law” (p. 71)—but also contains much of interest on Marianne Weber’s communications with such “women activists, reformers, and educators” as Jane Addams, Lillian Wald, Florence Kelley, M. Carey Thomas, Yamei Kin, Helen Francis Garrison Villard, Caroline Beer Seligman, Ethel Puffer Howes, and Margaret Washington (p. 74). Because Marianne was writing her husband’s biography, she underplayed her own activities in America.
DuBois’s article appeared as “Die Negerfrage in den Vereinigten Staaten,” Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik 22 (January 1906), pp. 31–79. It is reprinted in Herbert Aptheker, Writings of W. E. B. DuBois in Periodicals Edited by Others (New York: Kraus-Thomson Organization, 1982), vol. 1, pp. 277–312.
32. Letter to DuBois, November 17, 1904. Quoted in Scaff, “The ‘cool objectivity of sociation,’” p. 72.
33. “Die protestantischen Sekten 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. 207–36, translated by H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills as “The Protestant Sects and the Spirit of Capitalism,” in From Max Weber, pp. 302–22.
34. Weber reminds Felix Rachfahl that ideal types are roughly of two kinds. In the first case, an ideal type is constructed to show the abstract similarities between one social phenomenon and another; in the second case, the point is to distinguish sharply between social phenomena, thereby drawing attention to the peculiarities of the object under investigation. Weber’s analysis of “the Protestant ethic” and the “spirit of capitalism” seeks to delineate the uniqueness of both concepts and the social qualities they purport to convey. See Weber’s first response to Rachfahl, pp. 262–64, below.
The locus classicus of Weber’s discussion of “ideal types” is “‘Objectivity’ in social science and social policy,” in Max Weber, The Methodology of the Social Sciences, translated and edited by Edward A. Shils and Henry A. Finch (New York: Free Press, 1949), pp. 49–112, “Die ‘Objektivität’ sozialwissenschaftlicher und sozial-politischer Erkenntnis,” Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik 19:1 (1904), pp. 22–87
35. Toward the end of the first part of The Protestant Ethic, Weber had said “. . . we have no intention of defending any such foolishly doctrinaire thesis as that the ‘capitalist spirit’ (as always in the provisional sense of the word in which we are using it) let alone capitalism itself, could only arise as a product of certain influences of the Reformation. The very fact that certain important forms of capitalist business are considerably older than the Reformation would invalidate such a thesis. We intend, rather, to establish whether and to what extent religious influences have in fact been partially responsible for the qualitative shaping and the quantitative expansion of that ‘spirit’ across the world, and what concrete aspects of capitalist culture originate from them,” p. 36, below.
36. This volume, here, emphases omitted.
37. Gianfranco Poggi, Calvinism and the Capitalist Spirit: Max Weber’s “Protestant Ethic” (London: Macmillan, 1983), p. 69.
38. The “spirit” of capitalism, Weber affirms in the second of his critiques of Rachfahl, comprises “the ‘objectivity’ [Sachlichkeit] that is cool and lacking in humanity [menschlichkeitsfremde], the ‘calculation,’ the rational consistency, the serious approach to work with no trace of any naive attitude to life, and the specialist narrowness [that] have always provoked emotional antichrematist sentiments when viewed from the artistic, the ethical, and particularly the purely human angle,” pp. 294, below.
39. Lawrence Scaff documents the “series of visitations to sectarian ser-vices (Methodist, Baptist, Black Baptist, Presbyterian, Quaker, Christian Scientist, and the Ethical Culture Society)” that took place “during the last month of [the Webers’] travels.” See “The ‘cool objectivity of sociation,’” p. 66.
40. This suggestive expression is actually used in part 2 of The Protestant Ethic, composed shortly after Weber returned from his American trip. See p. 104, below.
41. To be sure, the relationship between church and sect is more fluid than we have so far suggested. The Geneva experiment of 1541–64, under John Calvin’s leadership, was to all intents and purposes the imposition of a church, in Weber’s sense, the duty of which was to ensure that all city members served the glory of God, by coercion if need be. Even so, Calvinism had an important impact on many Puritan movements that constituted “sects.” See Weber’s contribution to the first meeting of the German Sociological Society (1910): “Max Weber on Church, Sect, and Mysticism,” Sociological Analysis 34:2 (summer 1973 [1924, 1910]), translated by Jerome L. Gittleman, pp. 140–49.
42. Details in Guenther Roth, “Max Weber at Home and in Japan: On the Troubled Genesis and Successful Reception of His Work,” International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society, 12:3 (1999), pp. 515–25, at p. 521.
43. The following model of reception processes draws on Peter Baehr, Founders, Classics, Canons: Modern Disputes over the Origins and Appraisal of Sociology’s Heritage (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 2002).
44. Guenther Roth, “Introduction,” in Lehmann and Roth, pp. 1–24, at p. 3.
45. H. Karl Fischer, “Kritische Beiträge zu Prof. M. Webers Abhandlung: ‘Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus, Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik 25 (1907), pp. 232–42; H. Karl Fischer, “Protestantische Ethik und ‘Geist des Kapitalismus.’ Replik auf Herrn Prof. Max Webers Gegenkritik,” Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik 26 (1908), pp. 270–74; Felix Rachfahl, “Kalvinismus und Kapitalismus,” Internationale Wochenschrift für Wissenschaft, Kunst und Technik 3 (1909), columns 1217–38, 1249– 68, 1287–1300, 1319–34, 1347–66; Felix Rachfahl, “Nochmals Kalvinismus und Kapitalismus,” Internationale Wochenschrift für Wissenschaft, Kunst und Technik 4 (1910), columns 689–702, 717–34, 755–68, 775–94. Lujo Brentano, Die Anfänge des modernen Kapitalismus (Munich: J. Roth, 1916); Werner Sombart, Die Juden und das Wirtschaftsleben (Leipzig: Duncker and Humblot, 1911), translated by M. Epstein as The Jews and Modern Capitalism (New York: Collier Books, 1962 [1914]), with an introduction by Bert F. Hoseltitz; Werner Sombart, Der Bourgeois: Zur Geistesgeschichte des modernen Wirtschaftsmenschen (Munich and Leipzig: Duncker and Humblot, 1913), translated by M. Epstein as The Quintessence of Capitalism: A Study of the History and Psychology of the Modern Business Man (New York: Howard Fertig, 1967 [1915]).
46. For a brief but useful evaluation of some of Weber’s later critics—including H. M. Robertson, R. H. Tawney, Henri Pirenne, Kurt Samuelsson, and Hugh Trevor-Roper—see Malcolm H. MacKinnon, “The Longevity of the Thesis: A Critique of the Critics,” in Lehmann and Roth, pp. 211–43. The best overall appraisal of Weber’s argument is Gordon Marshall’s, In Search of the Spirit of Capitalism.
47. Weber’s qualifications to his thesis are lucidly summarized in Jacob Viner, Religious Thought and Economic Society: Four Chapters of an Unfinished Work by Jacob Viner (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1978), edited by Jacques Melitz and Donald Winch, pp. 154–59. On Weber’s analysis of the Jews, see Hans Liebeschütz, Das Judentum im deutschen Geschichtsbild von Hegel bis Max Weber (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1999 [1967]). For a discussion in English, see Gary A. Abraham, Max Weber and the Jewish Question (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992).
48. Weber’s home, and intellectual base camp, was Heidelberg, a city cradled in the Neckar river valley.
49. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1985 [1978]), p. 289; Mohammed Nafissi, “Reframing Orientalism
: Weber and Islam,” in Ralph Schroeder (editor), Max Weber, Democracy and Modernization (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998), pp. 182–201; Wolfgang Schwentker, “Western Impact and Asian Values in Japan’s Modernization: A Weberian Critique,” in Schroeder (editor), pp. 166–81.
50. The critical literature on Weber’s essay is enormous. Major root and branch critiques include Samuelsson, Religion and Economic Action; MacKinnon, “The Longevity of the Thesis: A Critique of the Critics” (MacKinnon’s own critique focuses on Weber’s misinterpretation of Calvinism and the putative “crisis of proof”); Hamilton, The Social Misconstruction of Reality, pp. 32–106 (which empirically assesses the twelve key claims of Weber’s argument); Luciano Pellicani, The Genesis of Capitalism and the Origins of Modernity (New York: Telos Press, 1994), translated by James G. Colbert, pp. 27–61. The best of the more qualified and sympathetic appraisals is Marshall, In the Spirit of Capitalism. See also, David Zaret, The Heavenly Contract: Ideology and Organization in Pre-Revolutionary Puritanism (Chi-cago: University of Chicago Press, 1985); and Zaret, “The Use and Abuse of Textual Data” in Lehmann and Roth, pp. 245–72.
A common criticism of Weber’s argument is that it adduced no substantial evidence to show, let alone prove, that the Puritans entertained the motives that it imputed to them; neither did it demonstrate that Puritans who believed in predestination “went on to become capitalist businessmen,” Michael Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints: A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965), p. 306. Conversely, Weber’s essay is defended on both empirical and theoretical grounds by David S. Landes in The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999 [1998]), pp. 174–81.
51. A “didactic catastrophe,” is Wilhelm Hennis’s judgment of Weber’s Protestant ethic writings. Hennis adds, “this is perhaps the basis of their indestructible attraction,” Max Weber: Essays in Reconstruction, translated by Keith Tribe (London: Allen and Unwin, 1988 [1982]), p. 31.