by Max Weber
Today’s capitalism, then, which has come to dominance in economic life, creates and trains, by means of “economic selection,” the economic subjects—entrepreneurs and workers—that it needs. But here is precisely where the limits of the concept of “selection” as a means of explaining historical phenomena are reached. In order that this kind of conduct of life and attitude to one’s “profession” [“Berufs”-Auffassung], “adapted” as it is to the peculiar requirements of capitalism, could be “selected” and emerge victorious over others, it obviously had first to come into being, and not just in individuals, but as an attitude held in common by groups of people. The origin of this attitude is therefore what needs to be explained. We shall speak later in greater depth about the view of naive historical materialism, according to which such “ideas” come about as a “reflection” or “superstructure” of the economic base.
At this point it is perhaps sufficient for our purpose to indicate that in Benjamin Franklin’s birthplace (Massachusetts) at least, the “capitalist spirit” (in the sense in which we are using it) was undoubtedly present before any “capitalist development” had taken place. It is also true, for example, that in the neighboring colonies—which were to become the Southern States of the Union—it remained far less developed, and this in spite of the fact that these colonies had been founded by great capitalists for business purposes, whereas the New England colonies had been founded by preachers and “graduates,” with the help of the lower middle class [Kleinbürger], craftsmen and yeomen, for religious reasons. In this case, then, the causal relationship is the reverse of that which would be postulated from the “materialist” standpoint.
The early progress of such new “ideas” is, however, beset by many more obstacles than the theoreticians of the “superstructure” assume; they do not blossom like a flower. The capitalist spirit in the sense in which we have hitherto understood it has had to prove itself in a hard struggle against a world of hostile forces. A way of thinking like that expressed by Benjamin Franklin was applauded by an entire nation. But in ancient or medieval times20 it would have been denounced as an expression of the most filthy avarice and of an absolutely contemptible attitude. Even today this still regularly happens in all those social groups that are least involved in the distinctively modern capitalist economy or are least adapted to it. This is not because the “acquisitive instinct” [Erwerbstrieb] was unknown or undeveloped in “precapitalist” eras—as is often said—nor because there was less of the “auri sacra fames,”21 outside the sphere of bourgeois capitalism [bürgerlichen Kapitalismus] in those days than within the specifically capitalist sphere, as modern romantics fondly imagine. In this respect, things have not changed. It is not at this point that the difference between the capitalist and the precapitalist “spirit” lies. When it comes to greed, there is nothing to choose between the Chinese mandarin, the aristocrat of ancient Rome, or the small farmer in modern times. And the “auri sacra fames” of the Neapolitan coachman or “barcaiuolo,” the Asian representative of similar trades, or the craftsman from southern Europe or Asia, expresses itself, as anyone can experience for himself, far more aggressively and certainly more unscrupulously than, for instance, that of the Englishman in a similar situation.22
The absolutely unscrupulous way they assert their own interests is a typical characteristic of such countries, whose bourgeois capitalist [bürgerlich-kapitalistisch] development has remained “backward.” As every manufacturer knows, the lack of “coscienziosità” of the workers [26] in these countries (Italy, for example, in contrast to Germany) has been one of the main obstacles to their capitalist development and to a certain extent remains so today. Capitalism has as little use for the undisciplined “liberum arbitrium” type of worker, as it has for the businessman who is simply unscrupulous in his outward conduct. This we can learn from Franklin. The difference does not therefore lie in the varying strengths of any “drive” to pursue money. The “auri sacra fames” is as old as the story of humanity itself, but we shall see that those who unreservedly surrender to this drive—like the Dutch sea captain who “was ready to go through hell for the sake of profit, even if it meant getting his sails singed”—were by no means the representatives of the attitude from which the capitalist “spirit” emerged as a mass phenomenon—and that is what we are talking about.
Above all, the “spirit” of capitalism had to wrestle with the kind of feeling and conduct that is customarily termed “traditionalism.” Here, too, any attempt at a conclusive “definition” must be deferred; we shall merely—here too, of course, only provisionally—make clear by reference to some special cases what is meant by the term, beginning “at the bottom,” with the workers.
One of the technical devices used by the modern entrepreneur to get the maximum performance out of “his” workers, and to increase the “work rate,” is piecework. In agriculture, for example, one occasion that generally demands the greatest possible increase in the intensity of work is the bringing in of the harvest. The weather may be changeable, and extraordinarily high levels of profit or loss depend on carrying out the work as rapidly as possible. Accordingly, the piecework system of payment is normally used here. With increasing yields and a more intensive operation, the interest of the entrepreneur in speeding up the harvest tends to become ever greater. It is therefore natural that attempts have again and again been made to interest the workers in improving their performance by raising the rates of pay for piecework, thus offering the workers the opportunity to achieve what are for them extraordinarily high earnings in a short space of time.
But here characteristic problems have arisen. With remarkable frequency, the raising of the piecework rate did not result in more, but in less, work being done in the same period of time, because the workers responded to the raising of the piecework rate not by increasing but by reducing the amount they worked in a day. The man who, for example, had hitherto reaped 21⁄2 acres of corn at 1 mark per acre and had thus earned 2.50 marks a day, did not, as had been hoped, after the raising of the piecework rate by 25 pfennigs per acre, take the opportunity of higher rewards and reap, say, 3 acres—as he might well have done—thus making 3.75 marks, but instead only reaped 2 acres a day, because in this way he could continue to earn 2.50 marks as before and, in the words of the Bible, “therewith be content.” The extra money appealed to him less than the reduction in work; he did not ask: How much can I earn in a day if I do the maximum possible amount of work in a day? but: How much must I work in order to earn the same amount—2.50 marks—that I used to earn and which covers my traditional needs? This is the behavior which—following the normal usage—we shall term “traditionalism”: a person does not “by nature” want to make more and more money, but simply to live—to live in the manner in which he is accustomed to live, and to earn as much as is necessary for this. Wherever capitalism has begun its work of increasing the “productivity” of human labor by increasing its intensity, it has run up against the infinitely persistent resistance of this leitmotiv of precapitalist economic labor. Even today, the greater the “backwardness” (from the capitalist point of view) of the workforce on which it relies, the more it continues to meet this resistance.
To return to our example. When the appeal to the “acquisitive sense” [Erwerbssinn] by the offer of higher wages failed, it only remained to try the diametrically opposite method: to force the worker by the reduction of the rate of pay to work harder than before in order to maintain his previous income. Even today, to the superficial observer, low wages and high profits seem (as they always did) to be in correlation to each other; any additional wages paid have always seemed to mean a corresponding reduction in profits. Time and again, from its very beginnings, capitalism has trodden this path, and for centuries it was regarded as an article of faith that low wages were “productive,” that is, that they increased work performance, and that, in the words of Pieter de la Court—whose thinking in this matter was, as we shall see, truly in the spirit of old Cal
vinism—the common people will only work because they are poor and only as long as they remain so.
However, the effectiveness of this apparently reliable method has its limitations. [27] Certainly, capitalism demands for its growth the presence of a surplus population that it can hire cheaply on the “labor market.” However, while an excessively large “reserve army” may, under some circumstances, favor quantitative expansion, it can inhibit improvements in quality. In particular, it gets in the way of the transition to forms of operation that make intensive use of labor. Low pay is by no means identical with cheap labor. Even from the purely quantitative point of view, performance declines whenever wages are inadequate to maintain physical health. In the long run, such levels of pay often mean virtually the “selection of the unfittest.” Today’s Silesian reaper, working at full stretch, can cover, on average, little more than two-thirds of the area that the better paid and better fed Pomeranian or Mecklenburger can cover in the same time, while the Pole achieves less than the German. And the further east he comes from, the less he achieves. From a purely business point of view, too, low wages fail as a principle of capitalist development whenever the manufacturing process demands qualified (skilled) labor or perhaps the operation of expensive and easily damaged machines, or indeed any reasonable level of close attention and initiative. Here low wages do not pay; in fact, they have the opposite effect. Here a well-developed sense of responsibility is absolutely indispensable, along with a general attitude which, at least during working time, does not continually seek ways of earning the usual wage with the maximum ease and the minimum effort, but performs the work as though it were an absolute end in itself—a “calling.” An attitude like this is not, however, something which occurs naturally. It cannot be directly produced either by high wages or by low wages, but has to be the product of a long, slow “process of education.”
Today, once established, capitalism is able to recruit the workers it needs relatively easily in all industrialized countries, and in every industrial region within individual countries. In the past it was an extremely difficult problem in each single case. [28] And even today it cannot always achieve its aim without powerful assistance, such as that which, as we shall see in due course, it received in its early days. An example will again best illustrate what is meant. Today, the traditionalist form of labor is often best exemplified by female workers, especially unmarried ones. Almost without exception, those who employ girls, especially German girls, complain of their absolute inability, or at least reluctance, to give up the traditional ways of working which they have been taught, in favor of others which are more practical. They will not adapt to new working methods. They are unwilling to learn, to concentrate, or to think for themselves. Attempts to discuss ways of rendering the work easier, above all more profitable, generally meet with complete incomprehension on their part. Raising the piecework rates does not have the desired effect either, simply bouncing off a solid wall of habit.
The only case which regularly differs—and this is a not unimportant point for our investigation—is that of girls who have had a specifically religious education, especially girls from a Pietist background. It is often said, and recently this was confirmed to me with regard to the linen industry by a relative, that far and away the best opportunities for economic education are to be found in this category of female workers. Within this group, the ability to concentrate the mind, as well as the absolutely vital ability to feel a sense of commitment to the work, is commonly found. These qualities are very often combined with strict economy that is mindful of the level of earnings, and with a spirit of sober self-control and moderation that enhances perfor-mance enormously. Here is the most fertile ground for the growth of that attitude to work as an end in itself, as a “calling,” that capitalism demands. Here, as a result of a religious upbringing, the chances of rising above the familiar old traditional ways are greatest. This observation from present-day capitalism [29] should be enough in itself to show us again that it is worth posing the question as to what form, in the early days of capitalism, such links between capitalist adaptability and religious factors might have taken. For it is evident from many individual phenomena that these links already existed in those days. For example, when Methodist workers in the eighteenth century were the object of hatred and persecution from their fellow workers, this was not due at all, or at least not primarily, to their religious eccentricities—England had seen plenty of these, some of which were more conspicuous. In fact, the frequent destruction of their tools, of which we read in reports of the time, suggests that they were targeted because they were excessively “keen to work,” as we might put it today.
Let us, however, first turn again to the present, to the entrepreneurs in fact, in order to clarify the meaning of “traditionalism” here as well.
In his discussion of the genesis of capitalism [30], Sombart distinguishes between “subsistence” and “acquisition” [Erwerb] as the two great “leitmotivs” between which economic history has oscillated, depending on the degree to which personal needs or the striving for gain and the opportunities for making profits (beyond what was needed for personal needs) became the driving force behind the type and direction of economic activity. What he terms a “system of subsistence economy” seems at first sight to be identical with what we have here defined as “economic traditionalism.” This is indeed true if the term “needs” is taken to mean “traditional needs.” If it is not understood in this sense, however, large number of economies which in terms of the form of their organization may be regarded as “capitalist” according to Sombart’s definition (given elsewhere in his writings) [31] cease to belong to the sphere of “profit-based” economies and must be classed as “subsistence economies.” Some economies are run by private entrepreneurs in the form of trade in capital (either money or goods with money value) for the purpose of profit, gained by purchase of the means of production and the sale of the products (which makes them undoubtedly “capitalist enterprises”). Such economies can still be traditionalist in character. In the course of recent economic history, too, this has been the case not just exceptionally but regularly—though with constantly recurring interruptions by new and ever more violent manifestations of the “capitalist spirit.” The “capitalist” form of an economy and the spirit in which it is run do indeed stand in a generally adequate relationship to each other, but not in a relationship of mutual dependency governed by any law. We shall nevertheless provisionally use the expression “spirit of capitalism” for that attitude which, in the pursuit of a calling [berufsmäβig], strives systematically for profit for its own sake in the manner exemplified by Benjamin Franklin. We do this for the historical reason that this attitude has found its most adequate expression in the capitalist enterprise, and conversely the capitalist enterprise has found in this attitude its most adequate spiritual motivation.
However, the two [i.e., form and motivation] may very easily become separated. Benjamin Franklin was filled with the “capitalist spirit” at a period when, in terms of its form, his printing business in no way differed from any craft business. And we shall see that, in general, at the threshold of the modern period, the bearers of that attitude which we have here designated “spirit of capitalism” [32] were by no means only, or even predominantly, “capitalist” entrepreneurs from among the patricians of trade, but were drawn chiefly from the rising strata of the middle class [Mittelstand]. In the nineteenth century, too, the classical representatives of this attitude were not the refined gentlemen of Liverpool and Hamburg with their inherited commercial wealth, but ambitious “nouveaux riches” from often quite humble backgrounds in Manchester or Rhineland-Westphalia.
Of course, the capitalist enterprise is the only possible form in which to operate a business such as a bank, a wholesale export business, a sizable retail store, or, finally, the large-scale putting out23 of goods manufactured in home industries. Nevertheless, they can all be run in a strictly traditionalist spirit. Indeed, it is
not possible for the business of the big banks of issue to be run in any other way. Overseas trade has for whole periods of history been organized on the strictly traditionalist basis of monopolies and quotas. In the retail trade—and we are not talking about those small-time spongers without capital who are today always appealing for state aid—the revolutionary process which is putting an end to old traditionalism is still in full flow. This is the same upheaval that has shattered the old forms of the putting-out system—a system to which modern outwork bears no more than a formal relationship. Familiar though these things may be, we propose once again to illustrate how this revolutionary process operates and what it means, and we shall do this by reference to a particular case.
Up until the middle of the last century, the life of a putter-out in at least some of the branches of the continental textile industry [33] was a fairly easygoing one by today’s standards. It went something like this. The peasants came with their fabrics—often (in the case of linen) still mainly or entirely made of raw materials manufactured by themselves—into the town where the putters-out lived, and, after careful—often official—scrutiny of the quality, received the usual payment for them. For more distant markets, the clients of the putter-out were middlemen who also traveled to see him, bought either according to samples or from stock on the basis of traditional quality, or placed an order well in advance—whereupon a new order would be placed with the peasants. Visits to the clients, if they occurred at all, were infrequent—usually correspondence and the sending of samples was sufficient. Office hours were relatively short—perhaps five or six per day, occasionally considerably fewer. Working hours were longer when sales representatives went on their travels, although this did not always happen. Income was modest, but sufficient for a decent standard of living [Lebensführung] and enough to put a little by in the good times to build up a small nest egg. On the whole, relations between competitors were amicable, and there was a large measure of agreement on the “principles of business.” Prolonged daily visits to the club, as well as perhaps a glass of wine in the evening with a circle of friends, made for an unhurried lifestyle.