by Max Weber
It is time to bring this really rather silly controversy about terminology to a conclusion. As the reader will recall, I did make it plain, and I am happy to reiterate it, that of course the expression “innerwordly asceticism” is available to anyone else to use as they see fit. I do this because Rachfahl, as usual, makes no mention of this to his readers, and, in what can only be described as his customary “spiteful” tone, attributes to me a desire to assert “paternal rights” over my mode of expression (although such expression is dictated by the subject matter, as I have explained at length).
Admittedly, it is a very different matter when we come to matters of fact. We shall have more to say about this in connection with my positive résumé (Section II). At the present juncture, however, we need to emphasize that the same sloppy kind of polemic, which shies away from an honest admission of its own superficiality, runs through R.’s entire response.
R. assures us that he neither asserted that toleration was the bearer of the capitalist spirit, nor that it was the effective cause of capitalist development. This is despite the fact (in addition to the remarks in his critique, which I have quoted with complete accuracy) that he again gives an assurance on the same column (bottom of col. 756), where he states: “It (toleration) was the soil that the capitalist spirit needed, in order for it to take firm root and not simply wither away; that is not invention [Konstruktion] but a historical fact [9]”. No, even if, making allowances for Rachfahl’s quibbling, we substitute the word “condition” for “cause,” that is neither a fact nor a (meaningful!) invention [Konstruktion], but a quite superficial assertion, and one that reveals that he has failed to grapple with the real problems.
The capitalist spirit (as defined by Rachfahl’s own words) ran riot in Venice, Genoa, Florence, Flanders, and large parts of France in the late Middle Ages, and—for example—even in Seville in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and yet the intolerance there, which was a matter of course at that time, did it no harm at all as such. It is clear to anyone familiar with Spanish economic history that the sources of the decay of Seville really lay in the well-known conflicts of the uncompromisingly Catholic city with church and state. (This applies, at least, to the extent that the distinctive character of Catholicism was involved in it—as indeed it was, to a considerable degree.) In particular, intolerance did no harm at all to the “economic supermen” singled out by Rachfahl as the true “bearers” of the capitalist spirit, that is, the really powerful bankers and monopolists (who, as we all recognize, have come to terms with it with relative ease from earliest times). The Fuggers as well as, for example, the big capitalists in Seville and elsewhere in the sixteenth century enjoyed outstanding success in business despite the greatest intolerance; the Peruzzi and the Bardi and others like them in the intolerant Middle Ages did the same, and so too did the English and Dutch big capitalists of similar type in both intolerant and tolerant countries. The long period of extremely far-reaching practical “toleration” shown by the Norman state failed to shift [hinwegzuziehen] the center of gravity of medieval Mediterranean capitalism from the thoroughly ecclesiastical and “intolerant” cities of Upper Italy to the Sicilian cities. Neither did the almost complete toleration practiced by the Roman Empire (within the bounds of “Staatsräson”) prevent the decline of either the specifically ancient capitalist “spirit” or that of ancient capitalism itself. Finally (another point that Rachfahl, in his eagerness, has simply forgotten), the fact that Protestant England—whether Anglican or Presbyterian—(as well as New England) was, in principle, just as intolerant as any Catholic state [10] was no obstacle to the rise of the capitalist spirit (in Rachfahl’s general, unhistorical sense). By contrast, where this was permitted at all, the existence of the Puritans (whether officially tolerated or not), as well as their rule [Herrschaft], whether intolerant or tolerant, did in general promote precisely that “nuance” (to use R.’s word) of the capitalist spirit, which to me is of crucial importance.
It is precisely this “nuance,” not the existence of Rachfahl’s big financiers, whose development was broken by the intolerant Catholic state, for example, France, when it revoked the Edict of Nantes, a fact that was well known to contemporaries, and, of course, especially to Colbert. In a word: Protestantism, and especially ascetic Protestantism, whether tolerated, tolerant or intolerant, helped the capitalist spirit both in its general (Rachfahl’s) sense and in my specific understanding of the term, to take root. Nowhere has Catholicism, whether tolerated or dominant, furthered its growth. If anyone thinks differently, let him produce the evidence. Toleration achieved this, as Rachfahl now admits, only where toleration, as such, assisted the capitalist spirit to take root. This, however, could only occur where certain sections of the population were bearers of that (specific) spirit for precisely religious reasons connected with some kind of intolerance. And according to R.’s own words, this is simply not the case for those big financiers, since they are found in all ages and in all states, tolerant and intolerant alike.
To conclude—in modern times, intolerant Catholicism was only fatal for the capitalist spirit in the following two instances.
Firstly, where it eliminated the heretical bearers of the middle-class [bürgerliche] business spirit, and, to repeat: it is no accident, as contemporaries (for example, Petty) knew, that ascetic heretics, or at least those suspected of heresy, were such bearers “κατ εξοχην.”5 (There were examples of this as early as the Middle Ages, incidentally, such as the Humiliati—to whom I have already referred—but they were more common in the Reformation and Counter-Reformation periods.)
Secondly, Catholicism was also fatal for the capitalist spirit where it enforced the foundation of monasteries and thus eliminated the accumulation of property acquired from private business life (something which, as my essay emphasized, was brought about even in the monasteries by the ascetic method of living), and diverted it into a “dead channel” (from the point of view of private capitalism). At the same time (and this is something which interests us particularly) those people whose rational, ascetic character [Eigenart] (a product of disposition and upbringing) would have specifically predisposed them to make a “vocation,” were, in a manner of speaking, taken out of the world by Catholicism, away from “divinely willed” work, and directed into monastic cells.
Thus, what pure toleration as such, that is, apart from the question of what kind of religiosity it benefited, could actually mean for the development of the capitalist economy and frequently has in fact meant for it, was precisely what I had previously said in my essays and what Rachfahl attempted to imitate, without even being capable of doing so accurately. This was, firstly: under certain circumstances it [that is, toleration] retained [erhielt] within the country not only inhabitants but also—in some cases—assets that would otherwise have been driven away by intolerance. [11] Secondly: it benefited the capitalist “spirit” (however we define it) in those instances (and only those) where it was toleration that was keeping the specific bearers of this spirit in the country. That is to say, people who as such, that is, as already stated, because this “spirit” was connected with the particular nature of their religiosity, would not have survived in a climate of intolerance. This was the case with the representatives of ascetic Protestantism. Thirdly: it is, however, nonsense to maintain, as Rachfahl does merely in order to prove that he is “in the right,” that religious intolerance, as such, could undermine any “spirit of capitalism” which was not anchored in religion. Where has it done this? Where could it have done this? And why would it have attempted to do so? It did, after all, allow the Florentines and all the later big capitalists to pursue their business in peace, provided that they gave the required obedience to the Church. Indeed, the Church did business with them, and made colossal amounts of money by doing so. But enough has surely now been said on this subject!
I have no intention, if I can help it, of letting pass without scrutiny a single one of the significant points he makes in the cou
rse of his polemic, characterized as it is by the “spirit” of an embarrassing lack of disingenuousness (for however improbable such a degree of negligence might appear, there is not a single one of them that is not based on distortion, superficial reading, or worse). I therefore propose to indicate a number of such individual points in a footnote [11a], and conclude this polemical section of the essay with just a few more particularly egregious examples of the sort of thing he believes he is entitled to permit himself.
In lengthy, quibbling, and (in my view) trivial detail (cols. 777 ff.), Rachfahl attempts—despite his express denial of this intention, which, along with his own quotations from my essay, he promptly forgets about in the next column—to impress the opinion on his readers that I have either denied the significance of those features of the capitalist spirit that have been proper to the bearers of capitalism at all times, or have only spoken of the capitalist spirit when the ascetic features which I have described as being involved in the birth of the modern capitalist spirit were present. [12] I have already demonstrated to Rachfahl in my “rebuttal” that this is not correct, and that in my essays I limited my task in precisely the manner stated in the rebuttal. R.’s readers, however, are now presented with a version of this fact (a fact which even he can no longer deny—col. 779) which states that I was now admitting—evidently because of Rachfahl’s critique!—that the component analyzed by me “did not remotely suffice as an explanation of the capitalist system (sic) of the modern period.” This offering, itself “a bit rich” in view of the above-quoted passages from my essays, is thrown into the shade by the sentence immediately following it, according to which I am supposed to have “admitted” that “the capitalist spirit with which I am concerned in no way relates to big capitalist development.” What I actually said will no doubt be recalled by readers of my essays (although admittedly his “critique” and the “rebuttal” are not designed for them). I said that an accumulation of wealth acquired through a specifically “ascetic” conduct of life unfailingly tends to break the power of asceticism—as the repeated “reformations” of the medieval monasteries (to which I had referred as parallels) show, and as the Puritans, the Quakers, the Baptists, the Mennonites, and the Pietists understood only too clearly from their own experience. It may not be true of the upstart selfmade [sic] man6 himself, but it is certainly the case that it is even rarer for his sons or grandsons, unaided, simply to resist “temptation,” or the “world” (in this case, indulging in the consumption [genussfrohen] of acquired wealth), than did the medieval monasteries that had become wealthy.
It is one of the achievements of ascetic Protestantism that it works against this tendency, that it resists, in particular, “idolatrous” tendencies. These include securing the “splendor familiae” by converting wealth into real estate and using it to generate rental income, the “seigneurial” pleasure in the “high life,” the heady delights of aesthetic enjoyment, “living it up,” and the pretentious craving for ostentatious display. And it is these tendencies, which are abhorred by ascetic Protestantism, which in turn constantly give rise to the danger of “capitalist weariness”: the inclination to use one’s wealth for purposes other than those of “building up capital” [Erwerbskapital], and which therefore work against the capitalist “spirit” (in whatever sense one uses the term); every one of these characteristics, whenever they are found in entrepreneurs, is an obstacle to its full development, and hinders “capital formation.” And at the same time, these characteristics are precisely the kind which tend to cling in equal measure to all those with great wealth or income, whether feudal landlords [Rentengrundherren], or those who live on interest [Kuponschneidern], or highly paid state or court officials, or the really big capitalists. Perhaps, though, this is necessarily less true of the latter, if they wish to remain “capitalists” in the precise commercial sense of the word, than of all the others. For their wealth is deprived of its capitalist generative power in parallel with the growth of “unproductive” consumption (to use today’s imprecise terminology). On the other hand, the private capitalist motives that drive a big capitalist of this type (one who is not under the influence of the ascetic method of living), for example, the conscious and deliberate striving for the expansion of his economic sphere of achievement, in other words, the striving to use his economic resources of power “to achieve something in the world,” is common to both the style of life which is emancipated from all religious determining factors and the style of life which I have analyzed. It should be added that the direction of his striving is determined by the nature of the means that must inevitably be employed in the sphere of commerce.
All that is lacking is the decisive foundation in personal life. For the optimism which has been customary since the Enlightenment, and which later reached its climax in “liberalism,” was no more than a socially oriented surrogate: it is a substitute for the “in majorem Dei gloriam.” It is, however, no substitute for the personal significance of “proof” [Bewährung], which, when applied in a purely this-worldly [diesseitig] sense, exhibits a tendency to turn into a struggle pure and simple, or to join the ranks of the various elements of trivial bourgeois [bürgerlich] complacency (see my essay). All those specific characteristics that really fit a life that is completely imbued with something one might call the “spirit” of capitalism: the “objectivity” [Sachlichkeit] that is cool and lacking in humanity, the “calculation,” the rational consistency, the serious approach to work with no trace of any naive attitude to life, and the specialist [fachmenschliche] narrowness, in fact all those characteristics that have always provoked emotional antichrematist sentiments when viewed from the artistic, the ethical, and particularly the purely human angle—all these characteristics, in the eyes of serious-minded people, lack a convincing ethical justification, which, as I have indicated, tends to be replaced, if at all, by all kinds of surrogates, which can easily be recognized as such.
In this situation, capitalism can, of course, exist quite comfortably, but either, as it increasingly does today, as a fatalistically accepted inevitability, or, as in the Enlightenment period, including modern-style liberalism, legitimated as somehow the relatively optimum means of making (roughly in the sense of Leibniz’s theodicy) the relative best of the relatively best of all worlds. But capitalism no longer appears to the most serious-minded people as the outward expression of a style of life founded on a final, single, and comprehensible unity of the personality. And it would be a great mistake to believe that this fact will be without consequences for the position of capitalism within the total culture: firstly, for capitalism’s effects, but also for its own inner essence and, ultimately, for its destiny.
What I said about those characteristics of the “capitalist spirit” which were not influenced by Protestant asceticism was therefore in fact not the sort of rubbish suggested by Rachfahl, such as that the big capitalists in particular “have no place in modern economic history” and the like, but firstly: that economic “supermen” (if I may retain the expression for the sake of brevity) exhibited far fewer of the specific ascetic characteristics of the capitalist ethic of the calling even in the Reformation period, and that these characteristics can far less easily be studied in them than (at that time) in the rising bourgeois [bürgerlich] middle classes. This can of course be explained, not only by the previously mentioned specific “temptations” to which they in particular were exposed, but also by, among other things [13], the simple fact that having once found themselves in this position of power, with the opportunities of political and aesthetic horizons such power offers, they were capable of enduring the inner situation of “beyond good and evil”: of being cut loose from the ethical and ecclesiastical obligations of conscience, in a way that, to judge from all the experience of history, was far more difficult for the bourgeoisie [Bürgertum], which was at that time rising to power in the modern state institutions [Staatenverbänden], if it was inwardly to grow into the “spirit” of capitalism, and construct its style of
life according to the dictates of this spirit.
Secondly: I also said that the mere “auri sacra fames,” the striving for money, has always been present in all periods of history, and is not somehow peculiar to the “capitalist class”; it has been at least as widespread outside of it as within it, and still is; indeed, the Oriental small-time dealer, the barcaiuolo, the coachman, the waiter, the porter in modern Italy and other countries (with the significant exception of those under predominantly Puritan influence), similarly the “impoverished farmer,” etc.—they all have it in far greater measure than the “capitalist” type, who, if he is to be continually successful, is generally characterized by at least either (1) devotion to the “cause” or (2) rational self-control. The achievement of the “innerworldly asceticism” was the creation of unified basic motives for the cultivation of these qualities. With typical overconfidence, Rachfahl now replies to my pointing out his ignorant coarsening of the problems with which we are concerned by saying that he is well aware of “the weakness of the psychological position (sic) of the acquisitive drive.” If I may say so, he knows nothing of the kind, otherwise he would not have argued against me in his “critique” in favor of the strength of this very instinct (in those other than the Puritans) in the wide-ranging and blunt sense that I rejected. But then, despite this—or precisely because of it—“he knows best.” He has appropriated some of what I said in reply (which he could have found explored in detail in my essay, if only he had read it with even a modicum of care): not enough, however, to prevent him reiterating the very same platitudes now in various places in his “response.” All he can do is cheerfully to ramble on, in what one might call a “worldly-wise” manner, about how the raising of this “drive” out of the sphere of the “naively instinctual” to the level of the “rational” was by no means “merely” the work of the “reformed ethic of the calling” (to which I by no means restricted myself, as is well known!). Do we find any hint or suggestion as to whose work it might otherwise be? We do not! [14]