This brilliant study opposes the Marxist concept of dialectical materialism and its view that change takes place through the conflict of opposites. Instead, Weber relates the rise of a capitalist economy to the Puritan determination to work out anxiety over salvation or damnation by performing good deeds — an effort that ultimately encouraged capitalism.
Great argument, poor translation that needs freshening While I cannot claim to be able to read this classic work in the original German, I share many of the other reviewers' frustrations with regard to Talcott Parson's English translation of it. First is all the passages from other authors which are left in the original French, Latin etc. and which the average anglophone reader today will be hard-pressed to decipher. Second is the shortage of explanatory notes pertaining to the various minutiae upon which Weber dwells. Contemporary readers can't be expected to know anything about Pietism, for example, so a few footnotes would have been helpful. Finally, there's the dated quality of Parsons' language which seems more redolent of the 19th century than the mid-20th. Every time he uses the word "to-day" complete with its archaic hyphen, it's hard not to be reminded of how musty this translation is and how the far the "to-day" he's writing about is removed from the "today" we live in.
For all the above reasons I would be reluctant to assign this book to an undergraduate class. Surely there's someone out there willing to take a shot at a new, fresher rendering of this book for the 21st century and fix some of the shortcomings of this rather flawed translation.
interesting this book was somewhat difficult to get through because of the footnotes (i have trouble with footnotes), once you get that point though, it's a fantastic book. it discusses why the capitalist system we have now, and the morality we have now is the way it is. we have all heard of the protestant ethic yes? it is that you must work hard, without pleasuring yourself too much, for the sake of pleasing god. working as hard as you can allows a person to 'most effectively' utilize the gifts god has given them, but they cannot take pleasure in the fruits if this because too much pleasure would result in the breaking of some sin, greed or sloth or what have you, pretty much all of them can be connected i'm sure. but if you can't have fun with what you're working so hard to create, why work so hard? because you are pleasing god, setting yourself up for the next life if you will. well this is wonderful for a historical reference, but we're very much secularized in society today so why does any of this matter? well, weber contends that a man named calvin (yes calvinism) took the protestant ethic and tied it to capitalism. calvin took the protestant ethic, which was good because it got things done with little complaint from the workers, and connected it to the economic system by turning god into money. we can imagine the problems with this, if nothing else, there would be trouble behind the fact that what motivated people before was spiritual, and now we expect the same results because of different motivations. that's like using a car to float down a river instead of a boat. ya cars go forward wonderfully, on the medium they were designed for.
so now we all ascetically put ourselves into our work towards the end of making more money. i'm not a history buff so i don't know if this is true or was just used as an example of how religion effected capitalism, but i don't really care as i can see the connections between the protesant ethic and our capitalist morality.
weber calls where we are now the iron cage, kind of pessimistic, but he believes that now we're here, we're stuck here. we can't get out of the mental state we are in now, which i don't necessarily agree with, but can see how someone could. if you leave the economic system today, chances are you'll end up on the street. i think this is my favourite quote, it's right at the end of the book and sums up the final point quite well.
"No one knows who will live in this cage in the future, or whether at the end of this tremendous development entirely new prophets will arise, or there will be a great rebirth of old ideas and ideals, or, if neither, mechanized petrification, embellished with a sort of convulsive self- importance. For the last stage of this cultural development, it might well be truly said: Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never achieved before "
an eye opener to say the least, but a really good read.
Anatomy of the Beast A decisive intellectual victory over the numbing utilitarianism of the day -- as important now as it was a hundred years ago. In his masterpiece, Max Weber traces the development of the worldly Protestant ascetic spirit from its predecessor (medieval otherworldly asceticism) to its modern religious peak (Puritan social ethics) and beyond, to the current utilitarian economic thought (with no religious elements whatsoever).
Weber also reveals the development of the spirit of capitalism as a tautologous paradigm of thought that has a long time ago abandoned its original religious motives, leaving behind only a system -- a ghost of a ghost -- that everyone must reproduce in order to survive. This is the "iron cage of [capitalistic] modernity" which we inhabit, and as Weber says, it will not be gone before "the last load of coal has been burned"... A chilling remark in retrospect, as we have now found out that the ever-growing global economy -- a growth for the sake of growth in both communist countries (especially China) and Western democracies -- is cooking up the Globe.
I suggest you waste your money on this.
What Made Capitalism Tick?
In my youth I used to believe that Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism was the very last word in understanding, sociologically, the driving force behind capitalism in its prime. His premise, at least his expressed narrowly- defined one, that out of the mishmash of feudalism a `new' man and a `new' woman were being created who could subordinate their temporal desires enough to begin the tedious process of primitive capitalist accumulation that got the whole mode started, hit home hard to my young mind. Of course, that was not my conscious take on it at the time, although parts of it certainly were. What interested me the most wa that Weber was using some examples that were close to home, the Massachusetts Bay Colony experiment, and, being from Boston and steeped in Purtian history, that is why I was glad to get a copy of the work.
Strangely, in recently re-reading the work I found that I was drawn by those same examples. Additionally, I was drawn by the huge set of footnotes at the end that I did not remember going through in my youth but offer some very interesting insights into how Weber put his argument together and the sources that he had available at the time and that he used. The re-reading poses this question, though. How does the work itself hold up?
Of course today my class struggle perspective derived from a Marxist world view notes that Weber is clearly a political opponent. Not so much for his argument, which actually has a certain merit, but for his tenacious desire to use a quasi-Marxism materialist approach to sociology without drawing those requisite class struggle conclusions. I might add that the class struggle was fully raging in Germany at the time of the publication of this work as the Social Democratic Party was becoming the voice of the German working class. Weber, thus, really needed to keep his blinders on. Moreover, as a work of scholarship, which I will grant it certainly is, it is an early effort in the very long struggle to divorce sociological observations from any practical use. A militant today in order to benefit from reading this work has to do the equivalent of suspending disbelieve in the plot of a novel to realize that it is important to know what made capitalism tick in the old days and why we have to move on. Here, nevertheless is my very condensed take on the work today.
In some place in 16th and 17th century Europe, the scope of Weber's study, individuals and small communities were breaking from the established churches, Roman Catholic and mainstream Protestant and creating, in some cases 'hit or miss', a culture that we today describe as secular but in the nature of those times had a religious connotation. That breakout, not without opposition and oppression by the constituted authorities, formed the nucleus of an ethic that made accumulation of wealth through hard work and thrift the norm-in short that private accumulation mentioned above. This, dear reader, was a historically progressive series of actions. In the year 2007 those traits have long since failed to be progressive. What is necessary, as Marx, Lenin, Trotsky and even someone like Che Guevara recognized is in the interest of social solidarity we need to create `the new socialist man and woman' out of the muck and mire of capitalism. Hell, we need our own version of the Protestant ethic-and if current worldwide economic conditions are any judge- we need it pronto. Read this one at your leisure.
The definitive introductory text in Modernization theory Weber is the definitive introductory text in Modernization theory. Although somewhat western-centric, this book is essential reading for any college student, as it gave rise to many theories in every branch of social science, and still has more influence on theoretical thought than most social scientists would like to admit.
Anything Goes Trivia
Megaton Man
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