The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism Read online

  PENGUIN CLASSICS

  THE PROTESTANT ETHIC AND THE “SPIRIT” OF CAPITALISM and Other Writings

  Max Weber (1864–1920) was a German sociologist and historian who significantly influenced the development of modern social science through his attempts to develop a systematic methodology for cross-cultural studies. His best-known work, The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism (1905), linked the growth of modern capitalism to Protestant religious beliefs. It was followed by encyclopedic inquiries into the world religions, geopolitics, revolution, domination, class structure, bureaucracy, law, the city, the state, and science, culminating in the posthumously published Economy and Society (1922). For the last twenty years of his life, Weber worked as an independent scholar, accepting professorships only briefly at the Universities of Vienna (1918) and Munich (1919–20). Paralleling and informing Weber’s scientific work in sociology, economics, law, and history was a serious involvement in political questions. A vocal critic of Bismarck’s political legacy and of the histrionics of Kaiser Wilhelm II, Weber championed a German parliamentary democracy based on the British and American models. He participated in the committee charged with drafting the Weimar Constitution and was also a member of the German delegation at Versailles. He died in Munich of pneumonia on June 14, 1920.

  PETER BAEHR was born in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in 1953 and came to England in 1962. Educated at Bournemouth College (Shelley Park) and the University of Leicester, he taught sociology at Coventry Polytechnic from 1979 to 1989 and at the Memorial University of Newfoundland from 1990 to 2000 before moving to Hong Kong, where he teaches in the Department of Politics and Sociology at Lingnan University. His publications include Caesar and the Fading of the Roman World, The Portable Hannah Arendt (editor), and Founders, Classics, Canons: Modern Disputes over the Origins and Appraisal of Sociology’s Heritage.

  Born in Bedford, England, in 1940, GORDON WELLS was educated at Bedford Modern School and at the Universities of Oxford and Birmingham. After a period of teaching at universities in Germany, he took up a post as lecturer in German at Coventry University (formerly Coventry Polytechnic) in 1974, a post he held until 2000. He is now a freelance translator. Published translations include The One Room by Jurek Becker and Icons by Helmut Brenske. He is coeditor and translator (with Peter Baehr) of Max Weber: The Russian Revolutions.

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street,

  New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand,

  London WC2R ORL, England

  Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood,

  Victoria, Australia

  Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue,

  Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2

  Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road,

  Auckland 10, New Zealand

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:

  Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England

  First published in Penguin Books 2002

  Translation, introduction, and selection copyright © Peter Baehr and Gordon C. Wells, 2002

  All rights reserved

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

  Weber, Max, 1864–1920.

  [Protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus. English]

  The Protestant Ethic and the “spirit” of capitalism and other writings / Max Weber;

  edited, translated, and with an introduction by Peter Baehr and Gordon C. Wells.

  p. cm.—(Penguin twentieth-century classics)

  Includes bibliographical references.

  Contents: The Protestant ethic and “spirit” of capitalism—“Churches” and “sects” in North America—Critical remarks in response to the foregoing “critical contributions”—Remarks on the foregoing “reply”—Rebuttal of the critique of the “spirit” of capitalism—A final rebuttal of Rachfahl’s critique of the “spirit of Capitalism”—Prefatory remarks to collected essays on the sociology of religion

  ISBN: 978-1-101-09847-9

  1. Capitalism—Religious aspects—Christianity. 2. Sociology, Christian. 3. Christian ethics. 4. Protestant work ethic. I. Baehr, P. (Peter) II. Wells, Gordon C. III. Title. IV. Series.

  BR115.C3 W413 2002b

  306.6—dc21

  2001133065

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  Version_3

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  A work of this kind draws on the skills and knowledge of many people. We are particularly grateful to the following individuals who gave generously of their time and their expertise by commenting on the Introduction, offering advice on an early draft of the translation, and answering our questions:

  George Becker, Christian Boyens, Randall Collins, John Conway, George Frisby, Daniel Gordon, Alex Kazamias, David Kettler, Joachim von Kölichen, Hartmut Lehmann, Manfred Liedtke and colleagues at the Pädagogische Hochschule, Heidelberg, Michael Matthiesen, John McCormick, Volker Meja, Stephen C. Perks, Jan Roes, Hans Rollmann, Guenther Roth, Hans Schleiff, Richard Swedberg, Jörg Thierfelder, Keith Tribe, Charles Turner, Colin Wright, and the German staff at Coventry University. Our editors’ footnotes drew extensively on various editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Meyers Enzyklopädisches Lexikon, and the Dictionary of National Biography.

  We owe a great debt to our families, especially to Hedda Schuurman and Anita Wells, for their love, help, and forbearance.

  The project is dedicated to Eva and Charles Wells for a lifetime of help and encouragement, and in memoriam to Anne Baehr, tireless supporter of our efforts, who died shortly before this book was completed.

  CONTENTS

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  Suggestions for Further Reading

  Note on the Translation

  The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism (1905)

  “Churches” and “Sects” in North America (1906)

  Critical Remarks in Response to the Foregoing “Critical Contributions” (1907)

  (Weber’s first rejoinder to H. Karl Fischer)

  Remarks on the Foregoing “Reply” (1908)

  (Weber’s second rejoinder to H. Karl Fischer)

  Rebuttal of the Critique of the “Spirit” of Capitalism (1910)

  (Weber’s first rejoinder to Felix Rachfahl)

  A Final Rebuttal of Rachfahl’s Critique of the “Spirit of Capitalism” (1910)

  Appendixes:

  I. Rejoinders to Werner Sombart and Lujo Brentano (1920)

  II. Prefatory Remarks to Collected Essays in the Sociology of Religion (1920)

  THE PROTESTANT ETHIC AND THE “SPIRIT” OF CAPITALISM EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION

  The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism is one of those audacious and robust texts for which the term “classic” could have been invented. Ever since its publication in 1905,1 the essay has provoked controversy, prompting successive generations of readers to wrestle with the paradox at its core. Many authors might have welcomed such notoriety, but not Max Weber (1864–1920), who bitterly complained that the critics had misunderstood him and that the ensuing debate was both obfuscating and sterile. To prevent further con
fusion, he revised the essay in 1919, modifying some of its formulations and increasing further an already massive apparatus of footnotes. But all attempts at definitive clarification were to no avail; Weber’s revision, published in 1920,2 served only to generate new problems and ambiguities. And herein, ironically, lies the secret of The Protestant Ethic’s fame. If Weber’s “thesis” were self-evidently true, simple, or translucent, it would never have engaged a critical audience in the first place or survived to become a classic. “Mere” solutions to a problem impede a text’s ascent to greatness for the simple reason that they offer no challenges for contemporaries to embrace and successors to ponder.3 Weber’s achievement was not to definitively answer a riddle but to stake out a territory fertile of new puzzles at the heart of which is the claim that religious forces, not simply economic ones, paved the way for the mentality characteristic of modern, Western capitalism. On Weber’s account, our secular and materialistic culture is partly indebted to a spiritual revolution: the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century. That Weber’s argument raises—or begs—a hundred questions is inseparable from its eminence and renown.

  II

  Although key themes of The Protestant Ethic were rehearsed by Weber as early as 1898,4 the essay itself was written in stages between the summer of 19035 and the winter of 1905. Its composition came at a watershed moment: Weber, recovering from a prolonged nervous illness, was once more testing his creative powers. His wife, Marianne (née Schnitger, 1870–1954), was under no illusions about the essay’s significance for her husband. She described it as “the first work to make Weber’s star shine again” and one “connected with the deepest roots of his personality.”6 Perhaps this is why he defended it so vehemently and with a passionate indignation unmatched in all his other scholarly writings.

  The writings on Protestantism that we present below—particularly The Protestant Ethic (the version of 1905) and its companion piece “Churches” and “Sects” in North America (1906)—condense Weber’s deepest interests and commitments, and this is what makes them such intensely personal works. They also abridge a number of themes that go beyond their obvious subject matter. Not least of them is a plea for Imperial Germany to grow up: to cast off a politically authoritarian, outmoded system, dominated by the Junker landed class and embrace the modern industrial order. Weber located the origins of modern freedom not in the Enlightenment,7 but in the Puritan Anglo-American tradition; the struggle to establish liberty of conscience and worship, he argued, was the cornerstone of all other human rights. The vanguard of that struggle was the Protestant sects—Baptists, Quakers, and others—whose influence in Germany had been eclipsed by the Lutheran Church and its “aura of office.” Weber acknowledged that Lutheranism began life as a radical movement, but he viewed its trajectory as moving in an increasingly illiberal direction, endorsing state power against individual freedom and, allegedly like Catholicism, encouraging passive adaptation to existing conditions rather than soliciting innovation and risk. As he confessed in a much-quoted letter to the theologian Adolf von Harnack, written shortly after The Protestant Ethic was completed: “Luther towers above all others, but Lutheranism is—I don’t deny it—in its historical articulation the most frightening of terrors for me. . . . [T]he fact that our nation never went through the school of hard asceticism, in no form whatsoever, is the source of everything that I hate about it (and about myself). I can’t help it, but in religious terms the average American sect member surpasses our institutional Christians as much as Luther excels, as a religious personality, Calvin, Fox, et tutti quanti.”8 The heartlands of radical individualism, Weber claimed, were to be found in England and America, nations that created not only free institutions, effective parliaments, and responsible and dynamic leaders but also the capacity for global power politics. In contrast, Weber lamented, Germany was in danger of becoming a laughingstock. Politically rudderless and impotent, crassly dependent on Bismarck’s “Caesarist” legacy9 and at the mercy of Wilhelm II’s well-publicized histrionics, Germany lacked the combination of discipline and freedom that the Puritan tradition had vouchsafed to the Anglophone world.10

  However, Weber’s writings on Protestantism bear traces not only of the travails of Lutheranism but also of Bismarck’s disastrous struggle against German Catholics—the so-called Kulturkampf (1871– 79)11—that, under the guise of resisting Catholic obscurantism, tore the nation apart and hastened the decline of German liberalism. It was not that Weber was any great friend of the Roman Catholic Church; on the contrary, he shared the widely held view among Protestant liberals that Catholicism was “traditionalist, hostile to progress, and culturally ‘inferior.’”12 It was more that, in the aftermath of the Kulturkampf, German Catholics were pressing vocally for occupational quotas, designed to redress the discrimination against them in the civil service and elsewhere. Though Catholics insisted that all they wanted was basic justice, Weber, like many of his contemporaries, interpreted their platform as a demand for preferential hiring. “The Catholic drumbeat for parity was not regarded as a universalistic civil rights movement that would, for instance, have included Jews but as a partisan campaign to establish a system of patronage and spoils, an attack on the idealized neutrality of the civil service and the principle of achievement.”13 This is the context of Weber’s opening observations in The Protestant Ethic on the relationship between religious affiliation and social stratification. For while Weber was aware of discrimination against Catholics in Germany, he was convinced, too, that their unequal distribution in the higher strata of economic life was principally a function of cultural orientations and antipathies, themselves a legacy of the Catholic communion. Or to put the matter in another way, that Protestants were successful not simply because of the state’s processes of selection or because of the historic preponderance of Protestants in German cities but because a community and home environment had fostered the peculiar mentality most suited to business acumen and professional advancement.14 In such wise, The Protestant Ethic was meant as a contribution to a contemporary political debate as much as a contribution to “social economics”15 and economic history.16 And although received wisdom portrays the text as essentially a reply to Marxian “materialism,” this was only one, and certainly not the most important, of Weber’s concerns.

  Weber liked to describe himself as “religiously unmusical,” but he never said that he was tone-deaf. He came from a Protestant family; in particular, his mother, a lasting moral presence in his life, was an earnest and, in her own way, worldly product of a heterodox southern German Protestant milieu.17 He was an active participant in the Evangelical-Social Congress (ESC)18—to which he was introduced by his cousin Otto Baumgarten—founded in 1890 to formulate social-policy questions relevant to German workers: Weber attended its conferences until 1897, sat on the ESC’s council, wrote for its house journal, Die Christliche Welt, directed under ESC auspices a survey in 1892–93 into the situation of rural laborers east of the Elbe river,19 and delivered lectures for the ESC on the stock exchange and agrarian social relations. Weber was also a friend and critical adviser of the Protestant reformer Friedrich Naumann. To be sure, Weber’s Protestant activism was in its own peculiar way agnostic: not a matter of a faith to be espoused, but, above all, though not exclusively, a means to educate the German working class and naive bourgeois Kulturprotestanten in the harsh imperatives of contemporary capitalism. For Weber, the modern world was not about to witness an impending reign of reason or an abundance of Christian compassion. Instead, the future promised a ceaseless global struggle over material resources and alternative modes of life. Only the most industrially competitive, politically dynamic, and assiduously hardheaded nations had a chance of becoming—or remaining—great powers and great cultures.

  Given this background, it is perhaps unsurprising that the historical connection between Protestantism and capitalism would emerge as one of Weber’s chief preoccupations. But there was even more at stake than we have so far suggested.
Marianne Weber tells us that her husband, the secular ascetic par excellence, strongly identified with the Puritans of his most famous essay, whose faith and heroism produced a “new type of man . . . entirely dependent upon himself, in terrible solitude, and bereft of all magical powers of salvation. No church, no preacher, no sacrament can help him in the decisive matter of his life.”20 Equally, Weber, a man whose precarious emotional condition sensitized him naturally to suffering and misfortune, was struck by the tragedy of the Puritans’ actions. Although he is often cited as a theorist of “rationality” and “rationalization,” Weber repeatedly noted that, from the standpoint of individual conduct, history is deeply irrational. Between action and consequence lies a chasm that no one can bridge, let alone control. The Puritans of Weber’s story did not know, could not know, what they were doing; people can only know what they intend to do, and even then their self-knowledge is highly imperfect. More precisely, the Protestant radicals, inspired by a powerful sense of the divine, helped unwittingly to create a social and economic order its pioneers would have seen as godless, materialist, and devoid of any ultimate purpose. “Weber,” says his wife, was “profoundly moved . . . by the fact that on its earthly course an idea always and everywhere operates in opposition to its original meaning and thereby destroys itself.”21 The statement is an exaggeration. Even so, it helps explain the cri de coeur with which The Protestant Ethic ends: Weber’s acidic indictment of those “specialists without spirit, hedonists without a heart”22 whom he feared modern capitalism was creating in abundance.23 Only for a relatively short time was capitalism animated by the moral purpose of Puritanism that it could, in any case, live “quite comfortably” without: “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.”24