The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism Read online

  III

  Soon after Weber completed the first part of The Protestant Ethic in the summer of 1904, he, Marianne, and a number of colleagues, including Ernst Troeltsch, Werner Sombart, Ferdinand Tönnies, and Paul Hensel, embarked on a trip to America. The German scholars had been invited by the Harvard psychologist Hugo Münsterberg, formerly of Freiburg University, to take part in the 1904 World Congress of Arts and Science, held in St. Louis. While the formal occasion of the American adventure was academic in a narrow sense—Weber’s own lecture for the World Congress, on comparative rural social relations, drew both on his Protestant Ethic research and on earlier studies of German peasant labor—25 the sojourn afforded him the opportunity to visit far-flung relatives and to feel the pulse of modern capitalism, America, for himself. Unchained from his desk, the German Tocqueville was now in a position to see and engage the peoples whose history and destiny were then at the heart of his interests.

  Hans Rollmann has nicely observed that “Max Weber in America reminds one of Camus’ saint without God, except that the saint is hyperactive.”26 And, indeed, from the time they arrived in New York harbor on August 31 until their departure some two months later, the Webers’ whirlwind itinerary took them from the East Coast to the Midwest to the South and the West and then back again to the eastern seaboard. New York, Buffalo, Chicago, St. Louis, New Orleans, Philadelphia, Washington, Baltimore, and Boston all played host to the peripatetic couple who asked questions without respite, eagerly sought out new contacts and contributors to various scholarly projects, and who, more generally, absorbed the remarkable variety of American life. Characteristically, Weber refused to share the stiff opprobrium of those German colleagues for whom “America” was a linguistic abbreviation for vulgarity, chaos, greed, and human misery. On the contrary, as his friend Troeltsch reported, he was full of admiration for “a people of freedom, of industry and promises for the future. Everything contrary is for him only youthfulness and incompleteness, and he considers the most uncanny things to originate as a result of this plenitude of power. His love in the fight and engagement for the individual finds here entire satisfaction.”27 Even Chicago, a veritable hell on earth for many continental visitors, failed to dampen Weber’s spirits. In accounts that combine wonder with detachment, Weber describes not only the city’s pollution, squalor, violent strikes, shootings, and showcased prostitutes but also its remarkable mix of ethnic groups and cuisines. His unsqueamish, Tayloresque account of one of Chicago’s legendary institutions is worth quoting at length:

  Everywhere one is struck by the tremendous intensity of work—most of all in the “stockyards” with their “ocean of blood,” where several thousand cattle and pigs are slaughtered every day. From the moment when the unsuspecting bovine enters the slaughtering area, is hit by a hammer and collapses, whereupon it is immediately gripped by an iron clamp, is hoisted up, and starts on its journey, it is in constant motion—past ever-new workers who eviscerate and skin it, etc., but are always (in the rhythm of work) tied to the machine that pulls the animal past them. One sees an absolutely incredible output in this atmosphere of steam, muck, blood, and hides in which I teetered about together with a “boy” who was giving me a guided tour for fifty cents, trying to keep from being buried in the filth. There one can follow a pig from the sty to the sausage and the can.28

  Weber’s enthusiasm for America is not, however, to be confused with voyeurism or naïveté. Nor did he direct his questions exclusively to the established savants—like Albion Small and William James—whom he encountered on his trip.29 If Weber was impressed by the New World, he was also disturbed, and his wife even more so, by the human price this experiment in nation building was exacting. In Chicago itself, the Webers visited Jane Addams’s Hull House and witnessed for themselves the plight of the destitute. In Tuskegee, they sojourned to Booker T. Washington’s “famous educational institution for Negroes. What they found,” Marianne Weber records, “probably moved them more than anything else on their trip. The great national problem of all American life, the showdown between the white race and the former slaves, could be grasped at its roots.”30 Just how seriously Weber took that “national problem” is shown by his interactions with Northern reformers like Edwin and Caroline Seligman and his correspondence with “Negro” leaders like Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. DuBois, whose The Souls of Black Folk (1903) Weber was keen to see in German translation; Weber also commissioned a paper from DuBois, whom he visited in Atlanta, on “The Negro Question in the United States” for the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik (the journal he jointly edited with Werner Sombart and Edgar Jaffé), which appeared in 1906.31 Assuring DuBois of his intention, never redeemed, to return to the South “as soon as possible,” Weber affirmed: “I am absolutely convinced that the ‘color-line’ problem will be the paramount problem of the time to come, here and everywhere in the world.”32

  Still, for our purposes the most significant outcome of Weber’s trip was the remarkable essay he penned on “‘Churches’ and ‘Sects’ in North America.” Like The Protestant Ethic, to which it is a scintillating counterpoint, Weber’s essay on the American sects appeared in more than one incarnation. It was published first in 1906 in the German liberal newspaper the Frankfurter Zeitung, reworked in the same year for Martin Rade’s Die Christliche Welt (the version translated here), and then revised once more for volume 1 of Weber’s collected essays in the sociology of religion under the title “The Protestant Sects and the Spirit of Capitalism” (1920).33 The nearest Weber ever got to an ethnography of American life, the essay is notable for its striking account of the relationship between the Protestant sects, business “sociation,” and the foundations of American pluralist democracy. At this point, a contrast of the “‘Churches’ and ‘Sects’” article with its more famous cousin is illuminating. We begin with the latter.

  In the 1905 essay on the Protestant ethic and in the rebuttals of H. Karl Fischer and Felix Rachfahl, also translated below, Weber seeks to document how the capitalist “spirit”—or mentality or philosophy of life (Lebensauffassung) or conscious way of conducting one’s life (Lebensführung) or Habitus (he gave it various names)—came into being. Central to that “spirit” is a view of economic activity that is historically novel, radical, and momentous. Consider first what it negated. Traditional, precapitalist attitudes toward work, Weber suggested, tend to see it as a necessary evil, to be expedited solely in order to live and as part of the never-ending, meaningless cycle of production and consumption. Economic activity is custom bound, and money or barter is the means to sustain habitual styles of life. Since work has no intrinsic value, laborers, when they are not under the compulsion of others, cease their exertions once their needs are met; the truly important matters of life begin once work has ended. Accordingly, Weber remarks, attempts to boost the productivity of tradition-bound workers by increasing piece rates often backfire. A model of homo economicus might lead one to assume that the prospect of more money through higher wages would encourage laborers to work harder and be more economically efficient. But, then again, homo economicus is simply a convenient fiction of economic theory. In real life, economic behavior is predicated on what people believe is rational for them, and such interpretations are socially embedded and culturally mediated. As a result, workers steeped in traditional ways of life may view the increased piece rate not as an incentive to become richer by working harder and longer but simply as a means to reach their customary wage sooner; having received enough to satisfy their needs, they may then desist from further activity. Similarly, the traditional employer tends to work at a more leisurely pace and is disposed by temperament and constrained by a complex web of social obligations to be conservative in his business methods.

  In contrast to these traditional attitudes, consider next the mental and moral universe of early capitalist entrepreneurs, as Weber describes it. No longer is work deemed a meaningless chore to be finished as soon as possible. Now it is invested with mo
ral value. For employers imbued with this new “spirit,” economic activity is an end in itself, central to their identity, a calling with rigorous implications that transgress old ways of doing business: if accustomed lifestyles and normative expectations are disrupted by the imperatives of productivity, calculated risk taking, innovation, and methodical behavior in which time is at a premium, then so be it. The enterprise is greater and more important than those it employs; the owner its resourceful steward, deferring the temptations of immediate consumption in order to make the organization more fecund and profitable. The priority of work over the worker, of the enterprise over the entrepreneur, means that there is little room here for sentimentality. In order to survive, the firm must constantly reinvest capital and adapt to an impersonal market; in order to flourish, competitors must be eliminated or at least neutralized. Steely objectivity and discipline are the orientations demanded from this godless mechanism.

  Weber’s depictions of both traditional economic activity and its antithetical capitalist “spirit” are what he calls “ideal types”: analytic constructs, or models, that impute to the fluctuating actions of real people an artificial consistency that is nonetheless useful in highlighting a distinctive pattern of conduct. Ideal types are not pictures or copies of reality; they are one-sided accentuations of it, “useful fictions,” arrived at on the basis of what the investigator deems culturally significant.34 That being so, both “tradition” and the “spirit” of capitalism are capable of articulations different from the ones that Weber gave them. Weber’s own characterization of the “spirit” of capitalism, which he illustrated copiously with quotations from Benjamin Franklin, sought to reconstruct attitudes and motivations toward work that he believed were uniquely modern. But where had they come from? Weber’s precise answer to this question was more evasive than he was willing to admit. But the general thrust of his argument is that the ethos of modern capitalism—that is, its distinctive moral attitudes toward economic activity and work, its methodical, specialized style of life—is historically indebted to (caused by, congruent with) the Protestant ethic: the ascetic movement that arose out of the Protestant Reformation and its aftermath. Pivotal to that movement was a transformation in attitudes toward worldly affairs. Work gained an unprecedented dignity by being understood as a vocation or calling (Beruf) ordained by God. The link between Protestant ethic and capitalist ethos (spirit) is one of the most complex aspects of Weber’s essay; we return to it in Section IV of this Introduction. For the moment, readers should be cautioned that the postulated relationship is between two normative constructions; more simply, between two sets of ideas common to which is the notion that work has ethical significance—that it is a duty and obligation to be expedited with maximum rigor and consistency. In Weber’s responses to Fischer and Rachfahl, he irascibly reaffirms this point, insisting that the object of his essay was not to explain the origins of the capitalist system as such—a task that would have required an analysis of its political, legal, and material conditions—but only to examine Protestantism’s contribution to aspects of the early capitalist frame of mind and Lebensführung (the way of deliberately conducting one’s life).35 How this squares with an assertion in The Protestant Ethic, reaffirmed in the first of Weber’s rejoinders to H. Karl Fischer, that a distinctive economic mentality still characterized late-nineteenth-century German Protestant communities, is not altogether clear.

  Among Weber’s most famous claims in The Protestant Ethic is the contention that Calvinism constituted the supercharged motivation behind the ascetic movement and its sectarian splinters. The Calvinist doctrine of predestination, according to which all humans are irrevocably either damned or chosen to be among God’s elect, posed an agonizing question to the faithful: Were they vessels of God’s grace or simply worthless creatures condemned to the unending torment of hell? God’s will could not be manipulated or deciphered. But could intimations of his divine purpose for humans be revealed to the faithful? Lacking any palatable answer from Calvin’s own theology, Calvinist believers looked to their pastors for help. The support they received was broadly of two kinds. First, believers were counseled to assume that lack of faith in one’s being chosen was tantamount to an absence of grace. The faithful were taught they “had a duty to regard themselves as [members of the] elect, and to dismiss any doubts as a temptation from the devil.” Second, they were encouraged to assume that “tireless labor in a calling was . . . the best possible means of attaining this self-assurance.”36 This enduring crisis of “proof”—of demonstrating to oneself that one was among the chosen spiritual elite—fashioned a distinctive kind of individual, Weber maintained. Unable to find solace in the sacraments or in the image of a kindly God, aware that their neighbors, even their family, may be among the perpetually condemned, Calvinist believers were psychologically isolated. Their distance from God could only be precariously bridged, and their inner tensions only partially relieved, by unstinting, purposeful labor. The result was innerworldly rational asceticism: rigorous, scrupulous, methodical work within a calling. In Gianfranco Poggi’s felicitous summary: “The elect is active, not passive; his activity is directed by his intellect, not by habit or feeling; the time span of his attention and his effort is lengthy, not brief; his activity is continuous, not intermittent; he takes charge of his life, does not drift nor does he trust events to go his way; he plans his existence and takes responsibility for its temporal outcome, does not bless or curse fate; he struggles to impose order and control over the things and people surrounding him, does not allow or expect them to determine him.”37 The individuals who are daily reconstituted by this discipline, Weber concluded, are the vehicles of the “rationalizing” capitalist “spirit”38 and the forebears of the modern capitalist Berufsmenschen.

  We can now return to Weber’s “‘Churches’ and ‘Sects’ in North America,” the fruit of his American observations. In that essay, Weber provides a novel twist to his previous argument by examining the manner in which a certain kind of group discipline, as distinct from an ethic (and its psychological inducements), nourishes and actively shapes the formation of the capitalist “spirit.” More especially, Weber documents the mode in which American business enterprises and the voluntary organizations of American democracy have at least some of their roots in the sectarian culture of Baptist, Quaker, Pietist, Methodist, and other religious denominations.39 Weber points out that although “Europeanization” and its accompanying secular attitudes are having a growing influence on American life, church affiliation remains strong. The majority of Anglophone Americans belong to a church that caters to their religious needs, yet also functions as a social club to provide a range of educative, athletic, and other ser-vices. Crucially, too, church membership is a visible demonstration of financial and commercial probity. Being a Baptist or a Quaker says more than “I am a believer”; it says, “I am honest, scrupulous, and can be relied on to charge fair prices to everyone, and to pay my debts, should I ever incur them, in a timely and expeditious fashion.” Because church membership confers on its members an ethical imprimatur—a certificate of moral qualification—that is simultaneously good for business, it comes to be highly valued by those who want to get ahead. By the same token, the church community must ensure that its members maintain high ethical standards, for failure to do so will damage the credibility of the group as a whole. Penalties for miscreants must be swift and unbending. Those who belong to these churches and those who seek entry to them must prove to their fellows (rather than to themselves, as in Weber’s discussion of the Protestant ethic) that they are worthy of membership: they must continually and indefatigably attest by their actions that they are meticulous, hardworking, punctilious, and disciplined in their vocation. The “spirit” of capitalism is significantly shaped by these forces.

  Whereas in the first part of the article, Weber uses the term “church” rather loosely, in the second part he seeks to clarify an important distinction. For, on his account, what are habitually r
eferred to as American churches—both by commentators and by members themselves—are, analytically speaking, better comprehended as “sects.” A sect, in Weber’s terminology, is different from a church—for instance, Lutheran or Catholic—in a number of ways. While a church is, in principle, an institution that ministers and dispenses sacraments to all—damned and saved alike—who happen, usually by birth, to fall under its jurisdiction, a sect is “a free community of individuals” restricted to those who pass certain tests of religious purity. Churches are inclusive, ascriptive, obligatory organizations, typically characterized by a formal, hierarchically structured administration. Where they can, churches seek to have their authority bolstered by becoming the compulsory confession of state. Sects, conversely, are exclusive, voluntary communities of the religiously qualified, governed by a network of peers (“moral police,” Weber calls them)40 who closely inspect the conduct of fellow members and whose principal political demand is freedom from state regulation or interference. Sects are not necessarily small in the total number of believers they comprise. However, the limitations they impose on membership typically do conduce to miniaturization and promote a level of collegiality among believers and a degree of collective scrutiny, unmatched in larger, more anonymous, less discriminating church organizations.41