by Max Weber
Historians, too, have been overwhelmingly skeptical. Had The Protestant Ethic been read mainly by historians, its influence on American thought would have been marginal. Most have found the “thesis” unconvincing or outdated, decisively surpassed by later Reformation research and largely irrelevant to the history of industrialization.78 Economists—congenitally ill disposed toward cultural accounts of economic phenomena—have typically granted Weber’s thesis a certain inventiveness but deemed it peripheral to disciplinary paradigms. Even those among their number, like Joseph Schumpeter, who took a generous view of the mutually fecund relations between economics and sociology (and most of his colleagues emphatically did not) gave the impression that The Protestant Ethic was a road unwisely taken. Schumpeter called it an example of “spurious problems,” that is to say, “problems that the analyst himself creates by his own method of procedure”—in this case, the formulation of an ideal type of the “New Spirit of Capitalism.” Alas, Schumpeter contended, there was no such entity, “in the sense that people would have had to acquire a new way of thinking in order to be able to transform a feudal economic world into a wholly different capitalist one. So soon as we realize that pure Feudalism and pure Capitalism are equally unrealistic creations of our own mind, the problem of what it was that turned the one into the other vanishes completely. The society of the feudal ages contained all the germs of the society of the capitalist age. These germs developed by slow degrees, each step teaching its lesson and producing another increment of capitalist methods and of capitalist ‘spirit.’ Similarly, there was no such thing as a New Spirit of Free Enquiry whose emergence would call for explanation. The scholastic science of the Middle Ages contained all the germs of the laical science of the Renaissance.”79 The point of quoting Schumpeter at length is not to endorse uncritically his depiction of Weber’s procedure or his conclusions but only to show that even a potentially tolerant observer from economics expressly disowned the “thesis.”
Sociology, we saw previously, has been much more favorable to The Protestant Ethic and not only because of the discipline’s bias toward cultural types of explanation. One reason is a tendency toward highly ritualized citation and summary, reinforced by the fact that sociologists are in the main professionally unequipped to make historically discriminating judgments. Another is the disciplinary firewall erected by specialization and “compartmentalization” shielding sociologists from the criticisms of colleagues in history and economics. But that is only part of the picture. The Protestant Ethic has perennially survived in American sociology, and in other national traditions, too, not because of its ostensible veracity80 but because of its utility: its protean aptitude, sketched above, to act as a catalyst of hypotheses or vehicle of multiple projects that have little to do with the impulse that originally animated it. Weber is found, for instance, wherever theories of “modernization”81 are debated or wherever Marx’s flag is hoisted; in the latter case, Weber can be counted on to lead the retaliatory assault on the Marxian citadel, notwithstanding the fact that in many respects he found fruitful an economic interpretation of history. Or to put the matter differently: sociology continues to accord The Protestant Ethic a singular standing not because of its putative historical accuracy but because of what it permits sociologists to do and project.82 It is the essay’s suggestiveness, not its ultimate verisimilitude, its pliability, not its irrefutability, that keeps it alive.
It was observed previously that the first two major translations of Weber’s work came from American hands. In fact, practically all the book-length translations of Weber’s studies of sociology, law, economics, method, politics, and religion up to 1990 were likewise produced under American auspices.83 So, too, was the first major Anglophone commentary: Max Weber: An Intellectual Portrait (1959)84 penned by Reinhard Bendix, a Berliner who had immigrated to the United States in 1938 and who, until his death in 1991, remained America’s foremost Weberian sociologist. Bendix’s base at Berkeley from 1947 onward (first in the Department of Sociology and later in the Department of Political Science) and Parsons’s at Harvard nicely epitomizes what became known as “coastal” sociology, the dominant centers of the East and the West. Still, undoubtedly the most influential text, after The Protestant Ethic, for the American reception of Weber came not from California or Massachusetts but from the University of Wisconsin at Madison and the University of Maryland: the collaboration between Hans H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills that produced From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. That anthology, which contained Weber’s companion piece to The Protestant Ethic—“The Protestant Sects and the Spirit of Capitalism”—helped launch the career of Mills, and with it an alternative reading of Weber. For Mills, Weber was quintessentially the theorist of modern history and of power relations, a pulverizing battering ram against Parsonian “grand theory” and a vital contributor to “the sociological imagination”: an imagination that “enables its possessor to understand the larger historical scene in terms of its meaning for the inner life and the external career of a variety of individuals.”85
Gerth and Mills’s tormented partnership in producing what has become the most widely read compendium of Weber’s works is one of the more fascinating stories of scholarly collaboration.86 For our purposes here, however, it is sufficient to recall that Gerth was among a group of talented scholars—it included Leo Strauss, Emil Lederer, Hans Speier, Adolph Löwe, Arnold Brecht, Hans Morgenthau, and Erich Fromm—who brought Weber to America as a consequence of the great German cultural emigration of the 1930s and 1940s. In the process, Weber was adapted, filtered, applied, and reshaped to make him intelligible to American pragmatic and religious sensibilities. Albert Salomon, from his base at the New School of Social Research in New York City, was an early cultural mediator.87 Hannah Arendt, robustly anti-Weberian on most dimensions, nonetheless paid tribute to the “greatness” of The Protestant Ethic.88 Addressing himself to an American audience on the parlous state of German academic social sciences during the first third of the twentieth century, Franz Neumann—the legal scholar, advocate, and “critical theorist” who had made America his home in 1936—noted one sterling exception: “Max Weber, whose name is known and honored wherever social and political science is taught. Weber’s greatness consists in a unique combination of a theoretical frame (although for me of doubtful validity), a mastery of a tremendous number of data, and a full awareness of the political responsibility of the scholar.” Neumann, writing in 1953, went on to say that while “Weber’s influence in Germany was very limited,” it “is here, in the United States, that Weber really came to life.”89 To which one is compelled to add: much to the chagrin of some Americans. Almost thirty-five years after Neumann’s encomium, Allan Bloom indicted Weber as one of the principal miscreants responsible for “the closing of the American mind.” Weber’s sin, Bloom thundered, was to be a chief purveyor of cultural relativism and decisionism, a siren voice proclaiming the age of disenchantment and rationalization. Substituting a concern for reason and good and evil with a hodgepodge of warring, incommensurable, freely chosen values, Weber reaffirmed the legacy of Nietzsche. Indeed, the “transfusion of this . . . mythmaking or value-positing interpretation of social and political experience into the American bloodstream was in large measure effected by Max Weber’s language. His success here is, I am tempted to say, miraculous. A good example is his invention, the Protestant Ethic.” Weber’s treatment of the Calvinists, Bloom claimed, was symptomatic of a more general nihilism. Denying the essential rationality of human values, Weber saw the Calvinists’ convictions as no more than “worldviews” or “world interpretations” imposed “on a chaotic world by powerful personalities.” For Bloom, probably Strauss’s90 most famous disciple, such an interpretation was a travesty, a denial of reason as well as God. Yet in spite of it, “the Weberian language and the interpretation of the world it brings with it have caught on like wildfire.”91 There are no signs that the flames are yet extinguished.
The Protestant Ethic and the
“Spirit” of Capitalism has been described by the sociologist Daniel Bell as “probably the most important sociological work of the twentieth century,”92 while the American intellectual historian H. Stuart Hughes has called it “one of the great works of the social thought of our time—an almost unique combination of imaginative boldness in its central hypothesis and meticulous scholarship in its documentation.”93 Few essays of social science are more daring, stimulating, and interesting. Modern scholarship has subjected the text to a constant barrage of critical attack, yet it has survived to be read and reread. The matrix of problems with which it deals retains an interest and pathos that are likely to endure. And behind the essay stands a man of remarkable qualities and paradoxes. The last encyclopedic genius of the twentieth century still awaits a biography that can do justice to his prodigious versatility. The problem is not only that we moderns lack Weber’s range, it is also that a culture of “specialists without spirit, hedonists without a heart” is ill equipped to understand a man who was in most respects its antithesis.
ADDENDUM ON THE 1905 AND 1920 VERSIONS OF THE PROTESTANT ETHIC
We noted that The Protestant Ethic exists in both an original (1905) and a revised (1920) form. The latter version, completed shortly before Weber’s death, was the one that Talcott Parsons drew on in his English translation of 1930. Until recently,94 it has been the only complete translation of The Protestant Ethic available for Anglophone readers. Our translation offers an alternative to Parsons, not only because it seeks to be more faithful to Weber’s concepts and phrasing95 but also because it goes back to the version of 1905. The decision to translate the 1905 text rather than to retranslate its 1920 successor was guided by a number of considerations.
To begin with, the 1905 version of The Protestant Ethic is foundational, the baseline that enables us to understand the text as Weber first conceived it and to calibrate the modifications that appeared in its 1920 counterpart. Those modifications were themselves prompted by the controversy that began shortly after the essay’s original publication. (Since Weber died in the same year that the 1920 version was published, he had no further opportunities to engage his critics.) His countercritiques appear in the four cannonades to Fischer and Rachfahl—translated into English in their entirety in this Penguin Classic—and in the feisty but more measured footnotes of the 1920 edition where Weber duels with Lujo Brentano and Werner Sombart.96 We have incorporated the most relevant of these footnotes in Appendix I so that readers have a virtually complete record of Weber’s replies to critics. In short, a return to the original, 1905 version of The Protestant Ethic and the associated rebuttals provides readers with the narrative context and trajectory of the debate during Weber’s own lifetime.
Our claim, let us be clear, is not that the first edition of The Protestant Ethic is somehow “better” than the second—in the way that some commentators believe Goethe’s so-called Urfaust (the earliest, 1775, version of Faust Part 1)97 to be more aesthetically remarkable than its successors of 1790 or 1808; or Mary Shelley’s 1818 version of Frankenstein superior to the much more famous text of 1831.98 It is rather that both the 1905 and 1920 versions of The Protestant Ethic are sui generis, interesting in their own unique ways and invite somewhat different kinds of consideration. (For this reason, the German Gesamtausgabe—the critical edition of Weber’s complete works—will publish both versions separately.99)
Second, the early text has distinctive qualities—a more tentative tone than its 1920 counterpart and a peculiar social-scientific orientation—that reveal a Weber who is still largely unknown. “In the first version of the text,” Hartmut Lehmann observes, Weber “sounds as if he is presenting an interesting argument: He proceeds as if conducting an experiment. By contrast, in the second version, Weber appears to speak with an authoritative voice: He writes as if [he is] presenting the final results of a study that allow no objection.”100
When Weber reedited The Protestant Ethic in the summer of 1919, he inserted it into a massive research program that had in good mea-sure already been accomplished: a sociology of the world religions with a specific, comparative focus on their economic ethics and their distinct modes of rationality.101 That project, together with the sociological perspective that informed it, simply did not exist for him in 1903–04 when The Protestant Ethic was in the process of gestation. On the contrary, Weber had a very different plan in mind. As the conclusion to the original essay makes plain, Weber’s initial predisposition was to examine the impact of ascetic rationalism on a host of institutions, “from the conventicle to the state,” and to situate the specific form of ascetic Protestantism in the history of Occidental ascetic rationalism more generally from “the Middle Ages to its dissolution into pure utilitarianism.” Deflected by more urgent tasks—most immediately, his feverish attempt to document the Russian Revolution of 1905–06102—and also by the growing conviction that further work on the nuances of Protestantism was best left to theological specialists such as Ernst Troeltsch,103 Weber never substantively pursued his original agenda.104 Evidently, as ambitious as that earlier project may have been, it proved too confining for Weber’s expanding theoretical interests, clear from 1909 onward,105 in the singularity of Western culture and the peculiar kinds of rationalism he claimed were at its heart.106 Indeed, according to Marianne Weber, the “cognition of the uniqueness of Occidental rationalism and the role assigned to it in Western culture was for Weber one of his most important discoveries. As a result, his original guiding question, on the relationship of religion and economy, was expanded into a more comprehensive one, concerning the unique nature of the entire Occidental culture.”107 To expedite and inform a convincing response to that new research question, Weber needed to do more than study the Western experience; he required contrasting case studies that might shed light on the West’s putative uniqueness. Accordingly, he turned to an investigation of Asian cultures, and more especially Asian religions, to establish why their economic development differed so fundamentally from Occidental paths; or, to put it another way, Weber employed his Asian case studies in an attempt to prove the unparalleled genesis of Occidental capitalism and rationalism. In contrast, the uniqueness of the West, or a comparative, cross-cultural theory of rationalism, are not part of the Problemstellung or Fragestellung (“problematic”) of the text of 1905, the focus of which is much more circumscribed: an inquiry into the impact of Protestant rational asceticism on the rise of modern capitalism.108
But it is not only that Weber’s focus was markedly different in 1905; so, too, was the standpoint from which he conducted his research. By 1919, Weber had been developing his own kind of sociology—conceived by him as a perspective on “social action” rather than as a substantive area109—for almost a decade. In 1903–04, by contrast, when Weber began to write The Protestant Ethic, he was proceeding primarily from the vantage of what he called “social economics” (Sozialökonomik), a term that emerged originally in France in the early 1800s (it is typically associated with Jean-Baptiste Say) but to which Weber gave his own idiosyncratic inflection. On Weber’s account, social economics combines elements of both analytic and historical economics (rival German schools at the time Weber was writing) and addresses the relationship of economics to noneconomic phenomena, notably, religion, law, and politics.110 The manifesto of this approach can be found in Weber’s essay “‘Objectivity’ in Social Science and Social Policy” (1904)111 in which he distinguishes between various modes of conceiving social economic “phenomena,” that is, phenomena characterized by “the scarcity of means” through which human needs can be satisfied.112 Note that, for Weber, the quality of a phenomenon that falls under the rubric of “social economics” is “not something which it possesses ‘objectively.’ It is rather conditioned by the orientation of our cognitive interest, as it arises from the specific cultural significance which we attribute to the particular event in a given case.”113 Thus, social-economic phenomena will differ according to the interest researchers bring to their i
nvestigation. Be that as it may, Weber suggests that there are three theoretically productive ways in which “social economics” can be considered as culturally significant. We can study economic “events” or, more especially, “institutions,” such as the stock exchange, that mediate, regulate, or seek to control the struggle over material resources. We can study “economically conditioned phenomena,” such as the artistic taste of a period, that may be influenced by economic events or institutions. Or we can study “economically relevant” phenomena, to wit, phenomena that are not economic in any orthodox sense of the term but that may be pertinent for our understanding of economic forces: Weber gives as an example the impact of religion. And what this suggests, to return to our major theme, is that The Protestant Ethic of 1905 is not a contribution to the sociology of religion (sociology is never mentioned in the text) but rather, at least in part, a study in social economics, concerned to document a culturally sig-nificant, “economically relevant”114 phenomenon: Protestant asceticism’s significance for modern capitalism.115
Social economics never entirely lost its interest for Weber; he continued to see it as an omnibus science that could accommodate economic theory, economic history, and economic sociology. Moreover, what we know as Economy and Society is but part of the wider multivolume project that Weber called Grundriss der Sozialöko-nomik, on which he worked, on and off, from 1908 until his death in 1920. However, he never returned to a systematic theoretical analysis of social economics; the tripartite distinction among economic phenomena, economically conditioned phenomena, and economically relevant phenomena is not pursued again; and even the title of the Grundriss appears to have become largely a flag of convenience adopted to avoid a lawsuit against the publisher.116 Instead, from 1909, Weber was drawn ever more deeply into sociology, and particularly the sociology of religion, law, domination, as well as economics. Of increasing importance to him was the complex relationship between “material” interests (struggles over physical resources) and “ideal” interests (conflicts driven by such things as status, nationalism, ethnic prestige, and the desire for salvation). Neither type of interest was reducible to the other, and Weber had a keen eye for situations in which material and ideal interests collided or when the latter impeded the former. Moreover, by 1919, Weber had at his disposal a sophisticated sociological theory of “social action” and of “rationalization” to develop these ideas for which the earlier “social economic” formulations were plainly insufficient. The sociological importance he attributed to rationality in the history and structure of Western institutions is shown to powerful effect in the “Prefatory Remarks” to volume 1 of the sociology of religion, which we translate in Appendix II.
