by Max Weber
3) The reason why I am not yet in a position to publish them lies not in any material factors. It is partly to be found in personal circumstances of no general interest, is partly related to some quite different works of mine (as anyone who has taken the trouble to glance at the Archiv will know), and is partly to be found in the fact that my colleague and friend E. Troeltsch has since brought his own brilliant insights to bear on a whole series of problems that I was planning to deal with, and I wished to avoid any unnecessary duplication of work in an area in which he had by far the greater expertise. In the current year, however, I hope to get around to this work and by the spring to be able to revise at least the essays for a separate edition.5 Undoubtedly, the delay has had, and continues to have, the disadvantage that superficial readers might be tempted to regard these articles as finished pieces of work. This is, of course, no excuse at all for the kind of “criticism” with which I am concerned here. My critic had every right to say: the counterarguments and more detailed interpretation, which have been promised, are still lacking. But to impute to me an “idealist” construction of history [Geschichtskonstruktion] which I have fundamentally denied, and now even to assert explicitly that I was not aware of these problems, is more than I am prepared to take—especially from someone who is completely lacking in competence in the field.
4) Although I immediately recognized the author’s ignorance of the sources, I recommended acceptance of the “critique” to my joint editors, because a number of individual comments and apparent difficulties were touched on in it. I well remembered having debated these points at the time in my head, but recommended publication in order to make use of the opportunity to discuss them, believing that I had not included such a discussion in my essays. I was not a little astonished, but not at all pleased, to discover, on rereading my essays, that all these matters were quite clearly contained in them and put into their context. The “critic,” uncritically and through lack of understanding, had ignorantly wrenched them out of context, and held them against me as “objections.” I regret not having spared the “Archiv” and its readers the burden of this worthless discussion, which—once it had been accepted—then obliged me after all to engage in a lengthy disentanglement of the confusion which had been caused. If the “critique” had been published elsewhere, I should not have deemed it worthy of a reply.6
5) He claims that Sombart, too, has been “challenged.” The proof is provided by a quotation from one of those reviews, equally dubious in both content and form, which Hans Delbrück is wont to devote to Sombart in the “Preuβische Jahrbücher.” Now, it so happens that this is the section of Sombart’s exposition—the explanation of the significance and the technique of calculability [Rechenhaftigkeit]—that is undoubtedly the least controversial, and for myself I regard it as absolutely accurate in the vital points, bearing in mind Sombart’s theme, namely, the origin of significant modern capitalist economic forms.
Of course, the fully developed trades [Handwerk] did bring with them a certain degree of “rationalization” of economic activity [Wirtschaften], and the ancient forms of capitalist business, which go back to the earliest millennia of human history, did bring with them a certain degree of “calculability.” The question remains as to why “calculability” in those (quantitatively) at times immensely highly developed capitalist economic forms of antiquity remained so far below what it was in those of the early modern period that Sombart can rightly speak not only of the existence of individual capitalist businesses—there is evidence of these four thousand years ago—but also of the existence of “capitalism” as an economic stage. The question will have to be discussed elsewhere. It goes without saying that for his problematic, Sombart designates technical “calculability” as the decisive feature of the “spirit of capitalism.” For my problematic [Fragestellung], which is concerned with the rise of that ethical “style of life” which was spiritually “adequate” to the economic stage of “capitalism” and which signified capitalism’s victory in the “soul” of man, I believe my terminology is justified. Other features of the phenomena which are being investigated by both of us from different approaches necessarily come into consideration for me. It is, then, a question of terminological differences, and not—at least not on my part—of differences of substance. In particular, as far as I can see, there are no differences whatsoever with regard to our respective attitudes toward historical materialism. It is not my fault if others have exaggerated the significance of my remarks for the weight they give to “ideological” causal factors. It is perfectly possible that when my investigations are finally completed, I may, just for a change, be accused with equal indignation of capitulating to historical materialism, instead of, as now, to ideological factors.
6) I did mention this in a quite different connection (with regard to certain phenomena in Pietism)! It really is a bit rich to conduct a polemic against me in this matter. After I had pointed out to my critic that his remarks on the “hysterical conditions” [hysterische Zustände] among the Baptists arose from a quite evident misunderstanding, he still comes back with the claim that I “admitted” that I was expecting research into hysteria to shed light on the Baptist phenomena. This claim is implicit in the “amusing” question whether this research was supposed to offer assistance in explaining the rise of the “methodical conduct of life.”
My answer to this is:
(1) I have quite simply “admitted” nothing that has not already appeared in my essay.
(2) My critic has not taken the trouble to as much as check on what I declared that I was particularly expecting (or not expecting) from research into hysteria. We can see that “the chain of unfortunate misunderstandings” seems never ending—and for the same reason now as before.
(7) Incidentally, the fact that such epithets as “thorough” were attributed—“at that time!”—to an essay which has—“now!”—failed to “see” the simplest causal problems, does not say much for either the specialist knowledge, or, unfortunately, for the objectivity of the author.
EDITORS’ NOTES
1. Max Weber, “Bemerkungen zu der vorstehenden “Replik,” Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik 26 (1908), pp. 275–83.
2. Echoing Mephistopheles’ cynical advice to the student in Goethe’s Faust, part 1, Scene in Faust’s Study: “Im ganzen haltet Euch an Worte! . . .Denn eben wo Begriffe fehlen, / Da stellt ein Wort zur rechten Zeit sich ein.” (In the main rely on words! . . . For if ideas are what you lack / Just pick a word to fill the gap.) Translation by the editors.
3. Nationalökonomie was a distinctive German tradition of economics that, unlike British political economy, emphasized the centrality of “human need.” For the term and its context, see Keith Tribe, “Introduction” to Keith Tribe (ed.), Reading Weber (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 1–14, at pp. 4–5.
4. Karl Gottfried Lamprecht: Deutsches Wirtschaftsleben im Mittelalter (German Economic Life in the Middle Ages), 4 volumes (Leipzig: 1885–86).
5. As things turned out, Weber postponed his revisions until the summer of 1919.
6. Notwithstanding this protestation, Weber did respond at length to a critique that was published “elsewhere” (that is, in a journal other than the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik): Felix Rachfahl’s appraisals in the Internationale Wochenschrift für Wissenschaft, Kunst und Technik. Weber’s rejoinders are translated here of this volume.
Rebuttal of the Critique of the “Spirit” of Capitalism1
Editors’ Preface: Felix Rachfahl,2 professor of history at the University of Kiel, provoked Weber’s fiercest defense of The Protestant Ethic. In two essays written in 1909 and 1910,3 Rachfahl criticized Weber’s argument on a number of grounds. A key objection was that the concept of the capitalist “spirit” was both too broad and too narrow. It was too broad in supposing a clear distinction between traditional subsistence economies (and their corresponding attitudes toward work) and capitalist ones. It was too narrow in its focus on wor
k: concern for family, striving for luxury, honor, and power are also central to the capitalist spirit. Besides, Rachfahl continues, there is a danger in Weber’s analysis that the capitalist spirit will look more “ethical” than in fact it was and is. While some successful entrepreneurs may have had qualms about eating oysters (one of Weber’s illustrations in The Protestant Ethic), many others have consumed such culinary luxuries with gusto, indicating no particular relationship between the spirit of capitalism and a guilty conscience. On the contrary, an entrepreneur may have a strong Berufsethik while engaging in conduct that cannot be described as moral in the accepted sense of the word. Weber’s “ideal type” analysis has led him astray; Rachfahl purports to stick to historical realities.
Another criticism that Rachfahl leveled at Weber concerned the discussion of asceticism in The Protestant Ethic. Rachfahl denies the continuity between monastic asceticism and its Protestant successor, but he also questions the plausibility of depicting asceticism (Catholic or Protestant) as “rational.” Rachfahl also takes issue with Weber (and Weber’s friend and colleague Ernst Troeltsch) on other empirical claims. Among Rachfahl’s counterassertions are that Dutch capitalism owed little to Calvinism; that the link between Puritanism and the development of American capitalism is doubtful; and that Jacob Fugger is much more representative of the spirit of capitalism than Baxter. More generally, since capitalism preceded Puritanism, the latter cannot be said to be a cause of the former. Weber and Troeltsch have wildly overestimated the importance of religious motives in the emergence and trajectory of capitalism. Conversely, both scholars have underestimated the impact of toleration for capitalism’s growth. If capitalism was strongest in the Protestant lands of England and Holland, it was because the practice of toleration was strongest there.
Weber’s response to these accusations and counterclaims can be found below. They led Rachfahl to take up Weber’s arguments once more. In his rejoinder of 1910, Rachfahl defends some of his own earlier views on toleration and asceticism, claims that Weber has misunderstood one of his own new sources, William Petty, and reaffirms the point, Weber’s recent protestations notwithstanding, that Calvinism is at the center of the argument in The Protestant Ethic. In addition, Rachfahl continues to deconstruct Weber’s notion of the “spirit” of capitalism. Far from caricaturing that concept, as Weber claims, Rachfahl argues that he has described it faithfully—and continues to chart its metamorphosis. To prove the point, Rachfahl offers the following précis: The capitalist spirit, according to Weber, is not the capitalist spirit per se but a particular species of it that only emerged in modern times under the influence of ascetic Protestantism. That species has coexisted with the older capitalist spirit. So the “spirit” of Weber’s usage is a particular feature of the capitalist “spirit” more generally, a feature that Weber identifies with the rational conduct of life (Lebensführung). Yet Rachfahl discerns a problem. Weber has previously described that rational conduct of life as a constituent component of the capitalist spirit. What does this mean? Is it a component of equal rank among others unstated? Or is it the essential component? In any case, Weber clouds the historical issue of the spirit of capitalism by an idiosyncratic “ideal type” that excludes big financiers and others. It is as if Weber had said: “When I talk about a horse, I mean a gray, which is a horse in my sense.” Even more confusingly, the “spirit” of capitalism now appears to be a mere “habitus” or disposition, whereas previously it amounted to something stronger: the potent presence of innerworldly asceticism.
As this summary has indicated, Rachfahl’s critiques of 1909 and 1910 are aimed at Troeltsch as well as Weber.4 Sometimes the two scholars are treated as collaborators that can be tarred with the same brush. At other times, Rachfahl drives a wedge between them, either by drawing on their somewhat different formulations or by claiming that Troeltsch is distancing himself from some of Weber’s arguments. Weber found this argumentative tactic particularly infuriating.
Weber called the debate with Rachfahl sterile and worthless. A more dispassionate analysis shows something more fruitful. Weber’s rebuttals led, firstly, to the redescription of key terms (notably, “the spirit of capitalism”) and the introduction/emphasis of others (for instance, Habitus and Lebensstil). Secondly, Weber’s rejoinders show him now to be principally concerned with the nature of the Protestant Berufsethik, the “ethic of the calling,” that helped shape the spirit of capitalism and thereby contributed to the development of a qualitatively new kind of human being. Thirdly, the replies to Rachfahl furnish an explicit account of Weber’s methodological procedure (especially his “ideal type” approach to historical investigation) and offer a number of additional historical illustrations to support his argument; some of them were incorporated into the second draft of The Protestant Ethic, published in 1920.
Perhaps most intriguing of all, the debate prompted Weber not only to confront directly the counterfactual question of what would have happened to capitalism, as an economic system, if the capitalist “spirit” had been absent. It also directed him to recount the thought processes that eventuated in The Protestant Ethic and to describe the relationship of that essay to its companion text “Churches” and “Sects” in North America. For inciting this reconstruction, located in part two of the second rebuttal, we can be grateful to Felix Rachfahl. Weber, of course, felt differently. “Petty,” “opinionated,” “quibbling,” and “smug” were just a few of the insults that he hurled at his adversary. And these were not the harshest.
* * *
In the Internationale Wochenschrift (vol. 3, nos. 39–43, Sept. 25– Oct. 23, 1909), Professor Rachfahl has published a critique of my essays on The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism (vols. 20–21 of this journal, as well as vols. 25–26 and the article in Christliche Welt, 1906, pp. 558ff., 577ff.). [1] To the extent that the critique is incidentally directed against my friend E. Troeltsch, he will respond to this in the same journal. Even though it would be most natural and, for me, most sensible to do the same, I unfortunately do not feel able to do so, in spite of the high esteem in which I hold the editor, in particular for his work as head of the “Deutsche Literaturzeitung.” In the case of a mere polemic such as this, I would, of course, as would E. Troeltsch, have overlooked the fact that the Internationale Wochenschrift, which was founded by F. Althoff, has certain editorial customs to which I would not be inclined to adapt. But the editor has chosen to leave it to the sole discretion of my colleague Troeltsch, who is only incidentally involved, as to whether he would like to reply to this article, which is directed almost en-tirely against me. I would, naturally, even be prepared to ignore this incivility—for that is what it is under the present circumstances. However, my esteemed critic has a habit of treating the two of us as a single unit, in order to make each of us responsible for the other—which has the advantage that actual (or supposed) errors of the one appear to apply to the other too. Moreover, he cannot resist playing one of us off against the other when it suits him, so that the “Weber-Troeltsch” unit, which he posits as the embodiment of the views of the one and the other, appears to suffer from an evident inner conflict. In view of this (it must be said) somewhat underhand practice, it seems sensible to go my own way in external matters too, and expressly to disclaim any responsibility for what I did not say, just as Troeltsch would undoubtedly do as far as he is concerned.
If I may, I should like to add the following. Anyone who had properly read our respective essays knows that Troeltsch has absolutely no need of my findings for his purposes and propositions (quite apart from the concept of sects, which Rachfahl fails to mention at all—compare Archiv, vol. 21, pp. 63–64, note 1 [note 200 in this volume], and the article in the Christliche Welt previously cited). His findings could be correct even if mine were wrong, and vice versa. He examines the historical process of the structure of the social doctrines of the Christian churches—I have so far only attempted to explain a particular phenomenon regarding the conduct of life [Leb
ens-führung] of their members with regard to its (originally) religious determination. If he occasionally refers to my work [2], then this is always regarding matters which are peripheral to his concerns but which happen to coincide with mine. There is only one exception, namely, the question of church and sect, and this is not our concern here. And it is appropriate to emphasize strongly that absolutely no collaboration [Kollektiv-Arbeit], even of a latent kind, has occurred. My work on these matters, some of which I was lecturing on twelve years ago, was not (as Rachfahl, following Troeltsch, assumes) only inspired by Sombart’s “Kapitalismus” (see my emphatic remark in Archiv, vol. 20, p. 19, note 1 [note 26 in this volume]). It may be that Troeltsch, who approached the topic that interested him by his own route a long time ago as well, may have been stimulated by individual comments in my essays to rethink a few of his problems from economic and sociological angles. Indeed, he has stated this from time to time. There is no question of one of us “taking over” the other one’s “theory.” It is simply this: anyone who considers these matters at all must arrive at a similar way of viewing them. It is therefore not surprising that Troeltsch’s findings in his far more comprehensive problem area should be such that the essential features of what I have set out in tackling my problem should complement his work. If I had extended my essay, I should have had the task of dealing with large sections of the area now being examined by Troeltsch. As a nontheologian, I should assuredly never have been able to carry this out in a manner equal to that of Troeltsch. However, as far as my own early studies permit me to judge, I am aware of no significant points in which I would have had any reason to dispute his account. Least of all can I deduce any such reason from the trivialities that Rachfahl holds against him. But Troeltsch will of course have to take the responsibility as a scholar for what he has said in the face of criticism, just as exclusively as I must for my writings. I have only made these observations on Troeltsch’s article in order that critics of the stamp of Rachfahl do not read into this division of responsibility a rejection of Troeltsch’s findings on my part. But now to the matter in hand.
