Pragmatic and Relatable Model of the Development of Capitalist Society - Research Paper Example

?Max Weber Max Weber 2 As one of the creators of the study of social science, Max Weber developed a cohesive, pragmatic and relatable model of the development of capitalist society. He broke new ground in utilizing non-deterministic evidence to examine religious, economic, religious and historic factors. Though profoundly influential, his views can be criticized as having adopted a too-narrow view of the Protestant ethic and of the impact of technology on the capitalistic power structure. Max Weber 3 Title Max Weber’s profound contributions to the disciplines of sociology, politics and economics place him squarely in the vanguard of the development of social sciences. His theories broke new ground, proposing that interpretive, non-empirical evidence can be used to analyze and understand the intentions and actions of individuals within socio-economic groups. Weber’s works put into perspective the effect of culture and religion on economics. Placed within a historical perspective, Weber’s work was bold for the time in that it refutes the notion that there can be a quantifiable gauge for the study of social dynamics. Observation and analysis, skills that served Weber well during his esteemed career, were part of a legacy of academic achievement, passed on to him by his accomplished parents. Weber: A brief biography Born into an affluent family, Weber’s father was trained as an attorney, held a prominent position in the civil service and was a member of the National Liberal Party. Max Weber, Sr.’s involvement in public life exposed his son to a wealth of socio-political ideas, the family’s home being something of a gathering place for many leading intellectuals of the period. The younger Weber thrived in this atmosphere, which inspired him to take up Goethe, whom he read voraciously from a young age as well as many other volumes of classical works (Ringer, 2004). Law school and a brief stint in the military during World War I were followed by the beginnings of a legal career, which further whetted his appetite for research and theory. The early stages of his professional life were marked by social and economic studies inspired by a growing Max Weber 4 progressive movement, which Weber joined in 1888 as a member of the Verein fur Sozialpolitik, a professional association for economists. “What united the members of the Verein was a belief that reforms were urgently needed in Germany” (Swedberg & Agevall, 2005). The Verein proved to be a stepping stone for Weber, who earned notice for his report on the displacement of workers in East Prussia by Polish emigres (Kim, 2007). Appointments to Freiburg, then Heidelberg University followed. It was at Heidelberg that Weber’s brilliance attracted the attention of other intellectuals, writers and scholars in the charged academic atmosphere of the famous university town. Germany of the late-19th century was a brash new nation, one gripped by hubris and the aggressive policies of the Prussian political ascendancy. The nation’s burgeoning self-confidence gripped many in the intellectual class, including some of Weber’s contemporaries. Refusing to be swept up, Weber remained true to his progressive convictions, venting his feelings about Germany’s increasing predilection for saber rattling. “(Weber) also wrote passionate polemics in behalf of parliamentary reform and against the annexationist hysteria that seized many of his colleagues…” (Ringer, 2004). After his father’s death in 1896, Weber’s unresolved, stormy relationship with his parent contributed to a nervous breakdown, which so debilitated Weber that he was eventually forced to resign from his teaching post and to suspend all scholarly activities. Ironically, Weber’s condition, which led to an abrupt and radical change in his professional life, brought about an intellectual change of direction and priority that would round out his personal philosophy and make him a pioneer in the developing field of social science (Kim, 2007). The resultant study Max Weber 5 and contemplation during this period of private scholarship led to the publication of what many regard as Weber’s seminal work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, and also Economy and Society, Part II. During this period Weber turned toward his mother’s Calvinist roots in works that illustrated “the notion of the ascetic calling and its uniqueness within the ethics of the world religions. The importance of this Calvinist ethic and its influence in Western culture are made very plain there, and his already worked-out analysis of it from that period returns to inform his own later ethical proposals” (Camic, Gorski & Trubek, 2005). Weber’s growing interest in the ethical concerns and the role of religion within the social sciences is made manifest by his assertion that quantifiable evidence alone is inadequate to the task of progressive, enlightened and effective social engineering. In Objectivity in Social Science and Social Policy, Weber posits that “social policy could not be created by ‘science,’ but depended, rather, on the values it was designed to fulfill” in an ultimately healthy competition between concepts and hopes, in which “the highest ideals, which move us most powerfully, are worked out in the struggle through all time through other ideals, which are as holy to others as ours are to us” (Camic, Gorski & Trubek, 2005). In later years, Weber dabbled in post-war politics, including a failed run for parliamentary office in the new Weimar Republic. Perhaps too scholarly and intellectual for the world of national politics, Weber taught at the universities of Vienna and Munich in 1919 and 1920. He continued to produce brilliant theoretical works during these years, including his Max Weber 6 influential General Economic History, as well as Politics as a Vocation. A compiled treatise on religion followed, prior to Weber’s death in 1920. The Protestant ethic Weber’s rejection of determinism lies in his belief that the mass geographic movements and economic changes that took place in Northern Europe, transformative though they were, were part of a confluence of social phenomena, which combined to bring about the modern form of capitalism. Economics and religious ideas come together in his assertion that the idea that hard work equates to a degree of self-determination influenced massive numbers of Protestants to engage in a form of market economy. In Weber’s theory, such determinants can never be more than a part of a greater whole and, as such, are intrinsically more susceptible to criticism (both informed and non-informed) than could empirical evidence. Consequently, criticism of Weber’s Protestant ethic thesis is detailed and draws, likewise, on the same kind of evidence as does its target. That the imposition and spread of capitalism in Europe was dependent on an ethic has been attacked on several fronts. “Most of the…criticisms of Weber rest on his assertion that modern capitalism could not have flourished in Europe without an ethic or spirit which had its roots in ascetic Protestantism. These criticisms themselves fall into two major categories: (1) that capitalism was a growing force before the Reformation and that it would have thrived as well under Catholicism as under Protestantism and (2) that the driving force behind capitalism was not ascetism but rationality” (Pierotti, 2003). Max Weber 7 Indeed, historian H.M. Robertson cites Thomas Aquinas in insisting that the social and religious conditions that merged to create capitalism in no way occurred strictly according to Weber’s theory. Protestantism in the 16th and 17th centuries was newly emerged from the Catholic forms and traditions from which it had broken. As such, the difference in church doctrines would not yet have been sufficiently significant to account for a distinctly Protestant explanation. Robertson cites Aquinas on various points that illustrate the persistence of fundamental similarities, including basic beliefs regarding salvation. “There seems to be no essential difference between the doctrine of the Catholics and the Puritans on this point (the calling)” Robertson quoted Aquinas, referring to the notion that individuals must take action in order to be saved (Pierotti, 2003). Numerous examples exist of Catholic sects and brotherhoods which were notable for their insistence on the sanctity of honest toil and equitable reward. “The Jansenists…reminded their flocks that the Christian life was ‘a serious life, a life of toil and not of diversion, play or pleasure’ so that one ought never to forget that it ‘should be filled with some useful and sober occupation suitable for one’s state of existence’” (Pierotti, 2003). Robertson also cited the example of the Jesuit order, which taught a similar doctrine. In some parts of Europe, the Catholic church actively supported those classes of society that provided the labor on which society relied (not to mention a population that supported the church). “In France, the church went out of its way to welcome the honest bourgeois on the ground that he was the only type of man who followed God’s commands and lived in a ‘calling’” (Pierotti, 2003). Max Weber 8 Power Weber’s conception of the nature of power, while very likely more pragmatic (and less resolvable) than Marx’s ideas of social revolution were, in some respects, contradictory and possibly not sufficiently objective in their view of the bourgeois. His assertion that capitalism sprang from the hard work and frugality inherent in the Protestant ethic was perhaps too close to a romanticized picture of the bourgeois struggle against those who wield power. While Weber doesn’t particularly commend the bourgeois lifestyle or find it attractive, some have found his characterization of the emergence of the worker class less than objective and lacking in its examination of factors that impact Catholics and Protestants alike. Weber pointed to a number of virtues, in which “the combination of hard work, methodic economic activity, frugal life and the reinvestment of savings: (were) a description which is very close to the idealized self-image of the bourgeois!” (Lowy, 2007). It is to be remembered that Weber considered himself bourgeois, a potentially significant factor in considering his notions of power with the capitalistic structure. “One could say that (Weber) is divided between his identity as a bourgeois which fully supports German capitalism and its imperialist power, and his statute as an intellectual, sensitive to the arguments of the Romantic anti-capitalist Zivilisationskritik so influential among the German academic mandarins at the beginning of the 20th century” (Lowy, 2007). This split bourgeois/intellectual perspective did not reckon with the struggle of the Proletariat, as did Marx, or concern itself with the cynical exploitation of the under classes by those who wielded “status” and “power.” And though he came to decry imperial Germany’s expansionist policies, Weber avoided addressing the plight of Max Weber 9 indigenous populations, which were often victimized by Imperialism and who themselves quickly became the underclass, profoundly vulnerable to the status and power of their European rulers (Lowy, 2007). For some, Weber’s ideas about social stratification, about what it means to be rich and poor, stem from a misreading of important influences and sources. The writings of Benjamin Franklin made a deep impression on Weber, who drew on the American’s philosophy as a reinforcement of the precepts of capitalism. Weber interpreted Franklin as espousing the Protestant ethos of frugality, hard work and of savings. In his zeal, it is quite possible that Weber misunderstood Franklin who, according to some writers, is simply offering day-to-day advice rather than proposing an ethic. “Far from demonstrating a commitment to the ‘spirit of capitalism,’ and the accumulation of wealth as an end in itself and moral duty, Franklin’s writings are in fact evidence against the existence of such a spirit,” and that, as such, “what Franklin is offering is prudential advice, rather than insisting on a moral imperative” (Pierotti, 2003). In his own time, Franklin famously struggled against notions of status and power and is unlikely to have been laying out a manifesto for the accumulation of money and power for its own sake. The Iron Cage Weber may have given in to flights of fancy when it came to Benjamin Franklin, but his assessment of the true nature of capitalism was rooted in rationalistic pragmatism. Whereas Marx had put forth a model in which some great industrial nation would rise against those who controlled capital, Weber maintained that such an eventuality was not possible given the grip the Max Weber 10 capitalist system held on modern society. His idea of a charismatic capitalism gave way to a rational legal power structure; he realized during the war that even changes wrought by such a cataclysmic event could not dislodge the entrenched political and economic system. As the war neared its end, Weber retained “not even a nostalgic whiff of the charismatic” view of the status quo. “With its vocational ethic of duty and its vocational sense of honor, it has created ‘that iron cage…through which economic labor receives its present form and destiny…a system which inescapably rules the economy and through it the everday destiny of man” (Mitzman, 2002). For Weber, this was a vicious circle in which “the alternative to this rational private capitalism would not be less bureaucratic domination and rigidity, but more” (Mitzman, 2002). The evolution of Weber’s thinking on the structure of authority, which led him to a rationalist position, is in part attributable to the instability of the charismatic view. This outlook, which drew from the affinity of the aristocracy to charisma, is a theory without any solid basis in analyzable, observable evidence. “Despite (its) affinities…it is impossible to make any absolute identification of aristocratic feudalism as the historical embodiment of charisma. For Weber defines charisma as specifically a-historical” (Mitzman, 2002). And, with the overwhelming advance of modern, capitalist society, even the traditional authoritarian hierarchy, so prevalent in the German character, had been eclipsed. The iron cage was a morose, yet inevitable and unavoidable outcome, the logical extension of the capitalistic ethic. Weber’s rationalistic theories, to which he devoted the majority of his scholarship in his latter years, came to encompass political, economic and religious institutions which had come Max Weber 11 together to form capitalism. For Weber, these conclusions were inescapably, relentlessly logical. “But the legacy of this process of rationalization is the loss of any sense that the world is ultimately meaningful, an abandonment of certain naive hopes…” (Mitzman, 2002). However, as with Marx, Weber reckoned without the effect that advancing technology would have on the capitalist power structure, the relationship between labor and capital and the means of production. Weber and his contemporaries had been witness to astounding progress in the field of technology. Industrial productivity was one example; Germany’s leadership in the development of military technology (for instance, the ingenuity of the Krupp armament works) was another. While Weber, Marx and others of their time could not imagine the rapid pace of change that would unfold in the 20th century, the examples of their own time should have alerted them to the fact that technology held tremendous potential for improving not only productivity, but also for easing the burden of the worker and increasing standards of living, life expectations, health care and other socio-economic determinants. Nevertheless, Weber theorized a largely accurate, practical and relatable idea of how capitalist society developed and sustained itself. Max Weber 12 References Camic, C., Gorski, P.S. & Trubek, D.M. (2005). Max Weber’s Economy and Society: A Critical Companion. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 49, 50. Kim, S.H. (24 August 2007). “Max Weber.” Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy. Web. Lowy, M. (Winter 2007). “Marx and Weber: Critics of Capitalism.” New Politics, vol. XI-2. Web. Mitzman, A. (1970). The Iron Cage: An Historical Interpretation of Max Weber. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. 226, 245, 260. Pierotti, S. (2003). The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism: Criticisms of Weber’s Thesis. Atlanta, GA: Georgia Tech University. Ringer, F.K. (2004). Max Weber: An Intellectual Biography. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. 3, 123. Swedberg, R. & Agevall, O. (2005). The Max Weber Dictionary: Key Words and Central Concepts. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 291. Read More