Max Weber and the Spirit of Modern Capitalism - 100 years later

Centenary Conference, London, 11-12 June, 2004, organised by Max Weber Studies and supported by the British Sociological Association. Venue: Toynbee Hall, 28 Commercial St, E1. Registration 9.30am.

See also < http://www.maxweberstudies.org/anconfdetails.htm>
Contact: s.whimster@londonmet.ac.uk

PROGRAMME (as of 15 May)

Father William Taylor, author of This Bright Field - a study of Spitalfields, will conduct a short tour of local religious sites, including Wesley's Chapel.

Prof Jack Barbalet, University of Leicester
"Max Weber and Judaism: An Insight into the 'Protestant Ethic' Methodology".
[Max Weber's perennial classic, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, contains an argument not simply about the significance of Calvinist theology for the ethos of modern capitalism, but also concerning the necessarily limited role of post-exilic Judaism in the development of capitalism. Indeed, the most significant difference between the first edition of The Protestant Ethic (1905) and the second edition (1920) is development of the idea that the Jews are a "pariah people" capable of contributing no more than a "pariah capitalism". Weber felt compelled to develop this case in response to Werner Sombart, The Jews and Modern Capitalism (1911), in which an alternative to Weber's argument concerning the Protestant sources of modern capitalism is presented. Weber's conceptualisation of the Jews as a "pariah people" has attracted much criticism. Yet what the concept reveals of Weber's methodology has not been explored in the literature. Once the limitations of Weber's method, as revealed by consideration of the "pariah" concept, are clear, then the main thesis of The Protestant Ethic can then also be reconsidered.]

Prof Peter Breiner, Dept. of Political Science State University of New York at Albany
"Weber's Protestant Ethic as Hypothetical Narrative"
[This paper addresses the "hypothetical," "self-referential, and "constructed" nature of Weber's Protestant Ethic and the 'Spirit' of Capitalism. In particular, I want to argue that complaints of commentators that his account lacks empirical verification are misplaced. Weber's narrative in the Protestant Ethic does not function as an historical explanation of the origins of capitalism that can be tested against a body of facts. Rather, using the ideal type, it seeks to give a plausible account of how modern capitalism could have arisen, or more accurately, how an agent motivated to rationally accumulate capital could have arisen so as to launch as a byproduct of that agent's activity a system of social relations that can accumulate capital without requiring an entrepreneurial type to move it along. I also argue that the deliberately constructed and self-referential nature of Weber's concepts, especially of the Calvinist ethic and the capitalist "spirit," is a strength not a weakness of his account. This can be seen if we read this work against both Adam Smith and marginalist accounts of capital accumulation. Curiously, no commentator has found Weber's account of the origins of the vocational politician to be problematic even though the it is even more arbitrarily constructed than the that of the vocational capitalist.]

Professor David Chalcraft, University of Derby
"Max Weber and Merrie Olde England"
[This looks at Weber's treatment of the subject in the PESC, and how he was following literary characterisations he was familiar with (e.g. Washington Irving, Scott, Dickens). This was further endorsed in the second edition through his quotations from among others Herman Levy, who had written much on the contemporary sociology of English society. Further textual references relate to his personal experience in Scotland in 1895. ]

Dr Peter Ghosh, St Anne's College, Oxford
"Interpreting the text"
[Ever since its appearance Weber's "PESC" has been subject to interpretation. Peter Ghosh forwards his own reading of the text, one that differs distinctively from previous readings. He argues that the text has yet to be fully appreciated and talk of its demise is premature.]

Prof Liah Greenfeld, University of Boston
"Nationalism and the Modern Economy: Communing with the Spirit of Max Weber."
[The radical implications of the Weber thesis have yet to be fully appreciated. The Weber thesis analyses the start of modernity and Weber was right to locate its starting point in sixteenth century England. It is here that religious radicals create the first distinctively modern political community in the form of the nation. Following on from her book "The Spirit of Capitalism", Greenfeld will also argue that the explanation of the modern economic reality requires the use of Weber's thesis but at the same time its reconsideration.]

Dr Austin Harrington, University of Leeds and Humboldt University
"Concrete versus abstract universalism: some differences between Weber's and Troeltsch's conceptions of modernity"
[ In the light of current thinking about 'multiple modernities', the paper considers whether Ernst Troeltsch's late thematization of 'Europeanism' might not represent a more culturally localized and singularized understanding of the meaning of claims to universal validity than Weber's more abstract 'occidental rationalism'. Weber's opening words in the Vorbemerkung to GARS I famously vacillate between an assertion of the 'universal significance and validity' of the Western course of development and the suggestion of a perspectivistic withdrawal of this assertion as being only what we Westerners 'would like to imagine' ('wie wenigstens wir uns gerne vorstellen'). The paper considers whether Troeltsch's late writing on Europeanism, which acknowledges a more explicit debt to European cultural ideas and the philosophy of history, might not represent a more philosophically satisfactory mediation of this relationship between the empirical reality of universal rationalization (or what we today call 'globalization') and the culturally specific normative claims to universal validity made by definite agents in history ('we Westerners', 'we Europeans').]

Dr Peter Josephson, Uppsala University
"Max Weber and the concept of Beruf"
[The paper discusses the secularisation of the protestant work ethic and the uses of the concept of Beruf in theological and philosophical debates during the 19th and early 20th century.]

Professor Hartmut Lehmann (Emory College, Atlanta and MWG editor of PESC)
"Max Weber's use of scholarly praise and criticism in PESC"
[From the very start of its publication the Protestant Ethic thesis has attracted critical reviews. As we know Weber replied is a series of articles to his contemporary critics. While offering praise and condemnation of other authors, often of a personal nature, these remarks do in fact contain a number of interesting insights into the Weber thesis.]

Professor Wolfgang J. Mommsen (University of Duesseldorf)
"Capitalism, theoretical economics and the pre-history of the thesis about capitalism and the Protestant Ethic".
[This draws upon the results of Wolfgang Mommsen's recent research on Max Weber`s lectures on "General theoretical economics" at Freiburg and Heidelberg universities in the 1890`s and in addition carries the story up to 1904. The paper is of especial interest because it charts the move from Weber's lecturing on the subject of economics to the re-launch of the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik (where PESC was first published), one of whose goals was to consider the cultural causes and consequences of economic phenomena.]

Professor Hans-Peter Müller, Humboldt University, Berlin
"Work and the conduct of life. Weber's legacy"
[The paper deals primarily with the concept of work in Weber's oeuvre and its implications for the conduct of life.]

Dr Mohammad Nafissi, London Metropolitan University
"Islamic Reformation as Secular Democracy"
[Are the long term decline and the contemporary crisis of Muslim societies rooted in mainstream Islam? Is there a long marginalised Islamic legacy that may serve to legitimise and energise the movement for democratisation of the Muslim societies? Is reformation as a concept useful in explaining the decline of the Islamic zone and the prospects for its revival? This paper elaborates the positive answer it gives to these interrelated questions through constructing a concept of reformation based on the example of Protestantism, but capacious enough to accommodate the distinctive features of Islam. The concept is then used to frame and analyse certain major turning points in Islamic history and, in consonance with the common claim of Muslim reformers, defend the case for considering democracy as a necessary element of any sustainable form of Islamic reformation in the modern context.]

Dr Göle Nilüfer, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris
"Islam: Alternative or Failed Modernity?"

Prof Kari Palonen, Jyväskylä University, Finland
"Weber and Sombart on Politicians"
["Die Protestantische Ethik" has a most immediate link to Weber's "Politik als Beruf in the double sense of the concept of Beruf as both profession and vocation. This distinction has a contemporary link to the heated debates concerning the legitimacy and the value of professional politicians. One of their fiercest critics was Werner Sombart, who edited a short-lived journal "Morgen". In a series of articles in 1907 he asked, why was it that in German the academics and literati - "die Gebildeten" - turned away from politics and found in the rise of professional politicians a main reason for this disgust with politics. Sombart's critique contains elements of a search for an "objective spirit" beyond politics and a nostalgia for a politics of gentlemen (Honoratioren), but also insights such as professional politicians are a by-product of democratisation of politics itself or that in the Wilhelmine Germany parliament and elections offered only second-rate careers.
Friedrich Naumann replied to Sombart in his journal. He insisted on Sombart's dilettantism towards electoral practices and defended the value of agitation. When Sombart was the co-editor of Weber in the "Archiv" and Naumann a friend of Weber, there is no doubt that Weber must have heard about Sombart's campaign against politics and politicians. However, in his contemporary writings and letters, there are no direct references to Sombart's series of articles. Despite this, in "Politik als Beruf", there are formulations and classifications which are directed against the specific Sombartian form of denouncing politics and politicians. This concerns, for example, the relationship between demagogy and "Sache," which Weber did not see as simple oppositions to each other. The figure of Sombart can also be seen behind Weber's critical views on the academic and literary disgust for the daily electoral and parliamentary politics. Weber deserves to be appreciated as one who clearly understood that a defence of politics without a defence of professional politicians would be an empty declaration.]

Nikola Regent (Central European University, Budapest)
"Weber versus the economic"
[The paper examines Weber's enmity towards the 'economic'. Under this term, political economy, national economy, economic policy, the economic system in general, and all economic and related phenomena are included.
Weber's prognosis of capitalism's future is well known; it is argued here that the negative attitude towards the 'economic' can be traced throughout whole of his work.
Two main lines Weber's critique against the 'economic' follows are identified: (1) against political economy, on the methodological grounds; (2) against political economy and the 'economic' in general, from his own values (personal views). The author first gives an overview of (1), and then concentrates on (2).
Regarding methodology, Weber's major criticism is that political economy is value-prejudiced, its standpoint is "the increase of the 'wealth' of population", taken as something indisputable and self-evident. And, it is only a specific perspective promoting specific ends.
The main part of the paper deals with Weber's more 'partisan' writings. The focus is particularly on his Freiburg inaugural lecture, the strongest expression of his anti-'economic' thoughts. Contrary to the most influential interpretations (particularly Mommsen), discussing the Freiburg lecture mainly from the point of nation and nationalism, it is argued here that Weber's attack against the 'economic' is the most important feature of the lecture. "In every sphere we find that the economic way of looking things is on advance." Social and economic history replaces political history, social policy politics, economic power relations legal ones. However, what is most dangerous is not the supremacy over social sciences, but the dominance economic way of thinking assumes over the whole life of modern man. Political (and cultural) aims should have a primacy over economic ones. The economy should be only a servant of politics, and not vice versa, and politics should be dictated by cultural and other 'higher' aims.]

Pier-Paolo Pasqualone & Alan Scott, University of Innsbruck
"Capitalism and the Spirit of Critique"
[A century after the publication of "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism", Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello have offered us an account of a new spirit; one that emerges from capitalism's capacity to selectively absorb critique and thereby find new sources of legitimation. Their work can be seen as an attempt to synthesize recent debates about flexible capitalism, temporary contracts, management by objectives, the 'audit society', etc. into a comprehensive theory of socio-cultural change. Like Weber before them, Boltanski and Chiapello associate this spirit with both a new conduct of life (Lebensführung in Weber's terms) in which individuals are set new challenges, and with a new form of capitalism's self-legitimation: the 'project polis'. This paper seeks to do two things: (i) to examine the differences between capitalism's alleged new spirit and that so famously described by Weber; (ii) to examine the extent to which recent social movements critical of capitalism - globalization-critical movements/NGOs such as ATTAC - themselves embody the spirit of the 'project polis'.]

Professor Sandro Segre, University of Genoa
"Weber on Trust, Social Norms and Modern Capitalism"
[The paper focuses on how Weber's writings, especially his essays concerning the Stock Exchange and the Protestant Ethic, imply a theory of the relevance of social norms for modern capitalism. A perusal of Weber's conception of norms, as evidenced by these and other Weberian texts, shows how Weber's conception of norms is incompatible both with Parsons' interpretation of Weber, and with some assumptions held by rational choice theory insofar as they bear on Weber's concept of social action. In an agreed-upon economic exchange, every participant has made a commitment to uphold contractual clauses, which have been rationally stipulated for this purpose. Every participant, moreover, expects that all the other participants act in consonance with a like commitment, and orients his or her action toward them according to this expectation. In the market community, trust is based not only on the legal protection provided by the law to contractual agreements, but also on the reputation of the exchange partners. As they may not know each other, this reputation is impersonal. In a particular milieu such as a Stock Exchange, however, density of relations may promote ethical, as well as unethical, consensual action. While in all markets undetected unethical behavior can diminish impersonal trust and thereby negatively affect business exchanges, in financial markets damage would be particularly serious as a consequence of the concentration of transactions in a few Stock Exchanges. As Weber contended, the leading position of the London Stock Exchange at the turn of the 19th century resulted from effective social control practiced within a close community of brokers who mediated financial transactions taking place there. This informal control included all members of the financial community at large. General compliance with the norms prescribing fair business practices may be accordingly interpreted as a result of individual endorsement of them and/or a rational calculation of benefits.]

Professor Guenther Roth, Columbia University, NY
"Transatlantic Connections:
A Family Context of Max and Marianne Weber's New York Visit 1904"
Note: professor Roth has had to withdraw for family reasons, but we hope to make his paper available at the conference.
[Max Weber's Amerikabild, his "picture" of the United States, was first shaped by the 1848 exile Friedrich Kapp (1824-1884), a leader of the German Republicans in New York, who after his return in 1870 became a close family friend and a paternal mentor. The first section sketches the relations between Friedrich Kapp and Max Weber senior, and also their sons, in the context of the global economic developments before the First World War. The second deals with the Webers' German-American and German-Jewish contacts in New York, the third with their meeting the Lichtensteins, Kapp daughters and sons-in-law. This served Max as a sounding board for evaluating the tensions between Yankee religious tradition, secularization and assimilation (section 4). Finally, I will turn to the fates of three generations of American and German Kapp descendants, a story of German-Jewish relations on both sides of the Atlantic. This completed a cycle of exile and emigration from the eighteen forty-eighters to the refugees from Nazi Germany. If with decreasing intensity, relations with the Weber family continued into the nineteen thirties.]

W.G. Runciman, Trinity College, Cambridge and President of the British Academy
"Not an Elective but a Selective Affinity:
the 'Protestant Ethic' as a Neo-Darwinian Co-evolutionary Hypothesis"
[Although Weber's hypothesis, as originally framed, about the influence of Protestantism on the evolution of modern capitalism has been invalidated by subsequent research, it can be reformulated as a hypothesis about the reciprocal adaptiveness of some elements of Protestant teaching and some aspects of the behaviour of 'modern' capitalists. Weber did not, and could not have been expected to, anticipate the insights of late-20th-century neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory. But he came remarkably close to appreciating the significance of the critical distinction between the competitive selection of information affecting phenotype and competitive selection of its carriers. Stated in these terms, and applied in particular to the evolution of capitalism in the Northern United States, the 'Weber thesis' becomes a persuasive story about how entrepreneurs socialized into an ongoing Puritan sub-culture turned out to be more likely, long after the Reformation itself, to adopt practices which would help them win market share than their non-Protestant or non-Christian competitors. This reformulated version of the thesis is further supported by evolutionary game theory and studies of the so-called 'handicap effect'.]

Professor Larry Scaff, Wayne University
"Weber in the US"
[This paper considers where, when, how, and why Max Weber was read in
the US. It will draw on letter material of Edward Shils who of course was so formative in the reception of European sociology in America.]

Professor Björn Wittrock, Swedish Collegium for the Advanced Study of the Social Sciences
"Multiple Modernities"

Dr Sam Whimster, London Metropolitan University
"R. H. Tawney's puritan ethic"
[R.H. Tawney requires more than an honorific mention in the reception of the 'Weber thesis' in Great Britain. He should first of all be honoured as a prominent member of Toynbee Hall, active in workers' education at the beginning of the century. And in the context of Toynbee Hall's mission under Canon Barnett and contemporaries of Tawney, like William Beveridge, there was a Christian, idealistic and egalitarian impulse to this work. Secondly, Tawney discovered the Weber thesis bringing it to the attention of academia and the Christian Fabian left in his Holland Foundation Lectures in 1922, entitled 'Religious Thought on Social Questions in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries'. This was written up and published as the now famous Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926) that in the field of English historiography has to be considered a far more comprehensive presentation than the 'PESC' itself.
Thirdly, he placed the Weber study in the context of the more general German Fragestellung. While he acknowledged the work of the English economic historians (Cunningham and Ashley), 'it is no reflection on their work to say that the most important contributions of recent years have come from continental students, in particular Troeltsch, Choisy, Sombart, Brentano, Levy, and above all Max Weber, whose celebrated articles on Die Protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus gave a new turn to the discussion.' But Tawney should not be confused as an English Weber. Obviously he accepted the major thrust of the Weber thesis that the puritan religious revolution was a major causal factor in the rise of those distinctive attitudes to government, economic activity and ethics that together formed the basis of 'our' modernity. But Tawney did not 'buy into' Weber's value free science, or his country-hopping ideal types. What one reads in Tawney is a well-crafted historical narrative of the Tudor 'revolution' that marked out the main lines of progress and drew a clear moral lesson about the dislocation of Church, monarchy, and people. If the English puritan revolution was the 'big-bang' theory of English modernity, you require little in the way of scientific schooling to be able to pick up its echoes as they resonate even today.
The Tudor revolution laid the foundations by which trade would follow its own colonial and domestic dynamic, the official Church would remain in permanent tutelage to monarchy and establishment, English Parliament and its liberties were secured by the soldier-saints of the civil war, and public morality became the private ethics of conscience. This is history, not only analytic in Weber's sense, but also in the 'Whig' sense of Macaulay. It seeks to address and inform a public audience about the nature of the English lineages of modernity - what it had achieved but also where it was vulnerable and brittle, and here no more so than the cataclysmic industrial modernity of the late eighteenth and nineteenth century. Now that Great Britain had come through that defining and above all amoral experience - that ethics and welfare had no place in commerce- and having survived the Great War, it was time to consider what the new industrial colossus could deliver in terms of the ends for which people live rather than means alone. His book Egalitarianism (1921) is an argument about how people treat each other in society, an argument for the moral worth of each individual - something that could only be secured by transforming the existing relations between social classes. His book The Acquisitive Society (1931) is a critique of the new material civilization but also a critique of the dominant discourse in English political economy (including the Utilitarians) that human happiness is not to be achieved through a narrowly drawn individualism and hedonism.
The paper concludes with a consideration of the 'Weber-Troeltsch' problematic, not least through Tawney's eyes rather than 'our' contemporary Weber. Should this problematic be regarded as a collegial division of labour, all part of 'Heidelberger Geselligkeit' with Weber emphasizing the world-historical significance of Puritanism and Troeltsch the universal features of natural law inhering within the European Christian tradition? Certainly the divergences are striking and should not be minimised. Weber located the origins of modernity within the particularising and exclusive discourse of Calvinism, which through its elective affinity with a nascent modern capitalism became a universal form of conduct. Troeltsch (especially in his examination of the role of St Paul) differentiated between validity and universalism. Revelation and the will of god confirm authority, but should that authority be assessed as universally valid? In the wider picture of natural law, Troeltsch would answer yes, and in the narrower tradition of Calvinism the answer would be no. If this is a legitimate distinction, should we infer that secularised natural law and modern capitalism have different grounds for their validity and that this the way to read jointly Troeltsch and Weber?]

Prof Sami Zubaida, Birkbeck College, London.
Weber's City and the 'Islamic City'
[The City played an important part in Weber's construction of the episodes making up the uniqueness of the West and the links to the mergence of Modern Western Capitalism. Religion, kinship and guilds are the major elements in the contrast drawn between the Medieval European city and those of antiquity and the orient. Extensive literature on the 'Islamic city' (in quotes because a unitary type is debatable) has dealt with some of these questions, with or without reference to Weber. What role did Muslim law and institutions, especially the waqf foundations, play in the structure of the city and its economic life? What was the nature of guilds and associations? What part did kinship play? And was it the worldly implications of some Islamic ethic which determined its nature, and to what extent did this influence political and military structures which shaped cities?]