Marxist critique of the Weber Thesis

[( R )evolution]

1. Can anyone guide me to a Marxist critique of the Weber Thesis?

What is your view on the Weber Thesis?

[Tower of Bebel]

1. Can anyone guide me to a Marxist critique of the Weber Thesis?

What is your view on the Weber Thesis?
The Weber thesis, is it about "monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force" or his famous history of the "Protestant ethic" and the spirit of capitalism? Because the first coincides a lot with a Marxian history while the second differs from the approach of historical materialism.

[( R )evolution]

it's the latter. Basically the argument that protestant religious ethics, hardwork, honesty and others lead to the development of capitalism. He further says that this is why capitalism was so strong in Europe and America and not in other places where Protestantism wasn't so prevelant.

This asserstion completely breaks from the Marxist perpectice because it places the hands of the prgression of capitalism in the hands of religion but in reality it was the devolpment of material forces and the eventually progression into capitalism from fuedalism.

Sorry for the spelling, I'm in a rush.

It isn't for school but my own questions. I like reading in depth critiques more so than just a few sentences

[Tower of Bebel]

Weber was wrong in a way that he ignore the relation between material forces and religion. He was also wrong to say that protestantism led to the development of capitalism, because you can easily think of other examples as well: Judeïsm ("jew bankers"), catholicism (Italian and Dutch merchants; at the birth of protestantism Antwerp was the heart of commercial capitalism) and even the islam which also had its share in the development of a commercial money economy (but the commercial laws prevented the proletarization of society).

[Hit The North]

Any study of the emergence of capitalism needs to take into account the changing material factors and how they relate to the changing ideas and social action of those living individuals who are caught up in those material factors. The key dispute between historical materialism and Weber's analysis in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism regards the question of what provides the motive force for social change. For Weber it is the existence of a historically peculiar ethos, within the context of particular material conditions, which provides the motive force. For historical materialism it is the material motivations of particular groups which explain why they come to embrace a specific ethos.

An excellent historical sketch of critical reactions to Weber's thesis - which could do more to incorporate a Marxist critique - can be found here:

http://grad.usask.ca/gateway/art_Gannon_win_02.pdf

[( R )evolution]

Any study of the emergence of capitalism needs to take into account the changing material factors and how they relate to the changing ideas and social action of those living individuals who are caught up in those material factors. The key dispute between historical materialism and Weber's analysis in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism regards the question of what provides the motive force for social change. For Weber it is the existence of a historically peculiar ethos, within the context of particular material conditions, which provides the motive force. For historical materialism it is the material motivations of particular groups which explain why they come to embrace a specific ethos.

An excellent historical sketch of critical reactions to Weber's thesis - which could do more to incorporate a Marxist critique - can be found here:

http://grad.usask.ca/gateway/art_Gannon_win_02.pdf

Thank you for the link.

So Weber did not ignore that the material conditions must have been present for capitalism to arise, but what he was arguing was that the driving force, the motivation for the development of capitalism laid in the hands in the rise of Protestantism. But in reality it was the peoples relationship with the material forces, and there means of subsistence which drove the change.

Weber also forget to take into account that the growing capitalist society influenced some points of Protestantism. It wasn't just a "supposed" one way relationship. As the capitalist society developed, its influence reach the religious ideas of the time. So of course some religious points would look to be helping the rise of capitalism but in reality they were meant to do that. Those points were in place because it benefited those in power at the time, not because of religious morality or ethics.

[Hit The North]

Weber was wrong in a way that he ignore the relation between material forces and religion. He was also wrong to say that protestantism led to the development of capitalism, because you can easily think of other examples as well: Judeïsm ("jew bankers"), catholicism (Italian and Dutch merchants; at the birth of protestantism Antwerp was the heart of commercial capitalism) and even the islam which also had its share in the development of a commercial money economy (but the commercial laws prevented the proletarization of society).

Weber acknowledges this. One thing that he likes to do is take a concept and divide it into possible "ideal types". His definition of capitalism takes this form as he identifies a number of historically existing forms of capitalism. Examples would be 'traditional capitalism' referring to one-off economic activities like building pyramids, where all the resources and labour is gathered for one huge effort and then dissolved. 'Booty capitalism', based on piracy and violent conquest such as the activity of Elizabethan 'privateers' which bolstered the coffers of the English crown through the looting of Spanish ships bearing the treasures of their own violent conquests in the Americas. He presents several other ideal types which I'd have to look up. However, the crucial ideal type is the one Weber argues approximates modern capitalism and that is 'rational capitalism', which has the characteristic of repetitive, on-going economic activity on the basis of rational calculation (book-keeping) and reinvestment of profit in order to grow the economic enterprise. For Weber, it is this rational form which distinguishes modern, Western capitalism from its counterparts in other advanced economic areas such as China and India, both of whom had larger economies with more advanced economic infrastructures in the 17th century compared to both Europe and North America. According to Weber, what India and China lacked was a set of ideas and social practices which gave a similar spur to rational innovation as Protestantism gave to European civilisation. So, for instance Chinese life was dominated by Confucianism, which fostered a traditional outlook - its big question is "Where do I come from?" and the answer is located in a contemplation of one's ancestors. However, for Protestantism, the big question is "Where am I going?" as it fixates on the ultimate destiny of the individual and creates anxiety about the possibilities of salvation. Therefore, according to Weber (and I'm pretty much over-simplifying here), Protestantism directs attention to the future and promotes rational planning; whereas Confucianism directs attention to the past and promotes custom and tradition.

[( R )evolution]

I found another link if anyone else is interested in the topic, it is a pretty good critique. It is by Grossman.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/grossman/1934/beginnings.htm

[rouchambeau]

it's the latter. Basically the argument that protestant religious ethics, hardwork, honesty and others lead to the development of capitalism.

Weber never argued this. He believed that capitalism existed long before the industrial revolution or even the Reformation. His argument is that contemporary, industrial capitalism is the result of the protestant work ethic.

[jonathan]

I've never thought of Weber and Marx to be inconsistent in the least, unless you have an unwavering belief in materialism. For me, Weber was making an addendum to Marx's greater project by showing how idealism works in a materialist context. The Protestant Ethic outlines in great detail how "[t]he ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class" (Communist Manifesto), hence the analysis of Benjamin Franklin as an examplar of protestant-capitalist ideology. I understand Weber to be illuminating a correlation between the material conditions of the later enlightenment period and the ideas that help propagate them. As such, a Marxist critique of the Protestant Ethic is a bit redundant...

In rereading this thread, it appears that what I am getting at has already been said much more eloquently...

[( R )evolution]

In Grossmans critique, he says that Weber attempted to place the new work ethic in industrial capitalism in the hands of Protestant ideas. But he refutes this by saying that the work ethic was not driven by religious ideas but rather the oppression of people and the forced labor by the ruling elite. In France and other European states they had "compulsory workhouses" which were in place to put people who were idle into forced work as to "teach" them not to be idle.

The connection that Weber made between his ideas and those of Benjamin Franklin has been refuted by 2 historians in a joint essay. I cant remember there names at the moment but if you would like I can find the essay they wrote in which they stated that Weber completely misinterpreted Franklin's words.

So I do believe that a Marxist critique is quite relevant.

[makesi]

In his book Science, Class, and Society Goran Therborn (when he was still a Marxist) devotes a large part of his book to differentiating Marxism from sociology and Weberian sociology in particular and also delineates some criticisms of Weber.
Marxism and Weberianism are not definitely compatible systems of thought. Therborn makes the argument that Weber's use of ideal types makes the two modes of analysis essentially unintelligble if one is attempting to view one of them through the prism of the other's conceptual apparatus.
One way of finding Marxist "critiques" of Weber, then, is not necessarily to look for direct attacks on him (of which there are some, I can think of Tawney and Callinicos off the top of my head) but for Marxist historical analysis that looks at the time in question about which Weber made his spirit of capitalism thesis.
I personally find Robert Brenner's analysis of the development of capitalism very compelling and think that he does an excellent job of presenting an alternative, Marxist analysis of the development of capitalism and one that makes no concessions to Weberian sociology.
Alex Callinicos also makes some very good points in criticism of Weberian sociology (not just Weber himself but Michael Mann and W.G. Runciman in his books Social Theory and Making History and Chris Wickham has two excellent and lengthy critical reviews of Runciman and Mann {contact me off-list and I can send you some or all of this stuff}). Weber's thought is very close to Nietzsche and is thus committed to a power-based and pluralist explanatory system, something that denies any fundamental explanatory efficacy to the mode, forces, and relations of production.
Perry Anderson also makes some excellent criticisms of Michael Mann in his book A Zone of Engagement.

[( R )evolution]

Thank you for the great post. I have decided to read the Protestant Ethic so as to understand it better but I am a little confused by this pasage



The emancipation from economic traditionalism appears, no doubt, to be a factor which would greatly strengthen the tendency to doubt the sanctity of the religious tradition, as of all traditional authorities. But it is necessary to note, what has often been forgotten, that the Reformation meant not the elimination the Church’s control over everyday life, but rather the substitution of a new form of control for the previous one. It meant the repudiation of a control which was very lax, at that time scarcely perceptible in practice, and hardly more than formal, in favor of a regulation, of the whole of conduct which, penetrating to all departments of private and public life, was infinitely burdensome and earnestly enforced. The rule of the Catholic Church, “punishing the heretic, but indulgent to the sinner,” as it was in the past even more than today, is now tolerated by peoples of thoroughly modern economic character, and was borne by the richest and economically most advanced peoples on earth at about the turn of the fifteenth century. The rule of Calvinism, on the other hand, as it was enforced in the sixteenth century in Geneva and in Scotland, at the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in large parts of the Netherlands, in the seventeenth in New England, and for a time in England itself, would be for us the most absolutely unbearable form of ecclesiastical control of the individual which could possibly exist. That was exactly what large numbers of the old commercial aristocracy of those times, in Geneva as well as in Holland and England, felt about it. And what the reformers complained of in those areas of high economic development was not too much supervision of life on the part of the Church, but too little. Now how does it happen that at that time those countries which were most advanced economically, and within them the rising bourgeois middle classes, not only failed to resist this unexampled tyranny of Puritanism, but even developed a heroism in its defense? For bourgeois classes as such have seldom before and never since displayed heroism. It was “the last of our heroisms,” as Carlyle, not without reason, has said.

I am not sure what Weber is saying here

[narcomprom]

@(R)evolution
i threw a look on the german version avaible at zeno.org; look for another translation. yours is literal to the point of being incomprehensible. due to it's specific syntax works in that language are best paraphrased



Es entsteht aber alsdann die historische Frage: welchen Grund hatte diese besonders starke Prädisposition der ökonomisch entwickeltsten Gebiete für eine kirchliche Revolution? Und da ist die Antwort keineswegs so einfach wie man zunächst glauben könnte. Gewiß erscheint die Abstreifung des ökonomischen Traditionalismus als ein Moment, welches die Neigung zum Zweifel auch an der religiösen Tradition und zur Auflehnung gegen die traditionellen Autoritäten überhaupt ganz wesentlich unterstützen mußte. Aber dabei ist zu berücksichtigen, was heute oft vergessen wird: daß die Reformation ja nicht sowohl die Beseitigung der kirchlichen Herrschaft über das Leben überhaupt, als vielmehr die Ersetzung der bisherigen Form derselben durch eine andere bedeutete. Und zwar die Ersetzung einer höchst bequemen, praktisch damals wenig fühlbaren, vielfach fast nur noch formalen Herrschaft durch eine im denkbar weitgehendsten Maße in alle Sphären des häuslichen und öffentlichen Lebens eindringende, unendlich lästige und ernstgemeinte Reglementierung der ganzen Lebensführung. Die Herrschaft der katholischen Kirche, – »die Ketzer strafend, doch den Sündern mild«, wie sie früher noch mehr als heute war, – ertragen in der Gegenwart auch Völker von durchaus moderner wirtschaftlicher Physiognomie und ebenso ertrugen sie die reichsten, ökonomisch entwickelsten Gebiete, welche um die Wende des 15. Jahrhunderts die Erde kannte. Die Herrschaft des Calvinismus, so wie sie im 16. Jahrhundert in Genf und Schottland, um die Wende des 16. und 17. in großen Teilen der Niederlande, im 17. in Neuengland und zeitweise in England selbst in Kraft stand, wäre für uns die schlechthin unerträglichste Form der kirchlichen Kontrolle des einzelnen, die es geben könnte. Ganz ebenso wurde sie auch von breiten Schichten des alten Patriziats der damaligen Zeit, in Genf sowohl wie in Holland und England, empfunden. Nicht ein Zuviel, sondern ein Zuwenig von kirchlich-religiöser Beherrschung des Lebens war es ja, was gerade diejenigen Reformatoren, welche in den ökonomisch entwickeltsten Ländern erstanden, zu tadeln fanden. Wie kommt es nun, daß damals gerade diese ökonomisch entwickeltsten Länder, und, wie wir noch sehen werden, innerhalb ihrer grade die damals ökonomisch aufsteigenden »bürgerlichen« Mittelklassen jene ihnen bis dahin unbekannte puritanische Tyrannei nicht etwa nur über sich ergehen ließen, sondern in ihrer Verteidigung ein Heldentum entwickelten, wie gerade bürgerliche Klassen als solche es selten vorher und niemals nachher gekannt haben: »the last of our heroisms«, wie Carlyle nicht ohne Grund sagt?.

i'll try to sketch his train of thought
Why did economically successful regions prefer protestantism?
a new economic base didn't fare well under the old catholic authority. ("doubt in economic traditionalism inclined to doubt religious tradition")
They didn't remove the barely extant catholic authority but replaced it with one, in case of calvinism, intruding in all spheres of personal and communal life.
Why would the patrician elite defend so "heroically" puritan tyranny which is a essential a much more radical flavour of the same thing?

In my opinion the main point for the new burgher class was not the church authority mingling with their personal or public lives by enforcing an ethos but the church owning the land and hampering the science. neither was done even by most radical and intolerant strains of protestantism.

the reformation preceded and not followed economic growth of the regions in question. regions that were successful in 1520 are the ones to retain catholicism to this day.

note that i haven't read any further than the end of your quote yet.