Max Weber and the Protestant Ethic: Twin Histories by Peter Ghosh (review)

Abstract

118 Max Weber Studies© Max Weber Studies 2016. scholars—to name the most prominent language groups—will need the Handbuch in furthering the next phase of Weber reception. Sam Whimster London Peter Ghosh, Max Weber and the Protestant Ethic: Twin Histories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), xviii + 402 pp. (hbk). ISBN 978-0-19-870252-8. £30.00. Weber’s study, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (PESC), is at its best on a first reading. Many of us can appreciate Mina Tobler’s remark that she felt in the hands of a great personality and that she read it as a novel. The narrative of this ‘novel’ is the depiction of Puritan religious ethics, how they were incorporated into a lifestyle or conduct of life, and how they came to define the mentality of modern capitalism. The denouement of the novel arrives in the final pages when the modern impersonal capitalist cosmos is able to cast off completely its precipitating ethical origins, and the modern reader finds herself granted the individuality of personhood but with no way of influencing the machine-like nature of capitalism. Puritan asceticism, seemingly a most unlikely candidate, called the beast of modern capitalism into existence only to be devoured by its successive guises as utilitarianism, hedonism, cartelization, and even sporting achievement. The first reading works because of the narrative drive and the rhetorical devices used by Weber. But when it comes to analyzing how the study was assembled, the text is perceived to be discontinuous . Puritanism is not one social/religious movement but composed of Calvinist predestinationist doctrine as variously taken up across Europe through synods, 16th century Pietism and Baptist sects in Germany, Methodism in late 18th century England, and—taking in the essay on the Protestant sects—American Baptist communities c. 1900. These are all separate episodes that illuminate the ‘Protestant ethic’, and Weber uses them in different ways to make the argument that they contributed to a spirit of capitalism that set economic man free of traditional constraints. Peter Ghosh’s treatment of the Protestant Ethic studies is the most analytical to date, and the discontinuous becomes a matter of studious dissection. Ghosh makes quite aggressive claims for the validity of his method of reading the texts, which is based on how a Book Reviews 119© Max Weber Studies 2016. historian, objectively, treats those texts in terms of their own history. Social scientists and economic historians, in contrast, use the Protestant Ethic studies for what they can get out of them, and that in turn is dependent on presentist debates. Ghosh also dismisses contemporary witnesses, like Marianne Weber and Karl Jaspers, as not having access to the truly private Weber, who discloses almost nothing to anyone about his aims other than in the text itself. Peter Ghosh is curt and objectionable in his dismissal of Marianne Weber. She is a mere copyist and secretary to his writings and in her Lebensbild an unreliable guide to Weber’s Werkgeschichte; for instance she had little notion of the studies on the economic ethics of the world religions, and she was rarely allowed to enter Weber’s study. Jaspers had his own existential philosophy to promote and Jaspers’ ‘Weber’ is part of that project. However this dismissal is itself open to historical scrutiny. In April 1913 Weber wrote to Marianne from Ascona and asked her to retrieve ‘the manuscripts from the bank’, which suggests that she was to a degree abreast with Weber’s compositions . At the least Ghosh needs to engage more fully with Bärbel Meurer’s biography of Marianne, whether he agrees or disagrees with her analysis. Marianne’s Ehefrau und Mutter in der Rechtsentwicklung (1907) clearly belongs within the Max-Weberian intellectual universe. Ghosh is also unaware of the opinion of the late Rainer Lepsius who held that it was Karl Jaspers who wrote the exposition of the world religions in Marianne’s Lebensbild. Between them, Marianne Weber and Karl Jaspers knew things about the construction of Weber’s writings that are not to be dismissed as failing full textual knowledge. These criticisms, one suspects, are mere quibbles for Ghosh, who demands an unencumbered reading of the textual...