The Protestant Ethic Turns 100: Essays on the Centenary of the Weber Thesis by William H. Swatos Jr , Lutz Kaelber (review)

Abstract

122 Max Weber Studies William H. Swatos Jr, and Lutz Kaelber (eds.), The Protestant Ethic Turns 100: Essays on the Centenary of the Weber Thesis (Boulder and London: Paradigm Publishers, 2005), pp. xxxii + 233. ISBN 1-59451-099-7 (pbk). $27.95. Max Weber published The Protestant Ethic and the 'Spirit' of Capitalism in the Archiv far Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik in two instalments in November 1904 and June 1905. There have been a number of celebrations of its hundredth anniversary in Europe and North America and this volume will be one of many publications. Cel ebrations aside, it is important to gather together new information and new insights into Weber's essay beyond what has already has been said about one of the most famous, contentious and heavily debated theses in the historical and social sciences. Hartmut Lehmann argues that Weber's essay should be seen as part of a more general debate within German Nationalökonomie on the genesis of modern capital ism. Both before 1904 as well as afterwards, Werner Sombart and Lujo Brentano were deeply engaged in a wide debate on the origins, development and significance of modern capitalism. Weber's own essay may well have started as a review of Som bart's Der moderne Kapitalismus of 1902. Today, Sombart's very large book is mostly forgotten and unread, but in its day it caused something of an academic sensation, not least because of its re-formulation of the relationship between history and economic theory. Wolfgang Mommsen has shown (in Max Weber Studies 5.2 [2005]: 185-203) that Weber himself had outlined in his economic lectures of the 1890s a similar pro gramme that would allow the relating of culture, to economic motives, and to the meeting of human economic needs. So, the Protestant Ethic and the 'Spirit' of Capitalism (PESC) did not come out of nowhere, but belonged to the contemporary discourse of Nationalökonomie. In the first edition (1904-1905) Weber rather disguises his critical stance to Sombart, not even admitting that the phrase 'spirit of capitalism' was coined by Sombart. And in the second edition (of 1920) Weber takes issue, mainly in the footnotes, of the very substantial subsequent publications of Sombart and Brentano. Lehmann observes that the interpretation of the wider debate has been too narrowly focused through WebeLs own presentation. In the replies to his critics (now translated into English) Weber deliberately keeps the focus on his own train of argument. This went: Puritan beliefs —> conduct of life —* spirit of capitalism. Analytically speaking, if this causal chain is thought of as a horizontal axis, the economic forms of capitalism represent a vertical axis where the causal linkage is rendered as an 'affinity'. Weber said veiy little about the various forms of capitalism, not least because so much was being written, in large books, about that subject. The Protestant ethic is an essay into the motivational and cultural origins of a 'spirit' which had an 'elective affinity' with those new emergent economic forms. As Weber repeatedly tried to point out to his critics, such as Rachfahl, he was not arguing for religion as the explanation of economic forms. One might say that from the outset Weber's essay produced an imbalance into the debate, which to this day is still operant. The very success of Weber's brilliantly written essay tended to cast the wider debate into the shade. Lutz Kaelber, in an informative essay, explores the problematic nature of the above linkages. Only through a careful reading of Weber's replies to his critics is the precise, but rather open-ended, nature of the linkages apparent. Historical scholars of early Puritanism in England and North America have presented, and continue to present, compelling evidence on aspects of religious motivation, discipline and conduct, and economic traditionalism without, however, gathering up all the threads© Max Weber Studies 2007. Book Reviews 123 of Weber's argument. The time dimension is also problematic. Are we expecting, say, Quakers to become capitalists, like the English Cadburys, or the puritan outlook to diffuse through a culture and be taken up within a new form of capitalism? Lutz defends the Weber thesis in its full articulation but...