The Rise of Capitalism: Weber versus Sombart

Abstract

On February 21, 1990, in a speech to both houses of Congress, the Czechoslovak playwright elected president, Vaclav Havel, explained that his country needed a great deal of assistance from the United States, not financial aid primarily, but help in other areas. Assistance, for example, in “how to educate our offspring,” “how to elect our representatives,” and “how to organize our economic life so that it will lead to prosperity and not to poverty.” In return, Havel remarked, Czechoslovakia could offer the United States its “experience and the knowledge that has come from it,” in particular “specific experience,” “one great certainty,” namely, that “consciousness precedes being, and not the other way round, as Marxists claim.” For this reason, Havel continued, “the salvation of this human world lies nowhere else than in the human heart, in the human power to reflect, in human meekness and in human responsibility.” One hundred years ago, in the decade before the turn of the last century, young scholars like Werner Sombart, born in 1863, or Max Weber, born in 1864, were not so certain about Havel's “one great certainty.” Weber and Sombart attempted to look into the historical background of the Marxist theory of history, and they set out to determine the relationship between the factors that Havel labeled “consciousness” and “being.” In those years, both Sombart and Weber published a number of works in which they discussed the relationship between what Marxists called the “material basis” and the “nonmaterial superstructure,” thus trying to explain the course of human development in general and the emergence of modern capitalism in particular.