Weber’s The Protestant Ethic as Hypothetical Narrative of Original Accumulation

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In this article, I address the ‘hypothetical’, ‘self-referential’ and ‘constructed’ nature of Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism. In particular, I 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. Thus, the deliberately constructed and self-referential nature of Weber’s genetic 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 two rival generic hypothetical accounts of capital accumulation, those of Adam Smith and marginalism.