Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic, and the Riddle of Modernity
World History Book Club, Historians Who Made Me: Max Weber
Max Weber, the German sociologist, is the next in this World History Book Club series of historians who made me. Mad mystical Max taught me far more about modernity than the stern-voiced father of historical materialism, Karl Marx.
Now some of my readers do affiliate with Marxism, or materialism, and have even recommended I read Xi Jinping’s speech on the historical importance of Marxism. I respect the tradition, and, before 1989, read deeply in it. But in that year of poverty for me, I sold my Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, and, in any case, Weber has always meant more to me.
It is not because I am a Weberian, in the sociological and US American functionalist adaptation of Weber’s thought, via Talcott Parsons. This tradition fossilises Weber as the founder of modern values-free social science, but discounts the text that intrigues me most, when Weber was at his most historical, mystical, and fresh off a spell of madness, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905).
This virally misunderstood text is my classic text in the History Book Club this month. If you are new to Weber, please note the phrase “Protestant Work Ethic” does not appear in the title.
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (I will use this acronym from here, TPESC) intrigues me not because Weber was the anti-Marx, or the master sociologist, but because the text was a form of poetry and personal encounter with the fates of history. That might seem strange to say about a very formal text of sociology, in which hundreds of long footnotes appear. But TPESC wrestles with the riddle of modernity - its industry, rationality and disenchantment of the world - and whether we, and the earth, can escape the way of life it has imprisoned us in.
There is a much quoted, variously translated passage towards the end of TPESC that captures these major themes of Weber’s work: the unintended consequences of ideas, the impact of religion on society, the cultural formation of economic systems, the process of rationalisation in power and modern history, and the “iron cage” of modern rationality that we live in. The phrase “iron cage” was Talcott Parsons’ creative translation of Weber’s original German phrase “stahlhartes Gehäuse”, which literally translates to “shell as hard as steel”.
The phrase appears in the fourth last paragraph of the essay. If pressed, you can grasp all Weber’s subtle argument by reading the last seven paragraphs in two-and-a-half pages of the essay, including the famous “iron cage” passage.
He summarises his core argument.
“A constituent part of the capitalist spirit, and not only this but of modern culture, namely, the rational conduct of life on the foundation of the idea of the calling, was born (as this essay shows) out of the spirit of Christian asceticism.
Weber, TPESC, p. 120
There were many forms of asceticism, and acquisitive business enterprises, before that which Weber described in this essay, but the Protestant otherworldly asceticism of the 17th century was the rupture through which modernity entered our historical lives. The Protestant ethic is this particular form of asceticism - not the work ethic of common misunderstanding - whose genealogy Weber traced from the Protestant Reformation to Benjamin Franklin’s platitudes. What really mattered was that the ideal of the “Renaissance man”, the full expression of universal humanity, was renounced in favour of specialisation. As a cultured German scholar, though, Weber compared this renunciation to the demise of Faust, or the loss of Athenian antiquity. The “inevitable consequence of the abandonment of the Faustian universality of humankind [Menschentum], is the precondition in today’s world for any worthwhile action.” We will come back to Weber’s own psychological schema encased in this steel-hard statement next.
“The Puritans wanted to be men of the calling,” Weber wrote, referring to the religious sense of vocation he identified in Protestant ethics, “we, on the other hand, must be.” Here Weber is writing the history of capitalism, modernity, and his private soul. He wrote this seminal essay after a breakdown, and a period of deep depression, from which he never fully recovered his formerly regimented, demanding work discipline. He had wanted to write rational universal histories of society, but the internal struggle, and the psychological pressures adapted from his mother’s own ascetic Pietist mysticism, forced him to stop. It left him confronted with a choice to specialise in the field of sociology, with which he never felt entirely comfortable, and to accept the limitations of the rational in life.
TPESC was the first text he wrote after his mental illness. His wife, and biographer, described how he came alive again while writing this text, and that he threw his whole soul into the work. It was more than sociology. It was history as therapeutic recovery. It was release from the iron cage of his familial and cultural schemas.
TPESC was also much more than a commentary on social scientific method or a polemic against Marxism. It was an engagement with the meaning of modern Kultur - the riddle of modernity that so many felt at the turn of the century, as I discussed in essays last year on China and 1910: The Year Human Character Changed. Weber’s thought experiment was conceived in a laboratory of social struggles between labour and capital, men and women, empires and colonies, cultures and religions. It was framed by debates within German and European intellectual circles between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, between Kultur and Civilization, between liberalism and socialism, between capitalism and communism, between idealism and materialism, between feminism and male authority, between the Viennese unconscious and bourgeois convention, between urban industrial and green rural lives, between black satanic mills and back-to-nature movements, between progress and the destruction of the world, between Valhalla and Götterdämmerung. Somehow Weber smelted all these metals into the steel-hard casing of his essay.
“For when asceticism moved out of the monastic cells and into working life, and began to dominate innerworldly morality, it helped to build that mighty cosmos of the modern economic order (which is bound to the technical and economic conditions of mechanical and machine production). Today this mighty cosmos determines, with overwhelming coercion, the style of life not only of those directly involved in business but of every individual who is born into this mechanism . . . ” Weber, TPESC, pp. 120-121
Weber does not describe the oppression of one class by another, but of the “overwhelming coercion” of the “style of life” all moderns are born into. It is a phrase written by an author who knew, in his bones, that the mind mattered every bit as much as material life, and, with the poet Hopkins, that those minds have mountains.
O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne’er hung there.
Gerald Manley Hopkins, "No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief” (1885), one of his “Terrible Sonnets”
But it might surprise you what Max Weber, this political centrist and writer on economic organisation, wrote next. It was the the height of Germany’s coal- and oil-fuelled industrialisation surge, and maybe the peak of its cultural influence worldwide, but Weber did not conclude his thought with liberal optimism. He planted a time bomb at the end of the sentence about the overwhelming coercion of a style of life to which he was born. I broke off that sentence before its end, when Weber sounded one last note of doom: “and may well continue to do so until the day that the last ton of fossil fuel has been consumed.” That day seems even closer to us than it did to Weber in 1905.
It is the very next sentence in which the famous “iron cage” or “stahlhartes Gehäuse” passage appears. He contrasts the modern spirit, coerced into a style of life, to the mystic idea of vocation embraced by one theological writer and English country parson of the 17th Century, Richard Baxter.
“In Baxter’s view, concern for outward possessions should sit lightly on the shoulders of his saints “like a thin cloak which can be thrown off at any time.” But fate decreed that the cloak should become a shell as hard as steel [stahlhartes Gehäuse]. As asceticism began to change the world and endeavoured to exercise its influence over it, the outward goods of this world gained increasing and finally inescapable power over men, as never before in history.
Weber, TPESC, p. 121
Here was the central enigma of Weber’s thought line. A turn of mind inwardly in religious thought brought about, through unintended consequences but traceable routes, a change of the world into ruthless, rational, capitalist, industrial, materialist modernity. He returned to how ideas shape the world, as much as material conditions, in his concluding paragraph. But first, he turned to thoughts on what might happen after the Twilight of the Gods, convinced that all spiritual meaning had left modern rational Kultur, the iron cage of modernity in which we are condemned to be ghosts of the civil dead.
“No one yet knows who will live in that shell in the future. Perhaps new prophets will emerge, or powerful old ideas and ideals will be reborn at the end of this monstrous development. Or perhaps—if neither of these occurs—“Chinese” ossification [Weber was writing in the last years of the Qing, as discussed in this essay from last year], dressed up with a kind of desperate self-importance will set in.”
Weber, TPESC, p. 121
One wonders if both ossification and a desperate self-importance have infected the USA today, which, even when Weber wrote his essay, was perceived as the society in which “capitalism is at its most unbridled, in the United States, the pursuit of wealth, divested of its metaphysical significance, today tends to be associated with purely elemental passions, which at times virtually turn it into a sporting contest (TPSCE, p. 121).” In contemporary US America that which Weber said of wealth is now also true of power and status. Weber saw a bleak future for modern Kultur in his Europe, inspired by Nietzsche’s tales of “last men” and disturbed by diatribes on degeneration. His essay on the capitalist spirit was not a celebration of rationalisation, but a premature elegy.
Then, however, it might truly be said of the “last men” in this cultural development: “specialists without spirit, hedonists without a heart, these nonentities imagine they have attained a stage of humankind [Menschentum] never before reached.”
Weber, TPESC, p. 121
It is a line fitting for the Dark Enlightenment broligarchs who have entrapped the USA in its iron cage of militaristic surveillance, the nonentities like Peter Thiel, Elon Musk or that notorious Substack writer, near the top of the history leaderboard, Curtis Yarvin. Many attribute the ‘specialists without spirit” line to Max Weber himself. But it is a line Weber slightly misquoted from memory, scholars have determined, written by a German economist, Gustav Schmoller, who was principally, and fittingly for the Burning Archive, a bureaucrat.
The last two paragraphs of the essay are less poetic and psychologically possessed, and more concerned with cautionary lectures on method. Weber insisted he did not seek to propose, against Marx, that all history is not the history of class struggle, but rather the history of religious ideas.
“However, it cannot, of course, be our purpose to replace a one-sided “materialist” causal interpretation of culture and history with an equally one-sided spiritual one. Both are equally possible, but neither will serve historical truth if they claim to be the conclusion of the investigation rather than merely the preliminary work for it.”
Weber, TPESC, p. 122
In those last two sentences of this classic history text, Weber also declared himself to be historian, not sociologist, to be pluralist, not dogmatist, and to be a seeker for the truth, and not one of those “last men” who in nihilistic confusion assert with apocalyptic certainty that they have found the truth.
For those reasons, Max Weber is an historian who made me.
Further reading
The literature and debate on Weber and his classic essay, The Protestant Ethic, is enormous. It is widely perceived as a foundational text of twentieth-century social thought.
The text is readily accessible online, such as here, here or here. The last of these allows you to read the hyperlinked sections of the essay as below.
Chapter 1: Religious Affiliation and Social Stratification
Chapter 2: The Spirit of Capitalism
Chapter 3: Luther’s Conception of the Calling
Chapter 4: The Religious Foundations of Worldly Asceticism
A: Calvinism
B: Pietism
C: Methodism
D: The Baptist SectsChapter 5: Asceticism and the Spirit of Capitalism
The text I used was the Penguin Classic edition, translated with an introduction by Peter Baehr and Gordon C. Wells. It contains all the footnotes, and the later commentaries and rejoinders Weber made in response to his critics.
There are many guides and commentaries, including by Anthony Giddens, who I have rediscovered in recent weeks, as I mentioned in the Saturday essay. The research database company, EBSCO has a Research Starter guide here.
Many of the interpretations of Weber are for Marx and from sociology. However, Peter Ghosh has written a major study, Max Weber and ‘The Protestant Ethic’: Twin Histories (2017), specifically interpreting Weber primarily as an historian, not sociologist (a term he disavowed for its associations with Comte) and “insofar as he was a historian, Weber was pre-eminently a historian of the longue durée.” An extract from this study is available free online, History and Theory in Max Weber’s ‘Protestant Ethic.’ Ghosh argued that Weber was not only an historian, but an unacknowledged legislator of modern historical practice.
Weber’s principal achievement was to lay down a set of propositions that are basic to our thinking today: the pathless ‘infinity’ or ‘chaos’ of past ‘happening’ (Geschehen); the inevitability of historical change and obsolescence; hence the need to construct finite and meaningful sections of the past in the present as the only possible response to that infinity; offset by the recognition that any such construction would be bankrupt if it overrode empirical reality.
Ghosh, History and Theory in Max Weber’s ‘Protestant Ethic’
History is chaotic, not cunning. Weber did not only make me as an historian. He, with many others, made modern history.
Weber was a key influence for Emmanuel Todd, La Défaite de l’Occident and his argument that the West is primarily defined by Protestantism. Todd adapted Weber’s argument, in the manner of other historians, by varying the hypothesis on secularisation (the fall to zero state religion) and emphasising how Protestant ethics increased literacy as much as otherworldliness or capitalism. You may wish to refer to my guide to Emmanuel Todd’s book, which is still not available in English translation.
The American bowdlerised Weber—which emphasised the work ethic, the primacy of ideas over interests, and the functionalist sociology—also influenced writers like Samuel Huntington who primarily defined civilizations by religion, and preferred Western Protestantism. However, Felipe Fernández-Armesto rightly argues that there is much that Weber got wrong. Arguing from the perspective of both world history and Catholic belief, Fernández-Armesto wrote:
“If it were really true that Protestants’ values typically elevate work into a kind of morality, I would take it as evidence of the moral superiority of Catholicism. The logical outcome of an ethos that overvalues work is the praise of work that hung over the gates of Nazi death camps: Arbeit Macht Frei. The historical consequences popularly supposed to flow from the Protestant work ethic—capitalism, imperialism, industrialism—are, when taken to excess, evils of which I would love to be able to exonerate Catholics. But they are not particularly Protestant vices: they are human vices, in which, unfortunately, Catholics have been as deeply implicated as everyone else.”
Fernández-Armesto, Our America
World History Book Club Live Call
Fernández-Armesto’s wise, humane scepticism brings us back, of course, to the book of the month in the World History Book Club, another study of the unintended consequences of religious ideas and imagination on history, his Straits: Beyond the Myth of Magellan.
Hero, Devil or Madman? The Biography of Magellan
The myth of Magellan long ago left the real history of the Portuguese explorer to become a cultural icon of discovery and a historical fable of colonialism. Magellan symbolises the heroic probing of the frontiers of knowledge and power - “bravely going where no one has gone before” - including in the USS Magellan in
It also foreshadows next month’s book, Mark Mazower, Antisemitism: The History of a Word.
The live call discussion of the April book of the month, Straits, and any other issues from the Burning Archive you would like to discuss, will be held on 30 April at 11:00 AM Melbourne time (UTC +10 hours).
Please join me as a paid subscriber to join me live on the call or to receive the full recorded session.
Thanks for reading
Jeff
Like so many, I read about Max Weber, without being well read In Max Weber himself. With your links, that is no longer the case. I will say, that in my history classes, I never lectured about New England without addressing Max Weber and The Protestant (Work) Ethic. Two thoughts:
1) Coming from an Eastern (Orthodox) perspective, where religious aestheticism is still very much a real thing, Weber's elaboration of a Protestant (largely Calvinist) aesthetic is almost incomprehensible--a different world altogether. His use of the word was certainly enlightening to me, as I had never before considered the behaviour as any type of aestheticism.
2) Weber is essential to understanding the American psyche. I have long contended that the small group of Puritan fanatics in New England had much more influence on the American character than the equally avaricious, but less dogmatic, Virginians and Carolinians. It was New England Puritanism that literally wrote the script for American exceptionalism, now running amok on every continent.
Great article.
The protestant work ethic, ay? It's a humdinger, all right.
Great to see those guys teased out in context of the time when they lived.
I'm in North West Germany for the last eight years and the entire German Volkgeist is on full display every day. In its current incarnation, there are still many of the psycho-social metaphysical creatures roaming both the architecture and the language.
If the woke word virus is responsible for some of the polarized political environment today, the origins of that partially come from the period and people whose lives you briefly trace in this article.
German romanticism has a lot to answer for in terms of what ails the German psyche.
One has to be something to do with identifying false origins, and the cliche about how logic only works to produce reliable results if you start from the right place.
I was born further north in Scandinavia and whole protestant work ethic there is attributed to deep genetic programming from the environment.
"Erst Fressen, dann kommt Moralen" is probably the perfect example of how biological dependency and the cruelty of cold and suboptimal soil has forced a work discipline into the Northern European genetic memory. "Making hay while the sun shines" approximates the same dynamic, but in the north those who failed to heed the advice simply died out in winter from starvation due to insufficient stores of food. It's beyond morality, but in a Christian culture obsessed with origin according to scripture rather than biology due to the "telos first" origin hierarchy brings profound cognitive dissonance to the nervous system function and its integration with the conscious mind. Goethe and German romanticism was a high water mark of this civilization regardless of what we might also think of the haber-bosh process, or the Porsche, Mercedes, Audi etc engineering and industrial chemistry benchmarks.
The most sinister part, in my opinion, is how the tendencies of the romantic languages genderise non-human objects. A chair, and a table have a gender ascribed in the Die, Der, das denominators. This seems a bit weird to an English speaker, but after an initial balking at the concept we move along. Learning the language, however, it becomes clear that a profound gender discrimination is built into language structure itself. This, borderline evil, resides in the rule that while objects can be feminine, girls are gender neutral. Until they marry, then they become women (die Frau). Until then, they are all " das" Mädche. The girl. Direct translation is something equivalent 'she woman' and 'it girl' rendering girls as objects. Things to be traded, the epitome of the chattel slave, indoctrinated through the mother-tongue to learn, along with learning to speak, that a little girl has no gender, but is simply an object, even into her teens she remains an it, rather than a she.
I am, as might be evident in this rambling comment still outraged by this convention of language and the effect it clearly has on the psyche of certain kinds of women who carry a permanent facial expression of wrack and ruin. And they don't seem to understand why, as the damage was caused before their sense of self had formed during the early years of life.
Perhaps you can think of this linguistic angle within your anti-colonial narrative to bring some cross perspective to the mindset of the perpetrators of domination and the formative scars that seem to make monsters out of some men. And the cultural influences that feed it in along with mother's milk.