Born in
Erfurt in Germany in 1864, Weber grew up to see his country convulsed by the
dramatic changes ushered in by the Industrial Revolution in a time that a new
managerial elite was replacing the old aristocracy.
His wife,
Marianne, turned out to be unhelpfully similar to his mother.Weber’s path to
intellectual recovery began after he had a liberating affair with a
sexually-progressive 19-year-old student.
Capitalism
might feel normal or inevitable to us but, of course, it isn’t. It came into
existence only relatively recently, in historical terms, and has successfully
taken root in just a limited number of countries.
Protestantism
makes you feel guilty all the time. Capitalism was created by Protestantism,
specifically Calvinism, as developed by John Calvin in Geneva and by his
followers in England, the Puritans.God is thought able to forgive and He won’t
make his intentions known until the Day of Judgement.
All work is
holy, god likes hard work.Protestant guilt feelings were diverted into an
obsession with hard work.God didn’t like time off. Money earnt wasn’t to be
blown in feasts celebrating the here-and-now.It was always and only to be
reinvested for tomorrow.
Work of any
kind could and should be done in the name of God, even jobs like being a baker
or an accountant. Work was no longer just about earning a living, it was to be
part of a religious vocation connected with proving one’s virtue to God
It’s the
community, not the family, that counts. One was meant to direct one’s selfless
energies to the community as a whole, the public realm where everyone deserved
fairness and dignity.Protestantism turned its back on miracles. God wasn’t
thought to be lever-pulling behind the scenes day-to-day - ‘the disenchantment
of the world.Protestant philosophy, the emphasis fell on human action
Marx had
argued that religion was ‘the opium of the masses’, a drug that induced passive
acceptance of the horrors of Capitalism.Marx had proposed a materialist view of
Capitalism (where technology was said to have created a new capitalist social
system), whereas Weber now advanced an idealist one (suggesting that it was in
fact a set of ideas that had created Capitalism and given the impetus for its
newfound technological and financial arrangements).
People
didn’t tolerate Capitalism because of religion, they only became capitalists as
a result of their religion. There are about 35 countries where Capitalism is
now well developed. Weberian analysis tells us that these materialist
interventions will never work, because the problem isn’t really a material one
to begin with. One has to start at the level of ideas.
Certain
countries fail to succeed at Capitalism because they don’t feel anxious and
guilty enough.They like to celebrate now rather than reinvest for tomorrow and
their members feel it’s acceptable to steal from the community in order to
enrich their families, favouring the clan over the nation. Protestantism had
merely brought to their first fruition ideas which could now subsist outside of
religious ideology
Capitalism
to concentrate on our equivalent of religion: culture. The path to reforming an
economy shouldn’t hence wind through material aid, it should go through
cultural assistance. The decisive question for an economy is not what the rate
of inflation is, but what is on TV tonight.
We will
need to look to changing mentalities, instilling something akin to an updated
version of the attitudes of Calvinism.They believe in clans, they have magical
thinking, they don’t believe that God would Himself command them to be an
honest mechanic or hairdresser…
The belief
in samsara – the transmigration of souls – also inspires the view that nothing
substantial can change until the next life. At the same time, a Hindu ideology
of the clan takes pressure off individual responsibility and encourages
nepotism rather than meritocracy.
There Confucianism
gives too much weight to tradition. No one feels able to rethink how things are
done. The devotion to bureaucracy encourages a static society
Three
distinct types of power across its history
1. ‘traditional authority.deeply inert
and only rarely allowed for initiative
2. ‘charismatic authority’change
everything around him through passion and will
3. bureaucratic authority The only way
to overcome the power lodged within bureaucracy is through knowledge and
systematic organisation.
He tells us
how power works now and reminds us that ideas may be far more important than
tools or money in changing nations.
We associate with vast impersonal external
forces,in fact, dependent upon something utterly intimate and perhaps more
malleable: the thoughts in our own heads
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