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Title: The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Third Edition by Max Weber, Stephen Kalberg ISBN: 1-891487-43-4 Publisher: Roxbury Publishing Company Pub. Date: 31 May, 2001 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $25.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4 (1 review)
Rating: 4
Summary: Interesting but not really scholarship
Comment: There are so many problems with Weber's idea that it is hard to know where to begin. First of all, there are no examples anywhere in the text of statements of purpose from capitalists reflecting on the Protestant Ethic. The closest Weber comes is Benjamin Franklin, but Franklin was an American who lived several generations after the origin of capitalism in Europe. Franklin better reflects the "can do" spirit of a new continent, the "American Adam," than he is a "secularization" of Calvin. Couldn't Weber find a European Ben Franklin?
Moreover, Weber's thesis fails the Ockham rule. As Adam Smith argues, the reason people chose to play rather than work is because work offered such paltry returns. Why invent this complicated "secularization thesis" when "greed" is a sufficient explanation?
Third, as one astute reviewer noted below, Weber inherits a Kantian ethics that he was never able to lose. Why must the capitalist pursue money or success "for its own sake"? Are there not perfectly rational reasons for working hard, including greed?
Why must the capitalist adhere to a Kantian ethics of "wealth for its own sake" without any ulterior motives? No one before the Objectivist wackos ever argued that unlimited accumulation of wealth is an "end in itself," or argued that the pursuit of unlimited wealth is a right independent of the good it may do for society.
It should also be understood that Marx is not the only target of Weber's polemical thrusts. He considered his primary target to be Werner Sombart, but Sombart has never been taken seriously in the US because he was a conservative and briefly a Nazi. Sombart's books are in fact much more plausible than Weber's. Luxury and Capitalism is in fact a very "Smithian" account of the origin of capitalism in the seigneurial lord's fascination with luxury goods, and his gradual displacement by the urban manufacturer.
All of that said, Weber tells a very interesting story that is more about the "rationalisation" of "demagification" (Entzauberung) of society than it is about capitalism. By equating capitalism with "efficiency" or "rationalization," however, Weber obscures the basic issues.
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Title: The Marx-Engels Reader by Karl Marx, New York :, Friedrich Selections. English. 1978 Engels, Robert C. Tucker ISBN: 039309040X Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: 01 February, 1978 List Price(USD): $27.00 |
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Title: Civilization and Its Discontents by Sigmund Freud, James Strachey, Peter Gay ISBN: 0393301583 Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: 01 July, 1989 List Price(USD): $10.95 |
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Title: SUICIDE by Emile Durkheim, John A. Spaulding, George Simpson ISBN: 0684836327 Publisher: Free Press Pub. Date: 01 February, 1997 List Price(USD): $18.95 |
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Title: Elementary Forms Of The Religious Life : Newly Translated By Karen E. Fields by Emile Durkheim ISBN: 0029079373 Publisher: Free Press Pub. Date: 01 June, 1995 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: Three Guineas by Virginia Woolf ISBN: 0156901773 Publisher: Harvest Books Pub. Date: 01 June, 1963 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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