In Our Time - Weber's The Protestant Ethic

Episode Date: March 27, 2014

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss Max Weber's book the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Published in 1905, Weber's essay proposed that Protestantism had been a significant factor in the emergence of capitalism, making an explicit connection between religious ideas and economic systems. Weber suggested that Calvinism, with its emphasis on personal asceticism and the merits of hard work, had created an ethic which had enabled the success of capitalism in Protestant countries. Weber's essay has come in for some criticism since he published the work, but is still seen as one of the seminal texts of twentieth-century sociology.With:Peter Ghosh Fellow in History at St Anne's College, OxfordSam Whimster Honorary Professor in Sociology at the University of New South WalesLinda Woodhead Professor of Sociology of Religion at Lancaster University.Producer: Thomas Morris.

Thank you for downloading this episode of In Our Time, for more details about In Our Time, and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk slash Radio 4. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, in 1905, the German sociologist Max Weber published an essay, suggesting a connection between religion and the spread of capitalism. Weber had noticed that the countries in which capitalism had been most successful tended to be mainly Protestant. He believed that this was not a coincidence.

And he argued that certain people, types of religious belief had created a particular ethic, giving rise to a society in which hard work was celebrated and whether wealthy invested their money rather than spending it on luxuries. Weber called his essay the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism, and a century later, it's still seen as one of the founding works of modern sociology. The idea of the Protestant work ethic has been enormously influential, although many later thinkers have disputed Weber's basic arguments. With me to discuss Max Weber's the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism are Peter Gauch, fellow in history at Hans College Oxford,

Sam Wimster, Honoury Professor at the University of New South Wales, and Linda Woodhead, Professor of Sociology of Religion at Lancaster University. Peter Goach, can you tell us a bit more about Max Weber's background and early life? Well, so Weber is born in 1864, and that's a slightly symbolic date, because it's just before the unification, the political unification of Germany in 1866, 71. and the reason I draw attention to this is that I think we today tend to think that modern German history is heavily dominated by politics and that it's a story from Bismarck to Hitler.

Now that is obviously there's a lot of mileage in that of course, but when that politically unified state was created, that was literally just an overlay on a previous inheritance and the previous inheritance didn't go away. And that previous inheritance was in fact a set of quite small, what we might call city states, all of which had universities. And for centuries, the Germans not having had a strong political identity, had in fact got an enormous cultural identity. And Weber is in many ways the product of the last generation that really, in fact, benefited from that heritage,

that he's a great encyclopedist. You know, we tend to say he knew about sort of practically everything. And you can trace him back to, shall we say, people like Marx or the philosopher Hegel or earlier in time the philosopher Leibniz. Speaking about his more particular background, he comes from what we call the professional bourgeoisie, the high, the oat bourgeoisie. It's quite an elite class.

He grows up in the fashionable west end of Berlin in Charlottlenburg. And he has two very interesting parents. One is a lawyer and a politician. And I should stress that in Germany law is a very, very important subject and does not in any way simply imply that you go away and earn lots of money as it might do in Britain. and the father is basically very secular and has no time for religion whatsoever.

The other parent is equally important, his mother, Elena, and she is what the Germans would call a Christian social, and I suspect probably the easiest way we can render this into English is to say that she's something like a Christian socialist. She's very much a liberal, social reformer and is passionately committed to the idea of as it were doing good in the world. And I would like to suggest that Weber's very curious and distinctive religious views

are approximately equally derived from the two parents. On the one hand, the secular father and on the other hand the religious mother. And she was also very wealthy. How did he kickstart his career in his 20s? As I say, he comes from a sort of. of bourgeois elite. Which book set him off? Which book drew attention to him as somebody who was on the scene?

It's a very, very long tomb about agrarian labour east of the river Elba. That'll do. Why did he write that? He's asked to write it by a sort of a social science policy group called the Farian Physizetial Politique. And what drew him to that?

This polymath you speak of, he decided to do agrarian policy in East Germany. Okay. He's, well, He's very interested in the Juncker's. He's a left liberal politician. He doesn't like the Juncker's much in the modern day. And his great idea is to say, well, these Juncker's, this actually has a certain sort of contemporary resonance,

these Juncker are using immigrant labour. They're using Polish labour. And he said, well, if you're a true German nationalist, we surely don't want that sort of thing going on. And therefore, he says, if you're a real German nationalist, you'll break up the greater states. Sam Wimso, what was the significant influences? We've talked to her background, this political lawyer, father.

We've talked about the mother who was known as the saint for her charitable work and for her great presence in Berlin. Can you tell us the basic influence? Let's start with the religious views. His mother was very influential on him. We know that he was, he started off as a boy. Let's start with that. Well, when you say very religious, one has to qualify that.

somewhat because, as Peter's just said, these are educated parents. And the mother was very educated. She had a classical education. So she would know Latin and Greek. She was tutored privately by Germany's leading historian, a man called Gervinus. And her own religious upbringing was that, well, it was somebody called Pastor Ziff, I think. And he said, you know, the new term. Testament gospel of parables and miracles, that's for the simple people.

We don't actually believe as sort of grown up, middle-class people in this kind of superstition. But she clearly had a very strong ethical outlook. And she got this from the, actually they were called Falentines. The mother's side were of Palestine, a number of sisters. and they all had this ghastly experience of losing very young children, infants at the age of two, three, four. They died, dip theory or whatever. It was a common event. And for them, the ethical, religious question was how on earth can you have a Christian god who allows such things?

And so Helena, for instance, and she discussed this with Max as a young man, how are we? what is the status of a child who dies, how does God allow it, what happens to the soul of the child? And an American preacher, Unitarian, very unsuperstitious, not much interested in the rituals of the church, had this very humanist notion

of what happens to souls when they die. And that was very comforting, and very sensibly talked about. But religion was around, it's spoken of in terms of ethics, but still we can call it religion without, crossing a line too much. We're told that Weber when he was 16

had put it behind him. He'd moved on from that. He had great empathy for religions, but he didn't have the music of religion or whatever. Something like that phrase. What other we've talked about religion, what other influences are on him?

Is he reading, is he influenced by the economic theory at the time? Can you just fill it out a little bit more? Well, he trains as a lawyer, jurist, an academic lawyer, but he decides law is boring. Then he goes into economics, which is this study of the agrarian question.

So he's an expert on farming and why. And the sociological side of it starts to sneak in while these farmers, peasants moving from the countryside into the city. So they're coming from east of the Alba into Berlin. And so this is this huge social question. And we know he's interested in classics. Yes, he's always making allusions to classical Rome. That's what his second PhD was on, the Roman-Agrarian history,

which is an amazing work, which is very little read. And he's sort of floating-free intellectual, isn't he? He isn't attached to a particular university with a particular discipline. He moves around partly because I suppose he had the means to do so from one discipline as you use that word to another. Well, the Prussian Minister of Education, the Prussian Minister of Education, and wanted to keep him in Berlin as professor of commercial law.

Weber didn't like being told what to do or being patronised and he found a poster in Barden, Freiburg, as a professor of economics, which at a very young age. And then he moved from, from Barden about 1894 to Heidelberg where he became professor of economics.

And it's about this time that his life starts to go awry because to go through an assistant professor of law, and then he was teaching commercial law and economics, financial economics, banking law, the nature of banking. So he's mastered two disciplines by the age of 30. And this is where, and he's also working on commissions on the stock exchange. And his life starts to come unpacked at this point because he's overworking.

And he has, in effect, a breakdown which lasts for three or four years. And after that, he writes this book. So can you tell us, before we talk about this essay rather than this book, can you tell us about the drift of notions in Western Europe, particularly Germany at that particular time, the turn of the century? Well, we've just heard about the strange political context he grows up in, Of course, this is a time when nations are growing. You've got fantastic national experiments in places like France in Italy.

Germany is rather different. So he's born in Prussia. Prussia becomes part of the German Empire. And it's really a, it's not, it's a new state, but it's a mishmash. It's partly an old dynasty with Kaiser and the Chancellor being these strong men. It's partly a federation. It's partly a representative system. It's partly a despotism.

It's not a political laboratory like the USA was at the same time. It's more like a witch's cauldron and we know that it would bubble up in all sorts of ways in the future. So politically it's a mess and actually Weber's not a great political thinker or theorist, perhaps for that reason. But more interestingly, and this really explains Weber, what's happening in his lifetime in the new German empire is firstly a very rapid transition to capitalism. So the Reich in the late 19th century, it's urbanising incredibly quickly and it's moving to industrial capitalism at a breakneck speed and large scale technologically advanced, lots of industry,

the law is being rationalised, you know, commercial law is being rationalised, new corporations are growing up. And it's happening incredibly quickly. It's happened much slower in Britain, for example. He's seeing it. He's living through. this unbelievable transition. And the second thing is bureaucracy.

I mean, one thing that Germany is good at is bureaucracy and proud of. A massive civil service is probably leading the world in terms of developing a modern bureaucracy. There were other places. Austria, Hungary had a very powerful bureaucracy. France is developing one, the Indian Civil Service. But Germany has an extensive bureaucracy through which the state extends into life. Can I ask you, he comes out of this, we're told it was a very severe breakdown.

His wife had to help him against taking his own life sometimes. It happened for four years. Why did he come out of that in 1905 to write this essay, the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism? Do you know what led him into that specific direction? He travels widely at the time of his breakdown. He goes around the world. He spends time in the USA, for example.

and he's looking all the time at the parallels, urbanisation, move to capitalism, bureaucracy, and he's looking at all the factors that might be causing that in different parts of the world. And it's always been, as we heard before, it was always held that capitalism, why are some countries more economic successful at this time? Why are they modernising more quickly? Why is civilisation being driven by some countries? Well, they're Protestant. I mean, this was part of what people in this country, in the States, in Germany, thought.

But no one had really explained why. I mean, often it was popularly thought, well, God is blessing the Protestant countries. Faber wanted to come to a deeper answer to that. So out of his experience, on the ground experience, going around the world and answering this big question, why are these certain Protestant countries in the northwest of Europe really steaming ahead? So that's brutally simple. Okay. So can you make it more complicated, Peter Goshen?

please, and give us some summary of the points you're trying to make in the Protestant ethic. I think perhaps the first thing one should say, and I think one has to be a bit honest here and say this is one of the most disputed texts in the whole of the 20th century. What do you mean are disputed? You mean, is it any good? No, I mean that basically if you take any three academics, and I suspect that means the three of us around this table, and I ask them to summarise its argument,

I suspect we would all come up. I'm not saying completely different answers, but there would be very considerable differences of opinion. And I think this is, to an extraordinary degree. It's an unusual text in that respect. I mean, obviously, all texts are disputed in some sense. Well, can we have your version? Indeed.

Right. What do you think it's about, in summary? This is a text about ethics, and this is clearly announced in the title, because it says the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism, and the word spirit means ethic, and the word ethic is used synonymously with spirit in the text.

And the transition that the person, that the problem Weber has, has worked out is that at the end of the 19th century, whatever is wrong with the New Testament in terms of parables and miracles, New Testament ethics are still considered to be very much alive and well. And a typical New Testament ethic, which is in fact discussed quite a lot in the text, is love thy neighbor. And what Weber says about love thy neighbor, he's not against it on any personal grounds at all, but he says this is irrelevant in the modern world

and it's irrelevant for two reasons. One is it implies that when we behave, there are absolutely right ways of doing things. And the other obvious problem with Love Thy Neighbor is that it also implies that when we behave we are thinking about unique individuals. And Weber says, no, no, no, well, alas, in the modern world, we've got this world that Linda was talking about,

where in fact we have large impersonal structures and where in fact the ways we behave are not simply matters of what is in some sense right and wrong to us in our heart of hearts. Most obviously, and this is the example he gives in the text, he says, well, in a capitalist society, you have to obey the laws of the market. That's not an ethical point,

and that's why he says he can't quite describe it as he doesn't really like to call it the capitalist ethic. But nonetheless, this is a way you have to. to behave. So what interests him is how you got from the original Love Thy Neighbor situation to the modern world. And picking up a point that you yourself made, Weber undoubtedly says the only true source of ethics lies in religion. That's the only force that's powerful enough to generate ethics. And then he tries to bring it in, which is a big project, isn't it? Exactly, yes.

To try to bring in the economics and law and the changes is one of the factors, one of the factors bringing modern capitalism about, but unusual in the consensus of factors of the time. I mean, the one point I would make about capitalism is that capitalism is a good deal more than an economic system. Capitalism, as far as Weber's concerned, is a cast of mind. He has a wonderful phrase where he calls it the economic way of viewing things, and he means viewing life in general, all spheres of life.

Sam Wimsa, going on from that, he makes frequent use of the word rationalism. Would you tell us what he means by that and how he applies it? If I can just explain the notion of religious vocation, which is something that frames capitalist behaviour. But the framing of capitalist behaviour as rational behaviour, economic rationality, the idea of calculating every situation in terms of profitability, your labour, how much it's costing you. If you're a capitalist entrepreneur, you're looking for market opportunities. This is the economic rationality, yes?

Now, he says that there's a religious basis for this fundamental framework of thinking, how capitalists think sort of automatically, right, by the 19th. century. It's never been automatic to think like that ever before. This is what Weber is saying. No civilization has brought in a capitalist mentality that has this natural frame of reference that

we always calculate the profit. We always know what the bottom line is. And an example of this rationalist thinking in economics is, for instance, double entry bookkeeping, which appears in, actually it's

1485. It comes out of Italy. And this is an example of rationalism. Somebody has sat down and thought, we're going to apply mathematical, arithmetic ideas to our business. And the whole thing about a budget is that you know how much you're putting into the business on a yearly basis and what's producing the profit. Now, Weber says, this, you know, could have led to an interesting slow development on to capitalism, but what really kick-started the capitalist mentality in the way that we understand it, or used to understand it,

is the notion of religious vocation. And therefore you have this... Vocation. Vocation. Profession it becomes, but it's a religious vocation. And this is what the essay is about how this comes from Luther, who translates the Bible, into German

and the notion of occupation station in life he calls vocation. And so vocation is then seen to have an economic reference. Can you tell us how that, can you take that on? Tell us how the notion

Luther's notion of vacation, of having a vacation in this world and not being in a monastery, didn't lie monasteries, wanted to shut them down and praying for what might happening in the next world and living your life by that standard. Why the vocation was so radical and how Sam's given us a very good introduction to it, how that transferred into his theory of bringing religion into the notion of the origins

of modern capitalism. So he's trying to see what is it about Protestantism as opposed to Catholicism that's got this that may have caused the bringing about of capitalism. And he emphasises the huge difference between the Protestants who's starting with Luther, we've just heard, say, actually what God requires, isn't that you shut yourself away in a monastery, it's not that you become a vessel for God, that you spend your whole time being filled up with God,

in spiritual discipline, cloistered away. Luther says, no, what matters, and drawing on the New Testament, is, he quotes Paul, that you stay in the calling which God has given you. You live out your worldly vocation. So what God is asking to do isn't to spend all your time singing Psalms and worshipping him it's to be a tool of God,

a tool rather than a vessel. It's to work out God's purposes in the world in the worldly calling in which you're called. It might be a broadcaster, it might be a carpenter, it might be a lawyer. Those are the vacations and it's through fulfilling those worldly vacations that you please God

not by spending your whole time shut away in worship. So how is this linking to capitalism? So it gives a religious justification. It becomes your religious calling to work hard, to be successful in your worldly calling. It adds that justification. And Weber says add to that other features of Calvinism in particular. It's anti-hedonistic. So you may be very financially successful in living out your vacation,

but you shouldn't be frittering away the money. So you save it. you reinvest it. This is how capital starts to build up. So the religious ethic, inadvertently, you know, these are unintended consequences. Inadvertently, it gives rise to investment, capital accumulates. And then he adds this other element. He noticed that Calvin in particular had a doctrine called predestination. Calvin thought that God being... This is 16th century theologian Swiss, right? Calvin. Yeah. Yes. Calvin introduces the idea. He's trying to

explain if God is all-knowing and all-powerful, surely God knows from the beginning of time whether I'm going to be saved or damned. And Calvin says, yes, he did know that. And people, but people didn't know themselves. So we worry, am I predestined to salvation or damnation? And this created Weber thought a sense of anxiety. And it's that kind of psychological tension that drives people to work even harder and prove through their worldly success that they are saved. Excellent. Peter, you put your hand up. Do you want to say what you wanted to say and then take that on? Yes, I just wanted to add a little gloss of that, that I agree with absolutely everything Linda's been saying.

But I think we can put this also in a more modern secular language. And one of the most distinguished, distinctive things about this text, is precisely the way that Weber, unlike I think most of us, moves quite easily and seamlessly from the religious world of the 17th century, which is what the text is ostensibly about. and a very secular world in the 20th century. So, for example, when he's talking about the vocation, what he does is he takes this German word beruf. And the German word beruf has both this rather high, ethical-sounding meaning

of vocational calling. But it also simply means your census occupation. So when Weber says, well, actually, modern man is tied up with his vocation, what he's actually describing is the world that we all live in today, where we know that if we are not in employment, that's bad. That's actually we feel ethically quite deficient. Or again, he's describing the ethic in effect of corporation man, who lives simply for his job.

Do you see what to mean? By the 20th century, the whole religious route, as he calls it, has been left behind, but the ethic has been retained. And the point I want to stress here is that, in fact, this is at once both a very religious text. in its historical origin, but in its outcome, it's profoundly secular and does represent a world that I think is very familiar to all of us today. Sam Wimster, can you give us some notion of the evidence,

the range of evidence that they have brought to Berto prove, as it were, as he thought, well, his argument. It can be, as you said it, it's an essay. He gave it to a lady friend Mina Tobler, and she read it. She was a pianist. not a social scientist and he said I read it as a great novel, as a great personality as

you put it. It's this unfolding notion of the spirit. And the spirit, he picks up in the monasteries, he picks up in Calvinism, he picks it up in the secular Benjamin Franklin. Time is money, you remember him. You've always got to work

hard because that increases your credit. He takes it on into the Methodist movement because the Methodist movement, because the Methodist movement, is very important for introducing religion to the masses, and they have the idea of work brings you salvation. And of course, this is completely anti-Marxist, anti-socialist idea.

And then he takes it finally into the great economic cosmos of factory and bureaucratic life. And so it's sort of like the spirit is like a stone bouncing across economic eras. And he calls this a historical ideal type. that it's say, I haven't written the history of modern capitalism. I haven't actually causally explained what caused modern capitalism. I've just told you what I think the mentality is and where it's come from.

And where it's come from, it's actually embedded in our secular outlook today. Now, Peter will tell you that if you look at his footnotes, they are incredible works of scholarship. So this is each of these examples, these historical ideal, tights which aren't, you know, he's not a historian, he never was a historian, he's not really telling a narrative. Though in a sense, he is

telling a story about our capitalist spirit. You know, nobody else had capitalism, why did we have it? Because we had this peculiar spirit. And once we have this modern capitalism, we can't escape the spirit. And so it becomes very interesting, it relates to this

thing that why is it critically, so controversial? Why is it so controversial? Well, you know, the footnotes, historians can engage with that and say, oh, no, no, no, you know, Dutch synod didn't say that. Much disputed text, as someone said earlier in the poem. Yes, yes. And then other people... Mild disputes so far, I may say, but still, maybe it's still,

maybe fermenting a little. Anyway, I'd like to hear to Linda Woodhead here. It was published a decade after Karl Marx's Das Kapital. Was, well, obviously, there was a connection between Weber, not obviously, There was a connection between Weber and Marx. What was it? Well, Weber read Marx. Weber was interested in Marx's thought.

But Weber is very significantly different, of course, in his whole approach. So he sees this work as in many ways a refutation of a materialist conception of history, i.e. of the idea that it's the economic factors. It's the mode of production that drives history. Weber thought that's much too simplistic. He wants a much more multifactual. He wants to put in lots we've just been hearing. He wants to put in the spirit.

He wants to put in religious ideas. He wants to put in culture. He thinks that there are whole sets of factors that go into shaping history. And he thinks that a means of production, which Marx thought gave rise to whole eras, he thought that a means of production can give rise to many, many different social

and economic orders. And that's what he was interested in. So he was really, Weber was asking a question which Marx didn't. Marx was interested in capital and capitalism, but he didn't ask that question, why has it come about in Western Europe and not in other parts of the world? And it was that that Weber was pushing on.

Peter, Peter Gosch, what was the reaction? So it came out, 1905. What was the principal reaction? Can you just give us some little history of the reaction when it came out and what happened? Well, as you say, the essays were published in 1945 and the first reaction is that Weber is invited to give a summary of the thesis

to the Congress of German historians in 196. And this is actually, then, his response is very, very interesting. I think I would have to say that any academic today who'd written an article and was then told that they were asked to be the sort of headline speaker to the entire national community of historians would be only too delighted to take this opportunity. But Weber, in fact, is far too snooting. He says, oh, no, no, I can't be bothered with this sort of nonsense.

I shall delegate this to my friend and ally, the theologian, Ernst Trelch. Shortly after that, there are attacks in the press, but I would have to say, although... Just a second, my useful to pause there, so did they feel let down, did they feel this otter was misplaced? Did they feel that their victim or their hero escaped? Which one? In fact, they don't feel let down, because...

this is where we come back to this point that you're dealing with a galaxy of talent in Germany at this date. Trulch is a very big man and I'm sure Linda would tell you he's on plenty of sociology of religion reading lists today. A greater man than Weber in my view. That's what the people are saying. A little stirring is going on on my left.

But certainly they are in fact considerable allies, I'm sure we could all agree on that. And Trilch gives a presentation which is actually very close to what Weber was saying and in fact this is greeted I wouldn't say exactly in stunned silence but certainly it is not criticised and so the attacks in the periodical press

that come after that in fact come from frankly quite mediocre sources and the really important reactions are in fact I would say twofold one is from the theologians like Trulch and the other is from shall we say the more avant-garde economists and here I'm thinking of a man like Werner Zombart

who have taken on to board Weber's point, which is also the point Linda was making, is that there's rather more to the economy than just what Marx called the capitalist mode of production. You've got to think about, as it were, how people think. So this produces, in fact, two sorts of very big books. Trilch's most famous work, the social doctrines of the Christian churches, 1912, is without question a book produced in response to Weber. And equally, Van der Zombart, having published a book called modern capitalism just before the Protestant ethic in 192, then from 99 onwards, having read the Protestant ethic,

produces a whole new second wave of books about capitalism. And we're talking about two very major intellectual figures here. Can we go to the most serious objections, Linda Woodhead, to the, let's keep calling it the Protestant ethic. There were two or three serious objections. Can you just outline them briefly for us? The serious objections, and they've been made ever since, ever since, and they continue to be made. There's an industry of trying to refute the Protestant ethic.

One serious objection is that capitalism appears elsewhere where there is no Protestantism. So it appears in some Catholic areas and it appears in Japan, for example. So how do we explain that? But that's later. Yes. Well, and so it could have transferred as an ethic without needing the religion to sustain in Japan. He could have adapted itself to Japan. You're quite right, and that's the way to answer it. Right, sorry.

Now, keep going on with the objections. I shut up. They're not necessarily mine. There are other people. No, no, no, no. I'm not personalising this. I think you're right in your reputation. The second one is the kind of obverse of that. So it's, in some countries, you have the Calvinist ethic in place and you don't get capitalism. Like Scotland, for example, developed capitalism very late, but it's a Calvinist country. And then you have another body of objections, a third and final one, which look at how he characterises Calvinism and say,

actually, most Calvinists weren't in the least bit bothered about predestination, or actually vocation didn't matter to them. You know, they're picking holes in the way in which he's interpreting Calvinism and saying that, well, even if Calvin said that, that wasn't actually how Puritans lived their lives in practice. Okay, so Sam Wimster, there was a series, back to Weber, he followed this work by a series of essays on different religions, which is fascinating where he went out and talked about.

Why did Confucius did but stand in the way of this? Can you just say a little about that? Yes, the Brossan ethic has got these little insertions saying, well, I'm going to come back to the economic side of the argument, and there are further comparisons to be made, and indeed there's much more to be said about the history of Christianity. And he does a few other things. He does study on industrial psychology,

and then he starts writing this big encyclopedia. He's the main editor of this big encyclopedia, which has this enormous conspectus of views. And his viewpoint opens up. It goes from, he was always good on Europe and the ancient world, But now he goes to India, to China, to a certain extent, Persia. And he's looking at, well, these are very advanced civilizations. They've got advanced religions.

They have technology, China especially. They have administration. And China is a stand-out example because China, in terms of if you were going to say, which civilization was going to develop a modernity, it would have been China. round about the 16th century. It had a reasonable, well, it had a communication system. It had peace. It didn't, you know, it wasn't like Europe at war religiously and between states.

It had good administration. And so Weber was saying, well, and they didn't have monopolistic guilds. So China had a lot going for it. So why was it? Why was it Europe? and he's still holding onto this idea because it's this application of Calvinist ideas into people's work.

Compared with Confucianist ideas, which were... Confucianist, yeah, Confucian. You tell us what that's about, and then why held things back if it did? If it did, because this is highly disputed now, that Weber didn't have his scholarship right, and this is very important because it's the reception of Weber into China.

But what he said about Confucianism is that they don't even have a concept of heaven. or rather they do have a concept of heaven, Tian. But it doesn't have a god in it, right? It's the emperor in the world, and the sky is above the heaven, and that's as far as it goes. So there's no notion of superstition. And the Confucian scholar is a gentleman,

and religion is a dirty word, because the notion of self-perfection is reading the classics. It's an entirely secular notion. So if you take the example of Jesuits, who tried to be missionaries in 1700 in China. They took the view that Confucian rights, and ancestor worship was not a religion at all. And this was Weber's view as well.

So that you had a civilization with, you didn't have this tension between man and the world, right? The human being and the world. There was no punishing God. The Calvinist God is a punishing one. I mean, but for a Confucian, that's a ridiculous idea. It's uncouth. Do you want to take that on, Peter Gosho?

Do you want to take on other arguments against Weber? What Sam's told us about the Chinese, the 16th century Chinese tilt, which didn't, is absolutely fascinating. I mean, it was in many ways, you just touched the edge of it, in many ways far more advanced than Western Europe was. But then maybe it was this religious factor. Well, I think that...

This is disputed. That's a purely historical question. which would require, I think, an enormous army of experts to confront. I think, I mean, Weber's simple point, which is really the one you yourself made is, that like it or not, this economic system did emerge here, first of all.

And Weber then says, and he says it's quite clearly at the end of the Protestant ethic, he says, well, of course, now, you don't need to worry about what anybody thinks personally. It's a mechanism. and as a mechanism it can be exported everywhere. And in that sense, this isn't a bad description in many ways of what's actually happened. And whether we like it not, we can be as, as it were, anti-Eurocentric as we like

and have as much respect for traditional Chinese culture as we like. But if you want to do capitalism in China, you're going to have to use the West as your point of reference to get going. And that's obviously how the Chinese economy has been developing since circa 1980. One can go back to that Weber said in 1911 of Shanghai that this is modern capitalism. It's going to happen. You know, the notion of Marxist revolution in Europe for him was dead duck by 1900. The world was going to be capitalists and it was going to be imitated around the world. There was absolutely no problem about that.

But Peter is exactly right that Weber would have this expectation that you needed the rational, inbuilt sobriety of the original capitalist to make. it work. Capitalism to work needs discipline. Discipline, efficiency, rationalisation, sobriety, hard work and the existence of this world being preeminent. Linda Woodhead, how, we're near the end now, I'm afraid, how did his ideas run through the 20th century? Have there been any sort of stop him in his tracks objections? You know, he's had a really quite, he's had a mixed influence. If we look at sociology, which is my area, funnily enough, I think. think the best bits of him got lost.

I mean, sociology has neglected importance of religion, actually. And it's neglected looking at how cultural and religious factors affect the economy. When the banking thing came, no one's studying the spirit of capitalism today and what happens. So that bringing together the religious and the economic, that kind of got dropped. What has influenced a lot was another part of the idea, which is that this all eventually, leads to secularisation. And that idea took hold. Weber thought that would happen eventually.

It secularises you don't need the Protestant ethic to keep the rationalised spirit going. And it in the world will become completely disenchanted in Weber's view. You know, the iron cage of rationality takes over. We all become cogs in the capitalist machine. We lose spirit altogether. Now that idea has been incredibly influential.

It's kind of part of our bread and butter. Often we don't even question that idea. and yet, weirdly, it's not really what's happened. If you look around the world today, religion is flourishing. And actually a lot of it... The flourishing is a disputed word, Peter, wouldn't you say? Let's go on. It's flourishing around the world.

Outside Europe. Outside of Europe. Yeah. But interestingly, a lot of religion that's doing really well at the moment is prosperity religion. It's very much, you know, it's a gospel which is about economic advancement. Maybe an interesting in some ways an interesting, not pro-proof, but Weber would have not always. have been surprised to see the religion and the economic

is still incredibly closely bound up together around the world. Finally and briefly, Peter, where does Weber stand today? I think probably we would all agree that in the realms of the social science he's absolutely top of the tree, that he doesn't, of course, inspire political loyalties or partisanship in the way that Marx did in the later 20th century, but as a person of huge range, and great personal detachment.

I mean, he does fit our world very well in all sorts of ways. As Sam said, he declared revolution as dead as a duck. Alas, this is the world we live in. There were all sorts of things with capitalism he didn't like. But his question was, is there an alternative? There's no alternative to finishing now. Thank you very much, Linda. Woodhead, Peter, Goss. Sam. Mr. Next week, States of Matter, Solid liquid,

Gas and plasma. Thanks for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. So, there you are. Did you enjoy that? You're all first-timers. It's very, very unusual. Well, after the first few months of the programme, 114 years ago, to our first three first ones. Very, very fascinating, very fascinating.

The thing about wherever you just unpackes and unpacks and unpacks. It's always more and more to be said He's a bit of a slippery character I think that's why he's lasted really because he's not that clear It's like a great religious text It's like the Bible It's like the Bible

So you can have an industry of interpreter Forever because it's not that clear You know it's full of contradictions And qualifications and subtleties And that's why the Weber industry And there always will be No I actually I really don't agree with that The real problem with Weber

is that there was a rupture, and the rupture was the First World War on Hitler. Yeah. And so the culture from which he sprung has just been lost. German high culture? Yes, has been completely lost. And there was this crucial point of transition, particularly after 1945, when the great interpreters of Weber were either Americans or, very interestingly, Germans who went over to America after 1945 to work on Weber.

And they're the sociologists who really framed our modern understanding. and, for example, the huge great collected edition they're just completing now has been generated by people like that. Yeah. But we wouldn't... Why did you say that the other chap, how do you pronounce...

Trouch. Why, you nipped in quickly that you thought he was much more important than David. There wasn't time to take it up. Oh, he's got a much, much, much more sophisticated understanding of Christianity and he taxonomized Christianity in three main types in a way that's been in influential ever since. And he was a great political thinker,

and he was a great theologian. How come we're not? not talking about him, we're talking about Weber, though. Because Trulch is clearer. No, no, no, no. So, well, the first thing to say, of his famous three types, the third was given to him by Weber. But before writing that book, he only had two types. And the second thing is, I would dispute, I'm afraid, very, very strongly indeed, that he was a great political thinker.

In fact, he's a typical Lutheran who says, well, actually, the most important thing in the world is religion, and politics is secondary. What politics do you happen to have? Well, that's a tricky question. And don't get me wrong. In many ways, I think, you know, if we're talking about, you know, what is the real meaning of the world, that's a very respectful position. You can't, you know, it's hard to argue with it.

Why is the most important to leave out, Sam? Well, I mean, you could, pursuing it into the 20th century, I think it's the bureaucratic rationality, which is cold, impersonal. And people like... And this stems directly from favour, you think? Yes, this is actually because what we... bit we left out, and it's actually in the Prosten ethic,

is that to run a capitalist firm, 20th century capitalist firm, you need a bureaucracy to run it, right? You need accountants, you need office managers, etc., etc. And there's no difference between the bureaucracy of the firm and the Prussian bureaucracy that Linda was talking

about. And they both have this cold, impersonal rationality, and it squeezes out morality. Now, and an author like, Hannah Arendt picks this up and so that when you come to the administration

of if you take the first second and final solutions they're all bureaucratic right that you've deport people hold them in refugee so they come because of an impersonisation yeah I mean the thing I decided I was never going to say on the programme

because it's just too complicated is that he worked out the ethical argument you're all banging at a table That's all right, it's all right, I don't mind. We're not on a lot. That's all. He worked out the ethical argument, first of all, in the 1890s. And then he overlays it with a very closely related, but nonetheless distinct argument about rationality.

So the original argument is how you get from love your neighbor to the impersonal ethic. And the overlaid argument is an argument which is where he talks to the thing, the Protestantism he talks about is actually called ascetic Protestantism. And you move from ascetic Protestantism to rationalism. And acetic pottenicism, this is where the historians go out to see bananas, because there is no such thing as ascetic Protestantism in the 17th century. If you did an A-level or BA in history on religiousity in the 17th century,

there is no such entity. But Weber invented it, and acetic for him means proto-rational. So the actual technical argument of part two of the text is a movement from proto-rational religious behaviour to modern rational behaviour. I hear another thing that struck me yesterday. I was chairing a debate. about the Middle East and what's happening at the moment. And every debate you ever do about religion and politics

always splits into this incredibly simplistic question about, well, is it religion that's driving violence or is it politics? And you think, Max Weber would just say, go back to kindergarten. It's not an either-or. You know, is religion political. Well, especially as using the 17th century as his basic source, which is... Yeah, but we're so sophisticated in the way we think about religion. It's one simple thing and one fact.

going to have one factor. You know, religion and politics and economics, and they're all acting in an interesting way together. But to try and say it's not religious or it is or it's just political, it's crazy. I mean, in fact, you did touch on a very important point when you were talking, you said he famously described himself as religiously unmusical.

And that is actually obviously a very interesting conception because what it's saying is, well, actually, all previous history has been musical. has been religious, and he regards the musical or religious state as historically normal. However, he says in the 20th century, we moderns are not musical. And this is a very, very interesting description of what Linda was saying about secularisation. Because what Weber wants to say is, well, in some sense, secularisation may have taken place. But if it has taken place, it's a very odd thing, because we've moved from a situation which was, as it were, completely normal,

to one which is very unusual. So does he think that the spirit of the ethical spirit is, he's lurking on, ah. Well, I said... The BBC croissant is to be shared between four of us. Right, sorry, he was saying. No, I mean, his point then is just that the need, again, Sam was saying this, that the need for personal ethics in the modern world has been superseded by these impersonal structures which enforce codes of behaviour, whether you like it or not.

I think Kafka is always the person. Kafka's sense in the truth. There's a wonderful illustration of the emotional stultification, isn't it? That he deplores. And he thinks we're trapped in it. I mean, that's a debate we haven't had. Are we trapped? Are we truly trapped in a rational iron cage?

I don't think we are. Another thing I was never going to say on air is that that's actually one of the most important mistranslations of the text. It's not an iron cage. It's a steel-housed housing. A steel-tempered housing, wasn't it? A steel-hard housing. Yeah. Well, why did you and I know some of you say it's an iron cage?

Well, this comes back to Talcott Parsons, who was... The translator? The translator, American translator, who was, he was writing the big 20th century classic, which came out in the late 30s. And he did his translation in the late 20s, met Marianna Vava, the wife and Heidelberg. And he got inspired by this work, and it's an inspired translation. He writes, in his sociology, like a complete, very

badly and it's really hard work but the Protestant ethic it just flows you can actually read it like a novel so you know Puritanism descended on Mary England like a whole frost you know the phrases like this that's good

and I don't think the average student thinks it's a novel it's still quite a good read compared with some sociology I made it as an ignorant undergraduate as a narrative I mean I think you can pick it up. There are many more Radio 4 arts and discussion programs to download for free. Find these on the website at BBC.co.uk slash Radio 4.