Weber's critique of Marx in the Protestant Ethic
Noung has outlined Weber’s main argument in the Protestant Ethic in his excellent writeup. My purpose in this writeup is not to offer another description of Weber’s classic work. I focus on one of the most interesting aspects of the Protestant Ethic - Weber’s historical method and his critique of historical materialism.
Historical materialism
Historical materialism is the conception of history formulated by Marx. The clearest exposition of it is to be found in the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy and the German Ideology. A somewhat more simplistic materialist theory is presented by Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto.
According to historical materialism, ideas - and indeed everything in the superstructure - is determined, at least in the ‘last instance’, by the economic base. The German Ideology is worth quoting on this point:
The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. … The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance. (p. 64)
It is this theory of ideas being reflections of material circumstances and more generally the doctrine that there is one fundamental causal factor in history that Weber challenges in the Protestant Ethic.
Weber’s historical method
Marx asserts that there is one fundamental causal factor in history, the economic base. Though Weber does not deny that the economic has often been of crucial causal importance in history, he denies that it is always the ultimate causal factor. There are many possible factors which may in any particular historical case be the decisive one. What the decisive factor is in a given historical situation is left for empirical research to determine. The question cannot be answered a priori.
This methodological pluralism is at the heart of the Protestant Ethic. The point of the work is not to show that Protestantism ‘caused’ capitalism, but rather that it was a significant factor in its development. Weber does not deny that the economic had a crucial role to play in the transition from feudalism to capitalism. He is merely arguing that an economic reductionist account of the transition is inadequate.
Weber’s diversion from Marx’s approach is perhaps clearest his insistence that ideas should be taken seriously as causal factors in history. For Marx, causation always runs ultimately from the economic to everything else. Weber asserts that ideas can have a profound influence on the economic sphere itself.
Weber reverses the direction of causality that Marx presents. For Weber, a certain ideology or world view is a necessary precondition for a mode of production.
In order that a manner of life so well adapted to the peculiarities of capitalism could be selected at all, i.e. should come to dominate others, it had to originate somewhere, and not in isolated individuals alone, but as a way of life common to whole groups of men. (p. 20)
For capitalism to succeed, groups within society had to adopt ways of life compatible with it. Those ways of life were not caused by capitalism, rather they enabled its rise.
What kind of world view does capitalism require? Weber argues that the elimination of traditionalism is crucial. This is well covered in the above writeup, and repetition is not necessary. Suffice it to say that traditionalism means that workers are complacent with their standard of living. They cannot be induced to work harder by the introduction of piece rates, for instance. This kind of populace is not well suited for capitalism, since capitalism requires a constant improvement in productivity. In capitalism, profits are continually reinvested - something that doesn’t make sense to people who only want to uphold their current standard of living.
Capitalism requires that
Labour … be performed as if it were an absolute end in itself, a calling. (p. 25)
Such an attitude does not come about simply because the economic base requires it (for a functionalist account of Marx’s theory of history which argues that “bases get the superstructures they need because they need them” see G.A. Cohen’s Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence). Rather,
… such an attitude … can only be the product of a long and arduous process of education. (p. 25)
The spirit of capitalism makes capitalist activity intelligible. Where the spirit does not exist, capitalist activity makes no sense. This is essentially the reason why the spirit of capitalism is a precondition of capitalism itself.
… it is just that (the bourgeois lifestyle) which seems to the pre-capitalistic man so incomprehensible and mysterious … That anyone should be able to make it the sole purpose of his life-work, to sink into the grave weighed down with a great material load of money and goods, seems to him explicable only as the product of a perverse instinct … (p. 33)
Weber does not simply present a theoretical argument against historical materialism, he also presents empirical evidence. He places considerable importance on his example of colonial Massachusetts. According to Weber, the spirit of capitalism was present in Massachusetts before the advent of capitalism itself.
There were complaints of a peculiarly calculating sort of profit-seeking in New England, as distinguished from other parts of America, as early as 1632. It is further undoubted that capitalism remained far less developed in some of the neighbouring colonies, the later Southern States of the United States of America, in spite of the fact that these latter were founded by large capitalists for business motives, while the New England colonies were founded by preachers and seminary graduates with the help of small bourgeois, craftsmen and yoemen, for religious reasons. In this case the causal relation is certainly the reverse of that suggested by the materialistic standpoint. (p. 20)
… in the backwoods small bourgeois circumstances of Pennsylvania in the eighteenth century, where business threatened for simple lack of money to fall back into barter, where there was hardly a sign of large enterprise, where only the earliest beginnings of banking were to be found, the same thing (rational capitalist accumulation a la Franklin) was considered the essence of moral conduct, even commanded in the name of duty. To speak here of a reflection of material conditions in the ideal superstructure would be patent nonsense. (p. 36)
Weber or Marx?
Especially in American social science, often hostile to Marxism, Weber has been presented as the ‘bourgeois Marx’, the more acceptable of the two profound social theorists because of his more conservative politics. In terms of historical methodology, Weber is also seen as more acceptable, since he seems to be less reductionist. So, is Weber's critique of Marx succesful?
This is one of the classical questions of the social sciences, and I do not pretend to have an answer to it. The most profound differences of Marx and Weber do not lie in empirical investigations - which could be verified or falsified by further investigation - but in the theoretical foundations of their historical method. Weber seems the more attractive theorist, since he repudiates Marxist reductionism which most of us would reject. I think his critique of Marx is persuasive, though I doubt the controversy can be ultimately decided. Marx is not as reductionist as is often thought. For instance, in the Eighteenth Brumaire he describes a situation where the state has considerable autonomy from class forces in society. And even in the Preface, considerable latitude is left for the superstructure to exert causal influence in history. So, is Weber right in arguing that a certain world view is a necessary precondition of the rise of capitalism or Marx in arguing that such a world view is merely a consequence of the development of capitalism? Personally, I do not think there is an answer. The problem cannot be resolved by looking at historical facts, since it is precisely about how such facts should be interpreted. However, even if this question is unaswerable - or because of that - it is one of the most fascinating problems in the social sciences.
Sources
Howell, D. (2004) Seminars on Marx's theory of history and the Protestant Ethic (
York,
University of York)
Marx, K. & Engels, F. (1974)
The German Ideology (London, Lawrence & Wishart)
Weber, M. (2001)
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (London, Routledge)