(weberred)

N.B. This contains all that I want to say, but it needs a bit of re ordering in the second half, nearer the time.

RATIONALITY AND STRUCTURALISM: 1890 1920: MAX WEBER

The man and his fault lines

Like Adam Smith, Max Weber was brought up on several fault lines in this case between the Protestant and Catholic, the different kind of social structures of the east and west German peasantries , between areas where capitalism was growing and others were failing to take hold . It may be worth pursuing later how it was these lived clashes, and those of his parentage and upbringing, which forced a man living on the edges of the spreading capitalist system to investigate the contrasts between systems. e.g. his mental breakdowns etc.

His stature

Whatever the reasons are, there can be little doubt that in his immense and powerful writings, Weber provided the single most comprehensive vision of the nature and origins of modern civilization. His aim is 'nothing less than to comprehend capitalism as a civilization, the civilization of the modern world...' Like Marx his thought is holistic and encompassing in its 'attempt to grasp the interrelations on all institutional orders making up a social structure.' Yet in many ways because of its completeness it is more satisfying than Marx and we may well agree that his theories 'is still today the only comprehensive theory of the origins of capitalism.' As Hawthorn puts it, he produced 'an interpretation of the singularity of western capitalism which carries more weight than any but Marx's and in its historical sensitivity, more weight than any...'

Weber's methodology

Before considering his more specific analyses, it is essential to look at the question he asked and the methods which he employed in his search for an answer. Weber was well aware that money, markets, the profit motive and many of the elements of capitalism were to be found in all civilizations, ancient and modern. Thus he wrote that 'Capitalism existed in China, India, Babylon, in the classical world, and in the Middle Ages.' Yet he also believed that 'in all these cases, as we shall see, this particular ethos was missing...' Thus he took as his starting point the belief that 'In modern times the Occident has developed a very different form of capitalism which has appeared nowhere else...' At different times he defined the special features differently. One summary of his views suggests that 'The characteristics of rational capitalism itself are the entrepreneurial organization of capital, rational technology, free labour, unrestricted markets, and calculable law.' At other times he included other features, including 'capital accounting', a specific production establishment and many others. But whatever the features, it is clear that Weber's central assumption was that there was something peculiar and relatively recent about industrial capitalism. 'Throughout his work, Weber was concerned with the uniqueness of Western civilization, from Greek philosophy and Roman jurisprudence to the Protestant ethic, capitalist enterprise and modern science.' It is this insight into the relative peculiarity of capitalism which has attracted many to his work. 'Weber's "Protestant Ethic" "is a masterpiece...for its superb sketch of what it is that distinguishes the modern world from the other possible and actual social worlds...he knew full well that the modern world was but one of many possible ones and very different from the others..."' This insight leads Weber on to ask '"what were the specific preconditions and consequences of this unique kind of man, who was also responsible for that fascinating monstrosity, the modern world?"'

The fact that Weber viewed industrial capitalism as western and recent led him to emphasize its accidental nature. Many civilizations had risen and fallen without giving birth to this peculiar formation. The fact that it emerged only once and in a restricted area suggested the fortuitous and accidental nature. As Gellner again noticed, the Weberian vision is of a 'fortuitous, contingent opening of a normally shut gate...the accidentally open gate model...' Weber saw capitalism as the result of an accidental set of conditions, so unlikely to occur together as to be practically miraculous. 'Weber saw the rise of large scale capitalism, then, as the result of a series of combinations of conditions which had to occur together. This makes world history look like the result of configurations of events so rare as to appear accidental.' This was the 'European miracle' which subsequent analysts have analysed or attacked since then.

Why then was it so difficult to develop capitalism? Partly it was because what he saw were the necessary pre conditions were many and each of them was unusual. His enumeration of these pre conditions varied from place to place, but it is worth gaining some idea of the range of factors. Firstly he noted what were not significant factors. He dismissed colonialism, an increase in population, an inflow of bullion all popular theories at his time. Instead he stressed the importance of geography (transport), military development, luxury demand, the rationalization of economic life, ethics and Christianity. Earlier in the same volume he had stressed the importance of rational capital accounting, freedom of the market, rational technology, calculable law, the commercialization of economic life, all of which he believed occurred decisively in parts of western Europe from the late fifteenth century. But these, as we shall see, were only partial lists. Many other ingredients were elaborated in his other works, for instance a special kind of city, the destruction of large kinship groups, a specific work ethic. Yet his deepest insight lay not in enumerating the ingredients but in realizing the importance of the recipe.

The need to move beyond a list to a recipe is noted by Bendix. Enumerations of the features of a system such as feudalism, bureaucracy or capitalism, as Weber noted, 'say nothing about the strength or the prevalence of a given characteristic, nor do they say anything about structures in which one or another element of the definition is missing.' A good account of the way in which Weber stressed the connections, the relations, rather than the things themselves, is given by Randall Collins. He writes that 'Weber's constant theme is that the pattern of relations among the various factors is crucial in determining their effect upon economic rationalization. Any one factor occurring by itself tends to have opposite effects overall, to those which it has in combination with the other factors.' For example, Weber wrote that 'Cities on the other hand, have to be balanced by the bureaucratic state. But when the state is too strong by itself, it, too, tends to stifle capitalism.' This idea of tension and balance, reminiscent of De Tocqueville, is again illustrated in another 'little known passage' which Collins quotes from Weber. 'All in all the specific roots of Occidental culture must be sought in the tension and peculiar balance, on the other hand, between office charisma and monasticism, and on the other between the contractual character of the feudal state and the autonomous bureaucratic hierocracy.' Collins paraphrases and expands this key passage in a footnote as follows. 'In other words, the main features of the West depend on a tension between the routinization of religious charisma in the church and the participatory communities of monks, and on a tension between the democratising tendencies of self supplied armies and the centralized bureaucratic state. This gives us Weber's two great intermediate factors, a non dualistic religious ethic and calculable law, respectively.' He further expands it in the following words. 'No one element must predominate if rationalization is to increase. More concretely, since each "element" is composed of real people struggling for precedence, the creation of a calculable, open market economy depends upon a continuous balance of power among differently organised groups.' Thus there is a tension and contradiction and balance of forces in the capitalist system which only works through because no single sphere or tendency becomes dominant. As Collins continues, summarising the tension at the heart of the system, 'The capitalist economy depends on this balance. The open market system is a situation of institutionalised strife. Its essence is struggle, in an expanded version of the Marxian sense, but with the qualification that this could go on continuously, and indeed must, if the system is to survive.' Thus the essence of an understanding of capitalism is to see how the relations between polity, economy, society and ideology work out in practice. The miracle of capitalism occurred and is preserved only through an unusual set of balances in which no single institution dominates. 'The victory of any one side would spell the doom of the system.' We shall examine this in more detail later, for it is a key to Weber's brilliance. What he is saying is that capitalism is the first civilization in which no institutional order, whether castes, clan, religion or absolutism, dominates the rest. In this stand off in which there is no supremacy, individuals can be 'free' and 'rational', and the market can be expanded. This is too important to leave for long, so we shall return to it.

The final feature to note bout his methodology is that it is very explicitly comparative. Alerted to the advantages of comparison by his situation and upbringing, Weber spent his life in the pursuit of contrast and comparison. He realized that in order to understand what was special about capitalism in the west, he would need to see how other civilizations were constructed. For instance he wrote that 'we are absolutely in accord that history should establish what is specific, say, to the medieval city; but this is possible only if we first find what is missing in other cities (ancient, Chinese, Islamic).' Thus contrast could be used to define the special features of a particular society. But more generally, he wished to use the comparative method in order to test and refine his theories on the link between religion and capitalism. Gerth and Mills summarized his method here. In his broad surveys of India, China, Islam and Ancient agrarian civilizations, capitalism in the Western sense did not emerge.' Weber hoped 'to find those factors in other civilizations which blocked the emergence of capitalism, even though there were many favourable conditions present for its emergence.' This comparative analysis of causal sequences would, Weber hoped, show 'not only the necessary but the sufficient causes of capitalism.' Of course, Weber's task was made much more difficult by the fact that when he wrote there was no other obvious case of the development of successful industrial capitalism outside Europe. He could only therefore work by the weaker method of difference (see Mill), rather than the stronger method of agreement.

SEE TABLE OF MAJOR CONTRASTS OF PRE MODERN AND MODERN


This table is still very rough and approximate and will need to be heavily amended in the light of deeper reading of Weber. But there is enough here to throw up the contrasts. Basically Weber developed two 'ideal types'. The modern West and particularly England represented one extreme. A composite of his other studies of 'Ancient' civilizations, Islam, China, and India represented the other.

Reasons for the development of capitalism and modernity

(modified from \encounter\weber from 'Culture of Capitalism', 172 6)

Eliminating factors
Weber considered a number of possible explanations for the emergence of capitalism. He rejected the crudely technological and materialistic ones: colonial trade, population growth, the inflow of precious metals. He then isolated some of the necessary but not sufficient 'external conditions', the particular geography of Europe with its cheap transportation by water, the favourable military requirements of the small states, the large luxury demand from an unusually prosperous population.
The Protestant Ethic

Ultimately, it was not these external factors, but something more mysterious that was important. It was the ethic, the justification of the pursuit of profit. He found the roots of this in a paradox. The new attitudes were waiting to escape. The paradox is summarized by Weber himself. 'The final result is the peculiar fact that the germs of modern capitalism must be sought in a region where officially a theory was dominant which was distinct from that of the east and of classical antiquity and in principle strongly hostile to capitalism'. This region was medieval Christendom.

We may note the use of 'officially' here with its implication of the submerged, unofficial, practice. Judaism was an important background feature in giving to Christianity, 'the character of a religion essentially free from magic'. But what was most important was the presence of Protestantism. Protestantism was not the cause of capitalism, but it gave older and deeper tendencies a necessary protection. It was enabling force. This view of Protestantism as a kind of windbreak which allowed the young plant to grow is well shown in numerous places by Weber. For instance, when writing that the Puritan outlook 'stood at the cradle of the modern economic man', the image is not of a mother giving birth, but of a friend, perhaps a godparent, who gives support and blessing to the new infant. More specifically, Weber wrote that 'we have no intention whatever of maintaining such a foolish and doctrinaire thesis as that the spirit of capitalism...could only have arisen as the result of certain effects of the Reformation, or even that capitalism as an economic system is the creation of the Reformation'. Many aspects of capitalism were much older. As Bendix summarizes Weber's position, 'this world historical transformation, then, was not the product of Puritanism; rather, Puritanism was a late development that reinforced tendencies that had distinguished European society for a long time past'.

England as a test case

Weber provides some suggestive clues as to why England should be the cradle of capitalism. There was the peculiar position of the peasantry. In England the peasants were particularly weak and vulnerable because, being an island, they were not needed by the king and nobility as a necessary fighting force; 'hence the policy of peasant protection was unknown in England and it became the classical land of peasant eviction'. In England, he noted
no legal emancipation of the peasants ever took place. The medieval system is still formally in force, except that under Charles II serfdom was abolished...In England, the mere fact of the development of a market, as such and alone destroyed the manorial system from within. In accordance with the principle fitting the situation, the peasants were expropriated in favour of the proprietors. The peasants became free but without land.

In France, however, 'the course of events is exactly the opposite...France, in contrast with England, became a land of small and medium sized farms'. Not only was this a reflection of the different power of the peasants, the pressures of wealth in England were greater. Because of the rapid development of a particular means of production, the English woollen industry with its division of labour and commerce, the large scale stock raising, Weber argued, made the tenant weak and redundant. The massive growth of the English cloth industry from the fourteenth century onwards meant that a new capitalist class emerged. This was combined with the growth of the 'bourgeoisie', the free dwellers in the peculiar towns and cities of northern Europe.

The state and law

Having subtly interwoven some of the religious, economic and social factors, Weber does not omit the political and legal dimensions. He argues that 'the State, in the sense of the rational state has existed only in the western world'. He contrasts this western state with the charismatic, patrimonial and other traditional systems of government in China, India and Islam. The state is essential to capitalism; 'very different is the rational state in which alone modern capitalism can flourish'. The basis of the rational state is rational law. Here Weber recognizes another paradox. The most 'rational', that is, the most carefully worked out and logically coherent of legal systems, was that of Roman law. Yet, ironically, capitalism flourished most in the one area of Europe without Roman law, namely England. Weber resolves the contradiction subtly. He distinguishes between the formal side, in modern terms 'procedural' or 'adjectival' law, and its content or 'substantive law'. Thus the 'rational law of the modern occidental state...arose on its formal side, though not as to its content, out of Roman law'. Yet, since 'England, the home of capitalism, never accepted the Roman law', it is clear that 'in fact all the characteristic institutions of modern capitalism have other origins than Roman law'. Weber gives a list of these devices. 'The annuity bond...came from medieval law, in which Germanic legal ideas played their part. Similarly the stock certificate arose out of medieval and modern law...likewise the bill of exchange...the commercial company is also a medieval product, so also the mortgage, with the security of registration, and the deed of trust'.

Overlap with Marx

Several of Weber's characterizations of capitalism naturally overlap with those of Marx. The presence of a 'free' labour force, freed from the constraints of those fetters such as serfdom, slavery or kinship, is of great importance for Weber. Likewise, there is increasing division of labour, though here Weber elaborates a new distinction: 'the separation of business from the household, which completely dominates modern economic life' is of central importance. This is not necessarily a physical separation as between place of work and household, it is 'our legal separation of corporate from personal property'. It is the realization that a person may act in one way as a businessman, and another as a family member, it includes the devices of limited liability, of companies, of corporations. This separation of the economic unit of production from the social unit of reproduction lies behind the destruction of the hitherto widespread 'domestic mode of production' which blended the two. The distinction is behind the growing separation of public and private domains in politics, economics and elsewhere. It is also related to the new development of 'rational accounting'.

When contrasting feudal and capitalist systems, Weber argued that the large demesne farming of medieval Europe was not 'capitalist'. It would only have been so 'if it were oriented to capital accounting, particularly to an estimate, beforehand, in money of the chances of profit from a transaction'. Weber expands this view very clearly elsewhere.

We will define a capitalistic economic action as one which rests on the expectation of profit by the utilization of opportunities for exchange, that is on (formally) peaceful chances of profit...The important fact is always that a calculation of capital in terms of money is made, whether by modern book keeping methods or in any other way, however primitive and crude. Everything is done in terms of balances: at the beginning of the enterprise and initial balance, before every individual decision a calculation to ascertain its probably profitableness, and at the end a final balance to ascertain how much profit has been made.

Thus the central feature is not in the actual method of accounting, double entry book keeping or whatever, but in the mental attitudes, the desire to work out the likelihood of profit on a transaction.

Thus Weber is already talking about attitudes and ideology and it is in high insights into the ethos of capitalism that he made his most important contributions. Ultimately the uniqueness of capitalism lies in its attitudes towards such things as money, time, effort, accumulation and so on. Weber believed that what happened under capitalism was that accumulation, saving, and profit seeking had become ethically and emotionally attractive, whereas before they had been unacceptable. The ethic of endless accumulation, as an end and not as a means, is the central peculiarity of capitalism.
Man is dominated by the making of money, by acquisition as the ultimate purpose of his life. Economic acquisition is no longer subordinated to man as the means for the satisfaction of his material needs. This reversal of what we should call the natural relationship...is evidently as definitely a leading principle of capitalism as it is foreign to all peoples not under capitalistic influence.

This ethic or spirit could flourish in the backwoods or be absent in great markets in ancient civilizations. For what Weber saw was that it is not money in itself, it is not markets by themselves, it is not even particular accounting systems that are significant, it is the use and purposes to which these are put. It is not money which is the root of capitalism, but the love of money.

WEBER ON THE TYPES OF CITY

It may be taken as axiomatic that the nature of cities, both sociologically and physically, will reflect the civilizations within which they occur. Weber recognized this when he differen¬tiated many types of city "the cities of Asiatic, Ancient and Medieval types' (City, p.69), or "the trade city, the merchant city, the consumer city' (p.69).

In order to differentiate he put forward a definition of the 'true' or ideal type city. "To constitute a full urban community a settlement must display a relative predominance of trade commercial relations with the settlement as a whole displaying the following features: 1. a fortification 2. A market 3. A court of its own and at least partially autonomous law 4. A related form of association 5. At least partial autonomy and autocephaly, thus also an administration by authorities in the election of whom the burghers participated. "

Measured by these criteria, Weber believed, most 'cities' in the world had 1 and 2, but 3,4,5 were special to the West. "An urban "community" in the full meaning of the word, appears as a general phenomenon only in the Occident (the only minor excep-tions being Syria, Phoenicia, Mesopotamia, p.80). There must be "the presence of a special stratum, a distinct new estate" (the bourgeois), and "measured by this rule...the cities of Asia were not urban communities at all..." They were large commercial centres and fortresses, "However the possession by the urbanites of a special substantive or trial law or of courts autonomously nominated by them were unknown to Asiatic cites..." (p.81).

Even more importantly, Weber argues, there were not real townsmen just country people living in the town: "the appear¬ance in the city of an association of urbanites in contradiction to the countrymen was also found only in rudiments. The Chinese urban dweller legally belonged to his family and native village...the Russian village comrade, earning his living in the city but legally remained a peasant. The Indian urban dweller remained a member of the caste." (p.82) Thus, he argues, "In China, Japan and India "neither urban community nor citizenry can be found and only traces of them appear in the Near East". In other words, he believed that caste and kinship made real towns impossible.

The walls of the West were a symbol of a different social, economic, religious and political world within them. In the East they were just military defences. In the West the bourgeois was a separate estate and a separate breed of man; in the East, just a peasant or quasi merchant in a certain location.

The further refinement within Weber's model, which Braudel does not notice, but which is equally important, is within Eu¬rope. Weber accepted that there was a very great difference between North and South Europe. Thus the "medieval occidental city presents striking contrasts to its Asiatic counterparts. This was particularly true for urban formations north of the Alps where the western city developed in its purest form". (p.91). In Northern Europe an added and essential feature emerged, "City air makes man free" (cf. p.197). Thus in the north alone, was the city dweller cut off from his status roots whether of kinship or class. "The cutting of status connections with the rural nobility was carried out in relatively pure form only in the civic corporations of Northern Europe." (p.95).

Thus his schema has two major differences: Western and Asiat¬ic, Northern European and Southern European. Asiatic and North European cities form the two poles, while 'the ancient (Greece, Rome ? Alan) and to a lesser extent, the southern medieval Euro¬pean city form a transitional stage between the Asiatic and North European cities."
In all of this Weber seems only dimly aware that there is something odd about Japan, but he is half aware of it. He tends to lump it in, as we have seen, with China and India. But else¬where he hints at various oddnesses. It was a general rule of cities that they acted as fortresses or garrisons, with large walls. This was true in Antiquity, in medieval Europe and in Asia. But there was an exception Japan. "In Japan, for example it was not the rule. Administratively one may, with Rathgen, doubt the existence of cities at all." (p.75) He caught the an oddness, but instead of asking why, he leapt to a spurious con¬clusion.

Again, he hints that Japanese self rule was unusually de¬veloped. In certain early cities, "It was possible thus for them to be formed into communities with elected officials or hereditary elders." This, Weber says, "occurred in Japan where one or more civil administrative body (Machi Bugyo) was established as superior to self administered street communities." (p.82) But again, instead of following this further as an oddity, Weber retreats in the next sentence. "However, a city law similar to that of Antiquity or the Middle Ages was absent. The city as corporate per se was unknown."

Or again, he realizes that in Japan "the merchants and tra¬desmen" were "partly united in professional associations." Again, he quickly qualifies this to fit with his oppositional model which would emphasize the special nature of the west. "However, here too, the concepts of a 'citizenry' and an 'urban community' are absent." (p.83) Thus Weber, perhaps badly served by his sources, manages to miss the vital clue to one curious similarity between north European and Japanese structures the similarities of their cities.

If he had seen the similarities, his tentative suggestions on why North European cities could have critically cut the umbilical chord between their inhabitants and the country people would have been even more interesting than it is, or rather we could try to apply it to Japan.

A final check list of factors

Weber is an elusive and often contradictory thinker, yet occasionally he drew up checklists of what he thought were the necessary, if not sufficient, preconditions of capitalism. One such list is in his 'General Economic History'. He enumerates six such features. The first, 'rational capital accounting', the second, 'freedom of the market' (in other words, the absence of class or other constraints on trading), and the fifth, 'free labour', we have already encountered. The other three need to be added to the definition of capitalism. His third precondition is a 'rational technology', that is, one reduced to calculation to the largest possible degree, which implies mechanization'. Here he overlaps with the point we have already encountered with Marx, that capitalism is likely to be linked to a certain set of tools, and particularly with machines which give man control over his environment. Weber's last two additions take one again into the borderland between superstructure and infrastructure, that artificial distinction out of which Weber breaks. His fourth point is the necessity for 'calculable law'. As he puts it, the 'capitalistic form of industrial organization, if it is to operate rationally, must be able to depend upon calculable adjudication and administration'. This was not present in the Greek city state, the patrimonial state of Asia, nor, Weber believes in 'western countries down to the Stuarts'. But without political and legal certainty, rational decisions cannot be taken. The final feature is also related to law, but in another way. It is the 'commercialization of economic life', by which he means 'the general use of commercial instruments to represent share rights in enterprise, and also in property ownership'.

Of course one could add further features of capitalism, the psychological alienation which Marx drew attention to, the individualistic family system documented by Engels, the new attitude towards nature in Weber's famous 'disenchantment of the world'. But we have enough already to gain a good picture of many of the deeper characteristics of that historically specific phenomenon whose origins and development is one of the themes of this book.



Weber himself recognized that as the first industrial nation, it was also 'the home of capitalism'. Thus he wrote that it was important to trace the English development 'which determined the character of the evolution of capitalism.' Why England? Well one of his theories linked its uniqueness to the fact that it was an island. He realized that England had been different in its economic and social structure from the middle ages. He thought that part of the reason lay in the peculiarly permeable social structure resulting from the influx of town people into the gentry. He also thought that the Norman conquest had led to an unusually centralized form of feudalism. Yet above all its peculiar development lay in its separation from Europe. The difference from Europe is 'by no means fortuitous, but is the outcome of a continuous development over centuries...was the result of the insular position...' In particular he drew the connection between the peculiar social structure and later factory capitalism. 'Free labour was essential for factory system. "This mass of labour was created in England, the classical land of later factory capitalism, the eviction of the peasants..."' This eviction of the peasants was due to the island nature of the country a theory anticipating Brenner. 'Thanks to its insular position England was not dependent on a great national army...hence the policy of peasant protection was unknown in England and it became the classical land of peasant eviction...' This explained the difference between the English and continental experience. 'Thus, while in England shop industry arose, so to speak, of itself, on the continent it had to be deliberately cultivated by the state...'