Start ||| The Philosophical Europe ||| The Political Progress ||| European Witness Blog ||| Special Homages: Meister Eckhart / David Copperfield

Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

One of the fundamental elements of the spirit of modern capitalism, and not only of that but of all modern culture: rational conduct on the basis of the idea of the calling, was born-that is what this discussion has sought to demonstrate-from the spirit of Christian asceticism. One has only to re-read the passage from Franklin, quoted at the beginning of this essay, in order to see that the essential elements of the attitude which was there called the spirit of capitalism are the same as what we have just shown to be the content of the Puritan worldly asceticism, only without the religious basis, which by Franklin's time had died away. The idea that modern labour has an ascetic character is of course not new. Limitation to specialized work, with a renunciation of the Faustian universality of man which it involves, is a condition of any valuable work in the modern world; hence deeds and renunciation inevitably condition each other today. This fundamentally ascetic trait of middle-class life, if it attempts to be a way of life at all, and not simply the absence of any, was what Goethe wanted to teach, at the height of his wisdom, in the Wander-jahren, and in the end which he gave to the life of his Faust. For him the realization meant a renunciation, a departure from an age of full and beautiful humanity, which can no more be repeated in the course of our cultural development than can the flower of the Athenian culture of antiquity...  Read Complete 

      Cf.  J. O. y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses and Ernst Troeltsch, The Divine Seed * David Turner, Byzantium : The 'alternative' history of Europe