Margin : Max Weber, Values of Occidental Civilization
Organization of political and social groups in feudal classes
has been common. But even the feudal state of king and status groupsin
the Western sense has only been known to our culture. Even more are parliaments
of periodically elected representatives, with government by demagogues and party
leaders as ministers responsible to the parliaments, peculiar to us, although
there have, of course, been parties, in the sense of organizations for exerting
influence and gaining control of political power, all over the world. In fact,
the State itself, in the sense of a political association with a rational,
written constitution, rationally ordained law, and an administration bound to
rational rules or laws, administered by trained officials, is known, in this
combination of characteristics, only in the Occident, despite a other approaches
to it.
And the same is true of the most fateful force in our modern
life, capitalism. The impulse to acquisition pursuit of gain, of money, of the
greatest possible amount of money, has in itself nothing to do with capitalism.
This impulse exists and has existed among waiters, physicians, coachmen,
artists, prostitutes, dishonest officials, soldiers, nobles, crusaders,
gamblers, and beggars. One may say that it has been common to all sorts and
conditions of men at all times and in all countries of the earth, wherever the
objective possibility of it is or has been given. It should be taught in the
kindergarten of cultural history that this naive idea of capitalism must be
given up once and for all. Unlimited greed for gain is not in the least
identical with capitalism, and is still less its spirit. Capitalism may even be
identical with the restraint, or at least a rational tempering, of this
irrational impulse. But capitalism is identical with the pursuit of profit, and
forever renewed profit, by means of continuous, rational, capitalistic
enterprise. For it must be so: in a wholly capitalistic order of society, an
individual capitalistic enterprise which did not take advantage of its
opportunities for profit-making would be doomed to extinction.
From Max Weber, The Viewpoint of Sociology of World
Religions
