Understanding Weber

Capitalism in contemporary debates 37
fact but one that also needs to be further established . . . the Protestant
system of religion is the consequence rather than the cause of the modern-capitalist
spirit.
Sombart, like Weber, quotes (in a footnote) Eberhard Gothein’s contribution
to the debate.
Whoever will trace the origins of capitalist development, in whatever
country of Europe that may be, is always impressed by the same fact:
the Calvinist diaspora is at the same time the breeding ground (‘Pflanzschule’)
of the capitalist economy. The Spanish expressed this with bitter
resignation: heresy supports the spirit of trade (‘Handelsgeist’). 18
What, however, is required to avoid such an error, says Sombart, is a
closer examination of the actual historical constellation in order to draw a
satisfactory answer for the rise of modern capitalism.
The scientific significance of what Sombart and Weber were attempting
turns on getting the causation correct. An unbridled acquisitive urge
(Sombart) or inner-worldly asceticism (Weber) was the decisive motivational
principle that moved the economic development of western Europe into a
new phase and new dynamic. The new capitalist spirit (however described)
is part of the cultural genealogy of modernity. Both Sombart and Weber were
conducting a historical exercise to isolate this cultural ‘gene’ in the make-up
of modern capitalism. 19 If, as they argued, it were decisive and distinctive,
then it would also shape the behavioural patterns of contemporary economic
behaviour.
Weber’s dialogue with Sombart’s Der moderne Kapitalismus
A close reading of Weber’s Chapter Two, ‘The “Spirit” of Capitalism’, in
relation to Sombart’s mK reveals it to be a critical dialogue with Sombart’s
position on the motive forces of economic behaviour. Weber’s chapter heading
deliberately echoes Sombart’s own title for Part 3 of mK, ‘The Genesis of
the Capitalist Spirit’. Weber apologizes for the pretentiousness of the term
‘spirit’ but curiously fails to acknowledge that Sombart had already coined
the term two years previously. 20 Weber uses the case study of Benjamin Franklin
to illustrate what he means by the new spirit of capitalism. It is a systematic
work ethic driven by an ethical attitude to the world.
the summum bonum of this ethic, the earning of more and more money,
combined with the strict avoidance of all spontaneous enjoyment of life,
is above all completely devoid of any eudaemonistic, not to say hedonistic,
admixture. It is thought of so purely as an end in itself, that from
the point of view of the happiness of, or utility to, the single individual,
it appears entirely transcendental and absolutely irrational.
(PESC, p. 53)