The end of capitalism
I’m going over some old notes on Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism for a presentation on modern secularism that will be happening at Trent University next week. Let me just say that Weber rocks hard.
These are among the closing remarks of the book, which argues that the Protestant reformation effected radical changes in how people thought about work (self-denial, pursuing one’s calling, individual experience, rationalism), leading ultimately to the emergence of capitalism as a hegemonic social form:
The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so. For when asceticism was carried out of monastic cells into everyday life, and began to dominate worldly morality, it did its part in building the tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order. This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which today determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force… In [one critic's] view the care for external goods should only lie on the shoulders of the ‘saint like a light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment.’ But fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage.
