Well, the pie is cooling, the turkey's in the oven, and the cheese log is
out -- so back to Weber and Blaut.
There are many points at which I could enter Blaut's discussion of Weber,
but I really must pick one. In his chapter titled "The Myth of the European
Miracle" [subhd "Rationality.."] Blaut writes [and pardon the length of this
quote, but Blaut becomes very irrate over my editing, so I won't]:
"Whatever Weber considered to have been the basic cause of the
differences between rational, progressive European society and irrational,
traditional Asian society (Africa and America were scarcely noticed), he
delinated those supposed differences very carefully. The most crucial of
his arguments are found in his __General Economic History__ and __The
Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism__. The development of
rationality among Europeans -- however that happened -- led to a sort of
"economic ethic," a body of values, aspirations, and logical thought
processes that emerged primarily in connection with the Reformation (and
particularly Puritanism) but which, more fundamentally, capitalism. The
important point here is that basal rationality produced both the "economic
ethic" of capitalism and the Protestant movement. Weber is not (as some
think) explaining capitalism and modernity in terms narrowly of religion.
He does invoke religion to explain many aspects of the supposed
traditionalism of Asians, but here too a primordial irrationality is seen as
underlying religion. (He writes, for instance, of the "Magical
traditionalism" of Indians and Chinese.)" p. 103
Weber's concept of rationality is complex and he is often not clear about
how he is using it. Nonetheless, it seems to me that Blaut misrepresents
Weber's constructs.
Weber presents two catagories of economic rationality -- formal and
substantive.
1. Formal rationality, that identified with modernity, "is capable of
being expressed in numerical, calculable terms" which are "unambiguous, at
least in the sense that expression in money terms yields the highest degree
of formal calculablity."
2. Substantive rationality, found in traditional
civilizations/societies/cultures as well as in modern ones, "is full of
ambiguities" in that it is not restricted to "goal-oriented rational
calculation ... but apply certain criteria of ultimate ends, whether they be
ethical, political, utilitarian, hedonistic, feudal, egalitarian or
whatever." The results "however formally rational they may be in the sense
of correct calculation" are measured by essentually moral scales of"value
rationality" or "substantive goal rationality." "There is an infinite
number of possible value scales for this type of rationality, of which
socialist and communist standards constitute only one group." Weber
__Economy and Society__ (p. 85-86)
PLEASE NOTE that Weber excludes Marxism (which Blaut characterizes as a
variation of the "rationality doctrine") from the catagory of formal
rationality.
Weber presents two related forms of social rationality -- instrumentally
rational and value-rational .
1. Instrumentally rational (related to formal economic rationality)
defined as "the use of means for the attainment of the actor's own
rationally pursued and calculated ends," and
2. Value-rational (related to substantive economic rationality) where
social action is "determined by a conscious belief in the value for its own
sake of some ethical, aesthetic, religious [reasons] independently of its
pospects or success." Weber, __Economy and Society__, pp. 24-25.
He also presents two other forms of social action which are unthinking and
hence not specifically rational nor irrational -- affectual (based on
individual emotions/feelings) and traditional (determined by ingrained
habituation). These two may be found equally in modern and traditional
settings.
PLEASE NOTE: of all of these forms of rationality, Weber associates only
one specifically (if not exclusively) with modernity/capitalism -- formal
rationality, quantitative often expressed in monetary terms. Which brings us to
Protestantism and the Spirit of Capitalism.
Blaut misses Weber's point about the relationship of the two -- which is
not surprising given that Blaut denies that culture and mentality have
anything to do with the "rise of Europe." To admit this, he would also have
to admit that there was something unique about Europe that led to the
"miracle" and he has already made it quite clear that Europe possessed *NO*
such advantage and that it was onle a geographical accident that put Europe
in a position to discover America and loot its bullion which the one and
only reason for the European advantage from 1492.
Weber notes that "the management of a bank, a wholesale export business,
a large retail establishment, or a large putting-out enterprise dealing with
goods produced in homes, is certainly only possible in the form of a
capitalistic enterprise" (all of which existed, as a Blaut and many others
show, in many parts of the world prior to 1500). "Nevertheless," continues
Weber, "they may all be carried on in a traditionalistic spirit. ... The
foreign trade of whole epochs has rested on the basis of monopoloies and
legal privileges of strictly traditional character." This was as true in
monolitically Catholic Europe as anywhere on earth. Most of us are familiar
with the concern of St Thomas Aquinas with the need for insuring social
justice within the operation of increasingly market driven economies
(something Weber would class as substantive/value rationality. Thus, says
Weber, "The spirit of capitalism ... had to fight its way to supremacy
against a whole world of hostile forces ... which, in both ancient times and
in the Middle Ages, would have proscribed [it] as the lowest sort of avarice
and as an attitude entirely lacking in self-respect." (Weber, __The
Protestant Ethic__ pp. 52-57) In short, the key to the European capitalist
transformation was the transformation of mentality more than structure -- or
to put in another way, changes in mentality and culture wrought by the
Protestant Reformation created structural changes.
This is a good place to stop and allow Blaut to again put me in my place
with his keen intellect.
William Schell, Jr Voice: (502) 762-6572
Dept of History Fax: (502) 762-6587
Murray State University EMAIL bill.schell@Murraystate.edu
Murray, KY 42071