Re: Weber and rationality

Dassbach writes:

Like Weber,Schumpter was interested in action 
( a point which is largely forgotten in
the discussion of Schumpter becuase of the emphasis on innovation as "thing"
where, in fact, Schumpter was interested in innovation and even more
importantly, the consequences of innovation, as "conduct").  But unlike
Weber, who felt that we could, to some extent,  explain/understand the
motives and meanings underlying action, e.g. the irrational and
"otherworldly" concern with salvation as the basis for the rational and
"innerwordly" pursuit of profit, Schumpeter maintained that motives can not
be understood.  Nonetheless, an adequate explanation of economic phenomena
for Schumpeter means sifting to economic behavior until one reaches what he
calls the "non-economic" bottom - the motives underlying the behavior.  Once
you reach this point, you can, at least as an economist, go no further.

Ricardo:
I would add that this emphasis on innovation as conduct is true of 
the whole Austrian school of economics; it was, in fact, Mises's key 
point against socialist planning. One should not however reduce 
Weber's concept of rational action to economic action per se.  W's 
concept includes: formal, practical, theoretical, and substantive 
rationality. One of the novelties of  the West, according to W, 
is rational capital accounting through "universally applied rules, laws, 
and regulations", which should not be mistaken with the mere 
pursuit of  gain or the calculation of one's self interest. The one 
is *formal* rational action, the latter is *practical* action.  
Gunder Frank's *Re-Orient* suffers greatly from just this inadequate 
grasp of W's richly textured account of rationality. Re-Orient has 
simply shown that Asians were quite practical in their business 
dealings - that is, it has proven, once again, that Polanyi was wrong, 
but not Weber! 

Dassbach, are you saying that for W  the "otherwordly"  motives 
guiding economic action are "irrational".  W does say that the choice 
of  values is not rational. But he does write of *substantive or value 
rationality*  in the sense that one can reason about the choice of 
means within the context of one's values.

One should be careful not to reduce W's extremely rich, if 
convoluted, argument on the rise of the West to the Protestant 
thesis, as both Landes and Gunder Frank in their own ways tend to.