Religion and The Transformation of Capitalism

Comparative Approaches

Richard H. Roberts

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781134813506
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book addresses from a socio-scientific standpoint the interaction of religions and forms of contemporary capitalism. Contributors explore a wide range of interactions between economic systems and their socio-cultural contexts.

Part I

REVISING THE CLASSICS

1

MAX WEBER, CAPITALISM AND THE RELIGION OF INDIA

David N.Gellner

INTRODUCTION¹

The Religion of India (henceforth ROI) has suffered a strange and undeserved fate.² Unlike The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (henceforth PESC), it has given rise to rather little discussion of the numerous stimulating theories it puts forward among the specialists most competent to judge them. Part of the reason for this must lie in the fact that South Asian studies,³ to their detriment, tend to divide up three ways between (i) Sanskritists, (ii) historians of the Muslim and modern periods, and (iii) social scientists, either anthropologists or sociologists. Between these three groups there is only imperfect communication.⁴

Sanskritists frequently dismiss Weber’s book out of hand on the ground that nobody who had to rely on secondary sources can have anything to contribute to the study of South Asian religion or society. Occasionally historians have in fact discussed or made use of Weber’s work (Bayly 1983; O’Hanlon 1985), but they have tended to damn him with faint praise, or worse. Anthropologists and sociologists, on the other hand, are not in a position, in the nature of their study, to address the more specific historical theses which Weber advances; and they have frequently been ill at ease with Weber’s comparative framework (e.g. Appadurai 1986). Thus, Weber’s book has remained little read and largely unused by those South Asianists most competent to tackle it. As for sociologists in the West, it is probably the only book on South Asia they ever read. That this is certainly the case with Weber’s translators, Gerth and Martindale, is shown by the frequent obscurity and inaccuracies of the translation, the incredible number of misprints in the transliteration of Sanskrit and Pali words (for which they carry over unthinkingly the German transliteration), and by the fact that they translate yajnopavita from the German as ‘holy girdle’ instead of the normal ‘sacred thread’.

THREE FALLACIES IN THE INTERPRETATION OF THE WEBER THESIS

In so far as Weber’s work has been taken up at all by social scientists dealing with South Asia, the discussion has centred on the connection between Hinduism and capitalism, a debate sparked off by post-Independence economic development or the lack of it. This debate, inasmuch as it deals with Weber, has been almost wholly vitiated by misunderstandings of his central concerns. As Marshall (1982:168) concludes of the ‘Protestant ethic’ debate in general, ‘Working often with a crude and bastardized version of [Weber’s] thesis, most critics have pursued inadmissible data in the wrong times and places’. Weber’s writings on South Asia and China, and the projected work on Islamic civilization, were of course the counterpositives to PESC: that is, the latter explained, or began to explain, why capitalism originated only in the West, the other works why it failed to originate elsewhere. Thus in order to understand ROI, and why the above-mentioned interpretations of it are invalid, it is necessary to deal with PESC at the same time.

The debate over Weber’s ‘Protestantism’ thesis, both in the Western and in the South Asian context, has been dominated by three fallacies. These fallacies, though they can be held separately, are related and when held together reinforce each other, as I hope will become clear in the ensuing discussion. In decreasing order of vulgarity, they are:

(i) Weber was an idealist in the sense that he believed economic behaviour to be straightforwardly determined by religious beliefs, either of individuals or collectively or both,

(ii) There is only one problem of development, or the origin of capitalism, which is the same in essentials in Medieval China, nineteenth century Europe, and twentieth century Peru,

(iii) Weber held a whenever-A-then-B Humean view of social causality; in other words, he thought that if A was the cause of B, it was necessary and sufficient, or at least a necessary, condition of B.

The truth is that Weber was certainly not an idealist in this sense. Though vulgar Marxists and vulgar Weberians may be diametrically opposed, it is quite wrong to suppose that Weber represents historical materialism stood on its head. Protestantism for Weber was an exception to the general rule that ideas do not have an independent power to produce social change.

As far as fallacy (ii) goes, there are three separate problems of development requiring different answers:

(a) Why did one pre-industrial society develop faster than another (say, China than Christian Europe)?

(b) Why did one civilization only (Europe) develop industrial capitalism ‘from within itself’?

(c) Why are some societies better at (deliberate, imitative) development in the modern industrial and industrializing world than others (say, Japan and Singapore than China and Indonesia)?

Weber himself was above all concerned with (b) and very little with (c), which was not then the burning issue it was to become.

The truth corresponding to fallacy (iii) is harder to state briefly. But it should at least be clear from his methodological writings, if not from the consideration of ‘social reality’ itself, that for Weber society is causally complex. X may be a necessary precondition for Y only under certain circumstances. In another situation Y may be possible without X. Thus talk of causes, rather than conditions, is misleading, as we may be led to expect a single cause to be ‘constantly conjoined’, in Hume’s phrase, with a given effect. Much misguided criticism of Weber has been based on the assumption that he claimed Protestantism and capitalism to be ‘constantly conjoined’.

EXAMPLES OF THE FALLACIES

Fallacy (i) has not normally been committed by those who have read PESC closely. Weber’s statement that ‘it is not, of course, my aim to substitute for a one-sided materialistic an equally one-sided spiritualistic causal interpretation of culture and of history’ (PESC: 183) is too prominently placed for that. This has not prevented it from entering the South Asianists’ discussion. Mandelbaum, for example, aligns Weber with William Kapp and Gunnar Myrdal as explaining South Asia’s backwardness by citing the attitudes inculcated by Hinduism (Mandelbaum 1970:638). Fallacy (ii) is more interesting and it is more important to be clear about it. A concise formulation of it (a confusion of (b) and (c) above) is to be found in the preface by Gerth and Martindale to ROI: ‘The central concern of this and other of Weber’s studies of countries we today describe as “developing” was with the obstacles to industrialization and modernization. Weber anticipated by several decades a problem that has come to occupy the post-World War n world’ (ROI: v). Similarly, Surajit Sinha takes the Weber thesis with reference to South Asia to be that Hinduism is a ‘major stumbling block for modernization’ (Sinha 1974:519). In fact, Weber’s principal theme was an answer to problem (b): ‘no community dominated by powers of this sort [viz. religious anthropolatry on the part of the laity and a strong traditionalistic charismatic clergy] could out of its own substance arrive at the “spirit of capitalism’” (ROI: 325). The sentences which follow this in ROI state two corollaries which are indeed relevant to problem (c): that South Asia could not take over capitalism developed elsewhere as easily as the Japanese; and that, though capitalism had already been introduced to South Asia, only the Pax Britannica, according to some, prevented an outbreak of the old ‘feudal robber romanticism of the Middle Ages’. But these are only asides, and not the theme of the book as a whole.

Fallacy (iii) has not directly and openly been espoused, as far as I know, but it lurks in the claim that Weber’s project with regard to PESC and the studies of the world religions was an application of Mill’s method of agreement and difference. Of course the cases in which Protestantism did not produce capitalism are too well known for such a position to be tenable by present-day Weberians.⁵ Consequently, Weberians claim, not that Protestantism invariably produces capitalism, but that it has a potential to do so. However this does not seem to get us very far in the task of explaining why capitalism appeared in one place rather than another, unless it is analysed in turn in a way similar to that attempted below.

Most commonly, fallacy (iii) is committed tacitly along with fallacy (ii). It is assumed that Weber asserted the existence of a necessary and sufficient link between Protestantism and rational capitalistic activity, or at least that the former is a necessary condition of the latter so that even if all Protestants are not capitalists, no Catholic can be one. Put like this it may sound absurd, but much of the debate has been carried on at this sort of level. As H.Luethy (1970:128) remarked, ‘it was as though the essential thread had suddenly been discovered which would lead dialectically from the nailing of Luther’s ninety-five theses on the Wittenberg church door to the assembly lines of Detroit and the ramifications of Standard Oil’.

In the Asian context Weber’s claim that non-European civilizations could not have developed capitalism endogenously because they lacked the ideological resources to produce a capitalist spirit, i.e. an active rational this-worldly asceticism, is misinterpreted as the ‘theory’ that Chinese, Hindus, or whoever make bad capitalists. In other words, Weber’s answer to problem (b) above is taken as an answer to problem (c), and the causal connection asserted is presumed to be an invariable one. In this way it is possible to attempt to refute his characterization of the Hindu ‘spirit’ by citing ‘the evidence today before us of politically independent Asian states actively planning their social, economic and scientific and technical development’ (Singer 1961:150). This is of course to miss the crucial point that Weber was concerned with the first unplanned, endogenous appearance of industrial capitalism, and with South Asia’s potential or lack of it for the production of a capitalist spirit which was its necessary condition.⁶ Capitalist economic organization according to Weber is not at all the same thing; the latter may exist, carried on in a traditionalistic spirit, in preindustrial societies without having any potential to transform its environment.

In an approach similar to Singer’s, Tambiah seems to assume that because Buddhism and Hinduism can be adapted to modernization, because they can, ex post, provide analogues of the Protestant ethic, Weber’s theory is disproved (Tambiah 1973:13–16). But since Weber is addressing problem (b), in order to refute him in this way, one must show that Buddhism and Hinduism had this potential before the impact of modernization. It is quite wrong to attribute to him the thesis that there is an innate hostility between Hinduism or other eastern religions and capitalism. In his book on China he explicitly repudiates such a claim:

It is obviously not a question of deeming the Chinese ‘naturally ungifted’ for the demands of capitalism. But compared to the Occident, the varied conditions which externally favored the origin of capitalism in China did not suffice to create it. Likewise capitalism did not originate in occidental or oriental Antiquity, or in India, or where Islamism held sway. Yet in each of these areas different and favorable circumstances seemed to facilitate its rise.

(Weber 1951:248)

What then was Weber’s position? It was that the spirit of capitalism was a necessary precondition of the first appearance, or origination of capitalism. It was not of course a sufficient condition, as the case of Jainism, discussed below, shows. Nor was it a necessary condition of capitalism as such: once capitalism stands on ‘mechanical foundations’ it is capitalism which tends to produce a capitalist spirit, or aspects of it, rather than the other way round. The importance of Protestantism lay in the fact that it produced and legitimated a capitalist spirit; but there was no necessary and/or sufficient link between Protestantism and the capitalist spirit (see PESC: 91). It is therefore quite beside the point to cite against Weber examples of non-Protestant capitalists or of Protestant non-capitalists. Protestantism was one element of a situation which, taken as a whole, was sufficient to produce a capitalist spirit, which in turn was, as stated, necessary for the first unplanned appearance of industrial society.⁷

Weber’s studies of South Asia, China, and Islam were designed to show that, although other elements necessary for the production of capitalism sometimes existed (such as the availability of capital and formally free labour, and other factors discussed in his General Economic History), a capitalist spirit did not and indeed could not develop. Without a Protestant ethic or some equivalent no traditional (i.e. agrarian) civilization could develop industrial capitalism ‘from within itself. Only religious sanctions, Weber assumed, could induce men permanently to defer satisfaction in the way required to produce the capitalist spirit. No this-worldly religious ethic could produce an active rational this-worldly asceticism: only a particular type of soteriology could do so. In fact the studies revealed, in at least one case, an analogous ethic (Jainism) and the burden of explanation in the South Asian case shifted, as we shall see, to the absence of other conditions.⁸

PROBABLE REASONS FOR THE PREVALENCE OF THE FALLACIES

The three fallacies listed above are by no means always made, but even when they are rejected, the way in which they go together does not seem to have been grasped. Thus Giddens rejects fallacy (ii): ‘Weber’s concerns were with the f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Preface and acknowledgements
• Introduction: Religion and capitalism—a new convergence?
• Part I Revising the classics
• Part II The new handmaid? Religion and the empowerment of capitalism
• Part III Religion and modernity/post-modernity—capitalism and cultures East and West
• Index