"When philosophy paints its grey in grey then has a shape of life grown old. By philosophy's grey in grey it cannot be rejuvenated but only understood. The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of dusk." -- G.W.F. Hegel, 'Preface', Philosophy of Right.
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'Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainity and agitation distinquish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.' Marx
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Max Weber + capitalism
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November 22, 2010
In Anticapitalist Readings of Weber’s Protestant Ethic: Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, György Lukacs, Erich Fromm in Logos Magazine Michael Löwy gives a good description of Max Weber's ambivalence towards capitalism. He says:
Usually he seems to lean towards a resigned acceptance of bourgeois civilization, not as desirable, but as inevitable. However, in some key texts, which had a very significant impact on 20th century thought, he gives free rein to a insightful, pessimistic and radical critique of the paradoxes of capitalist rationality. Obviously, the issues raised by Weber are quite different from those of Marx. Weber ignores exploitation, is not interested in economic crisis, has little sympathy for the struggles of the proletariat, and does not question colonial expansion. However, influenced by the Romantic or Nietzschean Kulturpessimismus, he perceives a deep contradiction between the requirements of the formal modern rationality — of which bureaucracy and private enterprise are concrete manifestations — and those of the acting subject’s autonomy.
And:
Distancing himself from Enlightenment’s rationalist tradition, he is sensitive to the contradictions and limits of modern rationality, as it expresses itself in capitalist economy and state administration: its formal and instrumental character and its tendency to produce effects that lead to the reversal of the emancipatory aspirations of modernity. The search for calculation and efficiency at any price leads to the bureaucratization and reification of human activities. This diagnosis of modernity’s crisis will be, to a large extent, taken over by the Frankfurt School in its first period (Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse).
This diagnosis of modernity’s crisis has informed my understanding of modernity. This is the thesis that two forms of rationality are in conflict here: one, the Zweckrationalität, purely formal and instrumental, whose only aim is, in capitalism, production for production, accumulation for accumulation, money for money; the other, more substantial, which corresponds to the — pre-capitalist — ″natural conditions,″ and refers to values (Wertrationalität) such as : people’s happiness, the satisfaction of their needs.
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| | Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 6:47 PM | Permalink |
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