Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved." That eloquent and desolate line comes near the very end of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, and it sounds Max Weber's discordant note amidst our chorus of capitalist triumphalism. The lyrical bleakness of Weber's assertion could be easily dismissed as the weltschmerz of a German mandarin, the dying gasp of a highbrow humanism marked for historical extinction. Indeed, separated from its author, Weber's indictment could even be mistaken for the rant of a Muslim cleric, or at least as the "unhelpful" and "anti-American" spite of some Tory leftist egghead.

Which is why the centenary of Weber's classic couldn't come at a more appropriate moment. Despite its many errors and misconceptions, The Protestant Ethic remains indispensable, even urgent, precisely because of its humanist resistance to the authority of experts and moneybags. For all Weber's insistence on "value-free" social science, he produced a work of historical sociology that doubles as cultural criticism. It confronts the clichés that pass for wisdom among our punditocracy—"globalization," "the New Economy," "democratic capitalism"—and reminds us that the current victory of capitalism is as pyrrhic as it is global. It exposes our manic culture of labor as historically contingent, and invites us to wonder if Adam's sweat is really an oil of anointment. And despite Weber's brooding resignation to the "disenchantment of the world," it compels us to revisit some basic issues in Christian theology.

The Protestant Ethic clearly emerged from its author's personal turmoil. The eldest son of a prosperous but mismatched couple, Weber bore all of that role's ambitions and pathologies. His mother was intellectual, religious, and reform-minded; his father, heir to a sizeable mercantile fortune, was the prototype for the driven capitalist who shadows Weber's masterpiece. Unsurprisingly, their son became a workaholic who embraced and maligned the work ethic. He played the Rising Academic Star at Freiburg and Heidelberg, whose youthful work in sociology was, to use one of academia's most ambiguous compliments, "solid": the research was massive, the notes were copious, the imagination was bridled.

The pressures of climbing the academic ladder arguably triggered Weber's four-year bout with depression—"neurasthenia," in Victorian parlance. Though his wife Marianne attributed his malady to "renunciations and repressions," it also stemmed from the diligence always rampant among the over-achieving classes. It seems more than fortuitous that Weber began researching Protestant Ethic just as his depression was lifting in the spring of 1902. Without reducing greatness to convalescence, we could read Protestant Ethic as a classic case of therapeutic transformation.

Weber's book appeared alongside other turn-of-the-century assaults on bourgeois modernity: Freud's essays on infantile sexuality, Sorel's reflections on political violence and mythology, James' examination of religious experience. Like them, Weber impugned some rationalist piety of middle-class culture. To be sure, Weber certainly never renounced reason, and even after his illness he let up only a little in his scholarly labors. ("Specialized work," he writes with furrowed brow, "is a condition of any valuable work in the modern world.") But Weber's subsequent preoccupations with rationality, bureaucracy, and disenchantment testify, I think, to a real if comparatively muted sense that bourgeois reason aborted the flowering of a "full and beautiful humanity," as he put in Protestant Ethic.

Like Marx's Manifesto (which, my students are routinely shocked to discover, features a celebratory account of capitalism), Protestant Ethic can be easily misread. Weber himself anticipated facile readers, clearly rejecting the "foolish and doctrinaire thesis" of a causal link between Protestantism and capitalism. The connection, for Weber, inhered both in the "elective affinity" between Protestant theology and capitalist enterprise and in the "psychological sanctions" for accumulation afforded by religious doctrine. The "affinity" originated in the Protestant repudiation of Catholic sacramentalism and ecclesiology. In Weber's view, the marrow of Protestant (and especially Calvinist) divinity was its mistrust of "magical and sacramental forces," its "complete elimination of salvation through the Church and the sacraments," and its affirmation of predestination. Lacking the assurance provided by material and communal mediation, the Calvinist believer allayed the resulting anxiety through "intense worldly activity" in the form of a "calling." In the process, Calvinist capitalists achieved a "sanctification of worldly activity" once reserved for monastic contemplation, and cultivated a "worldly asceticism" which, once loosened from its theological moorings, became the classic trinity of bourgeois virtues: diligence, thrift, and self-restraint.

Two key points emerge from Weber's epic tale. First, the "spirit of capitalism" is not just another term for greed; it is the rationalized accumulation of wealth, undertaken, at least at first, for the sake of God's glory. Second, the nexus of Protestantism and capitalism lay in a "disenchantment of the world" which, by evacuating the material world of any sacramental significance, unleashed upon it (and human beings) the capitalist's energies of mastery and acquisition.

As scholars from Lujo Brentano and R. H. Tawney onward have pointed out, problems abound in Protestant Ethic. It caricatures both Protestant and Catholic theology, reducing the former to voluntarism and the latter to magic. (This is true but, as I'll argue shortly, misleading.) It erases craft guilds, accounts of which have emphasized the "sanctification of worldly activity" conferred by medieval economic culture. And it misrepresents Puritan capitalism itself, Weber's depiction of which relies on evidence from 17th-century England, not 16th-century Geneva. (Tawney's Religion and the Rise of Capitalism is more reliable and astute on all these counts.)

Still, Protestant Ethic remains valuable as a critical document charged by its author's own contradictions. Take, for instance, Weber's subtle but perceptible disparagement of bourgeois rectitude, leavened, in part, by Oedipal and professional stresses. His unforgettable portrait of the Puritan divine Richard Baxter is a warning against any philistine inclination to read the parable of the talents as a lesson in venture capitalism. Weber writes with a fine contempt for the "pharisaically good conscience" of capitalists who, then and now, preach the virtues of thrift while cutting wages. And his consignment to the notes of a paragraph on industrial labor's "joyless lack of meaning"—whether enforced, he adds, "for conscience sake" or "without transcendental sanctions"—hides a pearl of wisdom we need in the age of the air-conditioned sweatshop.

Yet for all its humanist magnanimity, Weber's book is virtually hopeless. Once pursued as a calling, the production of worldly goods becomes an "iron cage" of merely terrestrial duties and compulsions. Is there no escape? Perhaps, Weber mused, "new prophets" will arise to herald a "great rebirth of old ideas and ideals." But Weber thought more likely a drearier prospect of "mechanized petrification, embellished with a sort of convulsive self-importance"—the world, that is, of his soulless, technically proficient barbarians, convinced that they lived at the end of history. As intellectual history, that's Nietzsche in sociological drag; as prophecy, it's not a bad premonition of our command economy of pleasure. Disguised as "consumerism" or "hedonism," the work ethic rears its joyless head in the office and at the mall. Perpetually unsatisfied by our purchases, we transform the primrose path of destruction into the treadmill of delight.

Weber remains the Gloomy Gus of sociology, but he also gestures, albeit lamely, in two hopeful and liberating directions. While he sometimes identified economic "rationality" with the imperatives of accumulation and profit—acquisition "rationally pursued" must be calculated "in terms of capital"—he recognized, unlike neo-con heroes like Friedrich von Hayek, that capitalist reason was a historical and "particular concrete form of rational thought," and that there was something profoundly irrational in human terms about the rationalized vice of avarice.

One could, like the Frankfurt School Marxists, affirm this critique of "instrumental reason" without any theological warrant. Yet, for Christians, theology permits and (I would maintain) even mandates an argument against the account of "disenchantment" that Weber did so much to make a cornerstone of modern intellectual life, and which forms the foundation of capitalist rationality. Though propagated in every undergraduate economics survey, the disenchanted rationality of capitalism should be rejected for two reasons. First, it posits a scarcity about the world that is contradicted by the opening lines of Genesis. If abundance is the true condition of the world, then the skinflint virtues of bourgeois probity become at least historically tragic and at most perennially vicious.

Second, capitalist rationality rests on a conception of matter as pure "stuff," bereft of any enchanted—or, more precisely, sacramental—capacity to put us (literally) in touch with divinity. Though it's awkward for a Catholic to recall in this ecumenical review, Protestant theology and religious culture (which, I'll concede, Weber frequently distorts) do advance an understanding of sacrament which supports a disenchanted, de-sacramentalized view of the material world. So, in one sense, Weber was right to argue that the "disenchanted" universe posited in Calvinist Protestantism was the original cultural matrix for capitalist economics.

But even the sociologist who once described himself as "religiously unmusical" heard faint notes of enchantment in capitalist culture. The enchanted beings who once inhabited the material world did not simply hobble off to die. "Many old gods ascend from their graves," Weber would later write in "Science as a Vocation," reappearing to "take the form of impersonal forces," one of which was the Invisible Hand of the market. Like the ancients, "we live," he concluded, in a world "not yet disenchanted of its gods and demons." This, I think, is a far more suggestive line than Weber's readers, and perhaps even Weber, ever reckoned. Did capitalism disenchant the world, or did it recast the forms of enchantment? If the latter, then we must reject or at least reconsider Weber's implicit endorsement of Calvinist metaphysics.

So let me cheerfully propose to my (mostly) Protestant readers that Catholic theology enables us to tell a different tale about capitalist modernity, and offer a different critique of accumulation and its discontents. Perhaps the story of capitalist modernity is not one of "disenchantment" but of the repression, displacement, and perversion of sacramentality—that is, of the capacity inherent in material things to be portals onto divinity. Perhaps it is Marx's notion of "commodity fetishism," rather than Weber's notion of "disenchantment," that offers the more fruitful connection between Christian theology and secular theory. (And Marx was more right than he imagined when he wrote that the commodity "abounds in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.") Perhaps capitalism perverts and imprisons our longing for a sacramental way of being in the world. Our cage is enchanted, not iron.

Eugene McCarraher is professor of humanities at Villanova University. He is writing The Enchantments of Mammon: Corporate Capitalism and the American Moral Imagination.

Copyright © 2004 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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