Anticapitalist Readings of Weber’s

Protestant Ethic: Ernst Bloch, Walter

Benjamin, Georg Lukacs, Erich
Fromm
by Michael Lowy 2010: vol. 9, issue 1

This paper will try to analyze a curious intellectual phenomena: a group

of Jewish-German authors that developed, during the Weimar Republic, a
radical anti-capitalist and anti-protestant argument, directly inspired by
Weber’s Protestant Ethic. They did not hesitate to denounce capitalism as a
sort of diabolic religion (Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin), or as the product of the
evil ethical tendencies of Calvinism (Ernst Bloch, Erich Fromm).
Max Weber admired the protestant ethic as one of the great moments in the
disenchantment of religion, and its transformation from magic rituals into an
ethical life-conduct. His attitude towards capitalism is more ambivalent and Commented [J1]: Justamente não é o desencantamento da
religião, mas o encantamento do mundo, como em Adorno e
contradictory. One could say that he is divided between his identity as a Horkheimer, a racionalização se torna mito.

bourgeois which fully supports German capitalism and its imperial power, and
his statute as an intellectual, sensitive to the arguments of the Romantic anti-
capitalist Zivilisationskritik so influential among the German academic
mandarins at the beginning of the 20th century. From this viewpoint, he could be
compared to another split “if not schizophrenic” German bourgeois/intellectual:
Walther Rathenau, Prussian and Jew, capitalist entrepreneur and sharp critic of
the mechanical civilization.
Rejecting any socialist idea, Weber does not hesitate, on some occasions, to
use apologetic arguments in defense of capitalism, in its relation to protestant
ethics. This is particularly obvious in his description, in The Protestant Ethic and
the Spirit of Capitalism, of the origins of capitalism as the result of Protestant
work ethic, i.e. the combination of hard work, methodic economic activity, frugal
life and the reinvestment of savings: a description which is very close to the
idealized self-image of the bourgeois!
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. 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).
What is striking in Weber’s pessimistic/resigned assessment of modernity is its
refusal of the illusions of progress which were so powerful in the European
consciousness at the beginning of the 20thcentury. This pessimism is
inseparable from a critical view of the nature itself of capitalism and its
dynamics of rationalisation/modernisation.
One can distinguish two aspects “intimately linked between them” in Weber’s
critique of the substance itself of the capitalist system:
The inversion between means and ends. For the spirit of capitalism “intimately
linked to the protestant ethic – of which Benjamin Franklin is an ideal-typical
figure” almost chemically pure to win money, to gather more and more money
(to accumulate capital would say Marx) is the supreme good and the ultimate
aim in life:
“The pursuit of riches is fully stripped of all pleasurable, and surely all hedonistic
aspects. Accordingly, this striving becomes understood completely as an end in
itself” to such an extent that it appears as fully outside the normal course of
affairs and simply irrational, at least when viewed from the perspective of the
“happiness” or “utility” of the single individual. Here, people are oriented to
acquisition as the purpose of life: acquisition is no longer viewed as a means to
the end of satisfying the substantive needs of life. Those people in possession
of spontaneous (unbefangene) dispositions experience this situation as an
absolutely meaningless reversal of “natural” conditions (as we would say today).
Yet, this reversal constitutes just as surely a guiding principle of [modern]
capitalism as incomprehension of this new situation characterizes all who
remain untouched by [modern] capitalism “tentacles”.•
Supreme expression of modern aim-oriented rationality
“Weber’s Zweckrationalität or, according to the Frankfurt School, instrumental
rationality capitalist economy reveals itself, from the viewpoint of the substantive
needs of life• or of human happiness, as “simply irrational” or “absolutely
meaningless” Weber returns several times to this issue in The Protestant
Ethic, always insisting on the irrationality his emphasis of the logic of capitalist
accumulation: a comparison between the spirit of capitalism and economic
traditionalism for whom work is simply “indispensable to life” “renders obvious
the irrationality, from the viewpoint of one’s personal happiness, of this way of
organising life: people live for their business rather than the reverse.”
Of course Weber believes that this “absurd” and “irrational” system has its own
formidable rationality: his remarks show nevertheless a deep critical distance
towards the spirit of capitalism. Obviously 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.
This definition of capitalism as irrational is not without certain affinities with Marx
ideas. The subordination of the aim the human being to the means the
enterprise, money, commodity is an argument that comes very near to the
Marxist concept of alienation. Weber was conscious of this similarity, and refers
to it in his 1918 conference on Socialism: “All this [the impersonnal functioning
of capital] is what socialism defines as the ‘domination of things over the human
beings’ which means: the means over the aim (the satisfaction of the needs).”
This explains, by the way, why Lukacs’ theory of reification in History and Class
Consciousness (1923) is based on both Marx and Weber.
2) The submission to an all powerful mechanism, the emprisonment in a system
which oneself has created. This issue is intimately related to the former one, but
it emphasizes the loss of freedom, the decline of individual autonomy. The locus
classicus of this criticism is to be found in the last paragraphs of The Protestant
Ethic, doubtless the most famous and influential passage of Weber’s work and
one of the rare moments where he permitted himself what he calls “value and
faith judgements”. Again, the role of the protestant ethic in the origin of this
process is taken into account.
First of all Weber considers, with a resigned nostalgia, that the triumph of the
modern capitalist spirit requires the “renunciation of the Faustian multi-
dimensionality of the human species”. The acknowledgment of the rise of the
bourgeois era has, for Goethe as for Weber the meaning of a farewell to an era
of full and beautiful humanity.
On the other hand, capitalist rationality creates a more and more constraining
and coercive context: “The Puritan wanted to be a person with a vocational
calling; today we are forced to be”. The modern capitalist economic order, with
its technical conditions of mechanical and machine production, “determines the
style of life of all individuals born into it, not only those directly engaged in
earning a living”. This constraint, Weber compares it with a sort of prison, or
“iron cage” where the system of rational production encloses the individuals:
“According to Baxter [a Puritan preacher ML] the concern for material goods
should lie upon the shoulders of his saints like a lightweight coat that could be
thrown off at any time. Yet fate allowed a steel-hard casing (stahlhartes
Gehäuse) to be forged from this coat”.
The expression became famous. It strikes by its tragic resignation, but also by
its critical dimension. There are different interpretations or translations for the
words sthahlhartes Gehäuse: for some it is a “casing” for others a “shell” or a
“cell”. But it is probable that Weber borrowed the image of an “iron cage of
despair” from the English Puritan poet Bunyan. In any case, it seems to
describe, in the Protestant Ethic, the reified structures of capitalist economy as
a sort of steel-hard prison rigid, cold and pitiless.
Weber’s pessimism leads him to fear the end of all values and ideals, and the
advent, under the aegis of modern capitalism, of a “mechanized ossification,
embellished with a sort of rigidly compelled sense of self-importance”. He
foresees the process of reification as extending, from the economic sphere, to
all areas of social life: politics, law, culture.
Soon after Weber’s death, there appears in the Weimar Republic an intellectual
constellation – essentially composed of Jewish authors of German culture –
which one could describe as the anti-capitalist – as well as, to a large extent,
anti-protestant, or anti-calvinist – readings of Max Weber. This sort of
interpretation must be considered, to a large extent, as a creative
“misappropriation”: these dissident “disciples” will use the ambivalent arguments
of the Protestant Ethic in order to develop a virulent anti-capitalist critique, of
socialist/romantic inspiration.
The first star in this constellation is Ernst Bloch, who had taken part, in the
years 1912-14, in Max Webe’s circle of friends which met every Sunday at his
home in Heidelberg. It is Bloch that “invented”, in his Thomas Münzer from
1921, the expression “capitalism as religion”• (Kapitalismus als religion), a Commented [J2]: Expressão criada por Bloch

theological disaster whose moral responsibility he squarely places on the

shoulders of Calvinism. The witness called for to sustain this accusation is none
else than …Max Weber : among Calvin’s followers, says Bloch, “thanks to the
abstract duty to work, production unfolds in a harsh and systematic way, since
the ideal of poverty, applied by Calvin only to consumption, contributes to the
formation of capital. The obligation of saving is imposed on wealth, conceived
as an abstract quantity which is an aim in itself requiring growth. (…) As Max
Weber has brilliantly shown, the capitalist economy in development is totally
emancipated, detached, liberated from all qualms (Skrupel) of primitive
Christianity, as well as of all relatively Christian aspects of the economic
ideology of the Middle-Ages”.• Weber’s “axiologically neutral” analysis of the
rôle of Calvinism in the rise of the capitalist spirit becomes, in the words of
Ernst Bloch – a sui-generis Marxist fascinated by Catholicism – a ferocious
attack on capitalism and its protestant origin!
Among Walter Benjamin unpublished papers which came out in 1985, edited by
Ralph Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser in volume VI of
the Gesammelte Schriften (Suhrkamp Verlag), the fragment “Capitalism as
religion” is one of his most intriguing, but also most interesting pieces. It is made
of only three or four pages, including notes and bibliographical references;
dense, paradoxical, sometimes hermetic, it was not intended for publication and
is not easily deciphered. Commented [J3]: Pode ser citado

The title of the fragment is directly borrowed from Ernst Bloch’s above
mentioned Thomas Münzer, theologian of revolution (1921). We know that
Benjamin read this book, because in a letter to Gershom Scholem from
November 27, 1921 he told his friend: “Recently he [Bloch] gave me, during his
first visit here, the complete proofs of his “Münzer” and I’ve begun to read it.”•
This means that the date when the fragment was written is not exactly at latest
in the middle of 1921, as the editors indicate in a note, but rather at the soonest
at the end of 1921. By the way, Benjamin did not at all share the views of his
friend about a Calvinist/Protestant treason of the true spirit of Christianit
Benjamin’s fragment is visibly inspired by Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic and the
Spirit of Capitalism; it is twice mentioned, once in the body of the text, and then
in the bibliographical notes, which include the 1920 edition of the Gesammelte
Aufsätze sur Religionssoziologie, as well as Ernst Troeltsch’s book, Die
Soziallehren der christlichen Kirchen und Gruppen (1912) – a work that
develops, concerning the origins of capitalism, similar theses as Weber.
However, as we shall see, Benjamin’s argument goes well beyond Weber, and,
above all, it substitutes his “value free” (Wertfrei) analysis by a passionate anti-
capitalist attack.
“One must see capitalism as a religion”: it is with this categorical statement that
the fragment opens. It is followed by a reference, but at the same time a critical
comment, to Max Weber’s thesis : “To demonstrate the religions structure of
capitalism – i.e. to demonstrate that it is not only a formation conditioned by
religion, as Weber thinks, but an essentially religious phenomena would take us
today into the meanders of a boundless universal polemic”. Further on, the
same idea appears again, in a somewhat attenuated form, in fact nearer to the
Weberian argument : “Christianity, at the time of the Reformation, did not favor
the establishment of capitalism, it transformed itself into capitalism”. This is not
so far from the conclusions of The Protestant Ethic! What is new is the idea of
the properly religious nature of the capitalist system itself: this goes well beyond
Weber, even if it is based on many aspects of his analysis.
Both dimensions are visible in his discussion on the main characteristics of the
“religious structure of capitalism”. Benjamin does not quote Weber in this
context, but his presentation is nourished by the ideas and arguments of the
German sociologist, giving them however a new meaning, infinitely more
critical, more radical socially, politically and philosophically (theological?) and in
contradiction with the Weberian thesis of secularization.
The first decisive trait of the capitalist religion is that is “a purely cultic religion,
perhaps the most extremely cultic that ever existed. Nothing has meaning in it
that is not immediately related to the cult, it has no specific dogma nor theology.
Utilitarianism wins in it, from this viewpoint, its religious coloration”.
In other words: the utilitarian practices of capitalism – capital investment,
speculations, financial operations, stock-exchange manipulations, selling and
buying commodities – have the meaning of a religious cult. Capitalism does not Commented [J4]: Para Löwy todas as transações capitalistas
são parte do culto, não só o culto ao dinheiro.
require the acceptance of a creed, a doctrine or a theology, what counts are the
actions, which take the form, by their social dynamics, of cult practices.
But what is that permits one to assimilate this economic capitalist practices to a
religious “cult”? Benjamin does not explain it, but he uses, a few lines bellow,
the word “adorator”; one can therefore suppose that, for him, the capitalist cult
includes some divinities which are the object of adoration. For instance:
“Comparison between the images of saints in different religions and the bank
notes of different states”. Money, in the form of paper-notes, would therefore be
the object of a cult similar to the one of saints in “ordinary” religions. It is
interesting to notice that, in a passage of One-Way Stree (t928), Benjamin
compares the bank notes with the “architecture of Hell” (Fassaden-architektur
der Hälle) which manifests “the holy spirit of seriousness” of capitalism. Let us
remember also that on the door – or the façade “of Dante’s hell there is the
famous inscription : “voi ch’entrate, lasciate cui ogni speranza”; according to
Marx, these were the words inscribed by the capitalist at the entrance of the
factory, for the instruction of his workers. As we shall see below, despair is for
Benjamin the religious state of the world under capitalism.
The second decisive trait of capitalism, which is intimately linked to its concrete
cult nature is that “the duration of the cult is permanent”. Capitalism is “the
celebration of a cult sans tréve et sans merci. There are no ‘ordinary days’, no
days which are not holidays, in the terrible meaning of the deployment of sacred
pomp, of the extreme tension which inhabits the adorer”. Benjamin has probably
once more taken his cue from Weber’s Protestant Ethic, which emphasizes the
methodic rules of behavior imposed by Calvinism/Capitalism, the permanent
control of life conduct, and the “religious value set on restless, continuous, and
systematic work in a vocational calling”.
Restless, continuous, sans tréve et sans merci : Weber’s idea is absorbed by
Benjamin, almost with the same words; not without irony however, when
speaking of the permanent “holidays”: in fact, the Puritan capitalists suppressed
most of the Catholic holidays, considered as a form of idleness. Therefore, in
the capitalist religion, every days sees the deployment of the “sacred pomp”, i.e.
the rituals of Stock-Exchange or Finance, while the adorers follow, with anguish
and an “extreme tension”, the rise and fall of the share values. Capitalist
practices do not know any pause, they rule over the life of the individuals from
morning to evening, from Spring to Winter, from the cradle to the tomb. As
Burkhardt Lindner comments, Benjamin’s fragment borrows from Weber the
conception of capitalism as a dynamic system in global expansion, an iron
destiny to which no one seems able to escape.
Benjamin continues his damnation of the capitalist religion with the following
discourse:
“In this way, capitalism is thrown into a monstrous movement. A monstrously
guilty consciousness which does not know how to expiate, takes possession of
the cult, not in order to atone for [expiate] this guilt, but in order to universalize
it, to introduce it forcefully in consciousness, and above all, in order to involve
God in this guilt, so that he himself has finally an interest in expiation”.

Benjamin mentions, in this context, what he calls “the daemonic ambiguity of

the word Schuld” – which means at the same time “debt” and “guilt”.
One can find in Max Weber similar arguments, which also play with the
connexions between economic debt, moral duty and religious guilt: for the
Puritan bourgeois, “what he spends for his personal aims is stolen from the
service of God’s glory”; one becomes therefore at the same time guilty and “in
debt” towards God. “The idea of a person’s duty to maintain possessions
entrusted to him, to which he subordinates himself as a dutiful steward or even
as a ‘machine for producing wealth’, lies upon his life with chilling seriousness.
He must preserve these possessions and “for God’s glory” increase their value
through restless work”.
Benjamin’s expression “forcefully introduce guilt into consciousness” is not so
far from these Puritan/capitalist practices analyzed by Weber.
The result of this “monstrous” process of general capitalist culpability, is the
generalization of despair : “What capitalism has of historically unheard of is that
its religion is not reform but ruin of being. Despair extends itself until it becames
the religious state of the world, of which one should expect salvation”. Benjamin
adds, speaking of Nietzsche, that we assist to the “transition of the planet
human being, following its absolutely solitary orbit, to the House of Despair
(Haus der Verzweiflung)”. Haus der Verzweiflung, Stallhartes Gehäuse, Iron
cage of despair: from Weber to Benjamin we find ourselves in the same
semantic field, which tries to describe the merciless logic of the capitalist
system.
Lukacs’ History and Class Consciousness (1923) is another example of how
Weber can be used support of a radical critique of capitalism. The lukacsian
concept of reification (Verdinglichung) is a powerfull and original synthesis
between Marx’s theory of commodity fetichism and Weber’s theory of
rationalization. By combining the Weberian category of formal rationality –
characterized by abstraction and quantification – with the Marxist concepts of
abstract labour and exchange-value, Lukacs reformulated the arguments of the
German sociologist in the Marxist language. On the other hand, by extending
the Marxist analysis of the commodity form and of the “reification― to
other areas of society and culture, he took direct inspiration from the Weberian
diagnosis of modern life as penetrated by the capitalist spirit of rational
calculation (Rechnenhaftigkeit).
With the rise of capitalism, reification came to include all dimensions of social
life – begining with the State, the administration, justice and law. According to
Lukacs, this structural homogeneity has been observed by “all the lucid
historians of modern capitalism―. Who are these lucid authors? The only
exemple mentioned by him – and this is not by accident – is Max Weber…
Lukacs quotes several passages, including the following one from Economy
and Society : “The modern capitalist enterprise is above all intimately based
on calculation. She needs in order to exist a justice and an administration
whose functioning can also be, at least in principle, rationally
calculated according to solid genera rules, as one calculates the predictable
work done by a machine―. His discussion of the bureaucratic system is also
based on Weber, although the apparently “neutral― descriptions of the
sociologist from Heidelberg are put at the service of a ferocious critique of the
inhuman and reified character of this purely formal administrative rationality,
with its “growing scorn for the qualitative material essence of
‘things’―.
This anti-capitalist radicalisation of Weber’s ambivalent analysis is particularly
striking in the lukacsian interpretation of the Protestant Ethic. First of all, in
contraposition to most Marxist critics of the book, Lukacs has no interest in the
“materialist― quarrel on the origins of capitalism : “It is quite
indifferent, in order to appreciate the facts, that one approves or not Weber’s
causal interpretation―. What seems to him important, instead, is the
significance of the Weberian thesis for a critical analysis of capitalist reification.
According to Lukacs, “the Calvinist combination of an ethics of the self-
assertion (Bewährungsethik) (innerwordly ascetism) with the complete
transcendence of the objective powers that move the world and determine in its
content the human destiny – Deus absconditus and predestination – represent,
in a mythologizing way, but in its purest form, the bourgeois structure of the
reified consciousness (thing in itself)―. In a footnote , Lukács explicitly
mentions Weber’s works, as well as a text by Engels that also suggests the
deep affinity (tieferen Verwandtschaft) between capitalism and Calvinism.
Without formally belonging to the Institute of Social Research, Erich Fromm will
be associated, during the 1930’s, to the Frankfurt School, publishing several
essays and book-reviews in the Journal published by Max Horkheimer. One of
the most interesting, dating from 1932, “The psychoanalythical
caracterology and its significance for social psychology― discusses the
classic weberian thesis of the relations between religious ethics and the spirit of
capitalism, with quite astonishing conclusions. Analyzing the
capitalist/bourgeois spirit, as Sombart and Weber defined it, since 15 thcentury
Florence until Benjamin Franklin, Fromm compares it to the “anal
character― studied by Freud and his disciple Karl Abraham. He opposes two
radically distinct psycho-social forms : the pre-capitalist spirit, characteristic of
the Catholic Middle-Age, for which the economic activity is subordinated to the
search of pleasure and satisfaction as an end in itself; and the capitalist spirit,
which considers thrift and acquisition as the essential aims. In the medieval
society, the individual drew multiple satisfactions – according to his social
class – from sumptuous festivities, beautiful paintings, splendid monuments as
well as many holiday festivities. “It was understood that man had an innate
right to happiness, blessedness and pleasure; that was viewed as the proper
goal of all human activity, whether it was economic or not. The bourgeois spirit
introduced a decisive change in this respect. Happiness or blessedness ceased
to be the unquestioned goal of life. Something else took first place on the scale
of values : duty―.
To explain this transformation, Fromm quotes Weber, but also a contemporary
book by a certain J.B. Kraus, Scholastics, puritanism and capitalism (1930)Â ;
according to this author, what most clearly distinguished Calvin ethics of labour
from the scholastic period, was the suppression of all finality and the emphasis
on formal obedience to one’s calling in life. An iron discipline was required in
order to act with a profound feeling of obedience and duty. According to Fromm,
such a consideration of duty – instead of happiness – as the highest value, can
be followed, starting with Calvinism, through all bourgeois thought, theological
or profane. This applies not only to the imperative of labour, but also to the duty
to save, celebrated by puritan ethics, Benjamin Franklin’s rules, and
19th century bourgeois life-conduct. After surveying various psycho-social
characteristics belonging to the bourgeois protestant spirit – the puritan
limitation of sexual pleasure, the rejection of charity, the taste for order – he
connects them with the anal character, as studied by Freud, Jones et
Abraham…
Obviously, this essay interprets Weber against the grain, gegen den Strich, by
denouncing both the protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism in Romantic
terms, and by comparing them to pre-capitalist social and religious forms – such
as the Medieval civilization – presented as morally and humanly superior. No
doubt that his description of the Middle Age is largely idealized, but the
hypothesis that Catholic ethics are hostile to the spirit of capitalism appears
already in Weber. It may seem surprising that a non-believing, Freudo-Marxist
Jew such as Fromm, refers himself to Medieval Catholicism in order to accuse
the (protestant) spirit of capitalism, but one can find similar arguments among
other Romantic Jewish thinkers of German culture.
These are four striking examples of this « inventive » readings – all by
romantic/socialist Jewish/German thinkers – which use Weber’s sociological
research, and in particular The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, as
ammunition in order to mount a thorough attack on the capitalist system, its
protestant/Calvinist origin, its values, its practices and its “religion―.
Some more research is needed to find out if there are other authors which
belong to this surprising “constellation―.
Lukacs’ more sober assessment emphasizes the identity between Calvinist
ethics and the bourgeois reified consciousness.
M.Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism,translated by
Stephen Kalberg, (Los Angeles: Blackwell) 2002, p. 17 (slight correction by me
ML).
Ibid.
Ibid. p. 31. See also p.37.
Max Weber, « Der Sozialismus », in Schriften fÜr Sozialgeschichte und
Politik (Reclam) 1997, p. 246.
M.Weber, The Protestant Ethic…, p. 123.
Ibid. p. 123
See. E.Tiryakian, « The Sociological Import of a Metaphor. Tracking the
Source of Max Weber’s ‘Iron Cage’ », in P. Hamilton (ed.), Max Weber.
Critical Assessment (London : Routledge, 1991) vol. I, 2. Pp. 109-120.
M.Weber, The Protestant Ethic, p. 124.
Ernst Bloch, Thomas MÜnzer als Theologue der Revolution, 1921, Frankfort,
Suhrkamp Verlag, 1972, p. 123.
E.Bloch, Ibid, p. 119
W.Benjamin, Gesammelte Briefe, Frankfort, Suhkamp, Bd.II, pp. 212-213
On the relation between Benjamin and Bloch on this issue, see Werner
Hammacher « Schuldgeschichte », in Dirk Baecker, Kapitalismus als
Religion, Berlin, Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2003, pp. 91-92.
W.Benjamin, « Kapitalismus als Religion », ed. R.Tiedemann et
H.Schwepenhäuser, Gesammelte Schriften, VI, p. 102. All translations from
the German are mine ML
W.Benjamin, Einbahnstrasse, in Gesammelte Schriften, Band IV, 2001, p.139
Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic p. 116
B.Lindner, « Der 11.9.2001 oder Kapitalismus als Religion », in Nikolaus
MÜller Schöll (hg.), Ereignis. Eine fundamentale Kategorie der Zeiterfahrung.
Anspuch und Aporien, Bielefeld, 2003, p. 201.
According to Burkhard Lindner, the historical perspective of the fragment is
grounded on the premiss that . . . one cannot separate, in the system of
capitalist religion, the “mythical guilt― and the economic debt.
(B.Lindner, Ibid. p. 207.)
Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic, p. 115.
Concerning the relation between Weber andLukács, there exists an important
critical literature. Among the most interesting : Andrew FEENBFRG, Lukács.
Marx and the Sources of Critical Theory, Totowa, Rowman and Littlefield, 1981
; Andrew ARATO, Paul BREINESW, The Young Lukács and the Origins of
Western Marxism, New York, Seabury Press, 1979; Kurt
BEIERSDORFER, Max Weber und Georg Lukács. Über die Beziehung von
Verstehender Soziologie und Westlichem Marxismus, Francfort‑sur‑le-
Main, Campus Verlag, 1982.
Georg Lukacs, Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein, Berlin, Luchterhand, 1968,
p. 270‑274.
G. Lukacs, Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein, p. 379. The quote from Engels
refers to the preface to the English editions (1892) to the essay From utopian to
scientific socialism. See also p. 350 the analysis of the capitalists double
personality : on one side “an element of the movement of commodities―,
on the other “an (objectively powerless) spectator of this movement―. In
a footnote Lukacs adds : “this explains the importance, emphasized by
Weber, of the ‘innerwordly ascetism’ for the formation of the ‘spirit’ of
capitalism―.
E.Fromm, The Chrisis of Psychoanalysis, New York, Holt, Rinehart and
Winston, 1970, p. 151.
Ibid. pp. 151-153.