Anticapitalist Readings of Weber's Protestant Ethic: Ernst Bloch, Walter

Benjamin, György Lukacs, Erich Fromm

Michael Löwy

This paper will try to analise a curious intellectual phenomenon: 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 contradictory. One
could say that he is divided between his identity as a 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 an 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 20th century. This pessimism is inseparable from a critical view of
the nature itself of capitalism and its dynamics of rationalisation/modernisation.
One can distinguish two aspect –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's 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 impersonal 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 imprisonment 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 Weber'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 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
Marx Weber has brilliantly shown, the capitalist economy in development is totally
emancipated, detached, liberated from all qualms (Skrupel) of primitive Christianity, as
well 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 origins…
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.
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
Christianity…
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 (theologically?)– 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 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
Street (1928), Benjamin compares the bank notes with the "façade-architecture of Hell"
(Fassaden-architektur der Hölle) 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 trêve 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 trêve 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
day 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 analised 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. Analising the
capitalist/bourgeois spirit, as Sombart and Weber defined it, since 15th century 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); 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.

1. 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).
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid. p. 31. See also p. 37.
4. Max Weber, «Der Sozialismus», in Schriften für Sozialgeschichte und Politik (Reclam) 1997, p.
246.
5. M.Weber, The Protestant Ethic…, p. 123.
6. Ibid. p. 123
7. 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.
8. M.Weber, The Protestant Ethic, p. 124.
9. Ernst Bloch, Thomas Münzer als Theologue der Revolution, 1921, Frankfort, Suhrkamp Verlag,
1972, p. 123.
10. E.Bloch, Ibid, p. 119.
11. W.Benjamin, Gesammelte Briefe, Frankfort, Suhkamp, Bd.II, pp. 212-213.
12. 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.
13. W.Benjamin, «Kapitalismus als Religion», ed. R.Tiedemann et H.Schwepenhäuser, Gesammelte
Schriften, VI, p. 102. All translations from the German are mine ML.
14. W.Benjamin, Einbahnstrasse, in Gesammelte Schriften, Band IV, 2001, p.139.
15. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic p. 116.
16. 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.
17. 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.)
18. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic, p. 115.
19. Concerning the relation between Weber and Lukács, 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.
20. György LUKACS, Geschichte und Klassenbewußtsein, Berlin, Luchterhand, 1968, p. 270-274.
21. 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".       
22. E.Fromm, The Chrisis of Psychoanalysis, New York, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970, p. 151.
23. Ibid. pp. 151-153.