Anneke van Baalen, HIDDEN MASCULINITY, Max Weber's historical sociology of bureaucracy. 1994
Chapter 9 Connections between formal rationality and charismatic domination over and through free
men: the continuing role of magic in the construction of impersonal patriarchal fraternities; from
Ständestaat to revolution
165
5. Inner-worldly asceticism and its routinization: the protestant ethic and the new bourgeois
According to Weber 'a naturalistic and rational attitude toward the state' develops only when a
religion like Puritanism rejects office charisma.
In his first major sociological work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, he
presents the Puritan mentality as an important factor in the development of capitalism. He
views the Protestant mentality of an 'ethics of work' as paradoxically caused by the
psychological influence of the content of the Calvinist religion. According to Weber Calvin had
formulated the predestination doctrine with so much force, that it caused those who believed in
it unbearable loneliness and anxiety, since they could not know whether they were doomed or
whether their god had elected them
37
. The Protestants escaped this loneliness and anxiety by
interpreting economic success as a sign of election and in this way transformed the doctrine
into an everyday belief.
In The Protestant Ethic Weber gave his first instance of what he later called the 'Paradoxie der
Folgen'
38
, or 'law of unintended consequences', when he stated that ideas only survive if they
can be made to serve - perhaps after having been transformed - important economic interests.
I have shown 'routinization of charisma' to be a special case of this law: charisma is
transformed into a permanent institution to serve the economic interests of the followers of the
charismatic leader.
According to Weber the transformation of the content of the Calvinist belief did lead this faith in
a rational direction. Since the anxious believers could only be sure of reaching Heaven if they
had economic profits to show for, Protestantism extended the 'methodische Lebensführung' -
the methodical acquiring of salvation, in which the Catholic Church had schooled its religious
specialists
39
- also to the lay believers. If the only way to acquire profits and salvation is to
invest time and money, then consumption is sin, time is money, and work - routinized
economic activity - is holy.
In ES Weber analyzes the Protestant sects, which emerged after the end of city autonomy, in
his chapter on religion, in the section on 'The different roads to salvation and their influence on
conduct.'
40
Here he defines as ascetic the attitude characterized by 'the methodical procedure
for achieving salvation', giving this term the special meaning of 'the distinctive gift of active
ethical *conduct performed in the awareness that god directs this *conduct, i.e., that the actor
is an instrument of god.'
41
In Weber's view this 'asceticism' is an element of religious virtuosity; it always leads to a
radical ethico-religious critique of the relationship between the believer and society, since 'the
"world" in the religious sense - i.e., the domain of social relationships' - produces 'illusions as
to that which alone is indispensable' and therefore is considered as 'a realm of temptations'.
42
37
TPE p. 104, 107, 109/10, DpE p. 122, 125, 127; according to Weber Calvin himself did not suffer from this
anxiety, because he believed himself an instrument of his god.
38
ES p. 577, 586, WG p. 349, 353/4. See also Ch. 1,8.
39
TPE p. 118/9, DpE p. 134/5; in it, as will be shown in the next section, 'discipline' plays an important role.
40
ES p. 529 ff., WG Kap. V, § 10, p. 321 ff.
41
'We shall designate this type of attitude toward salvation, which is characterized by the methodical procedure
for achieving religious salvation, as "ascetic".' ES p. 541, WG p. 328.
42
'not only because it is the site of sensual pleasures which are ethically irrational and completely diverting from
things divine, but even more because it fosters in the religiously average person complacent self-sufficiency and
self-righteousness in the fulfillment of common obligations, at the expense of the uniquely necessary
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