ECONOMICS AND RELIGION

ECONOMICS AND RELIGION . [To explore the relations between religion and economics, this article takes as its starting place the beginnings of modern economic theory and examines the perspectives on those relations that have developed within the sociology of religion since the late nineteenth century.]

A sustained scholarly interest in the relationship between religion and economics crystallized in a number of Western societies in the early years of the twentieth century. Since that time it has been a topic of considerable research and debate.

Development of Economic Analysis

The discussion of the relationship between economics and religion is plagued by a general problem having to do with how appropriate it is to speak of separate domains—such as the economic or the religious—in premodern, especially primal, societies, where such distinctions were or are not part of everyday life. Indeed, only during the last two hundred years or so have people become accustomed to speak of the economy, even though the term was used as long ago as the fourth century bce by Aristotle to designate the relationships among members of the domestic household. Aristotle was particularly concerned to show, in the face of the commercial expansion of his time, that human wants and needs are not unlimited and that useful things are not, by their nature, scarce. In spite of the great expansion of trade, profit making, and eventually, price setting by market forces and the appearance of large-scale manufacture during the centuries following Aristotle, it was not until as recently as the end of the eighteenth century that "the economy" became fully thematized (and then only in the Western world) as a relatively autonomous realm of human life. That period saw the beginnings in Great Britain of the discipline that came to be called political economy and the first use of the term économiste by French intellectuals. The perception of the economy as a relatively autonomous realm (and, in the view of many of those who specialized in analyzing it, the most fundamental human realm) went hand-in-hand with the view that religion was of rapidly diminishing significance.

Primacy of Economic Aspect

The prevailing view among social scientists and historians has been that the economy, during the long period from ancient Greek civilization to the nineteenth century, became disembedded from the societal fabric, especially in the Western world. By the late nineteenth century, therefore, the economy was seen as standing apart from the rest of society. This move has been called the "naturalization" of the economy (in the sense that it came to be regarded as operating according to its own natural laws, particularly those issuing from the relationship between supply and demand, as expressed in monetary prices), and it constituted a crucial aspect of the nineteenth-century diagnosis of secularization (the decline in the significance of religion in modern society). The perception of the rapidly increasing autonomy of the economy inspired in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels the idea that human history in its entirety had been motored by economic forces or, more specifically, by class conflicts centered upon economic concerns. In response to the view of the classical British political economists that the best form of society is one in which there is free competition among many private producers in line with universal economic laws, Marx argued that different modes of production have prevailed during different periods of history, and therefore the embryonic capitalist mode cannot be regarded as the paradigm of all other modes, let alone as a permanent and universal system.

Both the classical political economists, on the one hand, and Marx and Engels, on the other, thus saw the economy as fundamental to the operation of human societies and correspondingly regarded religion, particularly in modernizing societies, as of peripheral significance (for Marx and Engels, it was primarily an epiphenomenon), but they differed greatly with respect to the implications of the fundamentality of the economy. Religion was, according to Marx, being driven from human life by capitalist materialism and in any case impeded the realization of proletarian class consciousness, which would make possible the release of the class from the exploitative bondage of capitalism. Nevertheless, despite Marx's mainly negative assessment of the historical role of religion, he initiated an intellectual concern with the historical origins of capitalism and, more generally, with the relationship between economic matters and religion.

Primacy of Social and Moral Aspects

Classical political economy as such did not encompass the sociological and historical themes that were developed by Marx and others during the nineteenth century. For the most part, the more sociologically inclined social scientists of the period shared Marx's belief in the increasing salience of the economy but tended to view it as a threat to the social and moral integration of industrial societies. In France, for example, Saint-Simon, after having written at length about the new industrial order, came to the conclusion that a new and in a sense secular version of Christianity was necessary in order to give the new form meaningful direction.

While Marx spoke of the new industrial order as providing the opportunity for deprived, exploited classes to seize control of the mainspring of human life (that is, its productive forces) and thus bring about the religionless humanization of the species, Saint-Simon had come to the conclusion that religion in a modernized form was essential in sustaining the meaningful sociality of human life in the face of the eruption of the economic factor. For Marx, religion is the definitive form of alienation, but for those who wrote from the perspective of Saint-Simon, religion cements society and in a sense expresses the sociality of humanity. The latter view was brought to its consummation by Émile Durkheim in the early years of the twentieth century. For Durkheim religion is the serious life, as he put it, and serves, inter alia, so as to elevate men and women above purely material interests.

Religion and Economic Legitimation

Although the developing nineteenth-century discipline of political economy (eventually known simply as economics) did not share the concern of Marxism and non-Marxist social science with religion, religious ideas and practices emerged in the major areas of capitalism—notably Britain and the United States—that legitimated the capitalist economy and sanctioned the existing social order. Indeed, capitalists themselves quite often expressed the view that certain forms of Protestantism encouraged a dedication to industrial work. More specifically, one may point to Wesleyan Methodism in England as an important example of the way in which religion played a significant part not merely in the development of the entrepreneurial attitude but also in the acquiescence of workers to their role in the system of social stratification. (That religion could, in spite of its allegedly imminent demise, perform this service for capitalism was conceded by Marx under the rubric of "false consciousness.") The greatest degree of religious legitimation of capitalism occurred in the United States, where the predominance of a basically Calvinist form of Protestantism encouraged the view that men proved themselves before God and their fellow men and women by successful, disciplined economic striving.

German Critiques of Capitalism

By the end of the nineteenth century, intellectuals in Europe and North America had become almost obsessed by the idea that a major transformation of the West had occurred, for by that time not only had capitalistic production greatly expanded but so had bureaucracy, science and technology, and urban forms of life. Thus in the declining years of the nineteenth century theories and diagnoses proliferated concerning the causes, magnitude, and implications of what was considered a more material and less religious mode of existence. It was in Germany, however, that the particular problem of the relationship between religious and economic factors was given the most sustained initial attention, particularly as far as its history was concerned.

The fact that an interest in the connection between economic matters and religion developed so strongly among German scholars can be attributed in part to their felt need to comprehend the character and the place in the modern world of Germany, which had only recently been politically united. Although it possessed a rich culture, the area that became the German empire in the 1870s had been relatively backward in economic terms and had not developed what came to be called by Max Weber "the spirit of capitalism" to the same degree as other parts of western Europe, notably Britain and Holland, and the United States. A number of German intellectuals were thus greatly concerned (as well as ambivalent) about the origins and ramifications of the capitalist mode of production, which had in those other countries seemingly been responsible for rapid economic growth, urbanization, the increasing significance of money, and so on. They were also concerned with the problem of developing in Germany an integrated national society despite class conflicts largely produced, as they saw it, by changing economic circumstances, as well as by religious and other cleavages.

It should not be thought, however, that concern about the connection between religion and economic matters was confined to Germany, for in less self-consciously intellectual ways the link was addressed in many contexts and societies. During the rapid expansion of capitalistic forms of production, distribution, and exchange in the nineteenth century, religious leaders had responded in a variety of ways. By the 1890s the problems posed by materialism, rapid urbanization, inequality and poverty, the rise of labor unions and working-class political parties, and related conflicts between the lower and middle classes had attracted the attention of many religious leaders, organizations, and movements. Indeed the declining years of the nineteenth and early years of the twentieth centuries witnessed a spawning of movements concerned with the relationship between religion and capitalism. The most conspicuous of these movements deplored the social consequences that they attributed to the capitalist system.

Social Gospel, Christian Socialism, and Roman Catholicism

The social condition that aroused the most concern, as expressed in the Social Gospel movement in the United States and in Christian socialist movements in Britain and other predominantly Protestant societies (where capitalism had progressed the furthest), was the poverty and exploitation allegedly inherent in capitalism. In response, these movements ranged from the theological or moral denunciation of capitalism in toto to the more typical advocacy of methods for ameliorating the distress caused by urbanization and industrialization. Their opponents within religious organizations tended to argue either that the primary concern of religion should be with strictly spiritual matters or, as noted in the case of Calvinist Protestants, that capitalism was a God-sanctioned form of economy in the context of which individuals should strive to do their disciplined best. There were also those in American churches who were strongly opposed to anything resembling socialism, in which they saw the prospect of a world without religion, not least because of the open hostility to religion often found among secular socialists (especially those of a Marxist persuasion). Within Catholic circles and specifically in the pronouncements of the Roman Catholic church itself one did not find such conspicuous extremes. Generally speaking, what prevailed in official Catholicism was the view that capitalism contained the seeds of materialism and exploitation but that outright opposition to it in the form of socialism or labor unionism carried the potential for antireligious developments. Socialism and secular unionism were regarded as forms of attachment that rivaled commitment to the Catholic church itself. Consequently, the official Catholicism of the period expressed antagonism not only to most of the trappings of modernity but to what it saw as an ideology of modernism.

The intense religious concern with economic matters that characterized the early years of the twentieth century soon faded. While it would be an exaggeration to say that only slight concern was expressed between World War I and the 1970s, that period constituted something of a hiatus in the modern religious conciousness of the economic domain. This may be attributed in large part to the fact that during and in the aftermath of the phase of religious interest in economic matters that spanned the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the modern welfare state came into being. Indeed, the concern expressed by religious leaders about poverty, health, and other issues had more than a little to do with the steps that many governments took in Europe and elsewhere to establish social welfare programs for their citizens. (Moreover, many religious organizations established their own welfare programs, partly following the lead of the Salvation Army.) During the 1970s and 1980s, however, the economic costs of maintaining the welfare state increased enormously, while serious problems of unemployment and poverty again became evident, partly due to the decline of traditional manufacturing industries in many of the more affluent societies. Meanwhile, the failure of most societies in the Third World to develop strong economies led to increasing concern about global poverty, material deprivation, and intersocietal inequalities. Against that background, there was a considerable renewal of religious interest in economic matters during the 1970s and 1980s, but this time on a much more global scale than at the beginning of the century.

Contemporary Context

One of the major sources of the revived concern with the religion-economics theme is the changed relationship between the economic and the governmental spheres. In the early decades of the nineteenth century the view developed that the economy, at least under classical capitalism, was naturelike and operated on its own terms. To that extent the government was thought to have only a small role to play in the production and distribution of wealth and material resources and that what is now called governmental intervention in the economy was inappropriate. However, thanks largely to the growth and monopolistic tendencies of industrial enterprise, governments were gradually conceded a definite role in the management of the economy. As the welfare state and strong central governments emerged, the economy was increasingly regarded as subject to state control or at least calibration rather than as an autonomous system following its own laws. The English economist John Maynard Keynes, by advocating a relatively high degree of governmental intervention in capitalist economies, did much to advance this view, which was further reinforced by the spreading influence of socialist, communist, and other conceptions of economic planning.

There has, however, been a reaction against the interventionist view, particularly in the United States, leading to a revival of the conservative idea that economic growth is best encouraged by the ethic that Weber considered crucial to the rapid economic growth achieved by the mainly Protestant societies of the West during the nineteenth century. On the other hand, the more recent rapid economic growth of some Asian societies, notably Japan, has further raised the possibility that it is not individualistic Protestantism as such that encourages industrial enterprise, but rather a generalized sense of sacrifice and collective involvement in work, at least in the modern corporative economy.

Max Weber's Contribution

In addressing the crystallization of scholarly interest in the relationship between religion and economics at the end of the nineteenth century it should be stressed that in the German context there was a general philosophical and sociological issue at the center of debate. In the later years of the nineteenth century Germany experienced a rapidly growing interest in the writings of Marx, due both to academic engagement with them and to the growth of the German Social Democratic Party, whose debates about ideology and strategy largely centered upon issues raised by Marx and Engels. For Marx and Engels and for those influenced by them, notably the historian and prominent ideologue of the Social Democratic Party, Karl Kautsky, the view that the economic realm was autonomous had led to analyses that rendered religion an effect of economic factors. This view became a major ingredient in the materialist, as opposed to the idealist, perspective on human life and history. It was against this general background that Weber began to make his highly influential contributions to the religion-economics theme.

Economics and religion

The novelty of the argument developed by Weber is best indicated at the outset by the fact that his colleague Ernst Troeltsch could emphatically remark that linking the scholarly discussion of economic matters to the analysis of religion and religious change, as he himself advocated, must have seemed strange to his readers, not least in the German context. The major reason for this was that for the majority of German intellectuals (not simply those of a Marxist persuasion), the modern world was characterized by the complete triumph of material, worldly concerns over spiritual ones, and religion was therefore retreating rapidly into the background. This was widely and often pejoratively perceived to have occurred most conspicuously in Britain and North America. At the end of his most important contribution to the discussion of the relationship between economic and religious matters, Weber indeed expressed the view that men and women were destined to live in an "iron cage" of concern with materiality, calculation, and routine, condemned to involvement in highly structured "intramundane" matters. However, writers such as Weber, Troeltsch, and Georg Simmel took the view that this self-interested concern with worldly matters, notably those of an economic kind, had not arisen autonomously but had developed out of changes in cultural presuppositions and psychological dispositions concerning such matters as the relationship between the individual and society. More specifically, in the writings of Weber there developed a particular interest in the relationship between what he came to call material interests and ideal interests in contrast to the prevailing distinction between material, economic forces and ideas.

Weber began his work The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904–1905) by referring to the observations and complaints in the German-Catholic press and at German-Catholic congresses about the fact that business leaders and owners of financial capital, as well as skilled laborers and commercially trained business employees, were overwhelmingly Protestant. He set out to show that this circumstance, which was duplicated on a larger scale in contrasts between whole societies (such as Britain and Italy), could be largely explained in terms of what he called the "permanent intrinsic character" of religious beliefs. Weber did not deny that such "temporary external historico-political situations" as the migration of ethnic groups to societies in which they became commercially successful had been important in effecting economic change. But he insisted that such events had occurred over a very long period of human history and in many different places, whereas his exclusive interest was in the differential development of the distinctively modern spirit of entrepreneurial capitalism.

Origins of capitalism

After the publication of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Weber began to situate his inquiries into the origins of modern capitalism within a more general inquiry into the origins of the calculative, rational-instrumental, and secular spirit of the Western world. In other words, his study of the ethos of modern capitalism, with its emphasis upon disciplined work, careful calculation, a willingness to forgo short-term for longterm gains, and so on, was subsumed by a wider interest in the making of the ethos of the modern Western world.

Weber argued that the tension between religious belief and what he sometimes called the economic impulse is central to the understanding of the human condition. The economic impulse is universal. But he asked, how and in what ways has it come to be tempered by rationality? In primitive society, he argued, religion is subordinated to the economic impulse and for that reason is best described as magic. Put another way, economic and religious matters are, from the modern point of view, conflated. Rituals and myths tend to be directed toward mainly economic functions. They are relatively instrumental in the provision of economic necessities and thus more magical than religious, not least because in primitive society there is virtually no development of economic ethics. In essence, economically based magic is the embryonic form of religion.

Dualist world images

From that primitive matrix there developed, argued Weber, dualistic world images, that is, images of a cosmos divided into two relatively independent realms, such as the opposed forces of good and evil in Zoroastrianism. Dualistic images of the cosmos gave rise to the problem of the relationship between an individual's action in the mundane world and the fate of the individual in relation to the supramundane world. Given the fundamentality of the economic impulse—or, put another way, the necessity of minimum levels of material satisfaction to support human life—it was inevitable that there should have been tension between the mundane world in its economic aspect and the supramundane world as a focus of meaning. As ideas about the two domains of the cosmos crystallized, a need developed, in turn, for what Weber called an ethical interpretation of the variations and vicissitudes in human fortunes.

Theodicy

Central to Weber's analysis of the economic ethics of the major religious traditions was the concept of theodicy. First systematically used by the philosopher G. W. Leibniz, the term theodicy in its most circumscribed sense has to do with the existence in this world of suffering, evil, and injustice in the face of belief in an omniscient, omnipotent, and just God. Weber expanded its range of application, particularly with reference to matters concerning economic circumstances, so as to embrace not merely monotheistic religions (notably Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) but also the major religions of India, China, and Japan (notably Hinduism, Buddhism, and Confucianism). It is crucial to recognize that in loosening the concept of theodicy (illegitimately, according to some) to encompass nontheistic religions Weber had a particular, guiding purpose: his quest for the origins of the modern ethos (a central part of which was, in his view, the instrumental, calculative rationality of entrepreneurial capitalism). In other words, although Weber in one sense followed Hegel and other Germans before him, and Troeltsch in his own time, in trying to establish a framework for the comparison of the major religious traditions, his work was unique in that he was not interested (as, for example, Hegel had been) in demonstrating that Christianity carried the greatest potential for the realization of the "idea of religion." Nor was Weber concerned, as others had been, with examining the degree to which Indian religion constituted a viable metaphysical alternative to Christianity. Closer to his project was Troeltsch's attempt to demonstrate the superiority of Christianity on the grounds that it promulgated both a particularly transcendent view of the supernatural and a definite set of social teachings. Nonetheless, Weber regarded Troeltsch's work as guided too much by theological purposes and a normative commitment to maximizing the relevance of religion to the modern world, as well as by too great an emphasis upon the social teachings that were explicitly developed by the Christian churches on the basis of official doctrine. Weber was interested in what he called the "practical-ethical" applications of religious teachings, the methodical, quotidian working out of theology and religious teaching in concrete circumstances.

Spirit of capitalism

Claiming that he was attempting only to show that it was just as possible to produce an idealistic interpretation of the rise of modern capitalism centered on religious matters as a materialistic one, Weber set out to provide an account of the "spirit" of modern capitalism. In emphasizing spirit (in the sense of the ethos that animates a certain kind of economic action and sustains certain kinds of economic institutions), Weber was in effect insisting that even though much of the behavior that informs the modern world is indeed sustained by what Marx had called the dull compulsion of economics, one could not plausibly account for its emergence solely in reference to economic change as such, not least because the monetary economy had initially become much more significant in the West than in the East, and then only in certain parts of the West. Weber thus set himself the task of stipulating what aspects of Christianity in general and of Protestantism in particular encouraged the growth of a positive orientation to the economic realm.

Weber began by emphasizing Martin Luther's injunction that the world should be made into a monastery. Whereas in traditional Christian teaching a clear distinction had been made between those who were called to live a monastic life of self-sacrifice (particularly in reference to the vows of poverty and chastity) and those who lived in the world, Luther argued that all Christians should be capable of following a God-inspired way of worldly life. Thus from Weber's point of view Lutheranism constituted a crucial unfolding and further rationalization of the inherently inner-worldly attitude of Christianity. The religious calling was, in other words, considered pursuable in this world. There was no need for a separate group of exemplary religious who turned emphatically away from the everyday world. Weber argued, however, that Luther's ideas in this and other respects were not so radical as those of John Calvin. The Lutheran conception of the calling was, in spite of its greater inner-worldliness in comparison with traditional, Catholic Christianity, essentially passive. It required the typical believer to live as religious a life as possible while remaining indifferent to the wider social context. In other words, the Lutheran was to take the world as he or she found it and respect the secular authorities and institutional characteristics of the wider society. The point of the religious life was to concentrate upon one's personal and familial circumstances in intimate relationship with God.

From Weber's point of view this Lutheran ideal was not sufficient to explain the development in the Western world of an ethos that positively encouraged active involvement in worldly and particularly economic affairs, even though it opened the door to such involvement. It was thus to the rather different Protestant attitude of Calvin that he turned in his search for the most significant source of the spirit of capitalism. Before considering what Weber saw in Calvinism in this respect it is necessary to emphasize again that Weber was concerned with the capitalism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Capitalism in the sense of profit-seeking had existed in many parts of the world for many centuries, but modern capitalism of the kind that had developed in the West since the late eighteenth century had distinctive characteristics. It was a form of economic life that involved the careful calculation of costs and profits, the borrowing and lending of money, the accumulation of capital in the form of money and material assets, investment, private property, and the employment of laborers and employees in a more or less unrestricted labor market. Given Weber's interest in the spirit, or ethos, of modern capitalism it was what one may loosely call the attitudinal aspect of capitalism and even more particularly the attitudes of businessmen that concerned him. What he was thus looking for was an image of the economic realm that emphasized the virtue of disciplined enterprise and a positive concern with economic activity as such (more or less regardless of the material riches that the successful accumulated).

The central feature of Calvinism in terms of Weber's interest in the growth of the modern monetary economy was its special emphasis upon the doctrine of predestination, the idea that the conception of God as all-powerful, all-knowing, and inscrutable led inexorably to the conclusion that the fate of the world and of human individuals was predetermined. For Weber the crucial question hinged upon the practical problem posed to those who subscribed to this doctrine. Specifically, how did Calvinistic individuals decide to act in the world when they believed that God had already determined the fate of each individual and that only a relatively small proportion of human beings could be saved? Weber argued that individuals were constrained to look for signs of having been accorded an elite salvational status. Those who were most successful would tend to regard their worldly success as an indication that they were among God's chosen. While the conviction that one had been saved was the most general indicator of being of the elect, Calvinism's emphasis upon each person having a calling in life, a calling to strive in as disciplined a manner as possible, without self-indulgence, strongly encouraged the view that worldly success was a confirmation of acting as an instrument of God's will and a sign of elect status.

Thus, in Weber's interpretation, Calvinism constituted a further evolution of the Lutheran idea that life itself could be subjected to the monastic conception of the religious calling. Whereas Luther had adumbrated the relatively passive notion of being called to be as devout as possible in the world, Calvin had articulated a more dynamic and active conception of the calling. Calvin called upon individuals to be religious by engaging with the world. And even though Calvinism as a religious doctrine did not specify how one could be supremely confident that one was acting as an instrument of God, it certainly encouraged the faithful to become actively involved in the major institutional spheres of society and, in so doing, to take individual responsibility as agents of God. Weber maintained that it was psychologically inevitable that those who were most tangibly successful as a result of disciplined, ascetic striving in the world would tend to think of themselves as chosen by God. Because worldly indulgence and luxuriating in the fruits of one's endeavors were precluded by the Calvinist ethos, the result of disciplined economic action was the accumulation of financial capital. For Weber, the process of economic investment followed by accumulation of profit and more investment was intimately related to the process of gaining confirmation of salvation, even though such a calculating attitude toward salvation was not prescribed by Calvinist theology.

Weber regarded the Calvinist doctrine of predestination (which has appeared with much less explicitness in many branches of monotheistic religions) as the extreme theological extension of the Christianity that had developed after the founding of the Christian church. It was the logical consummation of the idea of an omniscient God and the commitment to religious involvement in the world. Calvinism thus constituted a logically perfected theodicy.

In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism Weber concentrated on showing, as he put it, that a one-sided, idealistic account of the rise of capitalism (in the sense of stressing the role of ideas) was just as plausible as the equally one-sided materialist accounts produced by Marxists. In any case, he added, a historical account of the rise of capitalism ought to acknowledge the fact that capitalism (or any other mode of production) is not merely an objective structural phenomenon but is also, at least in part, sustained by a set of presuppositions that encourage specific interests in work and industry and discourage others. Thus, contrary to some interpretations of his work, he did not seek to provide a monocausal account of the rise of modern capitalism but rather to stress the ideational factors that had encouraged the capitalist work ethic and had been neglected by the Marxists. Even though he was intent on emphasizing the critical significance of religion in the rise of modern capitalism, Weber did not simply posit Protestantism as the cause and capitalism as the effect. Rather he insisted that a vital aspect of capitalism is the "spirit," or ethos, that legitimates it, and he sought the principal origins of that spirit. In this regard it should be emphasized that Weber undoubtedly exaggerated the degree to which the affinity between certain branches of Protestantism and capitalist economic success had been overlooked prior to his writings. Nevertheless, his own attempt to provide a detailed explanation of that affinity was unique and pathbreaking. It should also be stressed that according to Weber the spirit of capitalism had gradually become self-sustaining, so that by his own time it was no longer grounded upon the "Protestant ethic." Weber's major thesis about the link between Protestantism (particularly in its Calvinist and some other non-Lutheran forms) and capitalism was presented in the context of an expanding debate on that topic, notably, as has been emphasized, in Germany. His own ideas exacerbated the debate and have since been subjected to extensive criticism and appraisal. Indeed, the significance of his argument probably became greater in the course of the twentieth century. This is so not merely because of the purely scholarly interest in the making of the modern world and the crucial role of the West in that regard but also because the great economic disparities between contemporary societies became a matter of widespread concern, controversy, and conflict. Weber's major thesis about the promotion of the spirit of capitalism (and, more generally, of economic success) is thus of considerable relevance to the discussion of the making of the modern world as a whole and, more specifically, the distribution of resources and wealth within it. Before turning to such matters, however, it is necessary to indicate the ways in which Weber fleshed out his thesis about the origins of the modern Western consciousness.

Economic ethics

In the last decade of his life (1910–1920) Weber engaged in a series of studies of non-Christian civilizations with the express intent of explicating the economic ethics of their major religions. (He completed studies of India and China, as well as of the religion of ancient Israel, but not full-scale studies of medieval Christianity and Islam.) These efforts were largely guided by a general analytical contrast between Occidental and Oriental world-images, at the center of which were religious-metaphysical conceptions of the relationship between the cosmos and the world. His aim was to find out why there had arisen in the West (and more in some parts of the West than in others) the instrumental rationality that seemed to lie at the heart of not merely modern economic life but also modern science, modern forms of organization (what he called rational-legal bureaucracy), and modern life generally—or in other words, why modern capitalism and other aspects of modern life and consciousness had not arisen in Eastern civilizations.

The set of contrasts that Weber employed in his inquiries into economic ethics may be summarized as follows. The Eastern conception of the supramundane world centered upon a notion of eternal being, whereas the Western conception involved belief in a personal God. The first tended to encourage and to be consolidated by a mystical, otherworldly orientation, while the second was closely related to an ascetic, innerworldly orientation. The Eastern image was to be seen in its most acute and logically consistent form in classical Buddhism, which emphasized the basically illusory character of worldly life and regarded release from the contingencies of the everyday world as the highest religious aspiration. In contrast to Calvinism, its Western parallel and and opposite, Buddhism directed the attention of its adherents, particularly Buddhist monks, away from the conditions of everyday life and thus did not encourage the continuous application of religious ideals to the concrete circumstances of the world. More generally speaking, Weber maintained that in India, China, and Japan the dominant worldviews lacked the dynamic created in monotheistic religions, particularly in Christianity, by the conception of a demanding God who had enjoined believers to transform the world in his image. Thus in Eastern societies there was much more concern with the maintenance of an organically ordered society and the promotion of organic social ethics.

It is important to note that in his studies of Eastern societies, Weber took great pains to discuss the ways in which religious ideas and social structures were mutually reinforcing. In other words, even though he ascribed great significance to religion, he wished to demonstrate the specific links between religion and other aspects of human societies. But precisely because he did attend so closly to religion, his work has frequently been interpreted as an expression of religious determinism.

Weber's work on religion and economic life has been subject to an immense amount of exegesis and criticism, most of it centered on his thesis about the Western origins of capitalism. While much of the criticism has been well-grounded with respect to the historical record, a good deal of it has derived from tacit acceptance of the view that the modern economy is an autonomous realm lacking any kind of religious-symbolic grounding or relevance. During the 1970s and 1980s, however, renewed interest was generated in the religious foundations of economic life. The idea of the autonomy of economic life and action, as characteristically expressed in the work of professional economists, was strongly challenged, and religious organizations and movements became increasingly concerned about economic issues. Weber's work hovers explicitly or implicitly in the background of much of the contemporary interest in the relationship between religion and economics.

The Modern World

While Weber was clearly conscious of the extent to which nineteenth-century entrepreneurial capitalism was itself being transformed, not least through the expansion of the modern bureaucratic state, his work on religion and economic life has primary relevance to the growth or lack of growth of classical, as opposed to what is now often called late, or advanced, capitalism. Moreover, Weber's work touched little, if at all, upon one of the most significant ingredients of modern economic life, particularly in capitalist societies—consumerism. Weber, as has been emphasized, was interested in the development of entrepreneurial asceticism (an asceticism that, for him, had become freed of its original religious mooring). In contemporary language he was concerned with the origins of the work ethic. However, a more hedonistic dimension of economic culture is to be found in the odyssey of capitalism. Certainly the value placed upon the accumulation of consumer goods is central to the modern form of capitalism. An interest in consumerism has led some social scientists—notably anthropologists—to attempt to lay bare the symbolic basis of patterns of consumption. That is, some analysts have become increasingly concerned with the underlying meanings that are produced and distributed by the advertising, purchase, and display of consumer goods. While not specifically involving the study of religion, this relatively new focus is part of a growing tendency to situate the study of economic behavior and institutions in a broader sociocultural context.

Among the more important specific developments that suggest a return to the thorough investigation of the relationship between religion and economic matters are these: the rapid economic growth in the second half of the twentieth century in societies, such as Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, and Singapore, with religious traditions—sometimes called Neo-Confucian—that do not clearly conform to the Weberian image of Calvinist Protestantism; the emergence in the same period of religious movements, many of them inspired by forms of liberation theology, which stress the importance of linking economic ideas with theological ideas and religious practices; and the general problem of the global economy.

The capitalist world system

In fact these three phenomena discussed above are closely related, with the third probably being the most important. In the tradition largely initiated by Weber, the primary concern has been to connect the comparative economic success of societies (and of groups and regions within societies) with forms of religio-cultural tradition and religious commitment. But a contrasting approach, called world-system theory, has arisen out of the increasing awareness that the world constitutes a single sociocultural system, and that the affairs of particular societies, groups, and regions are inextricably bound up with it. In one of its most influential forms, the theory maintains that the modern world system is largely the result of the growth of capitalism and that the system should be understood as a primarily economic phenomenon. According to this view, the capitalist world system, which had its earliest beginnings in Europe some five hundred years ago, has spread to the point that it now embraces the entire world.

In the version developed by Immanuel Wallerstein, who has placed himself in the Marxist tradition, world-system theory reverses the priority that Weber's work gives to religion, for Wallerstein regards the religious cleavages that occurred in sixteenth-century Europe as consequences of the placement of societies in the nascent world economy. Specifically, he argues that those societies that became predominantly Protestant were the core societies of the embryonic world capitalist system, while those that remained or became Catholic were "peripheral" societies whose major economic function was the supply of raw materials to the dominant manufacturing centers. (Subsequently, as the world system expanded so as to become literally a worldwide system, those early peripheral units of the system became semiperipheral, insofar as they were economically situated between the core capitalist centers of economic domination and the peripheral societies of the world.)

Influence of religion

Thus, in the perspective of the school of thought largely led by Wallerstein, religion has played a significant, but nonetheless epiphenomenal, part in the making of the modern global system. It has, in other words, played an important ideological role, in the Marxist sense of ideology as the form in which inequality and exploitation are presented as justified. To a considerable extent this argument constitutes the highwater mark of the economistic view that everything in human life can be reduced to and explained by economic factors. Yet, in its very extremeness, it has stimulated what promises to be a constructive reaction in the form of a reassessment of the relationship between religion and economic life. In other words, just as the view, promoted by Marx and Engels, that individual societies are driven by conflicts attendant upon economic motivations stimulated the rich, if controversial, attempts by Weber to show that under certain circumstances religion could be a critical factor in sociocultural change, so the view of the entire world as governed by the dynamics of economic motivations and relationships is stimulating new ways of thinking about the economic significance of religion.

Talcott Parsons

A major example of such thinking, although not a direct reaction to the materialist form of world-system theory, is to be found in the work of Talcott Parsons. Greatly influenced by Weber, whose The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism he translated (1930), Parsons devoted much of his academic career to the question of what others have called the degree of embeddedness of economic life. At the center of his thinking in this regard is the general proposition that while economic activity is essential to human life, it is neither fully determining nor fully determined. Nonetheless, Parsons acknowledged that at certain points in history the economic realm has appeared to be particularly significant. Thus he attended to the various ways in which this apparent significance has been interpreted. Indeed, one of his main interests was the way in which the modern discipline of economics arose as one reaction among others to the cultural thematization of the idea that the economic realm is the central and most problematic realm of human existence. Specifically, Parsons examined the relationship between the responses to this idea and the industrial revolution that began in certain Western societies in the second half of the eighteenth century.

In this regard Parsons circumvented the perennial question of whether the economic or "material" aspects of life are more or less important than the "ideal" aspects. While conceding the great importance of the economic aspects, he tried to show that the ways in which they are interpreted and symbolized are of no less importance. The perception of economic autonomy yielded a number of different religious or quasi-religious interpretations, two of which carried it to the point of economic determinism. These were classical economics as it developed in the wake of the writings of Adam Smith and the particular socialist tradition initiated by Marx. Parsons regarded these economistic responses to the industrial revolution as being themselves quasi-religious in nature, for they carried with them sets of ideas concerning the nature and meaning of human existence. He proposed the important idea that nothing in social life is or can be purely economic.

Economic change

Wallerstein's world-system theory, it should be emphasized, originated as a direct response to the modernization theories of the 1950s and 1960s, which owed much to the writing of Weber on the relationship between religious and economic change. New life was given to Weber's work by the widespread concern with the economic gap between established societies, particularly those of the industrial West, and those that had won their independence during the wave of decolonization of the late 1950s and the 1960s. Many social scientists tried to account for disparities in economic circumstances and growth rates by assessing the degree to which religion encouraged or discouraged involvement in economic enterprise and the development of a work ethic.

A strong tendency among modernization theorists in the 1950s and 1960s was to maintain that cultural change, sometimes expressed more specifically as religious change, was a prerequisite of economic change, and that the mainly non-Christian societies of the world (as well as most of the Catholic Christian ones) needed either a Protestant ethic or its functional equivalent as a motivational base for engaging in economic activites that would produce economic growth. This was not at all an original idea, because, as has been seen, during the nineteenth century the claim that Protestantism in its Calvinist version encouraged commitment to enterprise and work had been quite widespread. Indeed in Latin America during that period it was not uncommon for the political leaders of newly independent states to encourage the spread of Protestantism in the hope that it would yield economic growth in the face of the dominant, largely anticapitalist Catholic ethos.

World-system theory achieved prominence largely because of its opposition to the view that poor societies can achieve prosperity by their own internal efforts (even if this means the importation of new cultural and religious forms). In place of this internalist conception of societal change, the theory afforded a basically externalist conception, one that regarded the position of individual societies in the world economic system as almost entirely the consequence of the character of the system as a whole. Rather than attributing economic growth or lack of growth to indigenous, including religious, characteristics, world-system theory maintained that the economic fates of individual societies are determined by the functioning and expansion of a capitalist world system (in which even internally socialistic societies are constrained to act capitalistically in their relations with other societies).

World as a whole

Even though a number of critical weaknesses have been exposed in this argument, there can be little doubt that it is to the world as a whole that one must now look in considering many of the most important questions about the relationship between economic and religious factors in modern life. One major example of this is the development of liberation theology, most conspicuously in Latin America. Latin American liberation theology, which has counterparts on all other continents, grew in part from a perspective on the world as a whole that is closely related to Marxist world-system theory. Dependency theory developed in Latin America in the 1960s in opposition to the view that the relatively backward economic state of Latin America should be attributed, inter alia, to its fatalistic Catholicism. Rather, it was argued, Latin America's condition was to be largely explained by its dependent status in relation to affluent countries, in particular the United States, whose very advantages were made possible by the economic underdevelopment of Third World societies. In combination with that perspective on the world system some leaders of the liberationist movement effected what during the late 1960s seemed an unlikely fusion of Christian theology and Marxist ideology, thus to a significant degree violating the traditional Marxist view that religion is, at least in the modern world, an enemy of socialist revolution. There is much debate as to the degree to which this fusion of Christian ideas concerning the achievement of the kingdom of God upon earth and the liberation of religious consciousness with Marxist ideas concerning the fundamentality of economic forces and relationships is simply a marriage of strategic convenience rather than a genuine synthesis. Nonetheless, the degree to which religion and politics, more specifically theology and ideology, have been recently combined among Marxist-tinged liberationist movements, as well as in movements often labeled as fundamentalist (ranging from Christian fundamentalism in the United States to Islamic fundamentalism in the Middle East), is very striking. Many such developments can best be understood in reference to the fact that the conspicuousness and evident fatefulness of the global economy (whether one calls it capitalistic or something else) elicits specific responses from movements, societies, regions, and so on, involving attempts to imbue the world order and its parts with some kind of symbolic meaning, such as the legitimation of privileged economic circumstances (what Weber called the theodicy of good fortune) or the attempt to overcome underprivileged conditions. In any case it is evident that the very different projections by Marx and Weber of a modern world without religion, which would allegedly yield to the force of economic interests and processes, have not yet been realized.

What thus has changed most of all since the period in which Weber wrote extensively about the economic ethics of the major religions is the highly conspicuous emergence of the global economy. This process has increasingly forced religions—more specifically, leaders of religious movements and organizations—to confront the economy and its appurtenances (such as materialism and consumerism) much more comprehensively than heretofore. Thus the original Weberian interest in the way in which religions differentially encourage or inhibit economic progress has been enlarged and refocused.

This is to be seen particularly in the case of Islam. Assisted in no small part by the economic circumstance of the world coming to depend so much, directly or indirectly, on the rich deposits of oil in a number of Islamic countries, Islam has reasserted itself in defiance of the West. In the process, many questions have been raised, both within Islamic contexts and by observers of it, as to whether the relative economic backwardness of Islamic societies in recent centuries has issued from inherent characteristics of Islam as a religious tradition, at one extreme, or from the subordinate position of Islamic societies in relation to those of West, at the other.

Weber's writings on Islam suggest strongly that it inhibited the growth of the instrumental rationality necessary for the emergence of a modern economic orientation, but that view is resisted by those who maintain that much of what appears, in Weber's terms, to be inimical to modern economic rationality is actually the consequence of Islamic culture's adaption to a subordinate politico-economic situation. Some scholars have argued that capitalism would have developed in Islamic societies but for this situation. Others have maintained that Islam is inherently more conducive to a socialist economic system, and that that is precisely what is developing in the modern period. In any case, unlike such societies as Britain and the United States, which led the way into, and in a sense created, the modern global economy, Islam, which not so many centuries ago was itself a dominant civilization, is currently engaged in a self-conscious, traumatic attempt to formulate very explicitly its economic ethics or, more generally, its economic culture. The self-conscious formulation of economic ethics or culture is also occurring to varying degrees in a number of other major religious contexts. Whether this will lead to a reunion of economics and religion of the kind that has prevailed in different patterns throughout most of human history remains to be seen.

See Also

Marx, Karl; Modernity; Money; Political Theology; Revolution; Secularization; Troeltsch, Ernst; Wealth; Weber, Max.

Bibliography

Max Weber's major writings on religion and economic issues are available in the following English translations: The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1930; New York, 1977), Economy and Society, vol. 1 (Berkeley, Calif., 1978), Ancient Judaism (1952; New York, 1967), The Religion of China (1951; New York, 1968), The Religion of India (Glencoe, Ill., 1958); and General Economic History (1927; New Brunswick, N.J., 1981). A valuable exegesis of Weber's thesis about the economic consequences of Protestantism is Gordon Marshall's In Search of the Spirit of Capitalism (New York, 1982). Weber's sociology of religion in a more general sense is adumbrated, in comparison with the views of Marx and others, in my "Max Weber and German Sociology of Religion," in Nineteenth Century Religious Thought in the West, edited by Ninian Smart et al., vol. 3 (Cambridge, U.K., 1985), pp. 263–304. Weber's scattered writings on Islam are brought critically together in Bryan S. Turner's Weber and Islam (London, 1974). A very useful set of essays on Weber's ideas about economics in relation to religious change is to be found in The Protestant Ethic and Modernization, edited by Shmuel N. Eisenstadt (New York, 1968).

The French tradition of positive evaluation of religion in relation to economic factors is exemplified in Émile Durkheim's Socialism, translated by Charlotte Sattler and edited by Alvin Gouldner (New York, 1962), and in Durkheim's The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, translated by Joseph Ward Swain (1915; New York, 1965). See also my essay "The Development and Modern Implications of the Classical Sociological Perspective on Religion and Revolution," in Religion, Rebellion, Revolution, edited by Bruce Lincoln (New York, 1985), pp. 236–265. A useful survey of Marxist theories of religions is contained in Delos B. McKown's The Classical Marxist Critiques of Religion (The Hague, 1975). Also relevant to understanding the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century posing of issues regarding religion and economics is Ernst Troeltsch's The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches, 2 vols., translated by Olive Wyon (1931; Chicago, 1981).

Talcott Parsons's important writings on economic and religious factors are exemplified by his "Christianity and Modern Industrial Society," in Sociological Theory, Values, and Socio-Cultural Change: Essays in Honor of Pitrim A. Sorokin, edited by Edward A. Tiryakian (New York, 1963), pp. 33–70, and "Religious and Economic Symbolism in the Western World," Sociological Inquiry 49 (1979): 1–48. Immanuel Wallerstein's basic ideas are to be encountered in his The Modern World-System (New York, 1974). For the relation between religion and the world system, see my chapter, "The Sacred and the World System," in The Sacred in a Secular Age, edited by Phillip E. Hammond (Berkeley, 1985), pp. 347–457. For liberation theology, see my essay "Liberation Theology in Latin America," in Prophetic Religion and Politics, edited by Jeffrey Hadden and Anton Shupe (New York, 1987), pp. 107–139.

Finally, on more general questions of the varying significance of the economic factor, see Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation (New York, 1944), Marshall D. Sahlins's Culture and Practical Reason (Chicago, 1976), Chandra Mukerji's From Graven Images: Patterns of Modern Materialism (New York, 1983), and Jürgen Habermas's Legitimation Crisis, translated by Thomas McCarthy (Boston, 1975).

New Sources

Dean, James, and A. M. C. Waterman. Religion and Economics: Normative Social Theory. Boston, 1999.

Graeber, David. Toward an Anthropology of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams. New York, 2001.

Howell, Martha C. The Marriage Exchange: Property, Social Place, and Gender in Cities of the Low Countries, 1300–1550. Chicago, 1998.

Knitter, Paul, and Chandra Muzaffar. Subverting Greed: Religious Perspectives on the Global Economy. Maryknoll, N.Y., 2002.

Long, D. Stephen. Theology and the Market. Routledge Radical Orthodoxy series. London, 2000.

Mazu, Eric, and Kate McCarthy, eds. God in the Details: American Religion in Popular Culture. New York, 2001.

Neusner, Jacob. Religious Belief and Economic Behavior in Ancient Israel, Classical Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, and Contemporary Ireland and Africa. Atlanta, 1999.

Silver, Morris, ed. Ancient Economy in Mythology: East and West. Savage, Md., 1991.

Roland Robertson (1987)

Revised Bibliography