The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
6. Naturally the difference cannot be conceived in absolute terms. The politically oriented capitalism (above all tax-farming) of Mediterranean and Oriental antiquity, and even of China and India, gave rise to rational, continuous enterprises whose book-keeping—though known to us only in pitiful fragments—probably had a rational character. Furthermore, the politically oriented adventurers' capitalism has been closely associated with rational bourgeois capitalism in the development of modern banks, which, including the Bank of England, have tor the most part originated in transactions of a political nature, often connected with war. The difference between the characters of Paterson, for instance—a typical promoter—and of the members of the directorate of the Bank who gave the keynote to its permanent policy, and very soon came to be known as the "Puritan usurers of Grocers' Hall", is characteristic of it. Similarly, we have the aberration of the policy of this most solid bank at the time of the South Sea Bubble. Thus the two naturally shade off into each other. But the difference is there. The great promoters and financiers have no more created the rational organization of labour than—again in general and with individual exceptions—those other typical representatives of financial and political capitalism, the Jews. That was done, typically, by quite a different set of people.
7. For Weber's discussion of the ineffectiveness of slave labour, especially so far as calculation is concerned, see his essay, "Agrarverhältnisse im Altertum", in the volume Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Sozial-und Wirtschaftsgeschichte.—Translator's Note.
8. That is, in the whole series of Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie, not only in the essay here translated. See translator's preface.—Translator's Note.
9. The remains of my knowledge of Hebrew are also quite inadequate.
10. I need hardly point out that this does not apply to attempts like that of Karl Jasper's (in his book Psychologie der Weltanschauungen, 1919), nor to Klages's Charakterologie, and similar studies which differ from our own in their point of departure. There is no space here for a criticism of them.
11. The only thing of this kind which Weber ever wrote is the section on "Religionssoziologie" in his large work Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. It was left unfinished by him and does not really close the gap satisfactorily.—Translator's Note.
12. Some years ago an eminent psychiatrist expressed the same opinion to me.
CHAPTER I
