Max Weber

Quotes From

Economy And Society (1956)

• The actual exercise of rule is governed by what the ruler and his administration can usually allow themselves in their dealing with traditionally deferential subjects without provoking them to resis­tance.#
• Granting leases and sinecures related to the raising of taxes normally limits capitalist development by creating vested interests in the existing sources of fees and contributions, and hence promotes the stereotyping of the economy and its re­sort to traditionalism.#
• The concept of “commercial economy” is quite independent of the exis­tence and extent of a “capitalist” economy, that is, economic activity oriented to capitalist calculation. In particular, the normal type of commercial economy involves meeting need through a monetised economy. It would be wrong to assume that the existence of capitalist economic activity developed in step with the increased use of money to meet need, hence, that it entirely followed the course taken in the Occident. Rather, the opposite is the case. The increased extent of a money economy could be accompanied (1) by the increasing mo­ nopolisation of Chancen of making large profits on the part of a ruler’s household. This occurred in ancient Egypt during the time of Ptolemy, for which domestic account books show that the money economy was very de­veloped, but they also show that this did remain a form of monetary accounting based on the household, and never became capitalist calculation. Or (2) with the rise of a money economy, the farming out of fiscal Chancen could arise, resulting in a traditionalist stabilisation of the economy (as in China, which will be discussed at the appropriate point). Or (3) the capitalistic valorisation of monetary property could be directed towards investments other than those oriented to exchange Chancen in a free goods market, and hence not oriented to acquisitive Chancen represented by the production of goods (which is al­most exclusively the case outside the modern occidental economic region).#
• From the purely technical point of view, money is the most “comprehensive” means of economic calculation, that is, the most formally rational means for the orientation of economic action. Monetary calculation, and not the actual use of money, is hence the specific means of purposively rational economic provision.#
• Had not rational calculation formed the basis of economic activity, had there not been certain very particular conditions in its economic background, rational technology could never have come into existence.#
• The most essential aspect of economic action for practical purposes is the prudent choice between ends. … The presence of a “technical question” always means that there is some doubt over the choice of the most rational means to an end#
• The fact that an economic system is thus dependent on protection by force, does not mean that it is itself an example of the use of force.#
• A motive is a complex of subjective meaning which seems to the actor himself or to the observer an adequate ground for the conduct in question#
• The line between meaningful action and merely reactive behavior to which no subjective meaning is attached, cannot be sharply drawn empirically. A very considerable part of all sociologically relevant behavior, especially purely traditional behavior, is marginal between the two.#

The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905)

• A healthy fear is a better sign of grace than certainty, says Spener, Theologische Bedenken.#
• Predestination made it fundamentally impossible for the State really to promote religion by intolerance. It could not thereby save a single soul. Only the idea of the glory of God gave the Church occasion to claim its help in the suppression of heresy. Now the greater the emphasis on the membership of the preacher, and all those that partook of the communion, in the elect, the more intolerable became the interference of the State in the appointment of the clergy.#
• The idea that the glory of God requires the subjection of the damned to the discipline of the Church was gradually superseded by the other idea, which was present from the beginning and became gradually more prominent, that it was an insult to His glory to partake of the Communion with one rejected by God. That necessarily led to voluntarism, for it led to the believers’ Church the religious community which included only the twice-born.#
• Ethical principles for the reform of the world could not be found in Luther’s realm of ideas.#
• The universal reign of absolute unscrupulousness in the pursuit of selfish interests by the making of money has been a specific characteristic of precisely those countries whose bourgeois-capitalistic development, measured according to Occidental standards, has remained backward.#
• The universal reign of absolute unscrupulousness in the pursuit of selfish interests by the making of money has been a specific characteristic of precisely those countries whose bourgeois-capitalistic development, measured according to Occidental standards, has remained backward.#