Inner-worldly asceticism
Inner-worldly asceticism was characterized by Max Weber in Economy and Society as the concentration of human behavior upon activities leading to salvation within the context of the everyday world.[1] He saw it as a prime influence in the emergence of modernity and the technological world,[2] a point developed in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.
Four-fold typology
Weber's typology of religion set off the distinction between asceticism and mysticism against that between inner-worldly and other-worldly orientations, to produce a four-fold set of religious types.[3][4] According to Talcott Parsons, otherworldly stances provided no leverage upon socio-economic problems, and inner-worldly mystics attached no significance to the material world surrounding them,[5] the inner-worldly ascetic acted within the institutions of the world, while being opposed to them, and as an instrument of God. However Stefan Zaleski showed that inner-worldly mysticism that is magic was interested in active transformation of reality.[4] In religions which can be characterized by inner-world-asceticim, the world appears to the religious virtuoso as his responsibility.[6]
Rationalism
For Weber, the worldly ascetic is a rationalist. He rationalizes his own conduct but also rejects conduct which is specifically irrational, esthetic, or dependent upon his own emotional reactions to the world.[7]
Criticism
Critics have challenged the validity of Weber's linking of Calvinism, and predestination in particular, with the emergence of the capitalist spirit;[8] as well as more generally disputing any inherent or correlative link between Protestantism and capitalism.[9] Postmodernism in its repudiation of metanarratives[10] has rejected Weber's theory as one Eurocentric aspect of such grand tales;[11] though Fredric Jameson sees it as illuminating at least one facet of the bourgeois cultural revolution[12]—the psycho-sociological transformation that accompanied the move from traditional agrarian society to the modern urban world-system.
See also
References
- ↑ G. R. Elton, Reformation Europe (1969) p. 278
- ↑ John O'Neill, Sociology as a Skin Trade (1972) p. 14 and p. 60
- ↑ Talcott Parsons, Introduction, Max Weber, The Sociology of Religion (1971) p. li
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 Pawel Stefan Zaleski "Ideal Types in Max Weber’s Sociology of Religion: Some Theoretical Inspirations for a Study of the Religious Field", Polish Sociological Review No. 3(171)/2010
- ↑ Parsons, p. li-lii
- ↑ Weber, Max. "Asceticism, Mysticism and Salvation." In Economy and society; an outline of interpretive sociology.. New York: Bedminster Press, 1968. 542.
- ↑ Weber, Max. "Asceticism, Mysticism and Salvation." In Economy and society; an outline of interpretive sociology.. New York: Bedminster Press, 1968. 544.
- ↑ Guy Oakes, 'The Thing That Would Not Die: Notes on Refutation' in H. Lehman/G. Roth eds, Weber's Protestant Ethic (1995)
- ↑ Elton, p. 312-8
- ↑ R. Appiganesi/C. Garratt, Postmodernism for Beginners (1995) p. 102
- ↑ Lehmann, p. 5
- ↑ M. Hardt/K. Weeks, The Jameson Reader (2005) p. 51
Further reading
- Christopher Hill, 'Protestantism and the Rise of Capitalism', in Change and Continuity in Seventeenth-Century England (1974)
- P. C. Gordon Walker, “Capitalism and the Reformation” Economic History Review Nov 1937
- R. W. Green ed., Protestantism and Capitalism: The Weber Thesis and its Critics (1959)