From: "" <mthrond-AT-hotmail.com>
Subject: Re: Protestants, hell and profession
Date: Thu, 18 Mar 1999 17:55:34 PST


That's not exactly how Weber would see it.  Predestination makes in 
itself no social statement.  But this very uncertainty, in Weber's work, 
led the Protestant to throw himself into his work for comfort.  God's 
very arbitrariness, and the inability to predict one's success in the 
hereafter, in effect left the world the only open place in which to seek 
happiness.  And happiness could be found in a craft or profession in the 
good old days, says Weber, in sharp counterpoint to modern man, who 
retains the drive to work but derives no spiritual comfort from it: 
"Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart," etc.  Whereas 
the accumulation of material possessions was part of capitalism in the 
17th and 18th centuries (capitalism as a system which relied on this 
sense of spiritual uncertainty to check pure acquisitiveness) in the 
present day it is simply force of habit--habit, he might add, which has 
institutionalized itself, with a counterpart in the bureaucracy.  Where 
Protestantism as a cultural phenomenon is to Weber responsible (because 
of the individual productivity of its members) for the present-day (c. 
1905) social stratification between Protestants and Catholics, he admits 
of no linkage between God's will in Calvinism and this stratification.  
(Though, perhaps, in some late generation of Calvinism people looked 
around and justified their continued success with some bastarized 
theology legitimizing their own status.  But Weber is relatively mute on 
this point.)  

>From: "Anaspinoza" <anaspinoza-AT-sinectis.com.ar>
>Reply-To: foucault-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
>To: <foucault-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu>
>Subject: Protestants, hell and profession
>Date: Thu, 18 Mar 1999 20:29:53 -0300
>
>Thanks again Henry and John for your answers,
>
>Regarded to the analysis of  Max Weber, do you think that the
>idea of vocation (profession) can be interpreted in calvinist doctrin 
as a
>predestination to heaven or to hell (symbolic or economical success) in 
the
>work we are called to develop? If some are predestinated to develop 
certain
>works (letīs say: to  write), and some are predestinated to wash water
>closets, God would legitimate division of work. God then would be very 
alike
>to Adam Smith? In both cases rationality is predetermined.
>
>
>

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