CAPITALIST SPIRIT

The Problematic Birth of Liberal (normative) ethics

Max

Weber

- What was new in the ‘spirit of capitalism’? Luther had rebelled against the Catholic Church’s sale of forgiveness in 1517 in Germany. Inspired Calvin in France and others. Protestant reform begins in England (1534) when the Catholics refuse King Henry a divorce. Puritans break away from Queen Elizabeth’s CoE by early 1600s and move to Netherlands. When they failed to prosper there, few of them migrate to America by 1620 in search of ”successful and efficient professional activity, occupation, and work.” They bore with them an ‘ascetic ideal’/passion for a ‘calling’ of a community without access to God in Heaven: “our whole life (everything we do or think, in private or in public) constitutes a sign or an expression of the Other scene” of Godly Truth, “of being chosen or not” ... Luxury was considered evil and so being chosen meant using accumulated wealth only to grow wealthier.

Adam Smith lectured the 1760s that the ma er-slave relationsh was a necessary part of the “dome ic relations” of political economy. Later through ‘Wealth of Nations’ (1776) th logic “became part of the canon of Enlightenment political economy.” In fact, “the theoretical mach ery of utilitarian m and po -Ricardian political economy” depended on th hypothes – that the colonies were part of the Engl h ma er's economic household.

- Weber essentially contended “that the darker world did not have the culture of frugality and thus willed itself into poverty”. They had to learn the Protestant Ethic.

J.S. Mill

God has set the world on a Prede ed course societies of heritance - acqu

- in his classic liberal essays , “On Liberty” and “On Representative Government,” Mill argued against giving Indians or Africans self-rule because they were not yet civilized enough to rule themselves. He “ converted history itself into a ... waiting room.”

- “In his mind, Britain and its colonies … formed part of a single analytical field” – a closed-system of mutual benefit. He had in fact authored “the leading economics textbook” of the age, during his time as a colonial administrator for the British East India Company.