This is my second review of a book by Randall Collins, the sociologist. You can read the first, on Non-Obvious Sociology, here.
Max Weber, the subject of this book, is generally considered one of the three founding fathers of the discipline of Sociology, along with Karl Marx and Emile Durkheim.
Early Life and Translators
Weber was raised by a father who was involved in moderate German politics and by a mother who was an extremely pious German Victorian involved in the progressive Christian politics of the time. This meant feeding the poor and an absolute abhorrence of sex.
Weber was a brilliant student, but did no interesting academic work until after he had a breakdown. He had married a woman his mother was fond of, and they had a celibate marriage, and many commenters, including Collins, think that the conflict between his mother’s progressive values (including his celibacy) and his father’s more worldly ways led to Weber’s breakdown.
Weber was to engage in an extra-marital affair and it was during his convalescence, that he first started writing the impractical work for which he is still read.
Weber’s most famous work in the English speaking world is the “Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism,” which is unfortunate, because it does a disservice to his overall corpus, it being his first book and representing only a small part of his mature thought. In general, Weber was ill-served by his early translators (such as Talcott Parson), who chose the pieces they thought would help their own academic and political persuasions. Parsons, in particular, was quite conservative and had an organic view of society in which everything had a purpose. This does violence to Weber’s analytical model, which is far more conflict prone.
Weber worked copiously, but I am going to pick out two major pieces of Collins’ precis on which to concentrate: rationality and the preconditions for rational capitalism and the industrial takeoff.
Rationality and Rationalization
Though Weber uses the term “rationality” in a number of different ways and never firmly defines it. The two most important forms of rationality appear to be: instrumental, or, mean rationality Zweckrationalitat) and value rationality (Wertrationalitat).
Instrumental rationality means calculating how to achieve an end. You have a model of the world, you have an end, you use that model to figure out how to get to the end.
Value rationality is an action that is an end in itself. Even if God does not answer prayers it may be good in itself to pray to him. Even if your protest against a government policy may not change the government’s policy it may be right to protest that policy. Going to jail to oppose an immoral war is the right thing to do–even if it won’t change the war’s outcome in the slightest.
These types of actions are different from two others: traditional action, in which we do what our ancestors have always done, and emotional action, in which we just do what feels good.
Traditional action, through the course of world history, may have been the most widespread type of action. While it’s not rational as Weber uses rational, it is rational in the sense that making changes increases risk, and when the chances for survival are razor thin, doing things how they’ve always been done makes sense; these methods may not be the best, but they obviously work.
Remember that these are what Weber called ideal types. Nobody is entirely values rational or means rational or traditional or emotionally driven, and neither is any society. I could want lots of money because that’s what people in my society do (tradition). I could want it because I believe having lots of money means I’m a “winner” (values driven). I could want to be filthy rich so I could have coke-fueled orgies every weekend (emotional) or I could want lots of money for… wait, there is no purely instrumental reason for having money—you always want money for some other reason. Money is an instrumentality to obtain other goals. Or is it?
Instrumental rationality always starts off as being for some other reason, until it forgets what it is doing.
Let’s go back to the Protestant thesis, not in the strict sense of the book, but in the broader sense Weber used it throughout his work.
In traditional religions, like Catholicism or most Buddhism or Hinduism, the highest, most ideal religious life is something only a few people live: There are monks or hermits who live that life and the role of lay-people is to support them.
Monks in monasteries pray and perform rites, priests make sure that sins are forgiven and perform the key rituals and all lay people can do is give them money, confess, and ask them for the key rituals at the right time.
Most forms of Protestantism change this: You read the Bible yourself, you don’t need priests, the monasteries are abolished, and you are called to live a Godly life. The idea of “being called” doesn’t mean anything is good, however. You should still not sin, but it emphasized that work is holy so long as it is not immoral work.
Capitalism before rational capitalism is gambling: Merchants send out their ships and convoys, they make big loans, and when the results come in and they win, they take the money and splurge. Often, indeed, they buy a patent of nobility and stop being merchants.
In the Medieval world, there is little sense that work is good, or holy, or anything but a PITA. Nobles don’t work. Monks may work the land, but their primary duties are prayer and ritual.
Protestantism changes this, or rather, it extends the late Medieval monastic revolution, because it’s not quite true that monks don’t work. The early Cluniac-style monastics certainly do some work, but the late Medieval monastics make work their thing: Monasteries improved the land, worked it hard, and became rich, because hey, they amounted to corporations which never die, never disburse funds, and are immune to taxation.
Protestantism breaks up the monasteries, transfers that attitude to hard labor (it’s holy and good, you’re not gambling, you’re making your toil an offering to God) and extends it to society.
Importantly early merchants are generally considered untrustworthy, but religiously motivated merchants are not. They want regular small profits, they don’t cheat their customers, they are fair and honest.
This is a chunk of the larger Weber religious (Protestant) thesis. He deals with this in multiple studies, including of Chinese Buddhism, Hinduism, and Ancient Egyptian religion.
Protestantism is not a radical break, it is an evolution.
The irony is that as the clerics became rich (this extends far beyond monasteries, into the Church as a whole, a huge enterprise), they were corrupted by their wealth. That corruption led to the Protestant revolution. Then Protestants became rich themselves, and were corrupted.
Meanwhile, the Catholic counter-reformation, though it did not adapt all of the Protestant reforms, adapted enough that the world changed.
Value rationality, in this case the idea that people must act holy, is one of the factors which has led to honest dealing, hard work, and a wish for a sort of business based on large volumes of low profit transactions.
That leads us to…
The Preconditions for Rational Capitalist Takeoff (Mass Industrialization)
Rational Capitalism: Capitalism in its modern form is different from traditional capitalism. Many societies have had capitalism: the ancient people of Mesopotamia certainly did, the Romans did, the Greeks did, the Chinese, and so on.
They had markets, those markets relied on price signals, and provided goods.
Rational capitalism is bulk capitalism. Modern capitalism requires:
- That people buy what they need on the market
- That people are available to be hired by the market
- Rationalized capital
- Rational technology
- Calculable law
Most people, for most of history, and in most societies, have not been available for hire. They have not needed to buy their necessities on the market, nor even much of their entertainment.
The capital required for rational capitalism was not available in most places: Capital went to merchant gambling, kings, or to kin. It was not liquid, but bound up in land and chattels.
Technology was bound up in the heads of a few people and a few books, handed down through apprenticeship systems and often tightly guarded. When it was not, the principles by which it worked were not widely understood. In the beginnings, modern patent law was not an attempt to reward those who knew technology, it was an attempt to get them to share their secrets by assuring them a share of the profits (in general, they received much shorter periods of assurance than we currently provide).
And, for much of history, the law was capricious and not suited to mercantile endeavours. Law was created and enforced by people who were themselves not merchants, and because merchants were regarded as scum by almost all traditional societies- including China, Japan and Europe–they were not treated fairly.
Good mercantile law arose in Europe in the free cities, run by merchants. It arose in Japan during the Tokugawa Shogunate because the Samurai didn’t want to dirty themselves by regulating such trash, so they allowed the merchants to mostly regulate themselves.
In general, modern capitalism is rational: Calculations are made of profit or loss. They are made of cost inputs and likely markets and predictions are made of the future. The larger the enterprise, the more this is the case. Merchants rely not on windfall profits due to a few large transactions or having one’s “ship come in,” but on millions to billions of small transactions at low profit.
This is, again, an ideal type. It is how rational capitalism is supposed to work, and deviations generally show pathologies (as with broadband companies getting near 100 percent returns).
The larger point here is simple: The conditions for modern capitalism and markets did not exist for most of history, and it took rather a lot of historical happenstance for them to occur.
Modern markets are rationalizing in the Weberian sense because their rules, while arbitrary (go to the highest profit), destroy those who do not obey. When markets become the predominant form of social organization, to fail to act as they dictate leads to you becoming weaker than those who do, and eventually those who make the most profits will buy you out or you will be reduced to poverty by bankruptcy.
Rational systems, in this regard, are not kind, but they are totalizing. Once these systems are put in place, they drive towards their ends relentlessly.
That does not mean they always “work” or are rational in the larger sense. Capitalism may well destroy itself by being unable to prevent climate change, for example. As noted, the wealth gained by Christians who sought the holy life in their works destroyed their faith, just as wealth destroyed the Catholic Church’s moral position and the faith that had truly made them powerful.
History is full of such ironies and catastrophes. Systems work until they don’t, but while they are working, to move against them is tantamount to moving against natural law. So long as humans believe in modeling behaviour on profit and rewarding such behaviour, those who don’t are meat for the gears. Those who tried to resist the Medieval church were cut out from the most advanced part of the Medieval economy and were often prosecuted fiercely. To be a Roman politician in the later Republic who did not believe in foreign wars was to be defeated by those who did, as the latter would have the loyal soldiers, the popularity with the mob, and the vast loot that comes from war.
Concluding Remarks
Weber tends to be misunderstood in the Anglo-American world because of an emphasis on the Protestant Ethic, and a history of partial translations calculated to support translators’ positions. His work is one of the cornerstones, however, for understanding why capitalism arose when and where it did. It is a very long answer to the old question of, “Why not in China?” and, indeed, Weber wrote a book on just that question.
The meta-theme of rationalization and how it both drives forward and dies is important to our own situation, here, near the end of one form of capitalism.
Of course, there is much, much more. I have not touched (though Collins does) on Weber’s analysis of power (class, status, political party) or many other threads. But this should give you a taste for the sort of thought Weber did engage in, far beyond the single thread of the Protestant Ethic.
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Gaianne
Ian: Thank you!
–Gaianne
Stirling Newberry
Excellent summary of what you have been talking about for a while.
hemeantwell
“Rational systems, in this regard, are not kind: but they are totalizing. Once they are put in place they drive towards their ends relentlessly.”
Caution urged here. A focus of the post-Weber debate has been whether a totalizing, ordering framework such as the empirical sciences are imperial in the sense that they have innate dynamics that erode alternative meaning systems of the “life world” or if, instead, it is the wedding of the sciences to capitalist accumulation processes, which are indeed driven by the law of profit, that makes them appear totalizing. I think it is useful to distinguish between a tendency of a framework agents to interpret within its terms, while being relatively free to entertain alternative frameworks, as opposed to capitalist framework agents being ongoingly required to extend their framework in order to ensure their survival as agents, e.g. as capitalists.
markfromireland
Yeeeeees but quibble coming up …. you can say that structural functionalism is an organic approach (Comte, Durkheim and followers) but that only takes you part of the way with Parsons. I think it’s more accurate to say that Parsons considered it to be a stage in the evolution of social sciences’ methodologies rather than a school of thought per se.
No argument from me that reading Weber in the original is far more informative. He was certainly more alive to nuance than Parsons’ translation made him out to be. But I think it’s more likely that this is a function* of Parsons’ grasp of German rather than an attempt to traduce Weber. Parsons was very taken with Weber’s work and was attempting a synthesis of Weberian and Durkheimian thought, not entirely successfully.
mfi
*Sorry I just couldn’t help it, when it comes to bad puns I’m like that other Irish guy who could resist everything except temptation.
Ian Welsh
Hmmm. Possibly. Collins is actually one of Parsons students, and thinks that it’s more a question of the former than the latter, at least if I read Collins correctly. I haven’t read enough Parsons myself to have a strong opinion.
Collins own work offers an attempt at a synthesis of Durkheim and Weber, as it happens (not fallen far from the tree?), but I haven’t spent any real time writing about that. Perhaps I will do one more Collins book review, of his own work, but I hesitate to review so many books by one author (currently the only other author I plan to review two books from is Jane Jacobs.)
hemeantwell
I suppose I’ve read Weber lazily, at least in the sense that those who’ve mined him end up determining my understanding. Habermas and Parsons have been important, the latter negatively so. Habermas helped to draw out the idea of institutionally-grounded logics, with tensions and conflict between them. (In some respects his work very resonant with Polanyi, who seems to be currently much more in vogue.) That perspective was so much closer to palpable social processes than Parsons and his AGIL system, notoriously arbitrary in arguing for abstract, second-order rationales guiding institutions and very ideology friendly.
Stirling Newberry
Possibly because there is the Marxists vs. non-Marxists line in Weber, and one cannot escape deciding which he is when reading H.
Stirling Newberry
Reminder: I must get hardcover versions of Habermas and Polanyi.
Jonathan Larson
Weber misses the point in so many ways, it is hard to know where to start. But I have a favorite.
Capitalism, as he was trying to describe it, simply does not exist without the Industrial Revolution. Industrialization happened first on the British Isles and as the historians tell us, the early movers and shakers of this new way of organizing society were almost all “dissenting Protestants.” Protestants who were not Church of England so could not attend Oxford and Cambridge, among other forms of persecution. This meant they could not participate in the civil service.
But Protestants had an organizing ideal that made their technology possible. Honesty. Absolute Kantian honesty. Honesty that rules even when no one is watching. More importantly, it is an honesty that is embraced with a passion. Just remember the opening sentence of the Protestant Reformation was Luther’s “Out of a LOVE for the truth and the desire to bring it to light…” Truth is something to LOVE. You don’t tell the truth because you fear hellfire. You seek it out because nothing makes you happier than finding a new truth. It is what you live for.
NOTHING rewards truth-telling more than science and technology. A chemical reaction will work a certain way if you take precaurions
Jonathan Larson
sorry about the unfinished accidental post
NOTHING rewards truth-telling more than science and technology. A chemical reaction will work a certain way if you take precautions to exactly replicate the experiment—every time. Technology measures truth in the millionths of a centimeter.
If this sort of love for the truth does not exist, it is impossible to even build a bicycle, much less an integrated circuit or a 767. And soon, James Watt the Presbyterian had perfected his steam engine and we were of to the races.
Tom Wolfe probably explained this whole process the best. His subject was Robert Noyce, who was once called the “Mayor of Silicone Valley.” Noyce was the son of a Congregationalist preacher and Fairchild Electronics was about as Protestant was you can get. It was the last magazine article Wolfe would write. You wouldn’t have to change a word.
https://web.stanford.edu/class/e145/2007_fall/materials/noyce.html
highrpm
yea, the old glory days of fairchild semiconductor. and then greed-capitalism fueled by the high IQ eastern euro venture capitalists — gee, it didn’t take long for the eastern euro implants to discover the one of the most pristine pieces of landscape on planet earth, the california coastline and “buy” it — kicked in and intel was the first of many generations. and it’s executive noyce-moore-grove triumvirate with j-boy’s andy grove flogging the techie wage slaves with his books and aphorisms like “work smarter not harder” bullshit disguising nothing but more flagrant soul ownership with “incentive” stock options and their 2-for-1 splits every 18 months as long as you their employee sold your being to the devil and worked the salt mines 20 hours / day and to hell with everything else….can’t serve god and mammon? hey, bobby boy, mammon wins 99% of the time. ah, but the feeling of the cool balmy bay area air rushing over you as you left the building and walked the parking lot to your car at 8-9 pm. surrounded by all the lush green well groomed fresh vegetation. nothing like it.
highrpm
edit: that gentle immersive bay breeze, with apparently just the right mixture of humidity, ozone and other minerals to clear the brain fog and fuel the creative circuits….nothing like it.
Ian Welsh
Protestant honesty is one of the points that Weber addressed repeatedly.
Billikin
Wait a second. Instrumental rationality is always derivative, never pure. It serves an end, for which there is, presumably, a reason, whether a value, custom, or desire. There is no purely instrumental reason for having money, because there is no purely instrumental reason for anything.
highrpm
@billikin,
there’s a reason the humanoid species has [at least] 2 types of brains, the massively parallel processing reflexive brain, know as the subconscious and the 3/8″ thick cortical shell, resembling a walnut, covering all the down under lower structures. the reflexive “pattern recognizer” contains the imagination that mankind uses to dream up and “see” big ideas. then the being using the cognitive constructs distributed throughout the cortex making up the serial processing reflective brain to plan out how to turn this big dream into reality. management by objective, heard of that? and then as the work proceeds and the being hones the target dream and the executive planning, positive expectation os seeing the vision become reality produces dopamine to keep fueling motivation to see the project to successful completion.
some intelligence somewhere in this infinite universe conceived this amazing self assembling dream machine we call man. and its such a shame that this dream machine puts its imaginative/cognitive processors to work on stealing/ killing /destroying, too.
so yes, instrumental rationality, residing in the cortex, is a derivative, or tool of, the massive pattern recognizer processor. (and yes, there is a purely instrumental reason for having money: to facilitate exchange of created value, the stuff we produce, the dreams we spend out lives on seeing and then turning into 3d measureable reality.)
and, incidentally, i recently read that the negro species has a noticeably less crinkley cortex, meaning less volume/ functionally smaller cognitive abilities. i guess that explains why the negroes are not know for their adult span inventions, as much as the aryans are. the negro is not a competent at turn dreams into reality. (can anyone tell me please if this difference in the black cortex is just crap science? what kind of double blind experiments were done on how large of negro samples?)
Stirling Newberry
>Protestant honesty is one of the points that Weber addressed repeatedly.
But you do see the point… say you’re wrong with tremendous holes in your argument is a sign of accomplishment to such people.
VietnamVet
Good Review. It highlights what is missing in today’s “anything goes” round of globalization; Truth, Honesty and Justice.
highrpm
not seeing what being a protestant has to do with anything. for all the myth narratives of the founding/ flourishing of silicon valley, like max weber’s gear grinding ruminations of how capitalism developed, there are simply too many independent variables for a credible hypothesis. e.g., i, like noyce, was raised in a thriving protestant home. and i developed a deep dislike for the protestant narratives about god and truth and …. and i, too, sidelined my culture of religion in favor of the more relevant work culture. hey, it was about making an income to support family, the natural result of the humanoid’s reproduction design. and the california freedom from aristocracy appealed to me. and silicon valley with its amazing creativity and freedom from formal structure was thriving and putting to shame the old style east coaster’s. gee, my world view as a “protest”ant, but not a hypnotized christian protestant, buying the line of an imaginary sky god who supposedly had my back but who i really could not count on 100%. who’d drive down a freeway in rush hour in a car constructed on the principals of “it’s ok if the wheel falls off, god will keep everyone safe?” but my life, and countless other “protest”ants working in silicon valley in the 70’s and 80’s did not turn out anyway anyhow similar to bob noyce’s. yet other non”protest”ants working there did. so, max weber, i wish you well. did max ever consider the effects that the independent variable called synchronicity might have in capitalism’s development? a what of the independent variable “passion for making the sale?” amd’s founder jerry sander’s was a top salesman at fairchild semiconductor.
there are simply too many metaphysical issues to develop a theory of capitalism and why it came to thrive in america. and now, it appears on the wane, at least in the more egaliatarian form it carried in the last half of the twentieth century, and on the upsurge in the communist/ authoritarian asian cultures. why? max weber please tell us!
further, my personal “protest”antism saw immediately the grossness of the morally outrageous executive compensations of the executive levels in silicon valley. shit, how much does one have to have to live on? but old bobby boy summed it up to his dad, “money means nothing but to serve score keeping? so life is just a game, and an especially sick one for those not good at playing it. pulling that excess out of the value of the corporation’s stockholders pockets to give to the few at the top in the lame excuse that the corporation must pay for high IQ top performing executives is irrational. because how much does money fuel performance? innate passion and curiosity among other metaphysicals fuel high IQ top performance. not grovelling in las vegas casinos. i lasted 3 years at intel as a young “protest”ant engineer and even got rewarded twice for outstanding performance with stock options before i could no longer stomach the immorality of silicon valley capitalism. that’s how my “protest”ant honest worked itself out in my life. marx’s writings on the subject still appeal to me as much as my hatred for the term “cultural marxism.” did marx coin that term? or political lefties? it’s a profaning of marx’s ideas about the unfairness in the culture of capitalism, at least in the manifestations that let the owners of the means of production keep the excess profits for themselves. i hate such a construct. bring back the commons. no property ownership for anyone. no paper money to facilitate exchange of value. tents in the parks for “not the least of these” is providing for himself. no exceptions. ah, the amazing adaptability of the humanoid species. for good and evil.
Lisa
And of course totally misses the impact and deliberate social engineering brought on by mass armies and the need for the industrial output to supply and maintain them….
As mechanisation of warfare increased the supply side chain got larger and larger relative to the number of troops and it was that, as much as anything else, that broke the ‘standard’ social model And it was in Britain that it happened first, in WW1.
highrpm
bob noyce’s proclivity for the competitive game had more to do with his success at the particular game of life we call capitalism than his protestant upbringing. certainly the religious belief side of his protestant upbringing contributed less. no doubt the “work culture” side of his protestantism contributed to his success. hell, the eastern euros who label themselves j** and who so dominate the big and complex supply chain industries certainly display a 10x love for the capitalist game. no doubt, noyce protestant types can easily hold their own with the andy groves. all to say passion for the game is more a factor than the value, emotion, tradition, instrumental agents.
Synoia
Two points:
There are no textbooks in the hard sciences (Chemistry, Physics and Biology) from the 19th century which are a part of the leading edge of science today.
The work of those sciences is used in Engineering, but engineers also know their underlying theories only work in limited conditions.
Where are the equivalent advances in Sociology and Economics? Missing or are these just not sciences, but art? Reading the comments on the author featured in this discussion, I feel as if I’m reading a set of art reviews, where no two people have the same interpretation of the topic.
I tend to the view that sociology and economics are art, only interpretable though one’s of filter of nature and nurture, and thus very subjective.
And now to the human condition described in sociology. I believe climate modifies behavior, that is exerts evolutionary pressures on people. I also believe there are all behaviors were selected as beneficial traits in the evolutionary process.
Thus I’d predict that behavior of Middle Easter people differs greatly from Norther Europeans, or and Tropical or Grassland dwelling peoples.
For example, sprinting, and jumping would be an evolutionary benefit in Tropical Jungles; long distance running an advantage in exhaustion hunting in the Grasslands; anal-retentive adherence to schedules, and an impatience towards protracted haggling, an evolutionary advantage in the short growing season of Northern Europe; while extended haggling and trading abilities a benefit for those who lived aside the silk road.
As evidence I’d also point out that there a very few black swimmer winning in the Olympics, and very few white sprinters. I perceive that as a very clear pointer to the history of human evolution.
However, the evolutionary advantages displayed by Clinton and Trump (and Harper), are not so clear.
Tom W Harris
A useful and pertinent example of social science done honeslty is Resurrecting Racism.
Billikin
@highrpm
You said it: crap science.
markfromireland
@ Synoia August 21, 2016
On Ian’s other Randall Collins posting I made the point that sociology, psychology, and economics all suffer from “Little girl with curl” syndrome — when it’s good it’s very very good and when it’s bad it’s horrid. And that all three disciplines suffered from a plethora of practitioners who would be just as gainfully employed expounding the principles of phrenology and astrology.
If you’ve ever dealt with programmers you may have come across C envy syndrome – which is where programmers who can’t program in C flock to languages promising the same benefits but without the rigour or the learning curve. The same sort of thing applies to the “social sciences” or perhaps that should be social “sciences”, they’re arts — you’re right about that, and like all arts in the hands of good practitioners they’re capable of producing great insights into that which they study.
Unfortunately all three disciplines suffer from a bad case a science envy and they also attract the sort of person who used to flourish in such disciplines as astrology and phrenology. I have on several occasions had quite serious discussions about the late Terry Pratchett’s retro-phrenology some of which lasted rather more than quarter of an hour before the post-graduate students involved realised I was taking the piss.
mfi
Ian Welsh
Economists like to say that because they use math, they’re more rigorous. But mathematicians tend to laugh at them.
There’s more that is known in the social sciences, that is pretty solid, than most are aware or want to admit. But there are vast oceans of crap as well. Lisa’s point about the effect of large armies, firearms and so on is known, for example (though it’s not a lone fact: Chinese armies were often HUGE and did not lead to rational capitalism or the industrial revolution).
In fact Smith makes the point explicitly that his type of market economy will produce better militaries, because capitalism will allow for mobilization of MORE of society’s resources. It was a place where he was largely correct.
One main issue in the social sciences is that people WANT to believe a lot of different things about humans. Social Sciences tend prescriptive.
I would be careful at sneering too much about that, however. Newton gets stuff right Descartes does not because Newton is willing to believe in action at a distance and Descartes is not. Newton is willing to believe in that because Newton is a Hermetic mage, and Descartes is not willing to because he is a harder materialist and action at a distance sounds like absolute bullshit to him: magical.
But in the end humans are a harder problem than physics, for a variety of reasons. Might be as well they are, because a hard look at some of the advances in neuroscience and biochemistry suggests to me that our ability to crudely program humans is going to increase.
When I was young I followed the science track. I changed at university. The sciences require more work than the social sciences or (most) humanities (musicians laugh at wimpy Engineers), but they also admit to correct answers. I have gotten 100% on maths, physics and chemistry exams. I have never gotten 100% on a social science exam or paper. Explaining this to students from the sciences and engineering used to be kind of painful. “The Professor needs to like you so that when they see all the things you’ve left out they assume you know them.”
Aside: I’m old enough to remember when C was considered easy compared to real man’s programming in Assembly. 😉
Mel
Joseph Stilwell complained bitterly about the [insert mega-intensifier here] level of dishonesty and corruption in the mass Chinese armies he had to command in his campaign in Burma. Such armies rarely arrived at the places they set out to go, or carried out the actions that were specified in their orders.
The gigantic mobilization of resources that capitalist systems were meant for could not have had any results without that great consistency, alias honesty.
Ian Welsh
Yes, more was needed than just large armies run by bureaucracies. Though the efficiency of Chinese bureaucracy varied with the time, as is true of Western ones. What kept Western ones “honest enough” was internicine European warfare. In the same respect warring states period armies in China were often pretty honest, because if they weren’t, well, that state lost sooner rather than later/
Lisa
“Economists like to say that because they use math, they’re more rigorous. But mathematicians tend to laugh at them.”. Falling down laughing in fact (see Steve Keen and his dynamic economic models based on Minsky and Keynes, just Goggle and learn).
As an aside, C was never a language it was an abortion, only intended to write an operating system (Unix) so it was a halfway house between assembler and a true 3GL There was a better one around called STAB but because it wasn’t American it got nowhere It was nothing like as rich as Algol, some other 3GLs or even the late Fortran versions. And don’t get me started on that heap of BS called ‘object oriented programming’.
Problem is sociologists simply do not have the technical skills to develop a ‘bottom up’ model. The requires really top notch stats (especially probability*) skills as well as solid cybernetics skills (dynamic modelling, feedback loops, filters and attenuators, etc). Beer and Ashley opened some interesting doors towards that in the 70s, doors that no one walked through because it went against the ‘accepted wisdom’+.
So they tend to take a preconceived model, usually low in complexity and force data (if they use any at all) into it. Realistically ‘Protestantism’ as a social factor is low impact variable, things like that are just overlays (and useful excuses, justifications and propaganda) for more fundamental drives and movements. Scratch anyone using a religious argument to justify something (now or in the past) and you will find the usual greed, drive for power, sex, hatred, elite inter fighting, severe personality damage** and all the rest reasons.
The religions that survived were the ones that supported the aims of the various elites in society, the ones that went against them …didn’t last long. The successful also had to be flexible enough to change when the elites opinions did. England creating its State religion is the classic example of that. Naturally there were feedback mechanisms and some influence the other way, but marginal.
To argue that England got a head start on industrialisation because a previous king created a State religion is silly, when the impact of it running out of wood and being forced to use coal was a much bigger factor (and a textbook case of the impact of EI/EO).
*Note Keynes never studied economics, he studied probability theory.
** It is no accident that elite ‘education’ is biased towards creating male homosocials that are borderline sociopaths. Again the English got a head start by creating the perfect model to generate large numbers of emotionally damaged men suitable for the military, administering the state and the empire, merging state and commercial interests and so on. You don’t get to be the biggest empire (and until 1943 drug empire) the world has ever seen by being ‘nice’, but grabbing an empire is one thing, keeping it is another and that required huge numbers of people to run (and expand) it, from elites right down to low level administrators.
+Note military ‘accepted wisdom’ is the worst of all. No one in the western militaries have studied the 2006 Lebanon war or 2014/15 Donbas one…or learned a single lesson from that.
Memory
So MFI, I’m chillin here on my sparkle pony (a pegasus/unicorn hybrid!) and wondering what your beef is with esoterica. Are you not from an eminent land of esoterica? Dost thou hate thyself?
You write, “On Ian’s other Randall Collins posting I made the point that sociology, psychology, and economics all suffer from ‘Little girl with curl’ syndrome — when it’s good it’s very very good and when it’s bad it’s horrid. And that all three disciplines suffered from a plethora of practitioners who would be just as gainfully employed expounding the principles of phrenology and astrology.”
Bear with me as I try to pin the tail on this donkey: I wholeheartedly agree that sociology & psychology suffer from this syndrome (I’ve never bothered to read economics because it scares me so I can’t speak to it at all). Modern psychology in academia (when I was a student, at least) does (did) present itself as a hard science. I left that shit in my dust because I wanted to understand the art, the esoterica, of this study of the humane soul. I moved from there to sociology before my brain broke & I moved into other realms of study entirely.
Why is it a bad thing that psych, soc, and econ disciples move into the study of other arts like phrenology, astrology, divination etc. etc?
In my (admittedly) very limited understanding of life on this twirling blue/green orb whirling through space, we become more whole as people when we move from the outer limits of extreme thinking into the balance of the middle. Why wouldn’t we want those who study the hard sciences and soft sciences to reach for the middle ground of the arts? Why wouldn’t we want to breach the boundaries of the mundane for the ecstasy of the sacred? To unify those polarities? To become more fully human & divine as we do so?
It’s been a long time since I read Marx with anything approaching rigor & my memory is absolute shit. However, I do seem to remember Marx writing about the need for the disciples of science to reach into the realms of art & for the disciples of art to reach into the realms
of science.
Please pardon me if I cause you any offense. I am not taking the piss, as it were. I do suffer from “Little girl with curl” syndrome — I am a good yet horrid creature, as my mother (may she rest, deeply, in peace) often reminded me as she brushed my hair into ponytails & pigtails in the morning before the bus whooshed me off to redneck public school hell. I am a ratty little brat with h u g e science envy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jKLiU7Hq93w But I’m coming up man-sized: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuJE40OBt48
wendy davis
@ highrpm: perhaps you’re running too fast. your brain anatomy understandings are quite different than mine, never mind, but i would like to try to address this:
“and, incidentally, i recently read that the negro species has a noticeably less crinkley cortex, meaning less volume/ functionally smaller cognitive abilities. i guess that explains why the negroes are not know for their adult span inventions, as much as the aryans are. the negro is not a competent at turn dreams into reality. (can anyone tell me please if this difference in the black cortex is just crap science? what kind of double blind experiments were done on how large of negro samples?)”
yes, Tom W Harris’s link is worthy deconstructing Entine, the chapters titles give hints, although i haven’t clicked in. he uses ‘blacks’ in quote marks, so it may be that he gets to the point that there is no such thing as The Negro, or The Black in his discussion on ‘human races’. Following the Y chromosome around the globe, geneticist spencer wells (using many of his mentor’s dna samples) discovered that all humans are descended from a single san bushman male in botswana (iirc). he followed the various migratory paths that accounted for changes in skin pigmentation and other adaptations to climate, altitude, and so on. national geographic funded his work, as well as his film ‘journey of man, a genetic odyssey’. another researcher followed the X chromosome. i forget where that led.
sure, plenty of ‘studies’ have discovered that black brains are inferior to white, from robert bennet bean and friends at the turn of the 20th century, to say: ‘the bell curve’ racist.
but your casual racialist (at the very least) contention that ‘the negroes are not know for their adult span inventions’ (dunno what that means) and that ‘the negro is not a competent at turn dreams into reality’ seriously put me in a what the fuck? mode. i didn’t spend much time on it, but i did find this page when binging for africans and math and science (astronomy would have bee good as well). but one could easily posit that africa was the birthplace of western civilization.
can’t remember who spoke of the industrial revolution and the advent of capitalism up yonder, but i think capitalism began with farming and food storage. yanno: the fruits of our labor as saleable? and iirc, marx had noted that the end of subsistence farming and the peasants being thrown off their traditional lands for that larger farming effort was the beginning of the capitalist class wars (think slavery, as well).
http://www.africa.upenn.edu/Bibliography/African_Origins_Math.html
highrpm
@lisa.
another aside on c. your remarks on both sociology and computer languages are beyond my depth. (and where would the web be without linux? probably still thriving but with different oses.) i will point out that c is still the lanuage of choice in smaller embedded systems where clock cycles are still important. and isr’s for consistent real time response. those coders want more productivity and legacy support than the asm level offers. and so the vendors give them c for that to drive sales. like lots of atmel avr mcu users. no real sense for usb and tcp/ ip stacks when one only has 16k ram and 256k flash on a 8-bit processor.
Duder
The Protestant Ethic is a great book. Weber’s insights in it go unappreciated due to poor interpreters and people who insist on reducing great books down to a cliche. Weber does a great job tracking the emergence of bourgeois ideology for capitalism from Christian theology during the Protestant Reformation. Unlike the cliche summaries that pass for knowledge of Weber, he was not making a chicken or egg argument about which came first, capitalist accumulation or the protestant ethic. Nor is he arguing for a linear development of capitalism. He traces all of the changes in the emerging capitalist subject to moments of political struggle. I find his later work less interesting because of his increasing desire to define social phenomena by ideal types, that are easy prey to evolutionary theorists and positivists like Parson. I find his early, more dynamic work, much more interesting.
Lisa
highrpm: My criticism of C was only along the lines of it being used where it is not appropriate, like 95% of it. Applications like that are fine.
The efficiency of the run time code will depend on (a) the programmer and (b) the compiler.
For example, you want to crunch numbers then nothing, but nothing beats Fortran with a good multi pass compiler. I have seen horrors because of people writing numeric/stats/etc programs in C++, bloated buggy messes.
Anyway I use the king of languages …APL these days, but along the way have used just about everything including assembler, algol, fortran, PL1, RPG, native C, C++, etc. etc.
EmilianoZ
There dont seem to be much of that protestant honesty left nowadays.
I wonder if the 5 or 6 pre-conditions for capitalism listed here are all independent variables or if there was one driving force and the 5-6 preconditions are just the results of that driving force.
The protestant reformation can be interpreted as a power struggle between the aristocracy and the clergy. The aristocrats basically took back what they had been forced to give to the clergy.
The Protestantism of the Church of England is rather dubious. The real protestants had to flee on boats like the Mayflower.
Newton hisself was not very comfortable with his own action at a distance. But Einstein put an end to all that. Descartes was not such a stickler for rigor. His “proof” of the existence of God is rather dubious.
Lisa
EmilianoZ : “There dont seem to be much of that protestant honesty left nowadays.”
And it ever existed?
People can argue their theology all they want, but the impacts on industrialisation was marginal at best and you could even argue counter productive. And it is industrialisation and mass production that really changed things, not any particular version of capitalism in itself.
There is not a shred of evidence that theology has had a positive impact on capitalism. And what exact version of capitalism do you mean by the way? Take the multiple versions over history, or even our rapid change in only 40 years to the current neo-liberal financial speculation version, from a social democratic consumerist one.
Then there are the ‘minor’ issues of the wealth share in society and the role of financial credit.
Tom W Harris
I don’t care what anyone says, I’m stickin’ with good old-fashioned IBM mainframe COBOL.