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Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved." That eloquent and desolate line comes near the very end of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, and it sounds Max Weber's discordant note amidst our chorus of capitalist triumphalism. The lyrical bleakness of Weber's assertion could be easily dismissed as the weltschmerz of a German mandarin, the dying gasp of a highbrow humanism marked for historical extinction. Indeed, separated from its author, Weber's indictment could even be mistaken for the rant of a Muslim cleric, or at least as the "unhelpful" and "anti-American" spite of some Tory leftist egghead.
Which is why the centenary of Weber's classic couldn't come at a more appropriate moment. Despite its many errors and misconceptions, The Protestant Ethic remains indispensable, even urgent, precisely because of its humanist resistance to the authority of experts and moneybags. For all Weber's insistence on "value-free" social science, he produced a work of historical sociology that doubles as cultural criticism. It confronts the clichés that pass for wisdom among our punditocracy—"globalization," "the New Economy," "democratic capitalism"—and reminds us that the current victory of capitalism is as pyrrhic as it is global. It exposes our manic culture of labor as historically contingent, and invites us to wonder if Adam's sweat is really an oil of anointment. And despite Weber's brooding resignation to the "disenchantment of the world," it compels us to revisit some basic issues in Christian theology.
The Protestant Ethic clearly emerged from its author's personal turmoil. The eldest son of a prosperous but mismatched couple, Weber bore all of that role's ambitions and pathologies. His mother was intellectual, religious, and reform-minded; his father, heir to a sizeable mercantile fortune, was the prototype for the driven capitalist who shadows Weber's masterpiece. Unsurprisingly, their son became a workaholic who embraced and maligned the work ethic. He played the Rising Academic Star at Freiburg and Heidelberg, whose youthful work in sociology was, to use one of academia's most ambiguous compliments, "solid": the research was massive, the notes were copious, the imagination was bridled.
The pressures of climbing the academic ladder arguably triggered Weber's four-year bout with depression—"neurasthenia," in Victorian parlance. Though his wife Marianne attributed his malady to "renunciations and repressions," it also stemmed from the diligence always rampant among the over-achieving classes. It seems more than fortuitous that Weber began researching Protestant Ethic just as his depression was lifting in the spring of 1902. Without reducing greatness to convalescence, we could read Protestant Ethic as a classic case of therapeutic transformation.
Weber's book appeared alongside other turn-of-the-century assaults on bourgeois modernity: Freud's essays on infantile sexuality, Sorel's reflections on political violence and mythology, James' examination of religious experience. Like them, Weber impugned some rationalist piety of middle-class culture. To be sure, Weber certainly never renounced reason, and even after his illness he let up only a little in his scholarly labors. ("Specialized work," he writes with furrowed brow, "is a condition of any valuable work in the modern world.") But Weber's subsequent preoccupations with rationality, bureaucracy, and disenchantment testify, I think, to a real if comparatively muted sense that bourgeois reason aborted the flowering of a "full and beautiful humanity," as he put in Protestant Ethic.
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