This article is built on a close reading of the use of the term 'calculation' by Max Weber. On the basis of this reading, I argue for a deeper understanding of Weber's views on uncertainty in the Calvinist ethos, and for a new approach to some key issues in the moral and discursive world of financial capital today, in which accounting, accountability and profit-making have become dangerously delinked from one another.
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In The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology
- Published (Print):
- 01 Mar 2012
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 3–17 (15 total)
From Politik als Beruf to Politics as a Vocation
The Translation, Transformation, and Reception of Max Weber's Lecture
Jens Borchert
Max Weber's 1919 lecture Politik als Beruf is still considered a classical text in the social sciences. The reception of the text in the Anglo-Saxon world has been profoundly shaped by the translation provided by Hans H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, first appearing in 1946. Their Politics as a Vocation is more than a vivid transposition of Weber's rather peculiar German rhetoric—it is rendered in a way that suggests a certain interpretation and makes others highly improbable. The present article traces the reception of Weber's text back to certain decisions made by the translators after World War II. It argues that the translation emphasized philosophical and ethical parts of the text at the expense of others that were more geared toward a political sociology of modern politics. Moreover, the adoption of Weber's approach in empirical research was hindered if not foreclosed by a distorted presentation of his key typologies and some central concepts.
In Contributions to the History of Concepts
- Published (Print):
- 01 Apr 2007
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 42–70 (29 total)
Kari Palonen
political representation and the rhetorical genres of justification. Max Weber speaks of elective affinity ( Wahlverwandtschaft ) in several parts of his work in order to illustrate certain forms of correspondence between types of ideas and types of persons
The White Cotton Robe
Charisma and Clothes in Tibetan Buddhism Today
Magdalena Maria Turek
point of departure in many discussions of sainthood and charisma in Buddhist contexts has been an analysis of the original concept of ‘charisma’ as conceived by Max Weber ([1922] 1980: 654) . Thus, Ray (1994: 422–423) critiques Weber for his
In Religion and Society
- Published (Print):
- 01 Sep 2017
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 173–188 (16 total)
Keith Hart
This note revisits Weber (especially his General Economic History) and Knight on risk and calculation, while adding commentary based on some other authors, notably Durkheim in The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. Some recent ethnographies of finance are considered, as well as popular literature on making money. The future is unknowable, but modern societies train their members to expect to pin down future time. Precise calculation of future outcomes is a chimera, one of the principal causes of the recent financial collapse. Reasoning works best backwards as rationalization and this is scientific method. Extrapolation from the past to the future is where it all breaks down.
In The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology
- Published (Print):
- 01 Mar 2012
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 18–24 (7 total)
Ideas, History and Social Sciences
An Interview with Quentin Skinner
Jérémie Barthas and Arnault Skornicki
the social sciences (from Max Weber to Peter Winch and Pierre Bourdieu). Questions were sent in French, via email, to Quentin Skinner, who answered them in English. The answers were then translated into French and the interview was published in Vers
The Politics of Conviction
Faith on the Neo-liberal Frontier
Jean Comaroff
What, if anything, is distinctive about the Pentecostal revival that is currently palpable in many parts of the world? How might such revitalization be related to larger transformations in economy and society, and to enduring Weberian questions about the spirit of capitalism? Drawing largely on material from the US and Africa, this article explores three dimensions of contemporary theologico-politics—the sociological, the ontological, and the cultural—to examine the ways in which current religious emphasis on realism and rapture in many quarters might differ from apocalypse past, and how theocratic tendencies might be linked to shifts in the nature of the state, the shape of the secular, and the axioms of liberal humanism. How have the mass media played into this, and why are they such uncannily apt vehicles for a late-modern culture of the miraculous?
Waiting for the Inevitable
Permanent Emergency, Therapeutic Domination and Homo Pandemicus
Laurence Mcfalls and Mariella Pandolfi
extend itself over the entire planet’ (1998: 38). While Agamben analysed this creeping authoritarian state of exception in the juridical terms of the problematic logical relationship between legal order and its foundational violence, we turned to Max
In Social Anthropology/Anthropologie sociale
- Published (Print):
- 01 Dec 2022
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 126–142 (17 total)
Donald Reid
Le Nouvel Esprit du capitalisme is a socio-cultural response to the neoliberal explanation of the successes and failures of capitalism in France during the last three decades in terms of individual rational actors and markets. Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello draw their inspiration from critical readings of sociologists who interpreted earlier incarnations of capitalism, including Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Max Weber, and Emile Durkheim.
In French Politics, Culture & Society
- Published (Print):
- 01 Sep 2000
- Article Type:
- Discussion
- Pages:
- 115–122 (8 total)
Javier Jiménez-Royo, Josh Bullock, Maïa Guillot, Caleb Carter, Evgenia Fotiou, Anna Clot-Garrell, Essi Mäkelä, Andrés Felipe Agudelo, Diana Espírito Santo, Kristina Wirtz, Joana Martins, Jon Bialecki, Joel Robbins, Richard Baxstrom, and Victor Roudometof
TREIN, eds., Narratives of Disenchantment and Secularization: Critiquing Max Weber's Idea of Modernity , 272 pp., notes, bibliography, index. London: Bloomsbury, 2021. Hardback, $115.00. ISBN 9781350145641. This is an extremely coherent volume that