The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, and: The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and Other Writings (review)

Nearly a century after its initial publication as a series of journal articles in the years 1904 and 1905, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism still remains one of the most influential and widely read works in social science. First translated into English by Talcott Parsons in 1930, Weber's book has been reissued by no fewer than nine publishers in at least sixteen separate editions, not including the two new editions under consideration in this review. ¹ Even today, it is one of the biggest-selling books in the field. As of this writing, the Parsons translation has an Amazon.com ranking that is well ahead of those for The Marx-Engels Reader and The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, the highest-ranking books by Karl Marx and Émile Durkheim. Indeed, among the sociological classics, only Democracy in America ranks higher (1,573) than The Protestant Ethic. ²

Of course, The Protestant Ethic has been intellectually influential as well as commercially successful. Phrases like "iron cage" and "elective affinity" are a part of every sociologist's working vocabulary, and the term Protestant work ethic is often invoked by people who have never even heard of Weber.

In these senses, the Parsons translation has been a remarkable success. Qua translation, however, it leaves a great deal to be desired. The defects of the translation are not stylistic in nature. Most readers would probably agree that Parson's prose is actually quite elegant — a good deal more elegant than the original, in fact. And therein lies the problem. For as anyone who has read the Protestant Ethic in the original can attest, Parsons took considerable liberties with Weber's language. These liberties have been ably catalogued and analyzed by Peter Ghosh. ³ Some were relatively harmless, as when Parsons rendered stahlhartes Gehäuse as "iron cage" rather than the more literal — and even more terrifying — "steel-hard shell." It is entertaining to think about the numerous chapter headings and book titles that have been affected by this rather arbitrary choice of words and the reasons Parsons might have had for choosing this translation (if, indeed, it really was a conscious choice rather than a momentary whim or a failure of vocabulary). ⁴ But it would be hard to argue that much was really lost, except perhaps for a few additional shudders on the part of Weber's first-time readers.

In other cases, though, something really was lost in translation, as on those occasions when Parsons rendered the term Wahlverwandschaft not as "elective affinity," but as "correlation" or "relationship." ⁵ Weber clearly chose this unusual term to denote a very specific type of causal relationship, one involving an unforeseeable but consequential crossing of two chains of causation that resulted in a strengthening of certain "historical individuals" and the weakening of others, in this instance the conjunction of Renaissance capitalism with Protestant asceticism, which gave an "ethical foundation" to capitalism and opened a new field of activity to the Christian ascetic, while weakening the power of "economic traditionalism" and the Christian devaluation of worldly gain — or so Weber wished to argue. ⁶ An elective affinity is something much more specific than a causal relationship, and something rather different from a correlation, especially in the sense that term has now come to be understood (i.e., as a statistical correlation).

In still other instances, Weber's words are not simply watered down with vague terminology, but twisted around to fit Parsons's own views, as when he translates the word Antriebe as "sanctions" rather than "drives." This translation leads the reader to understand Calvinism...