Page 72 - Contemporary Cultural Theory 3rd edition

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Critical theory: from ideology critique to the sociology of culture

and significantly more than Marx; that the capitalist system
remained subject to a developmental logic of rationalisation; and
that social order depended substantially on political legitimacy.
The first such lesson is asserted most effectively in The Protestant
Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Weber clearly accepted, and
indeed became fascinated by, the type of correlation between
social stratification and cultural belief that Marx analysed in terms
of ideology. Between Marx (or, at least, Engels) and Weber there
is no real disagreement as to the correlation between Calvinism
and capitalism. What Weber insisted on, however, was the view
that Protestant beliefs played an active, energising role in the
social process by which capitalism came into being. Thus The
Protestant Ethic is designed to demonstrate the extent to which
‘religious forces have taken part in the qualitative formation and
the quantitative expansion’ (p. 91) of the spirit of capitalism.
The rationalisation thesis is central to Weber’s account both
of modernity and of modernisation: he sees capitalism as a system
of rational economic calculation; bureaucracy as the distinctly
modern form of rational organisation; Protestantism as a system
of religious belief peculiarly conducive to a radical rationalisation
of individual ethical conduct; and even occidental music and its
system of notation as distinctively and characteristically ratio-
nalised (Weber, 1964, p. 279; Weber, 1930, pp. 153–4; Weber, 1958).
In some respects this notion runs parallel to Marx’s theory of
alienation, and especially so in its negative moment, as in the
characterisation of modernity as an ‘iron cage’ of reason (Weber,
1930, p. 181). It is sometimes suggested that the rationalisation
thesis implies a more benign vision of capitalism than that in
Marx. This seems doubtful, however, for Weber feared the
negative moment in rationalisation, just as Marx had acknowl-
edged the positive in capitalism. Paradoxically, the fundamental
difference between Marx and Weber is, as Giddens recognised,
over whether history itself has a rationality: Marx, following
Hegel, thought that it had; Weber, following Kant, that it hadn’t
(Giddens, 1971, p. 193). Hence Weber’s suspicion that socialism,
far from providing a solution to the problems of bureaucrat-
isation, might only exacerbate them (Weber, 1968, pp. 1401–2).
This understanding of the modern world as an iron cage of

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