Summary

Like Weber's first Reply to Rachfahl, Rachfahl's second essay contains extended denials and disclaimers of the positions imputed to him. Rachfahl insists that Weber and Troeltsch have borrowed from each other, consciously or not, and that far from ‘dishonourably’ playing them off against each other, he was merely seeking to determine differences between them. He denies asserting that the Protestant vocational ethic played no role whatsoever or that Enlightenment political culture and tolerance in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were exclusive causes of capitalist growth. He points out that he never ascribed to Weber the ‘foolish– doctrinaire thesis’ of ‘deriving’ the capitalist spirit ‘or even capitalism’ itself from the Reformation, indeed had quoted these very words of Weber in his review. He had merely counselled against exaggerating the influence of religious factors, arguing that we must try to establish the precise degree to which capitalism could have developed under Protestant influences. In focusing on Calvinism, he can hardly be accused of fixing on something peripheral to Weber's interests; and in arguing for more exactness and clarity in the causal linkage of the two elements, he cannot be caricatured as asking for some means of measurement or quantification.

A central plank of Rachfahl's argument is that Weber's numerous hedgings and qualifications of his thesis so narrows down its scope as to make its relevance to modern capitalism too tenuous to be of any great explanatory value. Weber offers a ‘case of the co-existence of Calvinism and capitalism without any causal connection’. Inasmuch as it only examines the ‘practical significance of Puritanism’ (in Troeltsch's paraphrase), it essentially renounces its claim to explain capitalist development in other key Protestant countries such as Switzerland and the Netherlands and among the French Huguenots; and in limiting himself to the smaller middling classes of England and America in the seventeenth century, Weber covers only a small fraction of the ‘modern capitalism’ implied in his reference to the ‘specifically modern capitalist spirit’. If we describe the way a cobbler manages his finances as illustrative of ‘capitalist spirit’, the following question arises: