Right to property

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The right to property or right to own property (cf. ownership) is often classified as a human right for natural persons regarding their possessions. A general recognition of a right to private property is found more rarely and is typically heavily constrained insofar as property is owned by legal persons (i.e. corporations) and where it is used for production rather than consumption.

A right to property is recognised in Article 17 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but it is not recognised in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights or the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. The European Convention on Human Rights, in Protocol 1, article 1 acknowledges a right for natural and legal persons to "peaceful enjoyment of his possessions", subject to the "general interest or to secure the payment of taxes".

Definition

The right to property is one of the most controversial human rights, both in terms of its existence and interpretation. The controversy about the definition of the right meant that it was not included in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights or the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Controversy centres upon who is deemed to have property rights protected (e.g. human beings or also corporations), the type of property which is protected (property used for the purpose of consumption or production) and the reasons for which property can be restricted (for instance, for regulations, taxation or nationalisation in the public interest). In all human rights instruments, either implicit or express restrictions exist on the extent to which property is protected. Article 17 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) enshrines the right to property as follows: 

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(1) Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others. (2) No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property.

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The object of the right to property as it is usually understood nowadays consists of property already owned or possessed, or of property acquired or to be acquired by a person through lawful means. Not in opposition but in contrast to this, some proposals also defend a universal right to private property, in the sense of a right of every person to effectively receive a certain amount of property, grounded in a claim to Earth's natural resources or other theories of justice.

Africa

The African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights (ACHPR) protects the right to property most explicitly in Article 14, stating: 

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The right to property shall be guaranteed. It may only be encroached upon in the interest of public need or in the general interest of the community and in accordance with the provisions of appropriate laws.

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Property rights are furthermore recognised in Article 13 of the ACHPR, which states that every citizen has the right to participate freely in the government of his country, the right to equal access to public services and "the right of access to public property and services in strict equality of all persons before the law". Article 21 of the ACHPR recognises the right of all peoples to freely dispose of their wealth and natural resources and that this right shall be exercised in the exclusive interest of the people, who may not be deprived of this right. Article 21 also provides that "in case of spoliation the dispossessed people shall have the right to the lawful recovery of its property as well as to adequate compensation".

Americas

When the text of the UDHR was negotiated, other states in the Americas argued that the right to property should be limited to the protection of private property necessary for subsistence. Their suggestion was opposed, but was enshrined in the American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man, which was negotiated at the same time and adopted one year before the UDHR in 1948. Article 23 of the declaration states: 

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Every Person has the right to own such private property as meets the essential needs of decent living and helps to maintain the dignity of the individual and of the home.

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The definition of the right to property is heavily influenced by Western concepts of property rights, but because property rights vary considerably in different legal systems it has not been possible to establish international standards on property rights. The regional human rights instruments of Europe, Africa and the Americas recognise the right to protection of property to varying degrees.

The American Convention on Human Rights (ACHR) recognises the right to protection of property, including the right to "just compensation". The ACHR also prohibits usury and other exploitation, which is unique amongst human rights instruments. Article 21 of the ACHR states: 

“

(1) Everyone has the right to the use and enjoyment of his property. The law may subordinate such use and enjoyment to the interest of society. (2) No one shall be deprived of his property except upon payment of just compensation, for reasons of public utility or social interest, and in the cases and according to the forms established by law. (3) Usury and any other form of exploitation of man by man shall be prohibited by law.

”

Europe

After failed attempts to include the right to protection of property in the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), European states enshrined the right to protection of property in Article 1 of Protocol I to the ECHR as the "right to peaceful enjoyment of possessions", where the right to protection of property is defined as such: 

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(1) Every natural or legal person is entitled to the peaceful enjoyment of his possessions. No one shall be deprived of his possessions except in the public interest and subject to the conditions provided for by law and by the general principles of international law. (2) The preceding provisions shall not, however, in any way impair the right of a State to enforce such laws as it deems necessary to control the use of property in accordance with the general interest or to secure the payment of taxes or other contributions or penalties.

”

Therefore European human rights law recognises the right to peaceful enjoyment of property, makes deprivation of possessions subject to certain conditions and recognises that states can balance the right to peaceful possession of property against the public interest. The European Court of Human Rights has interpreted "possessions" to include not only tangible property, but also economic interests, contractual agreements with economic value, compensation claims against the state and public law related claims such as pensions. The European Court of Human Rights has held that the right to property is not absolute and states have a wide degree of discretion to limit the rights. As such, the right to property is regarded as a more flexible right than other human rights. States' degree of discretion is defined in Handyside v. United Kingdom, heard by the European Court of Human Rights in 1976. Notable cases where the European Court of Human Rights has found the right to property having been violated include Sporrong and Lonnroth v. Sweden, heard in 1982, where Swedish law kept property under the threat of expropriation for an extended period of time. The highest economic compensation following a judgment of the Strasbourg Court on this matter was given (1,3 million euro) in case Beyeler v. Italy.

International conventions

Property rights are also recognised in the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination which states in Article 5 that everyone has the right to equality before the law without distinction as to race, colour and national or ethnic origin, including the "right to own property alone as well as in association with others" and "the right to inherit". The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women recognises the property rights in Article 16, which establishes the same right for both spouses to ownership, acquisition, management, administration, enjoyment and disposition of property and Article 15, which establishes women’s' right to conclude contracts.

Property rights are also enshrined in the Convention relating to the Status of Refugees and the Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families. These international human rights instruments for minorities do not establish a separate right to property, but prohibit discrimination in relation to property rights where such rights are guaranteed.

Relationship to other rights

The right to private property was a crucial demand in early quests for political freedom and equality and against feudal control of property. Property can serve as the basis for the entitlements that ensure the realisation of the right to an adequate standard of living and it was only property owners which were initially granted civil and political rights, such as the right to vote. Because not everybody is a property owner, the right to work was enshrined to allow everybody to attain an adequate standard of living. Today, discrimination on the basis of property ownership is commonly seen as a serious threat to the equal enjoyment of human rights by all and non-discrimination clauses in international human rights instruments frequently include property as a ground on the basis of which discrimination is prohibited (see the right to equality before the law). The protection of private property may come into conflict with economic, social and cultural rights and civil and political rights, such as the right to freedom of expression. To mitigate this the right to property is commonly limited to protect the public interest. Many states also maintain systems of communal and collective ownership. Property rights have frequently been regarded as preventing the realisation of human rights for all, through for example slavery and the exploitation of others. Unequal distribution of wealth often follows line of sex, race and minorities, therefore property rights may appear to be part of the problem, rather than as an interest that merits protection. Property rights have been at the centre of recent human rights debates on land reform, the return of cultural artifacts by collectors and museums to indigenous peoples and the popular sovereignty of peoples over natural resources.

History

In Europe, the notion of private property and property rights emerged in the Renaissance as international trade by merchants gave rise to mercantilist ideas. In 16th-century Europe, Lutheranism and the Protestant Reformation advanced property rights using biblical terminology. The Protestant work ethic and views on man's destiny came to underline social views in emerging capitalist economies in early modern Europe. The right to private property emerged as a radical demand for human rights vis-a-vis the state in 17th-century revolutionary Europe, but in the 18th and 19th centuries the right to property as a human right became subject of intense controversy.

English Civil War

The arguments advanced by the Levellers during the English Civil War on property and civil and political rights, such as the right to vote, informed subsequent debates in other countries. The Levellers emerged as a political movement in mid-17th century England in the aftermath of the Protestant Reformation. They believed that property which had been earned as the fruit of one's labour was sacred under the Bible's commandment "thou shall not steal". As such, they believed that the right to acquire property from one's work was sacred. Levellers' views on the right to property and the right not to be deprived of property as a civil and political right were developed by the pamphleteer Richard Overton. In "An Arrow against all Tyrants" (1646), Overton argued:

To every individual in nature is given an individual property by nature not to be invaded or usurped by any. For everyone, as he is himself, so he has a self propertiety, else he could not be himself; and of this no second may presume to deprive of without manifest violation and affront to the very principles of nature of the rules of equity and justice between man and man. Mine and thine cannot be, except this. No man has power over my rights and liberties, and I over no man.

The views of the Levellers, who enjoyed support amongst small-scale property-owners and craftsmen, were not shared by all revolutionary parties of the English Civil War. At the 1647 General Council, Oliver Cromwell and Henry Ireton argued against equating the right to life with the right to property. They argued that doing so would establish the right to take anything that one may want, irrespective of the rights of others. The Leveller Thomas Rainborough responded, relying on Overton's arguments, that the Levellers required respect for others' natural rights. The definition of property and whether it was acquired as the fruit of one's labour and as such a natural right was subject to intense debate because the right to vote depended on property ownership. Political freedom was at the time associated with property ownership and individual independence. Cromwell and Ireton maintained that only property in freehold land or chartered trading rights gave a man the right to vote. They argued that this type of property ownership constituted a "take in society", which entitles men to political power. In contrast, Levellers argued that all men who are not servants, alms-recipients or beggars should be considered as property owners and be given voting rights. They believed that political freedom could only be secured by individuals, such as craftsmen, engaging in independent economic activity.

Levellers were primarily concerned with the civil and political rights of small-scale property owners and workers, whereas the Diggers, a smaller revolutionary group led by Gerard Winstanley, focused on the rights of the rural poor who worked on landed property. The Diggers argued that private property was not consistent with justice and that the land that had been confiscated from the Crown and Church should be turned into communal land to be cultivated by the poor. According to the Diggers, the right to vote should be extended to all and everybody had the right to an adequate standard of living. With the Restoration of the English monarchy in 1660, all confiscated land returned to the Crown and Church. Some property rights were recognised and limited voting rights were established. The ideas of the Levellers on property and civil and political rights remained influential and were advanced in the subsequent 1688 Glorious Revolution, but restrictions on the right to vote based on property meant that only a fraction of the British population had the suffrage. In 1780 only 214,000 property-owning men were entitled to vote in England and Wales, less than 3 percent of the population of 8 million. The Reform Act 1832 restricted the right to vote to men who owned property with an annual value of £10, giving approximately 4 percent of the adult male population the right to vote. The reforms of 1867 extended the right to vote to approximately 8 percent. The working class (which increased dramatically with the Industrial Revolution) and industrialists remained effectively excluded from the political system.

John Locke and the American and French Revolutions

John Locke's 1689 Two Treatises of Government in which Locke calls "lives, liberties and estates" the "property" of individuals

The English philosopher John Locke (1632–1704) developed the ideas of property, civil and political rights further. In his Second Treatise on Civil Government (1689), Locke proclaimed that "everyman has a property in his person; this nobody has a right to but himself. The labor of his body and the work of his hand, we may say, are properly his". He argued that property ownership derives from one's labor, though those who do not own property and only have their labor to sell should not be given the same political power as those who owned property. Labourers, small-scale property owners and large-scale property owners should have civil and political rights in proportion to the property they owned. According to Locke, the right to property and the right to life were inalienable rights and that it was the duty of the state to secure these rights for individuals. Locke argued that the safeguarding of natural rights, such as the right to property, along with the separation of powers and other checks and balances, would help to curtail political abuses by the state.

Locke's labor theory of property and the separation of powers greatly influenced the American Revolution and the French Revolution. The entitlement to civil and political rights, such as the right to vote, was tied to the question of property in both revolutions. American revolutionaries, such as Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, opposed universal suffrage, advocating votes only for those who owned a "stake" in society. James Madison argued that extending the right to vote to all could lead in the right to property and justice being "overruled by a majority without property". While it was initially suggested to establish the right to vote for all men, eventually the right to vote in the nascent United States was extended to white men who owned a specified amount of real estate and personal property. French revolutionaries recognised property rights in Article 17 of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1791), which stated that no one "may be deprived of property rights unless a legally established public necessity required it and upon condition of a just and previous indemnity". Articles 3 and 6 declared that "all citizens have the right to contribute personally or through their representatives" in the political system and that "all citizens being equal before [the law], are equally admissible to all public offices, positions and employment according to their capacity, and without other distinction than that of virtues and talents". However, in practice the French revolutionaries did not extend civil and political rights to all, although the property qualification required for such rights was lower than that established by the American revolutionaries.

According to the French revolutionary Abbé Sieyès, "all the inhabitants of a country should enjoy the right of a passive citizen... but those alone who contribute to the public establishment are like the true shareholders in the great social enterprise. They alone are the true active citizens, the true members of the association". Three months after the Declaration had been adopted, domestic servants, women and those who did not pay taxes equal to three days of labor were declared "passive citizens". Sieyes wanted to see the rapid expansion of commercial activities and favoured the unrestricted accumulation of property. In contrast, Maximilien Robespierre warned that the free accumulation of wealth ought to be limited and that the right to property should not be permitted to violate the rights of others, particularly poorer citizens, including the working poor and peasants. Robespierre's views were eventually excluded from the French Constitution of 1793 and a property qualification for civil and political rights was maintained.

Rationalization (sociology)

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In sociology, rationalization (or rationalisation) is the replacement of traditions, values, and emotions as motivators for behavior in society with concepts based on rationality and reason. For example, the implementation of bureaucracies in government is a kind of rationalization, as is the construction of high-efficiency living spaces in architecture and urban planning. A potential reason as to why rationalization of a culture may take place in the modern era is the process of globalization. Countries are becoming increasingly interlinked, and with the rise of technology, it is easier for countries to influence each other through social networking, the media and politics. An example of rationalization in place would be the case of witch doctors in certain parts of Africa. Whilst many locals view them as an important part of their culture and traditions, development initiatives and aid workers have tried to rationalize the practice in order to educate the local people in modern medicine and practice (Giddens, 2013). 

 

Many sociologists, critical theorists and contemporary philosophers have argued that rationalization, falsely assumed as progress, has had a negative and dehumanizing effect on society, moving modernity away from the central tenets of Enlightenment. The founders of sociology had critical reaction to rationalization:

Marx and Engels associated the emergence of modern society above all with the development of capitalism; for Durkheim it was connected in particular with industrialization and the new social division of labour which this brought about; for Weber it had to do with the emergence of a distinctive way of thinking, the rational calculation which he associated with the Protestant Ethic (more or less what Marx and Engels speak of in terms of those 'icy waves of egotistical calculation').

— John Harriss The Second Great Transformation? Capitalism at the End of the Twentieth Century 1992, 

Capitalism

Rationalization formed a central concept in the foundation of classical sociology, particularly with respect to the emphasis the discipline placed – by contrast with anthropology – on the nature of modern Western societies. The term was presented by the profoundly influential German antipositivist Max Weber, though its themes bear parallel with the critiques of modernity set forth by a number of scholars. A rejection of dialectism and sociocultural evolution informs the concept. 

Weber demonstrated rationalization in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, in which the aims of certain Protestant Theologies, particularly Calvinism, are shown to have shifted towards rational means of economic gain as a way of dealing with their 'salvation anxiety'. The rational consequences of this doctrine, he argued, soon grew incompatible with its religious roots, and so the latter were eventually discarded. Weber continues his investigation into this matter in later works, notably in his studies on bureaucracy and on the classifications of authority. In these works he alludes to an inevitable move towards rationalization.

Weber believed that a move towards rational-legal authority was inevitable. In charismatic authority, the death of a leader effectively ends the power of that authority, and only through a rationalized and bureaucratic base can this authority be passed on. Traditional authorities in rationalized societies also tend to develop a rational-legal base to better ensure a stable accession. (See also: Tripartite classification of authority)

What Weber depicted was not only the secularization of Western culture, but also and especially the development of modern societies from the viewpoint of rationalization. The new structures of society were marked by the differentiation of the two functionally intermeshing systems that had taken shape around the organizational cores of the capitalist enterprise and the bureaucratic state apparatus. Weber understood this process as the institutionalization of purposive-rational economic and administrative action. To the degree that everyday life was affected by this cultural and societal rationalization, traditional forms of life - which in the early modern period were differentiated primarily according to one's trade - were dissolved.

— Jürgen Habermas's Modernity's Consciousness of Time

Whereas in traditional societies such as feudalism governing is managed under the traditional leadership of, for example, a queen or tribal chief, modern societies operate under rational-legal systems. For example, democratic systems attempt to remedy qualitative concerns (such as racial discrimination) with rationalized, quantitative means (for example, civil rights legislation). Weber described the eventual effects of rationalization in his Economy and Society as leading to a "polar night of icy darkness", in which increasing rationalization of human life traps individuals in an "iron cage" (or "steel-hard casing") of rule-based, rational control. 

Jürgen Habermas has argued that understanding rationalization properly requires going beyond Weber's notion of rationalization. It requires distinguishing between instrumental rationality, which involves calculation and efficiency (in other words, reducing all relationships to those of means and ends), and communicative rationality, which involves expanding the scope of mutual understanding in communication, the ability to expand this understanding through reflective discourse about communication, and making social and political life subject to this expanded understanding.

It is clear that in The Theory of Communicative Action Weber is playing something like the role that Hegel played for Marx. Weber, for Habermas, must be not so much stood on his head (or put back the right way up) as persuaded to stand on two legs rather than one, to support his theory of modernity with more systematic and structural analyses than those of the (purposive-rational) rationalization of action ... Weber 'parts company with a theory of communicative action' when he defines action in terms of the actor attaching a subjective meaning to it. He does not elucidate "meaning" in connection with the model of speech; he does not relate it to the linguistic medium of possible understanding, but to the beliefs and intentions of an acting subject, taken to being with in isolation. This leads him to his familiar distinction between value-rational, purposive-rational, traditional and affectual action. What Weber should have done instead was to concentrate not on orientations of action but on the general structures of the lifeworld to which acting subjects belong.

— William Outhwaite Habermas: Key Contemporary Thinkers 1988, 

The Holocaust, modernity and ambivalence

The railway line leading to the death camp at Auschwitz II (Birkenau).

 

For Zygmunt Bauman, rationalization as a manifestation of modernity may be closely associated with the events of the Holocaust. In Modernity and Ambivalence, Bauman attempted to give an account of the different approaches modern society adopts toward the stranger. He argued that, on the one hand, in a consumer-oriented economy the strange and the unfamiliar is always enticing; in different styles of food, different fashions and in tourism it is possible to experience the allure of what is unfamiliar. 

Yet this strange-ness also has a more negative side. The stranger, because he cannot be controlled and ordered, is always the object of fear; he is the potential mugger, the person outside of society's borders who is constantly threatening. Bauman's most famous book, Modernity and the Holocaust, is an attempt to give a full account of the dangers of these kinds of fears. Drawing upon Hannah Arendt and Theodor Adorno's books on totalitarianism and the Enlightenment, Bauman argues that the Holocaust should not simply be considered to be an event in Jewish history, nor a regression to pre-modern barbarism. Rather, he says, the Holocaust should be seen as deeply connected to modernity and its order-making efforts. Procedural rationality, the division of labour into smaller and smaller tasks, the taxonomic categorization of different species, and the tendency to view rule-following as morally good all played their role in the Holocaust coming to pass.

For this reason, Bauman argues that modern societies have not fully taken on board the lessons of the Holocaust; it is generally viewed – to use Bauman's metaphor – like a picture hanging on a wall, offering few lessons. In Bauman's analysis, the Jews became 'strangers' par excellence in Europe; the Final Solution was pictured by him as an extreme example of the attempts made by societies to excise the uncomfortable and indeterminate elements existing within them. Bauman, like the philosopher Giorgio Agamben, contended that the same processes of exclusion that were at work in the Holocaust could, and to an extent do, still come into play today.

Adorno and Horkheimer's definition of "enlightenment"

In their analysis of contemporary western society, Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944, revised 1947), Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer developed a wide and pessimistic concept of enlightenment. In their analysis, enlightenment had its dark side: while trying to abolish superstition and myths by 'foundationalist' philosophy, it ignored its own 'mythical' basis. Its strivings towards totality and certainty led to an increasing instrumentalization of reason. In their view, the enlightenment itself should be enlightened and not posed as a 'myth-free' view of the world. For Marxist philosophy in general, rationalization is closely associated with the concept of "commodity fetishism", for the reason that not only are products designed to fulfill certain tasks, but employees are hired to fulfill specific tasks as well.

Consumption

The sign at a McDonald's 'drive-thru'. The "over 99 billion served" statement illustrates Ritzer's idea of calculability.

 

Modern food consumption typifies the process of rationalization. Where food preparation in traditional societies is more laborious and technically inefficient, modern society has strived towards speed and precision in its delivery. Fast-food restaurants, designed to maximise profit, have strived toward total efficiency since their conception, and continue to do so. A strict level of efficiency has been accomplished in several ways, including stricter control of its workers' actions, the replacement of more complicated systems with simpler, less time-consuming ones, simple numbered systems of value meals and the addition of drive-through windows.

Rationalization is also observable in the replacement of more traditional stores, which may offer subjective advantages to consumers, such as what sociologists consider a less regulated, more natural environment, with modern stores offering the objective advantage of lower prices to consumers. The case of Wal-Mart is one strong example demonstrating this transition. While Wal-Marts have attracted considerable criticism for effectively displacing more traditional stores, these subjective social-value concerns have held minimal effectiveness in limiting expansion of the enterprise, particularly in more rationalized nations, due to the preferences of the public for lower prices over the advantages sociologists claim for more traditional stores.

The sociologist George Ritzer has used the term McDonaldization to refer, not just to the actions of the fast food restaurant, but to the general process of rationalization. Ritzer distinguishes four primary components of McDonaldization:

• Efficiency – the optimal method for accomplishing a task; the fastest method to get from point A to point B. Efficiency in McDonaldization means that every aspect of the organization is geared toward the minimization of time.
• Calculability – goals are quantifiable (i.e., sales, money) rather than subjective (i.e., taste, labour). McDonaldization developed the notion that quantity equals quality, and that a large amount of product delivered to the customer in a short amount of time is the same as a high quality product. "They run their organization in such a way that a person can walk into any McDonald's and receive the same sandwiches prepared in precisely the same way. This results in a highly rational system that specifies every action and leaves nothing to chance".
• Predictability – standardized and uniform services. "Predictability" means that no matter where a person goes, they will receive the same service and receive the same product at every interaction with the corporation. This also applies to the workers in those organizations; their tasks are highly repetitive and predictable routines.
• Control – standardized and uniform employees, replacement of human by non-human technologies.

Commercialization

As capitalism itself is a rationalized economic policy, so is the process of commercialization it utilizes in order to increase sales. Most holidays, for instance, were created out of a religious context or in celebration of some past event. However, in rationalized societies these traditional values are increasingly diminished and the aim shifts from the qualitative aim of a meaningful celebration to the more quantitative aim of increasing sales. 

In the United States, for example, most major holidays now are represented by rationalized, secularized figures which serve as a corporate totem. In more traditional environments, gifts are more often hand-crafted works which hold some symbolic meaning. This qualitative value of gifts diminishes in rationalized societies, where individuals often offer hints or speak directly about what present they are interested in receiving. In these societies, the value of a gift is more likely to be weighed by objective measures (i.e. monetary value) than subjective (i.e. symbolism).

Further objects of rationalization

Human body

One rational tendency is towards increasing the efficiency and output of the human body. Several means can be employed in reaching this end, including trends towards regular exercise, dieting, increased hygiene, drugs, and an emphasis on optimal nutrition. As well as increasing lifespans, these allow for stronger, leaner, more optimized bodies for quickly performing tasks. Another aspect of this is maintaining a certain level of physical attraction. Processes such as the combing of hair, use of a fragrance, having an appropriate haircut, and wearing certain clothes receive calculated use, that of giving off a certain impression to other individuals. In these cases, we see how rationalization does produce meaning and is not just simply a way to speed things up, i.e., a fat person is said to have poor self-control and discipline and thus you can now make personal judgments about them. 

Another trend is in the bureaucratization of processes that formerly might have been done through the home. This includes the use of hospitals for childbirth and the use of doctors to identify symptoms of an illness and to prescribe treatment.

Education

Rationalized education tends to focus less on subjects based around the use of critical discourse (for instance, religion) and more on matters of a calculated importance (such as business administration). This is reflected also in the move towards standardized and multiple choice testing, which measures students on the basis of numbered answers and against a uniform standard.

The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

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The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

Cover of the German edition from 1934
Author	Max Weber
Original title	Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus
Country	Germany
Language	German
Genre	Economic sociology
Publication date	1905

The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (German: Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus) is a book written by Max Weber, a German sociologist, economist, and politician. Begun as a series of essays, the original German text was composed in 1904 and 1905, and was translated into English for the first time by American sociologist Talcott Parsons in 1930. It is considered a founding text in economic sociology and a milestone contribution to sociological thought in general.

In the book, Weber wrote that capitalism in Northern Europe evolved when the Protestant (particularly Calvinist) ethic influenced large numbers of people to engage in work in the secular world, developing their own enterprises and engaging in trade and the accumulation of wealth for investment. In other words, the Protestant work ethic was an important force behind the unplanned and uncoordinated emergence of modern capitalism. In his book, apart from Calvinists, Weber also discusses Lutherans (especially Pietists, but also notes differences between traditional Lutherans and Calvinists), Methodists, Baptists, Quakers, and Moravians (specifically referring to the Herrnhut-based community under Count von Zinzendorf's spiritual lead).

In 1998, the International Sociological Association listed this work as the fourth most important sociological book of the 20th century. It is the 8th most cited book in the social sciences published before 1950.

Summary

Basic concepts

Although not a detailed study of Protestantism but rather an introduction to Weber's later studies of interaction between various religious ideas and economics (The Religion of China: Confucianism and Taoism, The Religion of India: The Sociology of Hinduism and Buddhism, and Ancient Judaism), The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism argues that Puritan ethics and ideas influenced the development of capitalism. The 'spirit of capitalism' does not refer to the spirit in the metaphysical sense but rather a set of values, the spirit of hard work and progress.

Religious devotion, Weber argues, is usually accompanied by a rejection of worldly affairs, including the pursuit of wealth and possessions. To illustrate his theory, Weber quotes the ethical writings of Benjamin Franklin:

Remember, that time is money. He that can earn ten shillings a day by his labor, and goes abroad, or sits idle, one half of that day, though he spends but sixpence during his diversion or idleness, ought not to reckon that the only expense; he has really spent, or rather thrown away, five shillings besides. [...] Remember, that money is the prolific, generating nature. Money can beget money, and its offspring can beget more, and so on. Five shillings turned is six, turned again is seven and threepence, and so on, till it becomes a hundred pounds. The more there is of it, the more it produces every turning, so that the profits rise quicker and quicker. He that kills a breeding feline taint, destroys all her offspring to the thousandth generation. He that murders a crown, destroys all that it might have produced, even scores of pounds.

Weber notes that this is not a philosophy of mere greed, but a statement laden with moral language. Indeed, Franklin claims that God revealed the usefulness of virtue to him.

The Reformation profoundly affected the view of work, dignifying even the most mundane professions as adding to the common good and thus blessed by God, as much as any "sacred" calling (German: Ruf). A common illustration is that of a cobbler, hunched over his work, who devotes his entire effort to the praise of God. 

To emphasize the work ethic in Protestantism relative to Catholics, he notes a common problem that industrialists face when employing precapitalist laborers: Agricultural entrepreneurs will try to encourage time spent harvesting by offering a higher wage, with the expectation that laborers will see time spent working as more valuable and so engage it longer. However, in precapitalist societies this often results in laborers spending less time harvesting. Laborers judge that they can earn the same, while spending less time working and having more leisure. He also notes that societies having more Protestants are those that have a more developed capitalist economy.

It is particularly advantageous in technical occupations for workers to be extremely devoted to their craft. To view the craft as an end in itself, or as a "calling" would serve this need well. This attitude is well-noted in certain classes which have endured religious education, especially of a Pietist background.

He defines the spirit of capitalism as the ideas and esprit that favour the rational pursuit of economic gain: "We shall nevertheless provisionally use the expression 'spirit of capitalism' for that attitude which, in the pursuit of a calling [berufsmäßig], strives systematically for profit for its own sake in the manner exemplified by Benjamin Franklin."

Weber points out that such a spirit is not limited to Western culture if one considers it as the attitude of individuals, but that such individuals – heroic entrepreneurs, as he calls them – could not by themselves establish a new economic order (capitalism). He further noted that the spirit of capitalism could be divorced from religion, and that those passionate capitalists of his era were either passionate against the Church or at least indifferent to it. Desire for profit with minimum effort and seeing work as a burden to be avoided, and doing no more than what was enough for modest life, were common attitudes. As he wrote in his essays:

In order that a manner of life well adapted to the peculiarities of the capitalism… could come to dominate others, it had to originate somewhere, and not in isolated individuals alone, but as a way of life common to the whole groups of man.

After defining the "spirit of capitalism," Weber argues that there are many reasons to find its origins in the religious ideas of the Reformation. Many others like William Petty, Montesquieu, Henry Thomas Buckle, John Keats have noted the affinity between Protestantism and the development of commercialism.

Weber shows that certain branches of Protestantism had supported worldly activities dedicated to economic gain, seeing them as endowed with moral and spiritual significance. This recognition was not a goal in itself; rather they were a byproduct of other doctrines of faith that encouraged planning, hard work and self-denial in the pursuit of worldly riches.

Origins of the Protestant work ethic

Weber traced the origins of the Protestant ethic to the Reformation, though he acknowledged some respect for secular everyday labor as early as the Middle Ages. The Roman Catholic Church assured salvation to individuals who accepted the church's sacraments and submitted to the clerical authority. However, the Reformation had effectively removed such assurances. From a psychological viewpoint, the average person had difficulty adjusting to this new worldview, and only the most devout believers or "religious geniuses" within Protestantism, such as Martin Luther, were able to make this adjustment, according to Weber. 

In the absence of such assurances from religious authority, Weber argued that Protestants began to look for other "signs" that they were saved. Calvin and his followers taught a doctrine of double predestination, in which from the beginning God chose some people for salvation and others for damnation. The inability to influence one's own salvation presented a very difficult problem for Calvin's followers. It became an absolute duty to believe that one was chosen for salvation, and to dispel any doubt about that: lack of self-confidence was evidence of insufficient faith and a sign of damnation. So, self-confidence took the place of priestly assurance of God's grace.

Worldly success became one measure of that self-confidence. Luther made an early endorsement of Europe's emerging divisions. Weber identifies the applicability of Luther's conclusions, noting that a "vocation" from God was no longer limited to the clergy or church, but applied to any occupation or trade. Weber had always detested Lutheranism for the servility it inspired toward the bureaucratic state. When he discussed it in the Protestant Ethic, he used Lutheranism as the chief example of the unio mystica that contrasted sharply with the ascetic posture. Later he would associate "Luther, the symbolic exponent of bureaucratic despotism, with the ascetic hostility to Eros — an example of Weber's sporadic tendency to link together bureaucratic and ascetic modes of life and to oppose both from mystical and aristocratic perspectives."

However, Weber saw the fulfillment of the Protestant ethic not in Lutheranism, which was too concerned with the reception of divine spirit in the soul, but in Calvinistic forms of Christianity. The trend was carried further still in Pietism. The Baptists diluted the concept of the calling relative to Calvinists, but other aspects made its congregants fertile soil for the development of capitalism—namely, a lack of paralyzing ascetism, the refusal to accept state office and thereby develop unpolitically, and the doctrine of control by conscience which caused rigorous honesty.

What Weber argued, in simple terms:

• According to the new Protestant religions, an individual was religiously compelled to follow a secular vocation (German: Beruf) with as much zeal as possible. A person living according to this world view was more likely to accumulate money.
• The new religions (in particular, Calvinism and other more austere Protestant sects) effectively forbade wastefully using hard earned money and identified the purchase of luxuries as a sin. Donations to an individual's church or congregation were limited due to the rejection by certain Protestant sects of icons. Finally, donation of money to the poor or to charity was generally frowned on as it was seen as furthering beggary. This social condition was perceived as laziness, burdening their fellow man, and an affront to God; by not working, one failed to glorify God.

The manner in which this paradox was resolved, Weber argued, was the investment of this money, which gave an extreme boost to nascent capitalism.

The Protestant work ethic in Weber's time

By the time Weber wrote his essay, he believed that the religious underpinnings of the Protestant ethic had largely gone from society. He cited the writings of Benjamin Franklin, which emphasized frugality, hard work and thrift, but were mostly free of spiritual content. Weber also attributed the success of mass production partly to the Protestant ethic. Only after expensive luxuries were disdained could individuals accept the uniform products, such as clothes and furniture, that industrialization offered. 

In his remarkably prescient conclusion to the book, Weber lamented that the loss of religious underpinning to capitalism's spirit has led to a kind of involuntary servitude to mechanized industry.

The Puritan wanted to work in calling; we are forced to do so. For when asceticism was carried out of monastic cells into everyday life, and began to dominate worldly morality, it did its part in building the tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order. This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which today determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force. Perhaps it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt. In Baxter’s view the care for external goods should only lie on the shoulders of the 'saint like a light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment.' But fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage. (Page 181, 1953 Scribner's edition.)

Weber maintained that while Puritan religious ideas had significantly impacted the development of economic system in Europe and United States, there were other factors in play, as well. They included a closer relationship between mathematics and observation, the enhanced value of scholarship, rational systematization of government administration, and an increase in entrepreneurship ventures. In the end, the study of Protestant ethic, according to Weber, investigated a part of the detachment from magic, that disenchantment of the world that could be seen as a unique characteristic of Western culture.

Conclusions

In the final endnotes Weber states that he abandoned research into Protestantism because his colleague Ernst Troeltsch, a professional theologian, had begun work on The Social Teachings of the Christian Churches and Sects. Another reason for Weber's decision was that Troeltsch's work already achieved what he desired in that area, which is laying groundwork for comparative analysis of religion and society. Weber moved beyond Protestantism with his research but would continue research into sociology of religion within his later works (the study of Judaism and the religions of China and India).

This book is also Weber's first brush with the concept of rationalization. His idea of modern capitalism as growing out of the religious pursuit of wealth meant a change to a rational means of existence, wealth. That is to say, at some point the Calvinist rationale informing the "spirit" of capitalism became unreliant on the underlying religious movement behind it, leaving only rational capitalism. In essence then, Weber's "Spirit of Capitalism" is effectively and more broadly a Spirit of Rationalization.

Reception

The essay can also be interpreted as one of Weber's criticisms of Karl Marx and his theories. While Marx's historical materialism held that all human institutions – including religion – were based on economic foundations, many have seen The Protestant Ethic as turning this theory on its head by implying that a religious movement fostered capitalism, not the other way around.

Other scholars have taken a more nuanced view of Weber's argument. Weber states in the closing of this essay, "it is, of course, not my aim to substitute for a one-sided materialistic an equally one-sided spiritualistic causal interpretation of culture and history. Each is equally possible, but each if it does not serve as the preparation, but as the conclusion of an investigation, accomplishes equally little in the interest of historical truth." Weber's argument can be understood as an attempt to deepen the understanding of the cultural origins of capitalism, which does not exclude the historical materialist origins described by Marx: modern capitalism emerged from an elective affinity of 'material; and 'ideal' factors.

Table of contents

Table of contents from the 1958 Scribner's edition, with section titles added by Talcott Parsons:

Part 1. The Problem

I. Religious Affiliation and Social Stratification

II. The Spirit of Capitalism

III. Luther's Conception of the Calling. Task of the Investigation.

Part 2. The Practical Ethics of the Ascetic Branches of Protestantism.

IV. The Religious Foundations of Worldly Asceticism

A. Calvinism

Predestination; Elimination of Magic; Rationalization of the World; Certainty of Salvation; Lutheranism vs. Calvinism; Catholicism vs. Calvinism; Monasticism vs. Puritanism; Methodical Ethic; Idea of Proof.

B. Pietism

Emotionalism; Spener; Francke; Zinzendorf; German Pietism.

C. Methodism

D. The Baptism Sects

Baptist and Quaker; Sect Principle; Inner Worldly Asceticism; Transformation of the World.

V. Asceticism and the Spirit of Capitalism

Richard Baxter; Meaning of Work; Justification of Profit; Jewish vs. Puritan Capitalism; Puritanism and Culture; Saving and Capital; Paradox of Asceticism and Rich; Serving Both Worlds; Citizenry Capitalistic Ethic; Iron Cage of Capitalism.

Criticisms

Economic criticism

The economist and historian Henryk Grossman criticises Weber's analysis on two fronts, firstly with reference to Marx's extensive work which showed that the stringent legal measures taken against poverty and vagabondage was a reaction to the massive population shifts caused by the enclosure of the commons in England. And, secondly, in Grossman's own work showing how this "bloody legislation" against those who had been put off their land was effected across Europe and especially in France. For Grossman this legislation, the outlawing of idleness and the poorhouses they instituted physically forced people from serfdom into wage-labor. For him, this general fact was not related to Protestantism and so capitalism came largely by force and not by any vocational training regarding an inner-worldliness of Protestantism. However, it is possible that the Protestant "work ethic" reinforced or legitimized these legal measures within a larger cultural context.

In a paper published on 10 November 2009, Harvard economist Davide Cantoni tested Weber's Protestant hypothesis using population and economic growth in second-millennium Germany as the data set, with negative results. Cantoni writes:

Using population figures in a dataset comprising 276 cities in the years 1300–1900, I find no effects of Protestantism on economic growth. The finding is robust to the inclusion of a variety of controls, and does not appear to depend on data selection or small sample size. In addition, Protestantism has no effect when interacted with other likely determinants of economic development. I also analyze the endogeneity of religious choice; instrumental variables estimates of the effects of Protestantism are similar to the OLS results.

However, Cantoni uses city size, and not relative real wage growth, which was the Weber thesis, as his "main dependent variable" (Cantoni, 2). 

Other recent scholarship continues to find valid Protestant Ethic effects both in historical and contemporary development patterns. 

Dudley and Blum write:

Evidence of falling wages in Catholic cities and rising wages in Protestant cities between 1500 and 1750, during the spread of literacy in the vernacular, is inconsistent with most theoretical models of economic growth. In The Protestant Ethic, Weber suggested an alternative explanation based on culture. Here, a theoretical model confirms that a small change in the subjective cost of cooperating with strangers can generate a profound transformation in trading networks. In explaining urban growth in early-modern Europe, specifications compatible with human-capital versions of the neoclassical model and endogenous-growth theory are rejected in favor of a "small-world" formulation based on the Weber thesis.

Revisionist criticism

H. M. Robertson, in his book Aspects of Economic Individualism, argued against the historical and religious claims of Weber. Robertson points out that capitalism began to flourish not in Britain, but in 14th century Italy, a decidedly different epoch. Since this is true, then the rise of capitalism cannot be attributed to Adam Smith, the Protestant Reformation, etc. In fact, Robertson goes further, and states that what happened in Britain was rather a retrogression from what was achieved in Italy centuries earlier. 

Looking at the history of the development of economic thought, Robertson shows that Adam Smith and David Ricardo did not found economic science de novo. In fact, liberal economic theory was developed by French and Italian Catholics, who were influenced by the Scholastics. The British economic thought was rather a step backwards since it espoused the Labor Theory of Value, which had already been proved incorrect by the School of Salamanca.

Other criticism

It has recently been suggested that Protestantism has indeed influenced positively the capitalist development of respective social systems not so much through the "Protestant ethics" but rather through the promotion of literacy.

Becker and Wossmann at the University of Munich, as well as Andrey Korotayev and Daria Khaltourina at the Russian Academy of Sciences, showed that literacy levels differing in religious areas can sufficiently explain the economic gaps cited by Weber. The results were supported even under a concentric diffusion model of Protestantism using distance from Wittenberg as a model.

Support

In 1958, American sociologist Gerhard Lenski conducted an empirical inquiry into "religion's impact on politics, economics, and family life" in the Detroit, Mich., area. It revealed, among other insights, that there were significant differences between Catholics on the one hand and (white) Protestants and Jews on the other hand with respect to economics and the sciences. Lenski's data supported basic hypotheses of Weber's work The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. According to Lenski, "the contribution of Protestantism to material progress have been largely unintended by-products of certain distinctive Protestant traits. This was a central point in Weber's theory." Lenski noted that more than a hundred years prior to Weber, John Wesley, one of the founders of the Methodist church, had observed that "diligence and frugality" made Methodists wealthy. "In an early era, Protestant asceticism and dedication to work, as noted both by Wesley and Weber, seem to have been important patterns of action contributing to economic progress. Both facilitated the accumulation of capital, so critically important to the economic growth and development of nations."

German theologian Friedrich Wilhelm Graf notes: "Sociologists of religion like Peter L. Berger and David Martin have interpreted the Protestant revolution in Latin America as implicit support of basic elements of Weber's thesis. [...] At any rate, many pious persons there interpret their transition from the Roman Catholic church to Protestant Pentecostal congregations in terms of a moral idea that promises long-term economic gains through strong innerworldly asceticism. The strict ascetic self-discipline that has been successfully institutionalized in the Pentecostal congregations, the readiness to work more and with greater effort and to take less leisurely attitudes lead many Pentecostal Christians to believe that their new faith in God is supported by their economic successes."