Weber and the Persistence of Religion

Social Theory, Capitalism and the Sublime

Joseph W. H. Lough

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9780415543767
• eBook ISBN: 9781134289769
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

There is an increasing interest in religion and belief and the diverse forms these take in the contemporary world. This timely book provides a unique analysis of these issues through a discussion of the work of Marx and Weber.

Taking Max Weber's interpretations of capitalism and religion as its point of departure, Weber and the Persistence of Religion re-examines a wide range of classical and contemporary texts, including Immanuel Kant, Foucault and Jean Baudrillard, to help explain the peculiar character of religion and spirituality in mature capitalist societies.

This book shows how the peculiar disembodied character of contemporary spirituality and religion, along with the disenchanted character of public life, may be formally related to the increasingly disembodied, immaterial character of value in capitalist societies. It will be of interest to students and scholars of Social Theory, History, the Sociology of Religion and Philosophy.

1
Introduction: contemporary religion

By nearly all accounts a book such as this one should not have been possible. By the end of the last century nearly all leading social scientists – from Ferdinand Tönnies to Oswald Spangler, Émil Durkheim to Georg Simmel, on up to Max Weber – were lamenting the complete secularization of the public sphere and thus the emergence of what Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer mockingly referred to as the ‘fully enlightened earth’.¹ Few if any anticipated that religion and spirituality would come to play so central a role in public life as they have over the past century. Yet, notwithstanding this central role, religion and spirituality and their relationship to public life are still widely contested. Many fear that the liberal democratic and pluralist political arrangements that predominated in the west from the end of World War II at least through the 1970s are giving way to new post-democratic and post-liberal regimes of political, social, economic and cultural regulation.² However, even more people seem to feel that the religious ‘recolonization’ of the secular state has not been nearly as thorough as it needs to be. Our political and legal institutions are still governed by a ‘culture of disbelief’.³ As borne out by recent electoral results on both sides of the Atlantic, both sides of the Channel, and indeed throughout the developed world, mature capitalist society has become increasingly polarized between these two camps.⁴ And, yet, if we listen carefully each camp appears to be sounding the same warning signals: we live in a spectacularly religious society whose members nevertheless feel that they are adrift on a sea of unbelief. In some countries this feeling has already reached toxic levels. In others it is still no more than a persistent, if occasionally lethal, annoyance. And yet, when we search the catalogues of our better known research libraries to get a better grasp on how contemporary religion and spirituality may be related to the dominant social formation in which this polarization has appeared, it is easy to get the impression that social scientists have given up on any meaningful attempt to wrap their heads around this complex problem and have punted the problem off to writers whose interests may not be and often have not been those of science.

This work attempts to redress this deficit. Structured around Max Weber’s still influential interpretations of religion and capitalism, it seeks to explain how and why Weber’s theories respecting secularization and disenchantment have not been borne out by history. As its theoretical point of departure, it examines Weber’s interpretations through a lens supplied by critical Marxian and post-Marxian social theory. At the very least, this means that it seeks, in Habermas’ words, to ‘validate its own critical standards’⁵ not transcendentally, but historically and therefore contingently. It aims both to provide a theoretically satisfying and practically meaningful framework within which to understand the complex relationship between religion and capitalism that has emerged over the past five centuries, and to offer some ways that this polarization might be ameliorated. We may be able to get a better grasp of the scope of this problem by looking briefly at the Marxian or post-Marxian lens through which we will be viewing the Weberian and neo-Weberian legacy.

Marx and religion

Of course in its traditional form the Marxian interpretation of religion has tended to be overly economistic on the one hand and overly simplistic on the other. Whatever else college students (and professors) take away from their study of Marx and religion, few forget Marx’s famous lines about how ‘religion is the opiate of the masses’.⁶ But, then what about those among us who are not (or at least not transparently) part of ‘the masses’; those of us who experience little physical or economic suffering, and by whom religious practices or spiritual disciplines are valued less for their mortifying than for their enlightening effects? Obviously, in that case we must be among those who consciously (or more often unconsciously) merely ‘use’ our religion to reinforce our dominant class position over those who do use religion as an opiate. This is certainly a possibility. And, yet, this still suggests that religion and spirituality are things that are independent and isolated from the social formations in which they appear. In other words, at least in this instance, Marx clearly failed to account for the conditions of his own critique. Such a superficial, simplistic and unnuanced grasp of religion clearly will not do, not only because it fails to do justice to how we actually experience, practice and understand religion, but not least because it fails to do justice to Marx’s own mature critique of capitalism. Here it appears Marx and his ‘orthodox’ followers (and not his detractors), may have been guilty of a bit of ‘false consciousness’.

Here also Marx could become his worst enemy. Consider, for example, the buildup to Marx’s often-cited reflection on the fetishism of commodities. The value form, he wrote, had lost all its ‘sensuous characteristics [sinnlichen Beschaffenheiten]’. Marx then observed how the value form lends all the products of abstract, homogeneous labour time ‘the same phantom-like objectivity [gespenstige Gegenständlichkeit]’. Then when he examined the value of linen out of which a coat had been made, Marx found that even ‘the coat represents a supra-natural property [übernatürliche Eigenschaft]’. The equivalent form of value, he wrote, possesses a ‘mysteriousness’ (Rätselhafte) and a ‘mystical’ (mystischen) character.⁷ All of which laid the groundwork for Marx’s discussion of ‘The Fetishism of the Commodity and its Secret’, wherein he explicitly confirmed that his analysis of the commodity

brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties. So far as it is a use-value, there is nothing mysterious about it…. But as soon as it emerges as a commodity, it changes into a thing which transcends sensuousness…. The mysterious character of the commodity-form consists therefore simply in the fact that the commodity reflects the social characteristics of men’s own labour as objective characteristics of the products of labour themselves, as the socio-natural properties of these things. Hence it also reflects the social relation of the producers to the sum total of labour as a social relation between objects, a relation which exists apart from and outside the producers. Through this substitution, the products of labour become commodities, sensuous things which are at the same time supra-sensible [übersinnliche] or social…. [T]he commodity-form, and the value-relation of the products of labour within which it appears, have absolutely no connection with the physical nature of the commodity and the material relations arising out of this. It is nothing but the definite social relation between men themselves which assumes here, for them, the fantastic [phantasmagorische] form of a relation between things.

Marx, therefore, believed that ‘in order…to find an analogy we must take flight into the misty realm of religion.’ How true. Yet, it is here in particular that Marx displayed his poor grasp of religion, for he draws the entirely wrong analogy. ‘There [in religion]’, he surmised, ‘the products of the human brain appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own, which enter into relations both with each other and with the human race’.⁸ But, as we will see in greater detail below, what is most peculiar about contemporary religious subjectivity and practice is not its Feuerbach-like projection of the sensible world onto the surface of our mental life, but, to the contrary, the complete isolation of religious and spiritual values from their material forms of appearance. Marx’s theoretical analysis was impeccable. His grasp of contemporary religious subjectivity and practice was atrocious.

Nevertheless, Marx is indispensable to understanding contemporary religion. Here, Marx’s descriptions of the value form of the commodity offer a particularly illuminating window into the sublime character of contemporary religious subjectivity and practice. Consider, for example, Marx’s mature analysis of the commodity form in the opening volume of Capital. Here Marx aimed to show how the immaterial value form of the commodity could be both a product of productive human activity – of abstract labour – and also the subject or agent of this activity. It was the product of labour in so far as the value of the commodity was the social average of the amount of labour time it had taken to produce it. Since this labour time was the formally free contribution of the labourer, offered in exchange for wages, labour could be said to be the producer of abstract value. In Adam Smith’s words, ‘labour … is the real measure of the exchangeable value of all commodities’.⁹ Yet, in so far as investors employed labour to produce commodities only because of the return on their investment it promised, value could also be said to be the subject or agent of this productive process. The promise of abstract value attracts labour. In this sense, Marx argued, when investors contracted with labour, abstract value became the subject of a process – the production process – through which its own value would be enhanced. This expansion of value had, in fact, been both the motivating force and the object of this process all along.

Marx had identified a social form, the value form of the commodity, which reproduced itself by retreating behind and then annihilating its material form of appearance. As we will see below, this will be precisely how Burke and Kant will describe the sublime. It is of course ironic that the most ‘materialistic’ social formation in history should at the same time display the greatest hostility towards its own material form of appearance. Yet, it was precisely the ironic character of capitalism that marked the decisive difference between it and all other social formations. For whereas in other social formations, the creation of material wealth had been the primary object of productive human activity, under capitalism abstract value had taken the place of material wealth, not only as the aim or object of this activity, i.e. the commodity, but also as the subject of this activity. In this process, the abstract social value of the commodity came to be isolated from the materials out of which it was composed. Moreover, the agents of social action too increasingly came to qualitatively differentiate their own abstract immaterial value from their material form of appearance, i.e. from their bodies. This isolation of value from its material form of appearance forms the essence of religion in mature capitalist societies. In such societies, religion owes its persistence to the intimate relationship it bears to the value form of the commodity.

One reason orthodox Marxism has overlooked this connection between religious or spiritual subjectivity and the value form is that it has adopted a largely functionalist interpretation of religion and spirituality, viewing them as tools that serve the economic and political interests of the dominant class. Religious practitioners experience their own religious practices and spiritual disciplines as expressions of their deepest sense of self; what sociologist Robert Bellah has called ‘habits of the heart’.¹⁰ It is here, in fact, that Marx’s own functionalist treatment of religion should strike us as particularly unsuited to his overall critique. Consider, for example, the quasi-religious qualities that Marx attributed to the value form of the commodity. Should it not strike us as odd that he and his interpreters overlooked the central role this form had come to play in the formation of religious subjectivity and practice under capitalism? Contemporary religion and spirituality are not tools that serve the economic and political interests of one class over another. To the contrary, contemporary religious subjectivity and practice bear too intimate a relationship to the social formation as a whole for us to delegate them to one class or another. Indeed, although we will have to take care to elaborate precisely what we mean, it would not be too strong to say that it is capitalism and not religion that is the surface phenomenon. Religion to the contrary is the spiritual force that bears contemporary social reality, including contemporary social subjectivity, forward under capitalism. Far from being epiphenomenal, contemporary religion and spirituality stand at the heart of capitalist modernity.

Notwithstanding such criticisms, the present study is nevertheless unapologetically Marxist or Marxian or perhaps post-Marxian in form; I am not sure I know the difference. Building upon the work and thinking of Jacques le Goff, E.P. Thompson, Pierre Bourdieu, David Harvey, and particularly Moishe Postone’s reinterpretation of Marx’s mature social theory, I attempt to show how contemporary religious subjectivity and practice form central constitutive elements of the capitalist social formation. Neglect of these features I believe has led to partial, one-sided and distorted portrayals of both capitalism and religion, and certainly has led to fundamental misunderstandings over how the two are related. Precisely how they are related is the subject of this study.

Our inclination may be to think about this relationship through a lens that selects for domination. And obviously, to the extent that social actors are the agents in a process by which they themselves are dominated, capitalism is a process of self-domination. But, to the extent that social actors and the material wealth they produce are no more than a means through which abstract value enhances its own value, capitalism becomes an incredibly productive abstract system whose aim is the unending creation of ever greater immaterial value. To be sure, in the process of creating ever greater immaterial value, the value form also produces unprecedented quantities of material wealth. But, when we take the aim and object of this process as our point of departure the fact that this process also produces a material by-product, the commodity’s material form of appearance, is a largely accidental consequence of the expansion of value.

Marx summarized this process (in characteristically Hegelian style) as follows:

In the circulation M[oney]-C[ommodity]-M[oney] both the money and the commodity function only as different modes of existence of value itself, the money as its general mode of existence the commodity as its particular or, so to speak, disguised mode. It is constantly changing from one form into the other, without becoming lost in this movement; it thus becomes transformed into an automatic subject…. [V]alue is here the subject of a process in which, while constantly assuming the form in turn of money and commodities, it changes its own magnitude, throws off surplus-value from itself considered as original value, and thus valorizes itself independently. For the movement in the course of which it adds surplus-value is its own movement, its valorization is therefore self-valorization…. [V]alue suddenly presents itself as a self-moving substance which passes through a process of its own, and for which commodities and money are both mere forms.¹¹

As though to again prove his complete miscomprehension of how contemporary religion and capitalism might have been related to one another, Marx then proceeds to compare this process of self-valorization with the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, suggesting that value ‘differentiates itself as original value from surplus-value, just as God the Father differentiates himself from himself as God the Son, although both are of the same age and form, in fact one single person’.¹²

There are of course several problems ...

Table of contents

• Routledge Advances in Sociology
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Introduction: contemporary religion
• 2 The retreat of ultimate and sublime values
• 3 Disembodiment and the sublime: the birth of modern religion
• 4 The ‘spirit’ of capitalism
• 5 The hiatus irrationalis
• 6 The prophetic pneuma
• 7 The ‘community unto death’
• 8 The body of religion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index