From Weber to Reich

The greatest name in German idealistic philosophy is that of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770- 1831), according to whose magnificent scheme all reality is the outworking of the Spirit. This takes place, Hegel taught, according to a process called the dialectic, in which a thesis calls forth its own antithesis. The two combine to form a synthesis, which in turn becomes the new thesis in the next stage of the process. What Hegel saw as a spiritual process, Karl Marx conceived in materialistic terms: All history, all human thought, even philosophy and religion, is the product of a dialectic of material forces.

To put Marx’s idea into his nineteenth-century setting, it means that the Christian religion is the byproduct and has become the handmaiden of an economic system. The oppressive economic structure which produced religion now uses it as “opium for the people,” a drug to keep them subservient to their exploiters with promises of “pie in the sky, by and by.” There are many ways of dealing with this charge, one of them being tu quoque, frater: Isn’t Marxist philosophy itself opium for the exploited Communist masses? A more dramatic reversal was attempted by Max Weber (1864-1920), one of the pioneers of modern sociology, in his epoch-making work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904-1905). Weber was neither a Christian nor a capitalist, but he was a remarkable practitioner of scholarly objectivity in the best German tradition. As a result, his reader does not have the feeling that Weber’s work is marred by any onus of hostility to the phenomena he describes and analyzes. Weber seems to respect both the accomplishments of capitalism and the stern if gloomy vigor of Calvinism (as he understands it).

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Harold O. J. Brown

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The greatest name in German idealistic philosophy is that of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770- 1831), according to whose magnificent scheme all reality is the outworking of the Spirit. This takes place, Hegel taught, according to a process called the dialectic, in which a thesis calls forth its own antithesis. The two combine to form a synthesis, which in turn becomes the new thesis in the next stage of the process. What Hegel saw as a spiritual process, Karl Marx conceived in materialistic terms: All history, all human thought, even philosophy and religion, is the product of a dialectic of material forces.

To put Marx’s idea into his nineteenth-century setting, it means that the Christian religion is the byproduct and has become the handmaiden of an economic system. The oppressive economic structure which produced religion now uses it as “opium for the people,” a drug to keep them subservient to their exploiters with promises of “pie in the sky, by and by.” There are many ways of dealing with this charge, one of them being tu quoque, frater: Isn’t Marxist philosophy itself opium for the exploited Communist masses? A more dramatic reversal was attempted by Max Weber (1864-1920), one of the pioneers of modern sociology, in his epoch-making work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904-1905). Weber was neither a Christian nor a capitalist, but he was a remarkable practitioner of scholarly objectivity in the best German tradition. As a result, his reader does not have the feeling that Weber’s work is marred by any onus of hostility to the phenomena he describes and analyzes. Weber seems to respect both the accomplishments of capitalism and the stern if gloomy vigor of Calvinism (as he understands it).