Barbalet, J. (2008). Weber, Passion, and Profits.

“The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of

Capitalism” in Context. Cambridge University Press.

2. From the Protestant Ethic to the vocation lectures: Beruf, rationality and emotion

“Weber reiterates the relationship between self-control and purpose constitutive of Beruf in ‘Knies
and the Problem of Irrationality’, published just after the Protestant Ethic. Here Weber contrasts the
romantic notion of personality, which emphasizes ‘the diffuse, undifferentiated, vegetative
‘underground’ of personal life’, and his preferred conceptualization of personality. For Weber,
personality entails instead ‘a constant and intrinsic realtion to certain ultimate ‘values’ and
‘meanings’ of life … which are forged into purposes and thereby translated into rational-teleological
action’” (50).

“Weber means by this that in the Lutheran understanding of calling the activity of work is
necessarily providential, requiring that the individual ‘remain once and for all in the station and
calling in which God had placed him’. Calvin, on the other hand, according to Weber, saw the
possibility of a calling in any activity in which a person might engage. Weber traces this entirely
modern understanding of calling from the Calvinist doctrine of predestination. This doctrine holds
that only God chooses who is ‘saved’, and that God’s choice cannot be influenced by mortals or by
the actions of mortals” (53).

“Weber returns to the formation and practice of calling in his lectures of 1917 and 1919 (…) Self-
limitation remains at the core of the concept, as it did in his 1905 discussion of calling in the
Protestant Ethic. But in the vocation lectures, Beruf is founded on emotion and not opposed to it. It
is particularly ironic, therefore, that one of Weber’s contemporary critics, Erich von Kahler, accused
him of perpetuating in ‘Science as a Vocation’ the conventional separation of ‘feeling and thought’.
(…) We shall see that Weber is able to embrace passion in the vocation lectures because he discerns
a disctintion between types of emotions that this critic ignores” (58).

“[Sobre la ética de la convicción y la ética de la responsabilidad] Weber’s discussion at this point is

remarkable not only in his admission that a calling for politics requires a passionate feeling of
responsibility (‘with heart and soul’), but also in that the ethics of ultimate ends and of
responsibility are somehow harmonized through the vocation for politics, through the practice of a
calling” (60-61).

“Underlying the political vocation, then, is passion. Indeed, it is absolutely foundational for a
political calling. It is only by being ‘passionate’ that a person can ‘take a stand’. A little later in this
discussion, Weber says that there are ‘three pre-eminent qualities [that] are decisive for the
politician: passion, a feeling of responsibility, and a sense of proportion’. (…) Weber’s qualification
of the understanding of passion is crucial because he distinguishes at least two meanings of the
term. Passion in the sense of matter-of-factness, Weber continues, means ‘passionate devotion to a
‘cause’, to the god or demon who is overlord’ .This is to be distinguished from ‘passion in the sense
of … inner bearing … as sterile excitation’. What separates these distinct usages is whether the
emotions are attached to forces outside the person, who is then moved by them, or wheter the
emotions come from an inner sensibility or sentimentality. In the former case, ‘passion as a
devotion to a cause’, Weber says, ‘makes responsibility to this cause the guiding star of action’. In
the other case, the emotion is attached only to an inward feeling, grounded in self-reflection and a
turning away from the task. This latter form of emotion, of emotionality for its own sake, which
Weber rejects, is characteristic of the cultivation of feelings found in the salon culture of his time”
(62)
“ ‘In Knies and the Problem of Irrationality’, for instance, Weber is dismissive of emotion in
general because he only sees it as sterile excitation. He is opposed to intuition, in particular, and
also empathy, because it never gets beyond such subjective states. (…) By the time he wrote
Ancient Judaism, Weber saw that emotion could indeed be the content of commitment, of devotion
to a cause” (62).

“In an article, the title of which literally translates as ‘Intermediate Reflections’, published in
November 1915 in the Archiv für Sozialwissenchaft und Sozialpolitik, Weber refers to the ‘very
extraordinary quality of brotherliness of war’. In contrast to political rationalization, in which
politics is freed ‘of passionate feelings’, he says war poses a counter-tendency that reveals the
impossibility of the former” [Esta mál. Lo cita como de 1915, la versión original no decía eso].

“But the account of the vocation of politics (without that term being used), in contrast to the
vocation lecture, holds that ‘the political man’ is without passion, despersonalized in the manner of
the economic man. Weber’s conception of the ‘very extraordinary quality of brotherliness of war’,
in which the political community is infused with emotion, is as much a religious as a political
experience, thus bringing politics ‘into direct competition with religious ethics’. But the competition
between emotion and rationalized politics is not conclusive” (70).

“[Judaísmo antiguo] Additionally, and with added fascination, Weber understood that the prophets
experienced their charisma as a ‘calling’ and a ‘duty’, even though they were not subject to an
‘inner-wordly asceticism’ and there was no possibility of a Protestant-type of religious concept of
‘vocation’. But Weber recognized that foundation to their calling was emotion, indeed passion. (…)
The basis of calling is emotion. The argument here entirely prefigures that concerning the
emotional foundation of Beruf in the vocation lectures” (71).

“[T]here is no better way of demonstrating the limitations of this approach to emotion than by
following Weber’s own development of the concept Beruf, and his later arguments concerning its
foundation in human passions. This also demonstrates, of course, Weber’s own assessment and
revision of his treatment of a key concept in the Protestant Ethic. It might additionally inform
scholarly appreciation of the work” (74).