Francis Fukuyama: The Relevance of Max Weber Today, 100 Years After the "Protestant Ethic" Essay

Roundup: Talking About History

Francis Fukuyama, in the NYT Book Review (3-20-05):

[Francis Fukuyama is a professor of international political economy at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and the author, most recently, of ''State-Building.'']



It is safe to say that most contemporary economists do not take Weber's hypothesis, or any other culturalist theory of economic growth, seriously. Many maintain that culture is a residual category in which lazy social scientists take refuge when they can't develop a more rigorous theory. There is indeed reason to be cautious about using culture to explain economic and political outcomes. Weber's own writings on the other great world religions and their impact on modernization serve as warnings. His book ''The Religion of China: Confucianism and Taoism'' (1916) takes a very dim view of the prospects for economic development in Confucian China, whose culture, he remarks at one point, provides only slightly less of an obstacle to the emergence of modern capitalism than Japan's.


SURPRISINGLY, the Weberian vision of a modernity characterized by ''specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart'' applies much more to modern Europe than to present-day America. Europe today is a continent that is peaceful, prosperous, rationally administered by the European Union and thoroughly secular. Europeans may continue to use terms like ''human rights'' and ''human dignity,'' which are rooted in the Christian values of their civilization, but few of them could give a coherent account of why they continue to believe in such things. The ghost of dead religious beliefs haunts Europe much more than it does America.


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