On Elective Affinities
To begin theorizing with Weber’s ideas about the “Protestant ethic,” i.e., to theorize alongside Weber (and perhaps even against him), I think it behooves us to come up with a working definition of what he could have possibly meant by Wahlverwandtschaften [Elective Affinities]. Perhaps it was Goethe’s play that exposed Weber to this idea and perhaps Goethe learned about it from the eighteenth-century Swedish chemist, Torbern Bergman, who coined the term in a treatise about molecular combinations. Swedberg and Agevall (2016) concede that “‘Elective affinity’ is not a carefully defined technical concept in Weber’s writings but rather a key phrase.” Scott (2015) argues that Weber used the term to “describe the relationship between Protestantism and capitalism.” In Scott’s view, the term “refers to the resonance or coherence between aspects of the teachings of Protestantism and the ethos of the capitalist enterprise: the contents of one system of meaning engender a tendency for adherents to build and pursue the other system of meaning. The actors concerned may not be consciously aware of this affinity.”
For whatever “[engendering] a tendency,” amounts to phenomenologically, it is helpful to note what Edles and Appelrouth write in their entry on Max Weber: “[Weber] cast the determination of causality as an attempt to establish the probability that a series of actions or events are related or have an elective affinity” (159). They also suggest that “Weber’s central point was not that the Protestant ethic caused the emergence and growth of Western capitalism. Protestantism alone was not sufficient for creating this profound economic change. Rather, he argued that Protestant asceticism combined with a number of other important structural and social factors to produce the dominance of Western capitalism. In particular, Weber pointed to the separation of business pursuits from the home; the development of rational bookkeeping methods; technological advances in methods of production, distribution, and communication; the development of a rational legal system based on impersonal, formal rules; and most important, the rational organization of free labor” (168).
Weber’s thesis includes a pluriform and overdetermined Lutheran Beruf (doubtless he was wrong about this from the perspective of the history of theology) which enabled (i.e., participated in the enabling of) conditions for the possibility of introspection, individuality, and a newfound interiority inflected by a pecuniary ascesis; the post-Calvinist call to confirm one’s election by the evidence of material wellbeing as a result of hard work. Weber famously writes that the “Puritan wanted to work in a 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 to-day 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” (123).
For William Connolly (2008), the elective affinities that produce resonances between and across religious and economic systems are captured by his theoretico-heureistic device of the “evangelical-capitalist resonance machine.” The second chapter of his Capitalism and Christianity, American Style reveals the empirical dimension of his archive; Connolly explores data which reveal “how a spiral of resonances between evangelism and cowboy capitalism embeds a distinctive spirituality into these institutional practices, one larger than the sum of its parts” (xi-xii),
It should be noted that Connolly’s liberalism seems more forward-looking than Weber’s, but that’s likely my own positionality and historicity intervening in what is likely an amorphous commitment to social democracy on the part of both parties. Connolly informs us that if we are to build “a new political assemblage,” one that is not a party to the evangelical-capitalist resonance machine, “it is necessary to go beyond both liberal secularism and some traditional notions of solidarity on the left—not by heaping contempt on either but by incorporating the two into larger imbrications between spiritual life, economic practice, and state politics” (xi).
Connolly suggests that to explore “the complex and shifting relations between capitalism and Christianity,” one must “show how the defining characteristics of capitalism display a degree of indeterminacy, room to be stretched, and evolutionary potential” (9). The new elective affinities, for Connolly, are found in the American Geist evangelical-capitalist resonance machine. The Lutheran Beruf now becomes an acerbic disavowal of the future. Indeed, at the intersection of Connolly’s cowboy capitalist and evangelical hell-enthusiasts rests a resonance, what he calls “electrical charges.” They “resonate back and forth, generating a political machine much more potent than the aggregation of its parts” (49). The texture of this resonance is a deeply Weberian-inflected account of the particular Geist of capitalism-axiomatic in the contemporary United States; it is an “abstract will to dismiss other constituencies and to disdain collective responsibility to the future helps to differentiate cowboys who align themselves with the right edge of the evangelical movement from those marketeers who break with it. […] The bellicosity and corresponding sense of extreme entitlement of those consumed by economic greed reverberates with the transcendental resentment of those visualizing the righteous violence of Christ: Across these modest differentiations, the two parties are bound by similar orientations to the future” (48-49).
Selected References
Scott, John. "elective affinity." A Dictionary of Sociology: Oxford University Press, 2015. Oxford Reference. Date Accessed 16 Jan. 2020 <https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780199683581.001.0001/acref-9780199683581-e-698>.
Swedberg, Richard, and Ola Agevall. The Max Weber Dictionary: Key Words and Central Concepts. Stanford, California: Stanford Social Sciences, an imprint of Stanford University Press, 2016. Print.
