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.”