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Buddhism and Social Conflict in the Age of Rational Modern Capitalism: A Weberian Reading of Early 20th-Century Euro-Buddhism

Sebastian Musch

During the first decades of the 20th century, a phenomenon grew popular among the educated and open-minded. It soon captured the attention of writers and thinkers, and a rich and wide-ranging literature on the subject appeared. It was not only a new mode relating to the world, to society and the individual, but also often thought to contain a remedy for the social conflicts that were threatening to tear apart European societies. This phenomenon was the teachings of the Buddha.

By scrutinizing the writings of these early Euro-Buddhists, along the lines of Max Weber’s theory of rational modern capitalism, I will shed light on the ways in which these Euro-Buddhists envisioned a resolution to the raging social conflicts. Religion and Rational Modern Capitalism

In November 1917, with the First World War raging across Europe, Max Weber, one of the founding fathers of sociology, and even today still a towering eminence in this discipline, gave his acclaimed lecture “Science as a Vocation” to students at the University of Munich. Here, Weber coined the famous expression, “the disenchantment of the world,” which describes the process of rationalization that does not necessarily entail a progress in general knowledge but rather a different approach to the world, namely the idea that everything can, in principle, be dominated through computation.1 The intellect thus establishes itself as the new reigning sovereign of the world, which was subsequently emptied of meaning outside of ratio. Religions, traditionally the normative forces, were broken into pieces under the pressure of relativism, which will not, nor can, provide meaning to life. The leftover warring gods appeal with guidance in life to the disoriented youth, and yet the wide range of choices lets them plunge even further into confusion.2 The shattering of the public dominance of religion through the disenchantment of the world made religions a private matter. These two features – the multiplicity of religious options and the privatization of religion – made the arrival of Buddhism feasible. Religious options other than Christianity or Judaism were now on the table. During the war years, Max Weber also published his voluminous studies on Hinduism and Buddhism, which must be read as “contrast studies” to his groundbreaking work The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905/06).3 Weber here highlights the question as to why neither Hinduism nor Buddhism triggered the development of the process of rationalization that fuelled the rise of modern bureaucratic capitalism, as European Protestantism, especially Calvinism, did. The “elective affinity,” i.e. the reciprocal gravitation of Protestantism and capitalism towards each other, despite not having a direct causality, leaves the question open as to why the subsequent amalgamation appeared in a certain age and a certain period (early modern Europe) and not in another part of the world, since modern rational capitalism would prove to be an immensely successful model (“the most fateful form in our modern life”4) that would swiftly conquer the world. Weber’s whole endeavor of comparative “sociology of religion,” as developed in his The Economic Ethic of World

1 Cf. Max Weber, 1992, 87. 2 Cf. Peter E. Gordon, 2013, 154. 3 Detlef Kantowsky, 1985, 467. 4 Richard Swedberg, 2005, 25.

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Religions project, is directed towards the question “Why has rational capitalism based upon calculation developed solely in the Occident?”5

The answer lay in how the previous normative forces, religions, related to the world and what subsequent economical ethics they developed.

What Protestantism, Catholicism, Judaism, Hinduism and Buddhism have in common is that they are all religions of salvations, religions that are basically in tension with the world.6 Soteriology is rooted in a deep discontent with the world as it is and its presumed irrationalism, and that is why religions of salvation develop a soteriological doctrine to synchronize their expectations of a just, rational world with its cruel reality. However, religions of salvations can be further distinguished along the lines of their soteriological content. While certain religions (Calvinism, ancient Judaism, etc.) direct their soteriological goals towards this world, i.e. inner-world asceticism, and try to rectify worldly matters, other religions of salvation focus their soteriological efforts on the other-worldly realm and reject the world as such. Max Weber saw “Old Buddhism” (that is, for Weber, Buddhism before Ashoka) as a religion of the second type, as “the conceivably most radical form of pursuing salvation ever.”7 Weber’s depiction of Buddhism in negative terms, as asocial, individualistic and favoring knowledge over ethical conduct, is often at odds with the fervent early Buddhists and scholars featured in this article.8 At times, his interpretation of Buddhism stands diametrically opposite to what was considered favorable in Buddhism (its social, spiritual and ethical content) by most of its Western proponents.

While I will not dig into the question of how these two very different interpretations of Buddhism could arise, I will try to reconcile these two sides by combining Weber’s theoretical approach regarding Buddhism with the notion of Buddhism shared by such figures as Theodor Schultze and Paul Dahlke, among others. For a reconciliation between these two opposing views, we have to take a closer look at the function of Buddhism within their respective world views. Max Weber saw monastic Buddhism as a counterpart to the economic rationalism of Protestantism. The soteriological aspect of renouncing the world prevents, in Weber’s eyes, the maturation of a rational ethics of economics.9 All rationalization is focused on oneself and its other-worldly goals.10 The aforementioned figures who embraced Buddhism saw precisely this lack of a rational ethics of economics as appealing. For them, Buddhism is a tool of social cohesion, a remedy to social conflicts, which originated in the disenchantment of the world that Weber himself had diagnosed in his lecture “Science as a Vocation.” However, Weber was convinced that the exemplary religious leaders of the prelapsarian time could not persist nowadays. “To lead the life of Buddha, Jesus, Francesco seems merely to be doomed to failure under the technical and social circumstances of a rational culture.”11

Yet, at the bottom of this development we can find a quasi-dialectical process. The decline of religion as the leading light of meaning, and the loss of absolute claims, are caused precisely by the rise of religion. “Calvin did not desacralize [or disenchant] the world; on the contrary, he turned the entire world into a monastery,” Fredric

5 Max Weber in a letter (March 3, 1920) to Robert Liefmann. Cf. Richard Swedberg, 2005, 26. 6 The counter example is Confucianism as a religion that embraces the world. Cf. Richard Swedberg, 2005, 238f. Other examples would be Ancient Greek and Roman religions and laymen Catholicism, which Weber distinguishes from the Catholicism of the religious elite. Cfr. Wolfgang Schluchter, 1994, 14. 7 Max Weber, 1996, 330. 8 Max Weber, 1996, 350ff. and 355ff. For a thorough critique of Weber’s notion of Buddhism, cf.; Stanley J. Tambiah, 1984. 9 Cf.: Max Weber, 1996, 348. 10 Cf.: Max Weber, 1996, 356. 11 Max Weber, 1989, 520.

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Jameson reminds us.12 But once the rise of rationalism is completed, it turns against its own ancilla, namely religion. Protestantism is therefore what Jameson calls a “vanishing mediator,” i.e. the catalyzer of inner-worldly rationalization, which then vanquishes religion.13 Here lies the fundamental difference between these two views. Weber believes that the amalgamation of Protestantism and capitalism had started an irreversible process which had pulled the rug from under its own feet. The Buddhists, and Buddhism’s sympathizers, of this age (which in the following I will subsume under the label “Euro-Buddhist,” because even though this article deals mostly with German thinkers, “Europe” constituted their frame of reference) believed that this process could be, if not reversed, at least mitigated. The vanishing of mediator had left an empty spot which could now be filled with Buddhism. A Time of Crisis and the Search for a Resolution

By analyzing the enthusiastic approach many of the following figures displayed towards Buddhism, through the Weberian paradigm of the prevalence of modern rational capitalism of Protestant persuasion, we can shed light on the function of Buddhism in these people’s mind-set. They perceived the world as an ideological battleground in which a last reason must be found. By infusing European intellectual life with Buddhism, they hoped to alternate the mental and social structure. This meant de-emphasizing the other-worldly soteriological aspects of Buddhism, and instead focusing on – in Weber’s terminology – its mystic and yet rational aspect. Unlike many of their contemporaries, the Euro-Buddhists did not object to rationalism altogether, but sought another rationalism that would provide meaning and orientation.

Max Weber’s theses on rationalization, religion and capitalism received a cold reception in his own age, and they were therefore probably unknown to the following figures as they were to most others, even among the educated. A quite popular narrative during this period (and even today) however states that the prevalent ideologies of materialism and scientific positivism were the main reason for the decline of religion during the 19th century. From the Enlightenment onwards, religion in Europe only engaged in rearguard actions, losing territory to sciences, materialism and the ensuing consumerism. At the threshold of the 20th century, religion had, especially in the cities and among the educated, lost its appeal. Secularism went hand in hand with the scientific positivism of this era, which with every achievement by the sciences seemed to advance towards a better future. As Romain Rolland noted in 1915: “They believed in reason as the Catholics believed in the Blessed Virgin.”14 But, slowly, a counter public sphere emerged, first among the obscure and marginalized, and among artists and literati, often shunned by the intellectual mainstream. As Eric Hobsbawm notes, these were “usually a café-table full of young men speaking for the networks of friends they had made when they entered the École Normale Supérieure in Paris or some self-selected leaders of intellectual fashion in the universities of Cambridge or Heidelberg.”15 But even if adherents to this intellectual fashion only numbered in the low tens of thousands, these were the people that became the loud proponents of a new way of thinking, and many of those we consider the seminal thinkers of these days have to be counted among them. Propelled by the powerful anti-philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, who became, in the years after his death in 1900, the poster boy of almost every movement that tried to challenge the hegemony of reason, Buddhism became a

12 Fredric Jameson, 1973, 76. 13 Fredric Jameson, 1973, 78. 14 Quoted in Eric Hobsbawm, 1989, 262. 15 Eric Hobsbawm, 1989, 260.

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cultural and societal force and often functioned as a projection screen for those desires and wishes of disillusioned Europeans.

In the academy, the hegemony of neo-Kantian philosophy and the dominance of rationalism as the prevalent mode of thought during the final decades of the 19th century were countered with the rise of irrationalist concepts or other, different, modes of rationalism. Obviously, at turn of the century, the European process of enlightenment had reached a watershed, where its legitimacy was continuously questioned. Not all of its achievements were put into doubt by everybody, but what became clear to many was that a parochial, European, kind of rationalism was due for an extension, most commonly towards the East. The German exoticism of this era were an echo to a surge of feelings of insecurity. Buddhism was a place outside, of otherness, to be sure, but one that maybe, precisely because of its vague profile, its unfamiliarity, offered the promise of rejuvenation, even though arguments for its spiritual superiority were often undergirded with reference to its old age. Yet, most Euro-Buddhists did not position irrationalism, in its excessive instrumental form, as an alternative to rationalism. They saw their times as an age of excess, which could not be remedied by reversing to another extreme. They were looking for a middle way. Euro-Buddhism as a Remedy

Theodor Schultze, at first a diligent state employee in Prussia, was one of the first to become openly Buddhist in Europe. In 1893, he published his programmatic treatise, Vendata and Buddhism as ferments for a future regeneration of religious awareness in the European Cultural Sphere, in which he sought to establish Buddhist teachings as a new groundwork for a religious and ethical revolution in Europe, which would disentangle religious doctrines from reason.16 In his work, Schultze tried to revoke religion as an “ethical-social power of positive value,” a status that Christianity had lost in Europe.17 Only through a merger of religion and philosophy could Europe be remedied. Exemplary for such a merger was Buddhism. The kind of religion Schultze had in mind had not to be based on divine revelation, as in Christianity and Judaism, but only on metaphysical underpinnings of some kind. Maneuvering away from instrumental reason, Schultze remained careful not to embrace an irrational leap of faith.

For him, Christianity and Western philosophy had failed Europe, which now stood at the edge of an abyss. Schultze draws a comparison to the decline of the Roman Empire, to which the forces of Christianity and philosophy were also the harborers of havoc.

Schultze then proscribes two principles as having the healing powers for Europe’s social conflict: one is compassion, which he equates with karuṇā and muditā; the other is amity, which he equates with maitrī and mettā.18 These principles will raise the level of solidarity among humans, and only in such a way can social conditions improve. The opposite to the quad of karuṇā, muditā, maitrī and mettā is the Christian principle of love, which Schultze tries to debunk as also purposeful and goal-oriented. Love is always based on a natural instinct or is restricted in its scope. For Schultze, it is crucial for Europe to forsake the imperative approach to ethics. Ethical behavior cannot be commanded (which would turn it into an instrument for achieving a goal), but has to rise intuitively inside every individual. That is why Buddhist maxims are not

16 Later published under the title Der Buddhismus als Religion der Zukunft (Buddhism as the religion of the future) Cf.: Theodor Schultze, 1898. 17 Theodor Schultze, 1898, IV. 18 Theodor Schultze, 1898, 82 u. 143.

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commands and imperatives, but rather advices, admonitions and instructions.19 Steering away from any eudaimonic approach to the notion of karma, Schultze brings to bear the egalitarian structure of Buddhist ethics: “Its subjective foundation is the (intuitive) awareness of the inner equality or identity of all living beings.”20 The human being is the vessel of ethics, not just its instrument.

While Schultze also discusses the terms karuṇā, muditā, maitrī and mettā in relation to karma and rebirth, his objective is mainly worldly: improving the social conditions of this world. On an epistemological level, Schultze describes Buddhism as a combination of “subjective Idealism” and “transcendental Realism,” which he pitches against the reigning ideology of scientism.21 Schultze’s concept is similar to a construct which also features prominently in the work of Paul Dahlke, a physician who became a devout Buddhist around 1900 and also founded the first European Buddhist retreat center, the Buddhistisches Haus, in Berlin in 1923/24. In his book, Buddhism as Religion and Morality, Dahlke paints a picture of Buddhism as the middle way between faith and science.22 Dahlke argues that the unity of the organic being has been severed into two different spheres: one, faith, completely focusing on the transcendental; the other, science, on the empirical.23 This dichotomy, which is inherent to modern man and is deprived of its inner organic life, triggers social conflict. Modern rational man lacks real religion and real morals, because he lacks a comprehensive Weltanschauung that supersedes the dichotomy between faith and science. What Schultze and Dahlke share is a synthetic conception of Buddhism, which can overcome contemporary binary divisions. Both diagnose an ethical-social crisis due to man’s alienation from his natural organic unity. Juxtaposing Buddhism against the West and/or Christianity allows a critique of the second order. By emphasizing Buddhism’s commitment to social cohesion, versus Christianity’s failure to do so, he points towards (Protestant) rational ethics as the main root of the current conflicts. Dahlke then does not hesitate to put a spotlight on the fact that during war both sides claim to march under the name of the Lord.24 The blending of the religious and political (i.e. in last consequence, violent) spheres, blurs the sacred boundary drawn between the sacred and the profane, by which the former becomes tainted through the bloody business of politics. Ideals are thus tarnished by ideologies.

Buddhism thus becomes a master key which not only could have avoided the outbreak of violence and can assure a peaceful future, but which also addresses the underlying erroneous structure of European society. War, social disintegration and upheaval are results of a misconstrued way of relating to the world. As people perceived the world in a wrong way, since the metaphysical underpinnings of their lives were based on a misconception, it comes as absolutely no surprise that European societies experienced a substantial crisis. The infusion of Buddhism, however, could be the life-saving panacea that could retrieve Europe from its spiritual cul-de-sac.

Dahlke, who spent several years living in Sri Lanka, laments the infusion of Sri Lankan society with Western modernity and the penetration by its materialism as the starting point of the erosion of traditional (and organic) order. The effect of money alienates the population from its traditional Buddhist roots and the saṅgha.25 “Modern life evens out everything and at the end only appreciates one kind of dignity: The

19 Theodor Schultze, 1898, 82f. 20 Idem. 21 Theodor Schultze, 1898, 142. 22 Paul Dahlke, 1923, 4. 23 Cf.: Paul Dahlke, 1923, 3. 24 Cf.: Paul Dahlke, 1923, 39. 25 Cf.: Paul Dahlke, 1923, 331f.

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dignity of richness.”26 Materialism results as an emblem for the currents of scientism and rationalism, finding their expression also in the lower classes of society, which do not necessarily subscribe to any scientific or rational system, per se, but nevertheless succumb to it directly through their growing disregard for tradition and the concentration on material possessions. That this is an essentially Western capitalist development, which now even the Sri Lankan society is following, only underlines, for Dahlke, the necessity and urgency of the dissemination of Buddhism in the West. On a meta-geographical level, we can find here reciprocal counter-positioning as a globalization of ideological foes. The Western devastating effect on Sri Lankan society has to be countered by spreading the Buddhist doctrine in the countries of origin of materialism and scientism. Dahlke clearly names his foe when he announces what the “capital vice of our time” is: “The addiction to accumulate money. The state has no reason to fight this addiction, except for some excesses. And so it prospers abundantly against all Evangelical commandments. Yes, it does not even appear to collide with Christianity.”27 Without going further into Dahlke’s manifold work, I will suggest that his, and to a certain degree, also Schultze’s, work implicitly follows Max Weber’s paradigm of the disenchantment of the world through computation and the rise of modern rational capitalism. Buddhism is both critique and remedy. The Globalization of Buddhist Knowledge

The first translation of the Puggalapaññatti into German was made by Nyāņatiloka, who was born in Germany under the name of Anton Walther Florus Gueth before being ordained as a Buddhist monk in Rangun, Myanmar, in 1904. A critic praised the book, writing that it is: “deeply entrenched by this sublime, detached attitude, which is characteristic for anything Buddhist, and it proposes such noble ethics, which is hardly comprehensible for us Europeans […] Because of this further immersion and occupation with this world so strange to us is a necessary counterpoise against the materialization of our civilization.”28 Here we find a fundamental position often taken: materialization of civilizations could be fought off by Buddhism, which, however, is hardly comprehensible to Europeans. But in a quite nascent fashion can we find here the notion that by distancing oneself from Europe one can come closer to this “sublime, detached attitude.” 29 A gradual substitution of inner dispositions is preferential to a shock therapy – the sudden and complete immersion into Buddhism. Thus, studying the Buddhist texts in Europe is a vital alternative to migration to Asia. At this point, when Europeans start to learn traditional Buddhist texts, and approach these texts with their own problematic issues in mind hoping to find a resolution, Buddhism asserts itself as a cultural force under the guise of capitalist globalization. Therefore, many of the problems caused by globalization could also be solved by the peregrine nature of Buddhism, by its sublime and subtle doctrine that easily adapts to new surroundings. Buddhism is therefore a fixed set of teachings in a shifting form, while European thought (in its Greek, Christian, Jewish or some hybrid version) has an unstable, erratic kernel which, however, is bound by its form. Buddhism’s pivotal role in resuscitating Europe’s perishing soul is bound to its essentialist core, while Europe suffers from its internally hollow core.

The German philosopher Rudolf Pannwitz depicts Europe in his most famous book, The Crisis of European Culture, as a failed society.30 It was published in 1917, 26 Paul Dahlke, 1923, 332. 27 Paul Dahlke, 1923, 39. 28 Oskar Schloss, 1924, 11f. 29 Idem. 30 Cf.: Rudolf Pannwitz, 1947.

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at the height of the First World War, which Pannwitz constitutes as a severe crisis from which a solution seems impossible. “There is no resort from the crisis of European culture in any feasible way,” he states, primarily because, for Pannwitz, European culture is an oxymoron, a contradiction in adjecto. “Culture is something oriental par excellence, something non-European, something supra-European. […] We Europeans are at the margins of greatness and at the edge of an abyss. […] Do not confuse the orient spoiled by us and for us, this paradise for globetrotter, mystagogues, adventurers, explorers, minister and retailers of colonial products, with the great Orient of classical cultures, who is still alive in sceneries, the humans and customs, but whose deeds excel in scripture.”31 Pannwitz advocates a European renaissance, not through expeditions or colonialism, not through exploring the Orient first hand, but through studying and reading the written works. He does not want to bring Europe to Asia, but rather the best, and only the best, of Asia to Europe. Pannwitz then identifies two figures as the “greatest teachers of virtue in the East”: “Gotamo Buddho” and “Kungfutse.”32

Invoking these two names as prosopopeial incarnations of a universal set of virtues that can construct a link between the dichotomic landmasses, alludes to a major trend that is obviously crucial for understanding the European approach at the beginning of the 20th century, namely the globalization of Buddhist knowledge. Since globalization has become such a buzzword during recent decades, we should not forget that even before it entered the jargon in the remotest corner of the earth, its effects were already noticeable over a hundred years ago when an early form of globalization sent shock waves through many societies. The colonialism of the great empires, an acceleration of global trade through new, faster, means of transportation, and the already progressed industrialization of big parts of the world and the subsequent emergence of labor migration as a mass phenomenon, had created a global capitalist world. 33 Knowledge of other parts of the world exploded and the number of publications far exceeded that of previous decades. While former generations often had to rely on literature in other, foreign, languages, which limited the dissemination of knowledge to some privileged educated few, now even the common layperson who would be interested in, let us say, China, could turn to an abundance of books in his or her own vernacular, which often were even conceptualized as popular introductions to the topic. This was especially the case for Buddhist literature. People like Pannwitz, who only had a very superficial understanding of Buddhism, but also more serious scholars of Buddhism and those who actually became Buddhists, could indulge in unprecedented numbers of books and journals.

As Eric Hobsbawm noted, while the earth became “a planet bound together ever more tightly by the bonds of moving goods and people, of capital and communications, of material products and ideas,” there was also a sense of a growing division in society. 34 Estrangement from the major forces – positivism, mass society, and rationalism – of these two opposing trends was the result. Distrust in the advancements of technology and the sciences, a deep (sometimes elitist) skepticism against mass society, and disappointment with Western civilization, became a popular mind-set among the educated. It is in the nexus of globalization and estrangement that the genesis of Buddhism as a popular phenomenon in European societies can be localized. This Euro-Buddhism often advocated only at the surface a coalescence of the “spiritual powers” of Asia and the “rational forces” of Europe, and instead most of the time tackled the exceeding task of finding a cure for the internal European divisions. What 31 Rudolf Pannwitz, 1947, 180. 32 Idem. 33 Eric Hobsbawm, 1989, 13. 34 Eric Hobsbawm, 1989, 14.

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distinguishes most Euro-Buddhists from the augurs of irrationalism and pessimism was the fact that they did not necessarily try to reach an irrational realm outside of rationalism, but rather an incorporation of Buddhist doctrine into the sphere of ratio, a course correction, so to say, of an adamant belief in the power of instrumental reason. Buddhism – A Bridge over Troubled Waters

By emphasizing the cultural, religious, spiritual and psychological and linguistic differences between the realm of Buddhism and the West, the Western proponents of a Buddhist permeation to Europe constructed Buddhism first of all as a counter image to their own regimes, institutions, political systems and ideologies, and secondly against the spiritual, cultural, religious, and intellectual main currents. It is quite significant that while Buddhism was presented as imposable on two spheres, what a Marxist would call the base and the superstructure, the proponents of Euro-Buddhism did not look at any alternatives on a superstructure level outside of Buddhism. This is mainly because these Euro-Buddhists did not deploy Marxist ideas in their transformative approach to society. They did not criticize the form of capitalism, i.e. its institutions, but rather its spirit or habitus.35 It is the mentality of what Weber calls modern rational capitalism that is seen by the Euro-Buddhists as the cause of social disintegration and the root of social conflicts. While Protestantism, as the ancilla of modern rational capitalism, is quintessentially ascetic, Buddhism is mystic and yet rational and therefore suitable for infusing meaning into modern rational capitalism. The social epiphenomenon of modern rational capitalism, namely social disintegration and alienation, are results of the excess of instrumentally rational action. This is not necessarily faithful to Weber’s theorem of social actions, but exactly what these Euro-Buddhists were getting at.

While Weber proclaims that Buddhism renounces any sort of action, may it be irrational, passionate, rational and/or instrumentally rational, Euro-Buddhists would argue that Buddhism is, to put it in Weber’s terms, inner-worldly value-rational and other-worldly instrumentally rational.36 This means that while it argues for a goal-oriented (i.e. nirvana) rationalism in other-worldly terms, it is socially conscious and cohesive in its inner-worldly orientation. Here, again, we find the familiar notion of Buddhism as a bridge builder, whether between faith and science, individual and society, or inner-worldly and other-worldly. And maybe it is this notion that yields a lesson for today. As many of the social and economic conditions that the Euro-Buddhists criticized still persist, it might be the time to reprise the role of Buddhism as a critique of society. In a world divided, building a bridge might be the sharpest critique of all.

35 For Max Weber’s distinction between capitalist spirit and form, cf.: Swedberg, 2005, 263f. 36 Max Weber, 1996, 356.

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