Commenda was a form of medieval trading association, entered into ad hoc for carrying out one sea voyage. A producer or exporter of goods turned them over to another who took them abroad (on a ship provided sometimes by one party, sometimes by the other) and sold them, receiving a share in the profits. The expenses of the voyage were divided between the two in agreed proportion, while the original shipper bore the risk. See Weber, “Handelsgesellschaften im Mittelalter,” Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte, pp. 323–8. —Translator’s Note ↩
The sea loan, used in maritime commerce in the Middle Ages, was “a method of insuring against the risks of the sea without violating the prohibitions against usury. … When certain risky maritime ventures were to be undertaken, a certain sum … was obtained for the cargo belonging to such and such a person or capitalist. If the ship was lost, no repayment was exacted by the lender; if it reached port safely, the borrower paid a considerable premium, sometimes 50 percent.” Henri Sée, Modern Capitalism, p. 189. —Translator’s Note ↩
A form of company between the partnership and the limited liability corporation. At least one of the participants is made liable without limit, while the others enjoy limitation of liability to the amount of their investment. —Translator’s Note ↩
Naturally the difference cannot be conceived in absolute terms. The politically oriented capitalism (above all tax-farming) of Mediterranean and Oriental antiquity, and even of China and India, gave rise to rational, continuous enterprises whose bookkeeping—though known to us only in pitiful fragments—probably had a rational character. Furthermore, the politically oriented adventurers’ capitalism has been closely associated with rational bourgeois capitalism in the development of modern banks, which, including the Bank of England, have tor the most part originated in transactions of a political nature, often connected with war. The difference between the characters of Paterson, for instance—a typical promoter—and of the members of the directorate of the Bank who gave the keynote to its permanent policy, and very soon came to be known as the “Puritan usurers of Grocers’ Hall,” is characteristic of it. Similarly, we have the aberration of the policy of this most solid bank at the time of the South Sea Bubble. Thus the two naturally shade off into each other. But the difference is there. The great promoters and financiers have no more created the rational organization of labour than—again in general and with individual exceptions—those other typical representatives of financial and political capitalism, the Jews. That was done, typically, by quite a different set of people. ↩
For Weber’s discussion of the ineffectiveness of slave labour, especially so far as calculation is concerned, see his essay, “Agrarverhältnisse im Altertum,” in the volume Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Sozial-und Wirtschaftsgeschichte. —Translator’s Note ↩
That is, in the whole series of Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie, not only in the essay here translated. See translator’s preface. —Translator’s Note ↩
The remains of my knowledge of Hebrew are also quite inadequate. ↩
I need hardly point out that this does not apply to attempts like that of Karl Jasper’s (in his book Psychologie der Weltanschauungen, 1919), nor to Klages’s Charakterologie, and similar studies which differ from our own in their point of departure. There is no space here for a criticism of them. ↩
The only thing of this kind which Weber ever wrote is the section on “Religionssoziologie” in his large work Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. It was left unfinished by him and does not really close the gap satisfactorily. —Translator’s Note ↩
Some years ago an eminent psychiatrist expressed the same opinion to me. ↩
From the voluminous literature which has grown up around this essay I cite only the most comprehensive criticisms, (1) F. Rachfahl, “Kalvinismus und Kapitalismus,” Internationale Wochenschrift für Wissenschaft, Kunst und Technik (1909), Nos. 39–43. In reply, my article: “Antikritisches zum Geist des Kapitalismus,” Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik (Tübingen), XX, 1910. Then Rachfahl’s reply to that: “Nochmals Kalvinismus und Kapitalismus,” 1910, Nos. 22–25, of the Internationale Wochenschrift. Finally my “Antikritisches Schlusswort,” Archiv, XXXI. (Brentano, in the criticism presently to be referred to, evidently did not know of this last phase of the discussion, as he does not refer to it.) I have not incorporated anything in this edition from the somewhat unfruitful polemics against Rachfahl. He is an author whom I otherwise admire, but who has in this instance ventured into a field which he has not thoroughly mastered. I have only added a few supplementary references from my anti-critique, and have attempted, in new passages and footnotes, to make impossible any future misunderstanding. (2) W. Sombart, in his book Der Bourgeois (Munich and Leipzig, 1913, also translated into English under the title The Quintessence of Capitalism, London, 1915), to which I shall return in footnotes below. Finally (3) Lujo Brentano in Part II of the Appendix to his Munich address (in the Academy of Sciences, 1913) on Die Anfänge des modernen Kapitalismus, which was published in 1916. (Since Weber’s death Brentano has somewhat expanded these essays and incorporated them into his recent book
