3rd Annual Forum on Capital as Power: "Capitalizing Power: The Qualities and Quantities of Accumulation"

September 28-30, 2012, York University, Toronto

13. The Rationality of Capital Accounting as the Quintessence of Capitalism: Max Weber's and Werner Sombart's Non-materialist Views of Capitalism

Gibin Hong, Global Political Economy Institute, Seoul (tentandavia@naver.com)

Max Weber and Werner Sombart, the great economic historians belonging to the last generation of the German Historical School, are known to have made the 'Spirit' the pivotal concept in their theories of capitalism. Many sociological studies of Max Weber, excessively obsessed with the so-called Weberian Protestant Thesis, have misrepresented his theory of capitalism as if its concern were restricted to the 'cultural' aspects of capitalism. Weber and Sombart had much more comprehensive views of the nature and evolution of capitalism. Both emphasized the centrality of capital accounting and viewed capitalism as a social system in which the rationality of capital accounting becomes the supreme order of everything in the social world. Moreover, Weber elaborated on the institutional structure in which a 're-ordering' of social relations in the image of the rationality of capital accounting is made possible. In this sense, their theories of capitalism may be said to have anticipated some aspects of Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler's creorder theory. However, crucial differences exist between the two Germans and our two contemporaries. The most prominent difference is that the notion of power, the pivotal concept in Nitzan and Bichler's theory, does not occupy a central place in the theories of Weber or Sombart. Nitzan and Bichler's concept of the 'mode of power' will be contrasted with Weber's Herrschaft and Sombart's 'modern sovereign state'.

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