The Kenotic Structure of Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Secularization

Abstract

In its classic form the theory of secularization is the story of a Fall. It charts the disenchanting potential of a rupture within the sacred cosmos, said to be responsible for violently sundering human unity with the divine. In most conventional accounts, the secularizing consequences of this primordial rupture are not fully realized until modernity when the culture of the “West” achieves complete emancipation from the supernatural.

In its earliest incarnations this narrative of progressive liberation was used to defend a moral schema that demarcated the modern from pre-modern and religious societies. Although the Enlightenment pretensions of this moral schema have been widely rejected by critics of secularization the association of modernity with secularity has not. The idea that the worldliness and rationality of modern culture lacks spiritual depth remains axiomatic in the social sciences today. Indeed its logic animates recent scholarship identifying the return of the sacred in the postmodern epoch.

Both advocates and critics of the secularization narrative tend to overlook the deeply entangled relation between spirit and flesh that endures within the modern. Using Max Weber’s seminal study of Protestantism and capitalism as its point of departure, this thesis demonstrates that secularization is a kenotic process. It is characterized by the passage between spirit and flesh, an active commerce that endures within the modern, as the condition of its secularity.

The kenotic understanding of secularization is tracked through the broader frame of Weber’s theory, providing detailed examinations of the narrative of disenchantment, Weber’s engagement with Calvinist theology, with particular a focus on the semiology that underpins Calvin’s concept of the fides efficax, and a number of unorthodox theories of secularization that emphasize the sacredness of the secular. Emerging from within the interstices of this inter-textual dialogue is a narrative of secularization that chronicles the survival of the religious spirit within disjuncture, disenchantment, and even death. This challenges received notions about secularity by relocating the religious within the modern, thus questioning the basis of its difference from both the primitive and postmodern.