ABSTRACT
Weber (1976) organizes his investigations into The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism around the following questions: how to describe capitalism in its modern form; how to account for its emergence; and how to explain why it emerged in the West and not elsewhere in the world (Eldridge, 1972, p. 33). Weber defines ‘a capitalistic economic action [as one which] rests on the expectation of profit by the utilization of opportunities for exchange, that is on [formally] peaceful chances of profit’ (Weber, 1976, p. 17). Within the generic category of capitalism Weber acknowledges that nothing specifically modern could be identified in this definition which had not ‘existed in all civilized countries of the earth so far as economic documents permit us to judge. In China, India, Babylon, Egypt, Mediterranean antiquity and the Middle Ages, as well as in modern times’ (Weber, 1976, pp. 18–19). This is true not only of capitalism per se, but also of the more specific category of industrial capitalism exemplified by industrial production allied with capital accounting techniques. It is the presence of the latter that signify that the organization of enterprise is rational. When this is present with other factors such as alienable, formally free labour, then this is taken to define the distinctive characteristic of modern industrial capitalism.
