ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights M. Weber’s argument that it was in such mechanised sites and rationalities where the employees’ spirit of capitalism—labour as a calling—had been subsumed. It suggests that the neoliberal present, with its precarious employment, financialisation, inequalities, climate change and cloud-based modalities, ushers in an experience of invisible distant powers, ambiguity and intangibility, even of apocalyptic threat, for the working population. ‘Developing and safeguarding ways of realizing this calling’, rather than inventing a new spirit to remedy a supposed normative deficit, is ‘key to capitalism’s legitimacy, and to its reinvention and reproduction’. In Willmott’s reading of Weber, this central, dominant, ‘calling to make money’ is the spirit of capitalism, and it is spirit that drives both capital and labour, owner and employee. Through identifying this ‘calling to make money’ Willmott understands Boltanski and Chiapello to be seeking a solution to the puzzle of capitalism’s legitimacy in the lives of its subjects that Weber has already solved.
