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Author: Luc Boltanski
Publisher: Verso
Published: 2005
Total Pages: 664
ISBN-13: 9781859845547
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA century after the publication of Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the "Spirit" of Capitalism , a major new work examines network-based organization, employee autonomy and post-Fordist horizontal work structures.
Author: Kathryn Tanner
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2019-01-08
Total Pages: 254
ISBN-13: 0300241127
DOWNLOAD EBOOKOne of the world’s most celebrated theologians argues for a Protestant anti-work ethicIn his classic The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber famously showed how Christian beliefs and practices could shape persons in line with capitalism. In this significant reimagining of Weber’s work, Kathryn Tanner provocatively reverses this thesis, arguing that Christianity can offer a direct challenge to the largely uncontested growth of capitalism.Exploring the cultural forms typical of the current finance-dominated system of capitalism, Tanner shows how they can be countered by Christian beliefs and practices with a comparable person-shaping capacity. Addressing head-on the issues of economic inequality, structural under- and unemployment, and capitalism’s unstable boom/bust cycles, she draws deeply on the theological resources within Christianity to imagine anew a world of human flourishing. This book promises to be one of the most important theological books in recent years.
Author: Jonathan Tran
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2021-11-09
Total Pages: 369
ISBN-13: 0197587909
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAny serious consideration of Asian American life forces us to reframe the way we talk about racism and antiracism. The current emphasis on racial identity obscures the political economic basis that makes racialized life in America legible. This is especially true when it comes to Asian Americans. This book reframes the conversation in terms of what has been called ""racial capitalism"" and utilizes two extended case studies to show how Asian Americans perpetuate and resist its political economy.
Author: Michael Novak
Publisher:
Published: 1993
Total Pages: 358
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAny vision of capitalism's future prospects must take into account the powerful cultural influence Catholicism has exercised throughout the world. The Church had for generations been reluctant to come to terms with capitalism, but, as Michael Novak argues in this important book, a hundred-year-long debate within the Church has yielded a richer and more humane vision of capitalism than that described in Max Weber's classic The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Novak notes that the influential Catholic intellectuals who, early in this century saw through Weber's eyes an economic system marked by ruthless individualism and cold calculation had misread the reality. For, as history has shown, the lived experience of capitalism has depended to a far greater extent than they had realized on a culture characterized by opportunity, cooperative effort, social initiative, creativity, and invention. Drawing on the major works of modern Papal thought, Novak demonstrates how the Catholic tradition has come to reflect this richer interpretation of capitalist culture. In 1891, Pope Leo XIII condemned socialism as a futile system, but also severely criticized existing market systems. In 1991, John Paul II surprised many by conditionally proposing "a business economy, a market economy, or simply free economy" as a model for Eastern Europe and the Third World. Novak notes that as early as 1963, this future Pope had signaled his commitment to liberty. Later, as Archbishop of Krakow, he stressed the "creative subjectivity" of workers, made by God in His image as co-creators. Now, as Pope, he calls for economic institutions worthy of a creative people, and for political and cultural reformsattuned to a new "human ecology" of family and work. Novak offers an original and penetrating conception of social justice, rescuing it as a personal virtue necessary for social activism. Since Pius XI made this idea canonical in 1931, the term has been rejected by the Right as an oxymoron and misused by the Left as a party platform. Novak applies this newly formulated notion of social justice to the urgent worldwide problems of ethnicity, race, and poverty. His fresh rethinking of the Catholic ethic comes just in time to challenge citizens in those two large and historically Catholic regions, Eastern Europe and Latin America, now taking their first steps as market economies, as well as those of us in the West seeking a realistic moral vision.
Author: Max Weber
Publisher: Courier Corporation
Published: 2012-04-19
Total Pages: 321
ISBN-13: 0486122379
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAuthor's best-known and most controversial study relates the rise of a capitalist economy to the Puritan belief that hard work and good deeds were outward signs of faith and salvation.
Author: Terje Oestigaard
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2013-03-22
Total Pages: 262
ISBN-13: 0857733222
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe Christian religion is deeply imbued with the imagery of water, and water plays a central role in its religious practices, not least in baptism. Yet the wider role of water in Christianity has been little explored. In this pioneering book, Terje Oestigaard uses the dramatic changes that took place in perceptions of water during the Reformation to reveal the importance that water played in structuring society and religion in the post-Reformation period. Prior to the Reformation, most common people believed misfortune and catastrophe were caused by the devil, and sought protection in the use of holy water blessed by the local priest. Holy water and holy wells gave laypeople a powerful weapon which could be used to keep the devil away, cure illness and protect fields, property and family. But with the Reformation, the nature of holy water was challenged and belief in the efficacy of holy water and holy wells was attacked as Popish magic and superstition: the status of holy water became one of the main battlegrounds between Protestants and Catholics. The author explores these conflicting views on the spiritual qualities of water and their consequences for society at large. He traces the changing views of nature that arose with Enlightenment developments in the scientific understanding of water and the hydrological cycle, and shows how the emergence of a natural theology helped encourage a belief in the Protestant work ethic whereby wealth and economic success equated with religious excellence. The author concludes by examining - and challenging - Weber's claim that the protestant work ethic and capitalist spirit of enterprise that was so important to the later success of the Industrial Revolution came about when magic and superstition were eliminated from religion by the Reformation. The result is a highly original work that provides one of the most detailed explorations of the importance of the role of water in structuring society and religion in post-Reformation England. Offering fresh insights into the development of society and religion, it will be welcomed by all those with an interest in water, religion, sociology, and the Reformation period.
Author: William E. Connolly
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 2008-04-09
Total Pages: 194
ISBN-13: 0822381230
DOWNLOAD EBOOKCapitalism and Christianity, American Style is William E. Connolly’s stirring call for the democratic left to counter the conservative stranglehold over American religious and economic culture in order to put egalitarianism and ecological integrity on the political agenda. An eminent political theorist known for his work on identity, secularism, and pluralism, Connolly charts the path of the “evangelical-capitalist resonance machine,” source of a bellicose ethos reverberating through contemporary institutional life. He argues that the vengeful vision of the Second Coming motivating a segment of the evangelical right resonates with the ethos of greed animating the cowboy sector of American capitalism. The resulting evangelical-capitalist ethos finds expression in church pulpits, Fox News reports, the best-selling Left Behind novels, consumption practices, investment priorities, and state policies. These practices resonate together to diminish diversity, forestall responsibility to future generations, ignore urban poverty, and support a system of extensive economic inequality. Connolly describes how the evangelical-capitalist machine works, how its themes resound across class lines, and how it infiltrates numerous aspects of American life. Proposing changes in sensibility and strategy to challenge this machine, Connolly contends that the liberal distinction between secular public and religious private life must be reworked. Traditional notions of unity or solidarity must be translated into drives to forge provisional assemblages comprised of multiple constituencies and creeds. The left must also learn from the political right how power is infused into everyday institutions such as the media, schools, churches, consumption practices, corporations, and neighborhoods. Connolly explores the potential of a “tragic vision” to contest the current politics of existential resentment and political hubris, explores potential lines of connection between it and theistic faiths that break with the evangelical right, and charts the possibility of forging an “eco-egalitarian” economy. Capitalism and Christianity, American Style is William E. Connolly’s most urgent work to date.
Author: Art Lindsley
Publisher: ACU Press
Published: 2017-08-08
Total Pages: 552
ISBN-13: 0891125930
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIf Christians want to accelerate the world’s transition out of abject poverty, they need to examine the role of capitalism. Counting the Cost helps readers begin with the truth of Scripture. It then relies on the economic realities that come from our Godgiven design as the foundation for enabling readers to think critically about capitalism. We live in an unprecedented time in human history. The number of people living in abject poverty is decreasing at an unprecedented rate. Capitalism has played a major role in lifting people out of such poverty, yet many raise legitimate concerns. Does capitalism hurt the poor? Promote materialism? Harm the environment? Allow the rich to get richer at the expense of everyone else? Is capitalism really the best system for organizing societies and the economies that keep them running? This edited volume of articles by noted economists and theologians takes an honest and empathetic look at capitalism and its critiques from a biblical perspective.
Author: Rodney Stark
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2007-12-18
Total Pages: 304
ISBN-13: 158836500X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKMany books have been written about the success of the West, analyzing why Europe was able to pull ahead of the rest of the world by the end of the Middle Ages. The most common explanations cite the West’s superior geography, commerce, and technology. Completely overlooked is the fact that faith in reason, rooted in Christianity’s commitment to rational theology, made all these developments possible. Simply put, the conventional wisdom that Western success depended upon overcoming religious barriers to progress is utter nonsense.In The Victory of Reason, Rodney Stark advances a revolutionary, controversial, and long overdue idea: that Christianity and its related institutions are, in fact, directly responsible for the most significant intellectual, political, scientific, and economic breakthroughs of the past millennium. In Stark’s view, what has propelled the West is not the tension between secular and nonsecular society, nor the pitting of science and the humanities against religious belief. Christian theology, Stark asserts, is the very font of reason: While the world’s other great belief systems emphasized mystery, obedience, or introspection, Christianity alone embraced logic and reason as the path toward enlightenment, freedom, and progress. That is what made all the difference.In explaining the West’s dominance, Stark convincingly debunks long-accepted “truths.” For instance, by contending that capitalism thrived centuries before there was a Protestant work ethic–or even Protestants–he counters the notion that the Protestant work ethic was responsible for kicking capitalism into overdrive. In the fifth century, Stark notes, Saint Augustine celebrated theological and material progress and the institution of “exuberant invention.” By contrast, long before Augustine, Aristotle had condemned commercial trade as “inconsistent with human virtue”–which helps further underscore that Augustine’s times were not the Dark Ages but the incubator for the West’s future glories. This is a sweeping, multifaceted survey that takes readers from the Old World to the New, from the past to the present, overturning along the way not only centuries of prejudiced scholarship but the antireligious bias of our own time. The Victory of Reason proves that what we most admire about our world–scientific progress, democratic rule, free commerce–is largely due to Christianity, through which we are all inheritors of this grand tradition.
Author: Eugene McCarraher
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2019-11-12
Total Pages: 817
ISBN-13: 0674242777
DOWNLOAD EBOOK“An extraordinary work of intellectual history as well as a scholarly tour de force, a bracing polemic, and a work of Christian prophecy...McCarraher challenges more than 200 years of post-Enlightenment assumptions about the way we live and work.” —The Observer At least since Max Weber, capitalism has been understood as part of the “disenchantment” of the world, stripping material objects and social relations of their mystery and magic. In this magisterial work, Eugene McCarraher challenges this conventional view. Capitalism, he argues, is full of sacrament, whether one is prepared to acknowledge it or not. First flowering in the fields and factories of England and brought to America by Puritans and evangelicals, whose doctrine made ample room for industry and profit, capitalism has become so thoroughly enmeshed in the fabric of our society that our faith in “the market” has become sacrosanct. Informed by cultural history and theology as well as management theory, The Enchantments of Mammon looks to nineteenth-century Romantics, whose vision of labor combined reason, creativity, and mutual aid, for salvation. In this impassioned challenge to some of our most firmly held assumptions, McCarraher argues that capitalism has hijacked our intrinsic longing for divinity—and urges us to break its hold on our souls. “A majestic achievement...It is a work of great moral and spiritual intelligence, and one that invites contemplation about things we can’t afford not to care about deeply.” —Commonweal “More brilliant, more capacious, and more entertaining, page by page, than his most ardent fans dared hope. The magnitude of his accomplishment—an account of American capitalism as a religion...will stun even skeptical readers.” —Christian Century
