Andreas Buss

The concept of adequate causation and MaxWebers comparative sociology of religion

ABSTRACT

Max Webers The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, studied in isolation,shows mainly an elective afnity or an adequacy on the level of meaning betweenthe Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism. Here it is suggested that Weberssubsequent essays on The Economic Ethics of World Religions are the result ofhis opinion that adequacy on the level of meaning needs and can be veried bycausal adequacy.

After some introductory remarks, particularly on elective afnity, the papertries to develop the concept of adequate causation and the related concept ofobjective possibility on the basis of the work of v. Kries on whom Weber heavilyrelied. In the second part, this concept is used to show how the study of the econ-omic ethics of India, China, Rome and orthodox Russia can support the thesisthat the spirit of capitalism, although it may not have been caused by the Protes-tant ethic, was perhaps adequately caused by it.

KEYWORDS: Elective afnity; adequate causation; objective possibility;Protestant ethic; world religions

Max Webers essays on the Economic Ethics of World Religions, i.e. hisessays on China, India and ancient Judaism, as well as the planned essayson Islam, early Christianity and Russian Orthodoxy (Schluchter 1984: theappendix), and even his articles on the antique and especially the Romanculture may be interpreted as a comparative universal history of capitalism.Indeed, Weber thought that capitalism in a general sense has existed inmost advanced cultures. Certainly, when he talked of capitalism Weber didnot mean the uncontrolled impulse to acquisition, the simple pursuit ofgain or of money, for this pursuit has been common at all times and in mostcountries among coachmen, dishonest ofcials, crusaders and waiters, and,as Weber said, this nave idea of capitalism should be given up once and forall. By capitalism in a general sense Weber meant the pursuit of pro t bymeans of continuous rational enterprise and by formally peaceful exchange(Weber 1958a: 17) which can exist among traders and moneylenders and

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can also take the form of political capitalism, for instance in colonial capital-ism or tax-farming.

While being well aware of these different manifestations of capitalism inWestern history as well as elsewhere, Weber was mainly interested in theparticular kind of capitalism which developed in Western society in the lastseveral centuries: modern Western capitalism. He described it as rational-capitalistic organization of formally free labour, based on free marketexchange and on the separation of business from the household, for thesatisfaction of the needs of the masses (Weber 1958a: 212; 1968: 164).1Within this system may be found at least at the time of its early develop-ment the spirit of capitalism, identied with the rational tempering ofthe irrational impulse of gain, based on calculations in terms of capital andresulting from the religious doctrine of proof (Bewhrung). In his ProtestantEthic (henceforth, PE) Weber mainly, although not exclusively, tried tounderstand (verstehen) this spirit of capitalism, a certain style and conductof life which a century or two after the Reformation appeared to have aclose elective afnity with the religiously oriented ethical rationalism of theProtestants.

Most present-day scholars of Webers PE see the relationship between theProtestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism as one of elective afnity or ofhomologic structures and not of causality (Fischoff 1968: 81). The theoremof elective afnity (Wahlverwandtschaft) originated in the natural sciences:the Swede Torbern Bergmann wrote De attractionibus electivis in 1782, refer-ring to the fact that in anorganic chemistry elements may form combi-nations which can later be dissolved in favour of others. Goethe, who hadhis own view of the natural sciences, interpreted these phenomena ofnatural law described by Bergmann as resulting from inclination, affectionor attraction, and he transferred these ideas and the German term whichdescribed them (Wahlverwandtschaft) to the realm of interhuman relation-ships.2 Goethes gurative use of the term was later adopted by Weber intwo different contexts and he attached to it two different meanings. On theone hand, it is true that it is used by Weber to indicate meaningful adequacy(Sinnadquanz) or afnity of meaning of religious concepts and motives inrelation to each other and in relation to the total construct of meaning towhich they belong. For instance, ethical (emissary) prophecy had, accord-ing to him, a profound elective afnity to the conception of a supra-mundane personal God (Weber 1920: 257), the dogma of predestinationhad an elective afnity with a systematic conduct of life as opposed to singlegood deeds, and the Protestant feeling of being a tool and not a vessel ofGod tted well into the whole religious world view although no causalrelationships are implied here. Similarly, the devout Hindu was accursed toremain within the structure of the karma doctrine (Weber 1921: 121) whichformed a meaningful whole resulting from the non-causal elective afnitiesof its parts.

On the other hand, Weber wished to place his methodology beyond theone-sided alternatives of materialism and idealism so that when he spoke,

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for instance, of an elective afnity between the spirit and the form of capital-ism (Weber 1978: 171) or between Calvinism and capitalism (op. cit.: 305),he wanted to reject any type of reductionism and he also wished to implythat any assertion about the manner and the general direction of causalrelationships, while not excluding reciprocal in uences, must be the resultof further historical research, not a methodological one.

It is in this second sense which does not exclude causal relationships ifthey can be established by historical research that Weber used the termWahlverwandtschaft in the PE. He knew that for the historian the method ofVerstehen provides no guarantee of empirical truth, if it is not complementedby a method which can establish causal relationships. Adequacy at the levelof meaning, as he said, needs to be veried by causal adequacy.

This was achieved by Weber in The Economic Ethics of World Religions(henceforth, EEWR), part of his Collected Essays in the Sociology of Religion,which were not intended as well-rounded monographs but rather empha-sized those elements in the respective cultures in which they differed fromWestern civilization. While Webers wife Marianne (Weber 1975: 333) wrotethat the essays on the EEWR contribute to the characterization of Westernman and his culture, and while it may also be true that before the publi-cation of his essays on India and China there lay Webers discovery, asSchluchter (1989: 45) puts it, that the whole of Western culture not onlyits economic aspects, but also its law, its organizational aspects and even itsmusic is permeated by a specic mode of rationalism which needed to becharacterized further by contrasting it with the different modes of rational-ism in non-Western cultures, it should nevertheless not be forgotten thatthese essays also constituted an attempt to verify and to validate the PE-thesis within the context of a universal history of capitalism.3 In fact, it wasone of Webers main historical and sociological interests, even in his studieson the Economic Ethics of World Religions, to establish the cause or thecauses of those particular aspects of modern Western capitalism which dis-tinguish it from all other forms and manifestations of capitalism.

As Weber talked of the causal imputation of the spirit of modernWestern capitalism to the religious ethic of Protestantism, or more gener-ally of the attribution of a concrete effect to a concrete cause, it may not besuper uous to ask ourselves how he thought to achieve this causal imputa-tion and what he meant by the terms cause or causation in a socio-historicalcontext. For an answer, we shall go back to the work of the distinguishedphysiologist v. Kries (1888) on which Weber heavily relied (Weber 1949:167) and then to the essays on The Economic Ethics of World Religionswhich can serve to apply v. Kries theory.

ADEQUATE CAUSATION ACCORDING TO V. KRIES

It is an axiom, says v. Kries, that every event which actually occurs, wasnecessarily produced by the totality of all previously existing circumstances

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many of which are often unknown to us. But if this is so, what do we meanwhen we attribute a concrete event to a single cause? In order to show this,we must rst clarify the notion of objective possibility.

If we say that an event is objectively possible, we mean that we areuncertain about its occurrence or non-occurrence because we do not knowall its conditions and all the surrounding circumstances, for under clearlydened conditions the notion of objective possibility cannot be applied.But the same notion imposes itself when the conditions and circumstancesof an event are only partially or generally known and when we wish to con-sider the relationship of an effect to these general or partial conditions. Forinstance, it is indeed objectively possible that, while playing at dice, the sixcomes up ten times in a row, for there is nothing in the general conditionsand circumstances of playing at dice which might necessarily prevent thisparticular outcome. But it is also objectively possible that the six nevercomes up.

We also say occasionally that a certain person could have done or knownthis or that. In such cases we abstract from the given particular thoughtsand preoccupations which existed at the time of the event in question, aswell as from the psychological make-up of the person under consideration,and refer only to that part of the circumstances which is of particular inter-est to us, namely the physical or intellectual capacities or the social positionof that person. We thus assert the compatibility of a certain action with apart of the total conditions involved. It might be argued, for instance, thatChamberlain could have stopped Hitler by not accepting the Munich agree-ment, if one abstracts from the political situation in Europe at the time andfrom his personal characteristics and refers only to his position as primeminister of Britain. On the whole, therefore, we may talk of the objectivepossibility of an event under generally or partially dened conditions, ifsuch determinations of the conditions are conceivable which would,according to our experience and nomological knowledge, produce theevent.

This notion of objective possibility will now be used in the context ofcausal relationships. Without any doubt, only the total complex of all con-ditions which produced a result may be called its cause in the strict senseof the term. But sometimes another sense of the terms cause and causationplays an important role, and this was particularly so in German legalthought which in Webers time was much concerned with the problem ofcausality. We might say, for instance, that certain generally dened con-ditions or circumstances represent a larger or smaller possibility of bring-ing about a given result (e.g. driving under the inuence of alcoholincreases the possibility of an accident). The question is, then, how suchgeneral statements about causal relationships might in uence the evalu-ation of concrete cases.

Before we return to this question, some preliminary remarks are neces-sary. According to v. Kries (1888: 22), the question regarding the causalityof a certain circumstance or factor is equivalent to the question of what

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would have happened in a particular case if from the total context of con-ditions this circumstance or factor had been absent while all others hadremained unchanged. Therefore, we shall say that a circumstance may beconsidered to have caused an effect if it can be shown that the same effectwould probably not have occurred without it. But what do we mean whenwe talk about the same effect?

To be sure, we deny the causality of any factor not only if without it theeffect would have occurred in the same way, but also if its absence wouldhave produced only an unimportant modication of the effect. It is clear,therefore, that we are not interested in the effect with all its concrete details,but rather in a generalized idea of it. For instance, if we ask whether acertain medication has caused somebodys death, we want to know whetherhe would also have died without taking this medication but not whether hewould have died in exactly the same position or in the same corner of hisroom.

Finally, the following distinction needs to be made: if a given factor hascaused an effect, the causal nexus may be either general or a peculiarityof the given case. The following example taken from v. Kries will clarifythis:

If a coachman who is driving a passenger is drunk or falls asleep and thusmisses his way, and if then the passenger is killed by lightning, it may besaid that the sleep (or drunkenness) of the coachman has caused the deathof the passenger. For if the coach had been on the right way, it wouldwithout a doubt have been at a different location at the time of the thun-derstorm and the passenger would probably not have been hurt. But onecan perhaps say that there is here no general connection between theabove-mentioned cause and the effect in all cases of drunkenness, althougha causal connection is undeniable in this particular case. Moreover, ingeneral, a traveller can also be hit by lightning, if the coachman is awake.

Matters are quite different if, in the same example, instead of being hitby lightning, the coach had been overturned and the traveller had in thisway been hurt or killed. In this case one would have to assume not only anindividual but a general causal relationship between the sleeping of thecoachman and the accident; one might say that in our experience the sleep-ing of a coachman, although it does not necessarily always cause an acci-dent, generally does increase the possibility and probability of an accident(v. Kries 1888: 25 sq.).

The purpose of these reections will become clear with the help of thenotion of objective possibility as it permits a general or abstract consider-ation of a causal relationship between a single factor and an effect. A theorywhich knows of no other causal relationship than that B always is the effectof A and which thus asserts the regularity of an effect without any excep-tion, often appears to be fruitless, for the relationship between a singlefactor and an effect often is not of such nature. But, as opposed to a causaltheory which assumes an absolute regularity of the causal relationship, it isoften possible to say that a causal element augments the objective possibility

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of an effect or that the presence of a causal element produces a certaineffect in a much larger variety of circumstances.

In order to have short terms to designate the two variations in theexample of the sleeping coachman, v. Kries talks of adequate and ofchance causation. A is called the adequate cause of B, and B the adequateeffect of A, if generally (in the large majority of possible circumstances) Amay be seen to favour B; in the opposite case he talks of chance causation.In the above example the drunkenness of the coachman was the chancecause of the effect that the traveller was killed by lightning; it would,however, have to be considered as the adequate cause in the modiedexample where the overturn of the coach resulted in the death of the trav-eller.

It is perhaps useful to point to a frequently occurring confusion whichtends to result from the misunderstanding of the fact that there is a basicdifference between an event which is considered to be the chance causeof an effect and an insignicant event. Weber used the example of the twoshots red in Berlin in March 1848 which were, according to him, causallyinsignicant (Weber 1949: 185).4 One would speak of chance causationand impute the March Revolution to those two shots only if it could beargued convincingly that without them the social and political circum-stances would not have produced a revolution. In fact, though, it is onlyconceivable that the two shots have had an in uence on the precisemoment of the outbreak.

It must be stressed that the distinction between an adequate cause and achance cause does not refer to the manner in which in a concrete case acausal factor produces an effect, but that it has an abstract meaning. It isassumed that the causal factor is a behaviour or an event which can beadded in the scientists mind to a manifold variety of circumstances.Equally, the effect which may or may not have been favoured by the cause,remains generally dened and not described in all its details. The distinc-tion between adequate and chance causation is always based on a general-ized consideration of a particular case, the result of mental manipulationsand comparisons, by which the degree of objective possibility is intendedto be grasped, not, however, on the objective causality of the events.

It should also be noted that in v. Kries theory of causality, which, as hasbeen seen, is based on the notion of objective possibility, a clear dividingline between adequate and chance causality cannot be drawn. The steadytransition follows from the fact that the general causal conditions for anyeffect may take any value between 0 and 1. If, for instance, a train accidentforces a traveller to spend a few hours at an unexpected location where hecatches an infectious disease and dies, we might say that the train accidentwas a chance cause of his death. We would, however, be inclined to con-sider the death to be slightly more adequately caused, if the accident hadhappened in an area which is known to be disease-ridden. In fact, in thisparticular case the increase in the risk may be great though the resultantprobability is still small. It should perhaps be mentioned in passing here

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that, as Hart and Honor (1985: 493) have noted, there is a standing dangerof confusion, if adequacy theory is misunderstood, between the notion ofa substantial increase of a risk and that of increasing the risk to a substan-tial one.

If one wanted to characterize the theory of adequate causation, onewould have to view it at some distance from many modern scientic out-looks. Platonic thinking is nowadays rather rare, and yet one misunder-stands the term adequate causation if one thinks of it in any but a Platonicsense i.e. that true adequate causation is an ideal to which real life situ-ations approximate more or less. Weber said that it admits gradations butthat one cannot arrive at numerical estimates (Weber 1949: 181 sq.). WhenTurner and Factor (1981: 25) who have tried to t adequate causationtheory into the Procrustean bed of modern probability theory criticize theconcept by suggesting that its only requirement for a claim of causal con-nection was a plausible claim of a relationship of conditionality and adependent probability of greater than zero and that it is difcult to seewhat proof means here, they think in the more modern terms oftrue/false which apply to propositions, rather than in the terms of lesstrue/more true which apply to types or ideal types of reality itself.

The distinction between an adequate cause and a chance cause can,according to v. Kries, easily be used in criminal law where it has to bedecided whether someone is responsible for a criminal act. Our sense ofjustice seems to suggest that a person is responsible only for the adequateconsequences of his actions. If, for instance, someone who in a street ghtwas slightly injured by a knife later died of tetanus, one would normally saythat the ght was the chance cause and not the adequate cause of hisdeath, because in general experience supercial knife wounds do not resultin death. In a legal system which accepts the notion of adequate causation,the opponent would then not be held responsible for the death.

WEBERS USE OF THE CONCEPT OF ADEQUATE CAUSATION

The work of v. Kries, not well known outside of Germany, has had few recentinterpreters or even analysts. S. Turner and R. Factor (1981) have com-plained about the enormous arbitrariness of v. Kries theory with regard tothe degree and way of generalizations and to the problem of selecting theright description, and they thus seem to hint at the necessity of searchingfor a universally valid xation of problems and concepts within the culturalsciences.5 This was not Webers view when he introduced some of v. Kriesthoughts into his theory of science. Nor did Weber in his later writings, asTurner and Factor suggest, appear to become disenchanted with v. Kriesdoctrine.

Max Weber had, of course, been trained as a lawyer and was quite famil-iar with legal theory. Having seen the fruitfulness of v. Kries work in legaltheory, especially in the work of Radbruch, he applied it to the historical

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and cultural sciences. Like v. Kries, Weber thought that reality is a hetero-geneous continuum, a stream of immeasurable events which, because ofthe interdependence of all events, is innitely complex. But scienticinvestigation can only grasp a nite and ever changing portion of this in -nite reality and of the causal connections within it by concentrating onthose aspects which acquire meaning and cultural signicance for us or forthe historian, i.e., which become historical individuals. Weber wentbeyond v. Kries in concentrating on those aspects of the innite web ofreality which acquire meaning and cultural signicance for us, i.e., whichbecome historical individuals, and then in perceiving these historical indi-viduals as genetic ideal types which the scientist constructs in order to clarifyreality and in the expectation of a possible causal relationship and whichhe then uses as hypotheses for causal imputations.6

It seemed to Max Weber that apart from the question of subjective guilt the legal expert and the historian or social scientist ask exactly the samequestion: under what circumstances and in what sense can it be assertedthat an event or a person has caused a certain effect and therefore thatthe ideas developed by v. Kries can and should be applied to the study ofuniversal history. Both the judge and the historian do not explain causallythe total course of events as that would be impossible and meaningless.While the judges deliberations take into account those components of theevents which are pertinent for the subsumption under the legal norms, thehistorian is exclusively concerned with the causal explanation of those ele-ments of the events in question which are of general signicance andhence of historical interest (Weber 1949: 170).

The battle of Marathon serves as an example. By the end of the nine-teenth century, the Greek victory in the battle of Marathon of 490 BCbetween the Athenian army under Miltiades and the Persian army of KingDarios the Great was considered to have been of such importance for thesubsequent development not only of Greek culture but of Western culturein general that the Baron de Coubertin did not hesitate to add theMarathon run of approximately 42 km to the list of Olympic competitions,in memory of the Athenian soldier who had run the same distance fromMarathon to Athens in order to announce the victory and had then diedof exhaustion. If the Persians had been victorious so it was thought theywould probably have imposed a theocratic regime in Greece as they haddone in Israel and Egypt a few decades earlier; the providers of oracles andmystery cults would have dominated the polis, and Greek culture with itsphilosophy, tragedy, sculpture, etc., the seedbed of Western civilization,would never have blossomed.

In Webers words, the battle decided between the independence ofGreek culture and a Persian-dominated theocracy which, in the case of aPersian victory, would have been objectively possible (although we cannotstate the degree, between 0 and 1, of this objective possibility), for, accord-ing to our general knowledge of the Persians, the course of events wouldhave been different in its general outlines and in those features the

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cultural values which depended on the Athenian victory which are sig-nicant for Western man. (It should be added in passing that this is thereason why Western man, according to Weber, rates Marathon higher thana battle between two African tribes). Weber concludes that it is not the casethat a Persian victory must have led to a quite different development of Hel-lenic culture but a different development would have been the adequateeffect of a Persian victory.

ADEQUATE CAUSATION AND THE ECONOMIC ETHICS OF WORLDRELIGIONS

The notions of objective possibility and of adequate and chance causationare equally useful in the interpretation of Webers investigation of thecauses of the spirit of modern capitalism. The thesis of the causal relevanceof the Protestant ethic meant for him that modern capitalism, with itsunchanged general characteristics, and quite apart from all its concretedetails, probably would not have appeared without this causal element.

This thesis, namely that the Protestant ethic is an adequate cause andnot simply a cause, and denitely not the only cause, and probably not eventhe only adequate cause, and perhaps not the most important adequatecause of the modern capitalist spirit, is at the centre of Webers com-parative sociology of religions. Within the eld of the cultural sciences,according to Weber, we can only have knowledge of adequate causes, andto say that an event was necessarily caused by previous conditions, would bea pure a priori. A thesis about adequate causation presupposes, as has beenshown, a judgment of objective possibility; in Webers case it presupposes ajudgment on what we can imagine to be the effect, according to the rulesof experience, if in the total complex of the historical conditions of moderncapitalism we assume the Protestant ethic to be either absent or modied.A judgment about what might have happened under different circum-stances would at rst sight perhaps be called irrational, but Weber does notsimply rely on the imagination of what might have happened.

In order to be able to arrive at a reasoned judgment, Weber turns towardshistorical analogies of the most different time periods and cultural areas.Ideally he would like to nd a historical course of events which coincideswith the development towards modern capitalism in all economically rele-vant respects except for the Protestant ethic. Weber does not nd thislogical ideal but he can show that, in spite of conditions in India and especi-ally China which were at times and as a rule favourable for the developmentof capitalism (high esteem for wealth, signicant technological knowledge,wars between competing states, etc.), capitalism of the modern occidentalkind was not born there (although political capitalism did exist), while inthe occidental cultural area, wherever the Protestant ethic took root,modern capitalism developed, even sometimes under the most unfavour-able and miserable conditions, for example among the Puritans of New

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England. Weber, therefore, draws the conclusion that the objective possi-bility of the independent emergence of modern capitalism, when theProtestant ethic is absent, must be considered as small, for, in the absenceof this causal factor, the other existing conditions and circumstances leadus to expect a high degree of possibility of another development.

It is possible to go one step beyond this argument. Weber was not onlyable to show, by means of intercultural comparison that, when the Protes-tant ethic was absent, modern capitalism as a rule did not arise (although,obviously, it could be imported from outside), but he also indicated thatsimilar rationalethical in uences among certain other sects in other cul-tural areas (e.g. some Russian Old-Believers and sects or the Jains and Val-labhacarins of India) (Weber 1958a: 197, (footnote 12)), although they didnot produce capitalism of the modern Western kind, nevertheless resultedin economic rationalization and success (v. Schelting 1934: 305) comparedwith the surrounding population of the same cultural area. This seems toindicate an adequate causal relationship between the ethics of certain kindsof sects and a generalized concept of capitalism. It is the paradox of allrationalethical asceticism as can be seen in the history of many monas-teries that it itself produces the wealth which it rejects. Not only asceticprotestantism but also certain other religious communities characterized bya religiously oriented asceticism and rationalism of the conduct of life havehad a revolutionizing effect on economic activity and pushed it in the samedirection and the realization of this fact in turn strengthens the Protes-tant ethic thesis, if one wishes to interpret it not only as a thesis about elec-tive afnity, as most scholars who know only the PE and not the EEWR do,but also as a thesis about adequate causation. It is true, though, that thereligious communities in question (some ascetic sects before the Reforma-tion, some monastic orders, some Russian sects) have not been closelystudied by Weber with the partial exception perhaps of the Jains, aboutwhom he wrote a few pages in his essay on India. The apparent positiverelationship between religion and economic success in the case of the Val-labhacarins and the Russian sects has been studied more recently (Ltt1987 and Buss 1989).

Some other possible explanations of the development of modern capital-ism were rejected by Weber. Technical advances, for instance, can certainlyfavour capitalist growth, but historical experience teaches that they aloneare not generally able to overcome traditionalism and to contribute to theformation of a new economic structure. In ancient Rome the capitalisticdevelopment was highest when the technological development had endedand the technical knowledge of the Chinese remained without practicalapplications (Weber 1924a: 451 and Weber 1959: 243). Similarly, theincrease of the reserves of precious metal can accelerate an already exist-ing economic development, but historical experience (e.g. in PtolemaicEgypt) shows that precious metals alone do not create a new economicstructure. It should also be remembered that, after the discovery ofAmerica, the ow of gold and silver to Spain produced a recession and not

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an increase of capitalistic development (Weber 1924b: 17 sq., 185 sqq.;Weber 1981: 353). And, nally, the existence of rational law cannot gener-ally, out of itself, change the prevailing circumstances in the direction ofmore modern capitalism. In Rome, for instance, the highest degree ofrationality in the legal system was attained only after the conclusion of thecapitalistic development (v. Schelting 1934: 113).

Technical advances, precious metal-resources and rational law, there-fore, although not irrelevant, cannot be held to be adequate causes ofmodern capitalism. Other phenomena mentioned by Weber, e.g. popu-lation increase, the development of autonomous cities or commercialroutes, etc., would perhaps merit some consideration but have not beenstudied comparatively as causes of capitalism by Weber.

The low degree of the objective possibility of the independent develop-ment of modern capitalism without the Protestant ethic, the developmentof modern capitalism even under otherwise unfavourable circumstanceswhere the Protestant ethic predominated, further the high degree of objec-tive possibility of rational economic activity within the sphere of in uenceof rationalethical sects in non-Western cultural areas, and nally his rejec-tion of other, though less investigated, possible causes of modern capital-ism have led Weber to the conclusion that the causal in uence of theProtestant ethic was very high (Weber 1978: 325), that it was the adequatecause of modern capitalism, although, obviously, it is never possible, in thehistorical imputation of an effect to a cause, to arrive at a numerical ratio.

It has thus perhaps been shown that The Economic Ethics of WorldReligions must not only be interpreted in relation to Webers discovery ofa specic mode of rationalism in Western culture, but also as the method-ologically necessary consequence of his discovery in the PE that there is anelective afnity between certain aspects of protestantism and the spirit ofcapitalism. In the EEWR Weber proceeded to establish a relationship ofadequate causation assuming the precise understanding of this delicatenotion as formulated by v. Kries between certain ideal, typically renedphenomena, while in the PE he had, to a large extent, only established elec-tive afnity. Weber had perhaps referred to a yet undened plan of thiskind in the sibylline remark, made in 1908 in response to one of his critics,that the Gegenprobe (Weber 1978: 54) of his PE, although promised, was stilllacking.

The interpretation of the term Gegenprobe, apparently used by Weber onlyonce, is not without difculties, but it probably refers to what in the Anglo-Saxon literature on Weber is termed control-test and what the Frenchinterpreters call, much more clearly, validation causale indirecte.

This leads to a nal point. When H. Tyrell (1990: 132) sums up thepremises and intentions of the PE-essay and then declares that Weber neverplausibly or systematically explicated the power and efcacy of religionwhich he rather took, in the wake of Nietzsche, to be self-evident, he simplyignores all the Gegenproben of the EEWR which Weber had undertaken inhis later years. By revealing relationships of adequate causation, Weber

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indeed also established the efcacy of religion, at least the adequateef cacy (sit venia verbo).

In any case, Weber did not minimize the signicance of causal adequacyin his later writings, and the unity of Max Webers theory of science ofwhich Henrich (1952) spoke is perhaps more than the result of a Skinner-ian mythology of coherence.

(Date accepted: October 1998) Andreas BussUniversit Sainte-Anne,

Canada

NOTES

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1. A more complete denition woulddistinguish between the capitalistic enter-prise and the capitalistic system which canonly develop under the rule of law andwhen the administration of the monetarysystem has been monopolized by the State.

2. See Benno von Wieses Editorial Noteon Goethes novel Die Wahlverwandt-schaften, in: Goethes Werke, HamburgerAusgabe, Vol. VI, 1989, p. 675.

3. References to this Problematik aretoo frequent to be ignored, e.g. MaxWeber 1920: 12, 265, 373 sqq, 447, 512;1921: 110 sqq, 122, 203 sqq.

4. Julien Freund (1968: 66) erroneouslybelieved that the two shots were, inWebers thought, the chance cause of therevolution of 1848. He did not distinguishbetween insignificant events and suchevents which can be considered to be thechance cause of other events.

5. This is also and particularly so whenthey explain certain aspects of Weberstheory of ideal types by his lack of know-ledge of modern logic and of Frege(Turner and Factor 1981: 17).

6. Within the context of an investi-gation of certain phenomena chosenbecause of their cultural signi cance, anhistorical exposition may then be gov-erned by the assumption that the causes towhich an effect is imputed, have to beregarded as the sufcient conditions (MaxWeber 1949: 168), but they are not in factsufficient for the result, as Turner andFactor (1981: 10) like to think.

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