The German Genius

free labor . 42
    Weber was also fascinated by what he thought to begin with was a puzzling paradox. In many cases, men—and a few women—evinced a drive toward the accumulation of wealth but at the same time showed a “ferocious asceticism.” Many successful entrepreneurs actually pursued a lifestyle that was “decidedly frugal.” Why work hard for so little reward? After much consideration, Weber thought he had found an answer in what he called the “this-worldly asceticism” of Puritanism, a notion that he expanded by reference to the concept of “the calling,” a form of economic Bildung. 43 Such an idea did not exist in antiquity and, according to Weber, it does not exist in Catholicism either. It dates only from the Reformation, and behind it lies the (Pietist) idea that the highest form of moral obligation of the individual, the best way to fulfill his duty to God, is to help his fellow men, now, in this world. Whereas for Catholics the highest ideal was the purification of one’s own soul through withdrawal from the world (as with monks in a retreat), for Protestants the virtual opposite was true.
    Weber backed up these assertions by pointing out that the accumulation of wealth, in the early stages of capitalism and in Calvinist countries in particular, was morally sanctioned only if it was combined with “a sober, industrious career.” Idle wealth that did not contribute to the spread of well-being, capital that did not work , was condemned as a sin. For Weber, capitalism, whatever it has become, was originally sparked by religious fervor, and without that fervor the organization of labor that made capitalism so different from what had gone before would not have been possible.
    Weber also focused on bureaucracy and on science. There were two faces to bureaucracy, he said. Modern societies couldn’t do without bureaucrats and he thought that Germans have displayed a better talent for rational administration than other nationalities, this having something to do with the idea of Bildung, which he thought was in decline in his day. Necessary as they were, bureaucrats, he thought, always risked stifling innovation, as had happened in China in medieval times, and that was one reason why Bildung was so important.
    In his famous address, “Wissenschaft als Beruf” (Science as a Vocation), delivered in 1917, he found science hoist by its own petard, in that he thought originality could only come from increased specialization that, important as it was, was also a form of impoverishment, both for the individual scientist, who could never cultivate his “whole soul” in this way, and for the rest of us, in that through science we would become progressively disenchanted, magic would be removed from the world, as would meaning. Weber thought that scientific concepts, even when they weren’t scientific pseudoconcepts, were bloodless abstractions incapable of capturing the reality of life. Science could not offer meaning, he said; it could offer nothing we can base our values on. We are therefore left to create our own values without ever being able, even in principle, to know that they are right. This is our predicament. His analysis is almost as bleak as Nietzsche’s.
    Weber wasn’t as angered by modernity as some of his colleagues were. He wasn’t an unmitigated admirer, but he knew he had to be involved . 44 Perhaps that is why he has in general been more influential and is better remembered.
     
     
    These last two chapters have marked the emergence of “ Kulturkritik ,” a new philosophical and literary genre and an early indication of a pattern that would flourish in the twentieth century—the idea of cultural crisis and cultural pessimism. Involving warnings about the imminent cultural collapse of German Kultur , this was one of the ideas that helped propel the Conservative Revolution in Weimar Germany in the 1920s and made the rise of National Socialism possible. 45

Dissonance and the Most-Discussed Man in Music
     
    T he progression—Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Wagner, which had occupied the century from 1780 to 1880—might seem an unparalleled peak in musical history. But in the run-up to World War I there was another burst of creative energy in the German-speaking lands, which produced Johannes Brahms, Hugo Wolf, Johann Strauss I, Johann Strauss II, Richard Strauss, Gustav Mahler, Anton Bruckner, Max Reger, and Arnold Schoenberg. The well of musical