Islam, Christianity and the Development of Machine Capitalism: The Weber Hypothesis Revisited

This paper analyzes the autonomous effects of religious commitment on the development of machine capitalism. I explicate the logic of Max Weber’s analysis in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, providing both a characterization of the economic preconditions for the institutionalization of machine capitalism, and a reconceptualization of the nature of ascetic Protestantism. My characterization of Protestant religious commitments makes clear how they led to the rationalization of the first stage of manufacture (Marx’s formal subsumption of labor under capital), created the “spirit of capitalism,” and thus resulted in systematic capital accumulation leading to machine capitalism. I then characterize the nature of religious commitment in (Sunni) Islam, arguing that while the economic preconditions for the development of machine capitalism were sometimes present in Islamicate lands, Islamic religious commitments neither rationalized economic production, created a tendency towards capital accumulation, nor created the “spirit of capitalism.” Thus, Weber was correct both in assigning an autonomous role to ascetic Protestantism in the genesis of machine capitalism, and in denying a comparable role to Islam.