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3 - The Protestant Sects and the Spirit of Civil Society

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 September 2009

Sung Ho Kim
Sung Ho Kim
Affiliation:
Yonsei University, Seoul
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Summary

But with the member of a Nonconforming or self-made religious community, how different! The sectary's eigene grosse Erfindungen, as Goethe calls them, – the precious discoveries of himself and his friends for expressing the inexpressible and defining the undefinable in peculiar forms of their own, – cannot but, as he has voluntarily chosen them and is personally responsible for them, fill his whole mind. He is zealous to do battle for them and affirm them; for in affirming them he affirms himself, and that is what we all like.

Matthew Arnold

INTRODUCTION: SOCIABILITY OF THE PURITAN BERUFSMENSCH

Weber's modern self was predicated on the existential meaninglessness of this world; and yet the attendant psychological anxiety generated a most active sort of this-wordly agent he called the Berufsmensch. It reflected an attitude that sought with fanatical zeal to renounce and, moreover, to transform this world for the sake of the other world. In this light, the most remarkable fact in Weber's genealogical account of the Berufsmensch was that a natural self of unhindered impulses and desires was seen as a part of this world to be conquered and transformed by means of reason and will. For the sociability of such a self, the existing mode of association also constituted a part of this world to be renounced. Thus, the proud civic patriotism of Machiavelli's time was regarded as the deification of the creaturely.

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Max Weber's Politics of Civil Society , pp. 57 - 94
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2004

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