That observation is, for Weber, the nub of the matter, the crucial discrepancy that needs to be explained. Early on in the book, Weber makes it clear that he is not talking just about money. For him, a capitalistic enterprise and the pursuit of gain are not at all the same thing. People have always wanted to be rich, but that has little to do with capitalism, which he identifies as ‘a regular orientation to the achievement of profit through (nominally peaceful) economic exchange.’52 Pointing out that there were mercantile operations – very successful and of considerable size – in Babylonia, Egypt, India, China, and mediaeval Europe, he says that it is only in Europe, since the Reformation, that capitalist activity has become associated with the rational organisation of formally free labour.53
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,’ a singular absence of interest in the worldly pleasures that such wealth could buy. Many entrepreneurs actually pursued a lifestyle that was ‘decidedly frugal.’54 Was this not odd? Why work hard for so little reward? After much consideration, carried out while he was suffering from depression, 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.’55 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 idea that the highest form of moral obligation of the individual, the best way to fulfil his duty to God, is to help his fellow men, now, in this world. In other words, whereas for the Catholics the highest idea was purification of one’s own soul through withdrawal from the world and contemplation (as with monks in a retreat), for Protestants the virtual opposite was true: fulfilment arises from helping others.56 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 fervour, and without that fervour the organisation of labour that made capitalism so different from what had gone before would not have been possible.
Weber was familiar with the religions and economic practices of non-European areas of the world, such as India, China, and the Middle East, and this imbued The Protestant Ethic with an authority it might otherwise not have had. He argued that in China, for example, widespread kinship units provided the predominant forms of economic cooperation, naturally limiting the influence both of the guilds and of individual entrepreneurs.57 In India, Hinduism was associated with great wealth in history, but its tenets about the afterlife prevented the same sort of energy that built up under Protestantism, and capitalism proper never developed. Europe also had the advantage of inheriting the tradition of Roman law, which provided a more integrated juridical practice than elsewhere, easing the transfer of ideas and facilitating the understanding of contracts.58 That The Protestant Ethic continues to generate controversy, that attempts have been made to transfer its basic idea to other cultures, such as Confucianism, and that links between Protestantism and economic growth are evident even today in predominantly Catholic Latin America suggest that Weber’s thesis had merit.
Darwinism was not mentioned in The Protestant Ethic, but it was there, in the idea that Protestantism, via the Reformation, grew out of earlier, more primitive faiths and produced a more advanced economic system (more advanced because it was less sinful and benefited more people). Others have discovered in his theory a ‘primitive Arianism,’ and Weber himself referred to the Darwinian struggle in his inaugural address at the University of Freiburg in 1895.59 His work was later used by sociobiologists as an example of how their theories applied to economics.60
Nietzsche paid tribute to the men of prey who – by their actions – helped create the world. Perhaps no one was more predatory, was having more effect on the world in 1900, than the imperialists, who in their scramble for Africa and elsewhere spread Western technology and Western ideas faster and farther than ever before. Of all the people who shared in this scramble, Joseph Conrad became known for turning his back on the ‘active life,’ for withdrawing from the dark continents of ‘overflowing riches’ where it was relatively easy (as well as safe) to exercise the ‘will to power.’ After years as a sailor in different merchant navies, Conrad removed himself to the sedentary life of writing fiction. In his imagination, however, he returned to those foreign lands – Africa, the Far East, the South Seas – to establish the first major literary theme of the century.
Conrad’s best-known books, Lord Jim (1900), Heart of Darkness (published in book form in 1902), Nostromo (1904), and The Secret Agent (1907), draw on ideas from Darwin, Nietzsche, Nordau, and even Lombroso to explore the great fault line between scientific, liberal, and technical optimism in the twentieth century and pessimism about human nature. He is reported to have said to H. G. Wells on one occasion, ‘The difference between us, Wells, is fundamental. You don’t care for humanity but think they are to be improved. I love humanity but know they are not!’61 It was a Conradian joke, it seems, to dedicate The Secret Agent to Wells.
Christened Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, Conrad was born in 1857 in a part of Poland taken by the Russians in the 1793 partition of that often-dismembered country (his birthplace is now in Ukraine). His father, Apollo, was an aristocrat without lands, for the family estates had been sequestered in 1839 following an anti-Russian rebellion. In 1862 both parents were deported, along with Józef, to Vologda in northern Russia, where his mother died of tuberculosis. Józef was orphaned in 1869 when his father, permitted the previous year to return to Kraków, died of the same disease. From this moment on Conrad depended very much on the generosity of his maternal uncle Tadeusz, who provided an annual allowance and, on his death in 1894, left about £1,600 to his nephew (well over 100,000 now). This event coincided with the acceptance of Conrad’s first book, Almayer’s Folly (begun in 1889), and the adoption of the pen name Joseph Conrad. He was from then on a man of letters, turning his experiences and the tales he heard at sea into fiction.62