Good Works & what Weber actually wrote

[Terrance Flaherty]

Otto wrote:
> >
> 
> That would be indeed a misreading because Business itself has become the
> Invisible Hand, the driving force behind history, as the narrator explains.

Is it Business itself that has become the Invisible Hand (Smith's term)?
In other words, 
is business itself the Visible Hand (Chandler's term)? 
Business, what is it anyway? I sell books on the corner for coffee
money. And GM sells cars. We are both in business. 


What is Friedman's (Lexus and the Olive Tree) term? Electronic Herd.
Hmmmm, all very interesting. It's Chandler that I like, on the USA
Visible Hand. Friedman is fun to read. He's a good story teller. Not
sure he understands much of the depth of any of the many disciplines he
tries to introduce to the reader with his wonderful little anacdotals
and his far too many silly metaphors and analogies. The Golden Straight
Jacket is almost too stupid for the book, which is a very fun and
readable introduction to globalization (a term I hate and don't think
means very much at all, as I have said previously). Chandler says that
the Visible Hand is management (specifically the managerial structure
that developed in the Rail Roads and has been with us ever since)  in
the USA Firm. 

I don't think Mr. Pynchon is an expert on economic theory or business
history, but he knows enough and he knows how to use a good book like
I.G. Farben and look things up in the Encyclopedia of Social Sciences.
It has been suggested that Pynchon or at least the RC makes some kind of
connection between the postmodern "globalized" economic forces, the
global Firm and the giant trading India companies. 

> 
> In Weber's religion-sociology I've read indeed what I'd known before as a
> prejudice that in former times Roman-Catholic had meant more poverty and
> less education.
> 
> But maybe the 17th & 18th-century belief in the Jesuit or
> Popish conspiracies have been a necessary impulses for the development of
> the Puritan belief that God loves you for being economically successful:
> 
> "In those days (...) passing as in a glide, thro' the Country, safe inside a
> belief as unquestioning as in any form of Pietism you could find out there
> he, yes little JWL, goeth likewise under the protection of a superior
> power,-- not, in this case, God, but rather, Business. What turns of earthly
> history, however perverse, would dare interfere with the workings of the
> Invisible Hand?" (411.6-11)
> 
> This refers to Adam Smith (1776) and turns the phrase used at GR 30.30
> upside down:
> 
> "A market needed no longer be run by the Invisible Hand, but now could
> *create itself*--its own logic, momentum, style, from *inside*."
> (GR 30.30)
> 
> Steven Weisenburger:
> "An allusion to Adam Smith's famous metaphor in *The Wealth of Nations*.
> Arguing for the beneficial prospects of a true laissez faire economy, Smith
> reasons that anyone seeking his own benefit will also be guided, as though
> by an unseen force, to benefit his society. Such a person, he claims,
> "neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is
> promoting it. By preferring the support of domestick to that of foreign
> industry, he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry
> in such a manner as its product may be of greatest value, he intends only
> his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by *an
> invisible hand* to promote an end which was no part of his intention" (456,
> emphasis by W.). A large vein of Protestant belief in Providence and
> election lies beneath Smith's metaphor (...)." (Weisenburger, 1988, p. 31)

Yes, Sombart's "A life of its own." 


> 
> This is much more critical of Protestantism than of Catholicism. JWL's
> business has a lot to do with metal, is "against living Bodies,-- cutting,
> chaining, penetrating sort of activities,-- a considerable Sector of the
> Iron Market, indeed, directed to offenses against Human, and of course,
> animal flesh (...)" (412.3-6), but nevertheless he draws some kind of
> religious experience of "purity" out of this (6-9), a point of view that is
> rejected and criticised by Cherrycoke (11-21).
> 
> Otto

Thanks Otto