Weber’s Protestant Ethic deploys interpretive categories and constructs a narrative that leaves social actors little alternative other than–live like the Spirit of Capitalism itself–escaping the “iron cage” (stahlhartes Gehause) that their actions and spirit have played no small role building. The machine-like character of this casing, the ineluctibility of its advance, its comprehensive reach, the totality of its grasp, suggests a system from which there is no exit. To escape from the iron cage will require that you break out of it, that you blow it up. As a consequence, Weber’s understanding of human agency under capitalist modernity is such that, should it express its agency, its freedom, its will, it can only find itself at odds with the world it has constructed. Moreover, if we blow the machine up, we risk destroying our world. The “responsible” thing to do, therefore, is to bear with the machine and express our freedom indwardly, mentally, thoughtfully, but always responsibly, recognizing that even our thoughts and inward reflections could intentionally or not get caught in the gears and send some corner of the world careening out of control toward distruction.
Ernst Renan’s What is a Nation? is a very different piece. In it Renan rejects a long list of popular and academic ways of identifying the nation. He settles, at the end of his article, on a definition that is active, dynamic, dependent on the specific conditions of each nation. More specifically, he invites us to reflect on those who have given their lives constructing the nation; and, so, he finds the nation in that community of memory that we build out of our memories of those who have sacrificed on behalf of the nation. But, for this reason, his criteria for membership in the nation is those who recall these sacrifices and are prepared to make them anew.
The combination of Weber and Renan is potentially toxic. On the one hand is an interpretation of capitalist modernity that allows no pathway out of capitalism that does not destroy the machine and, with it, those wedded to the machine. (I think here of the words that Fritz Lang places in the mouth, I think, of the foreman, to the effect that by destroying the machine, the workers flood the workers city and kill all of its occupants, so that working and preserving the machine become necessary for the workers’ very survival.) Freedom is dangerous because it at no point articulates with the machine that simultaneously preserves us while enslaving us. On the other hand, our very meaning might be wrapped up in our willingness to die and in our actually dying in order to perpetuate our deepest, most fundamental, identity.
This suggests a tragic and provocative PROBLEM FORMATION.