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

Abstract

Max Weber characterized the values constituted in ascetic Protestantism that resulted in an inner-worldly asceticism. Karl Marx elucidated the first stage of manufacture, a form of capitalism characterized by precapitalist production processes. When these values interpenetrated an economy at the first stage of manufacture, they generated the spirit of capitalism, which resulted in systematic and sustained capital accumulation. My reconceptualization of Protestant religious commitments clarifies how they led to the rationalization of the first stage of manufacture and thus resulted in systematic capital accumulation leading to machine capitalism. My characterization of religious commitment in (Sunni) Islam shows that while the economic preconditions for the development of machine capitalism, the first stage of manufacture, were sometimes present in Islamicate lands, Islamic religious commitments neither rationalized economic production nor created a tendency toward capital accumulation. In consequence, they did not result in machine capitalism.