In March 1907 Aby Warburg read the first edition of Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism and responded enthusiastically.1 He called it ‘magnificent’ (prachtvoll) in his journal, adding ‘We must have him [Weber] for Hamburg.’2 To his wife Mary, he wrote that the essay was among ‘the most impressive’ texts he had read since the works of Thomas Carlyle and Hermann Osthoff.3

Warburg read The Protestant Ethic at an important moment, as he was painstakingly drafting his essay ‘Francesco Sassetti’s Last Will and Testament’4 in isolation in Berlin, and he claimed the treatise gave him the courage of his convictions in his own work. The overlap of Weber’s and Warburg’s interests is clear: both explore the emergence of a modern turn of values towards active involvement in the world, towards the rational exploitation of natural resources or trade opportunities for the accumulation of wealth. Both were tracing the development by which, in the West, the otherworldly demands of religion turned towards an ethical interaction with the larger world. For Warburg at the time, this was a process of enlightened reconciliation, part of the civilizing process; for Weber, it was part of a more ambivalent development of Western modernity.

Yet the fundamental incompatibility of the sociologist’s bold thesis about the origins of capitalist modernity and the art historian’s interrogation of the afterlife of antiquity is equally clear, and an examination of the latter’s response in the light of his own work has led commentators to characterize Warburg’s reading of Weber as idiosyncratic.5 Warburg claimed to find important confirmation in Weber of his own exploration of the process by which Sassetti, a merchant in the service of the Medici, balanced a deeply felt religiosity with worldly concerns in quattrocento Florence. But if the sociologist was concerned with the same issue – the way Christian values came to be harmonized with worldly life – his argument was very different. Weber traced the development of a methodical mode of living orientated towards the accumulation of wealth combined with a worldly ascetic lifestyle to Protestant, and particularly Calvinist, notions of vocation and predestination. His argument was, in fact, that the secular advances of modern capitalism did not find fertile soil in Catholic Renaissance Florence, as had been asserted by Werner Sombart in his Modern Capitalism of 1902 and repeated, in qualified and contradictory form, in several works thereafter.6

Bernd Roeck and Charlotte Schoell-Glass have pointed to some of these contradictions and also noted the strong identificatory aspect of Warburg’s reading of Weber. In his notes and letters to his wife, the art historian seems to have been most affected by the pathos of Weber’s discussion of the Protestant ethic: the demand for an ascetic life that must nonetheless be orientated towards secular and worldly pursuits, what Weber called the ‘iron cage’ (stahlhartes Gehäuse) of duty, of selfless toil in a calling that had become detached from the deep values that once gave it meaning.7 In The Protestant Ethic, Warburg found deeply affecting terms by which to understand his discomfort with his own Jewish and mercantile Hamburg environment – but in a description of Calvinism and other Protestant sects. Thus we find in his private writings a deeply personal reading of Weber, one that seems to conflate a ‘Jewish’ with a ‘Protestant’ ethos; while in his published work, Warburg refuses to argue in the open with Weber about whether the origins of capitalism are to be found in Catholic Italy or in the Protestant new world.

Warburg sent his Sassetti study to Weber, and Bernd Roeck has located and published Weber’s polite reply.8 That would seem to be the end of the Weber–Warburg dialogue. But a closer looks reveals two things: first, it shows some good grounds for Warburg’s rejection of Weber’s thesis, as well as reasons not to engage in open debate; and second, it points to a longer afterlife of this exchange, both in and beyond Warburg’s and Weber’s work. And if Warburg’s complex response leaves him open to accusations that he was a careless reader of Weber, the sociologist’s writings show his own inability to get to grips with the work of the art historian. Teasing out the complexities of this interchange allows important historiographical and epistemological concerns to come into focus around the complex issues of both ‘spirit’ and capitalism in the early twentieth century.

2 Aby Warburg (right) with his brothers (left to right) Paul, Felix, Max and Fritz, 1929. Photo: Warburg Institute, London.

When Weber wrote to Warburg to thank him for sending a copy of the Sassetti essay, it seems at first glance that the sociologist had understood the art historian quite well. Weber was fascinated by the simultaneous presence, in Sassetti’s testament, of mutually exclusive sets of values and approaches to the world, by Warburg’s attention to conflicting Weltanschauungen that could nonetheless be reconciled or held in some sort of balance. We can call these Weltanschauungen sacred and secular – or Christian and world-denying, on the one hand, and ‘pagan’ and world-affirming on the other. Weber wrote that he found Warburg’s account ‘extremely convincing’, and points to the way the essay captured:

Weber understands, in other words, Warburg’s attention to contradiction. Yet he reads the Florentine situation backwards through the lens of his own conclusions about the Protestant ethic, seeing in the Renaissance merchant an incomplete historical state, more particularly an inability to achieve a ‘new style of life’. He implies a teleology tending towards capitalist modernity, but this teleology in fact contradicts what he described as a fateful coincidence of value-rationality (Wertrationalität) and means–end rationality (Zweckrationalität) that produced, by a historical accident, the ideological preconditions for the development of a modern economy, one in which the desire to display the worldly signs of God’s grace paradoxically led to the methodical pursuit and generation of wealth. This casts light on the differences between the two scholars and suggests that there are methodological reasons for Warburg’s reluctance to get to grips with Weber’s real thesis. For Weber was looking for a unified point of view, a consistent set of values that would characterize a powerful ethic and would create a consistent ‘style of life’. Wilhelm Hennis, perhaps the most important recent commentator on Weber, has analysed the ‘spirit’ of capitalism as the principle behind a consistent form of the conduct of life, and indeed finds in the question of Lebensführung the central problematic of the sociologist’s entire oeuvre.10 Hennis’s argument, which seeks to redefine the relation of Weber’s work to the academic sociology that followed in its wake, is corroborated by the pithy but peculiar response to Warburg. Warburg, for his part, found no consistent styles of life or of art in history, but rather discontinuities and contradictions, agonistic negotiations between competing values and beliefs that could be reconciled but resisted identity. In his letter, Weber sees such clashes as a sign of incomplete development; and while Warburg implied at times a similar teleology, he was more interested in these inconsistencies and came to see them as constants of human history.

The difference was not merely one of temperamental or methodological inclination. At the time of the so-called Methodenstreiten, or methodological debates in the human sciences, much more was at stake. Warburg’s attention to contradiction, his refusal to focus on form alone, and his rejection of linear development and neat periodization  dization amount to an implicit critique of prevailing art-historical models of style. This model represented a compelling convergence of idealism, formalism and historicism that saw in visual form a more or less faithful image of a historically specific spirit or world view, a constellation perhaps most powerfully expressed in Heinrich Wölfflin’s famous remark that one could see the spirit of the Gothic as clearly in the shoes worn at the time as in the greatest cathedrals.11 It was an unstable convergence, creating methodological conundrums and inviting both circular reasoning and cliché; but the model and its problems were at the centre of Alois Riegl’s important conception of the Kunstwollen, Wölfflin’s sophisticated but ambivalent attempt to define the visual root of form, and Erwin Panofsky’s neo-Kantian exploration of ‘symbolic form’. All of these attempts involved the need to abstract from works of art the common denominator of a consistent visual style, the conviction that such a visual idiom expressed something essential about a culture – its ‘spirit’ – and the axiom that this common form alone was an adequate expression of the culture.

The likes of Riegl, Wölfflin and Panofsky were attuned to the methodological problems of this view, but they were equally attached to the paradigm. And the specificity of Warburg’s art-historical practice lay in his rejection of it. Though notes of the time reveal a conviction about the ‘organic’ nature of a culture, he drew attention to the stylistic discontinuities in word and image; he insisted on the complex and sometimes contradictory textuality of the visual; and he resisted the attempts to characterize cultures as harmonious or unified. In his essay on ‘Pagan-Antique Prophecy in Words and Image at the Time of Luther’, for example, he wrote as follows of Raphael’s frescos for the tomb of Agostino Chigi at Santa Maria del Popolo:

The formal beauty of these figures and the exquisite taste with which the artist reconciles pagan and Christian belief, must not be allowed to obscure the truth that even in Italy, around 1520, at the time of greatest artistic freedom and creativity, the antique was – as it were – revered in the form of a Janus-faced herm. One face wore a daemonic scowl, exacting superstitious awe; the other face was Olympian and serene, inviting aesthetic veneration.12

The serenity, balance and anthropocentric forms of the High Renaissance cannot, in other words, be taken as evidence of a consistent, harmonious humanist culture. Warburg took images to be symptoms rather than essences, and dealt with them as singular artefacts rather than examples of a type. And if his alternative conceptual framework formed around anthropological poles of myth and enlightenment, Aberglaube and Besonnenheit, created its own problems, Warburg’s interest in the afterlife of antiquity played havoc with usual periodizations and productively troubled historicist assumptions about historical time.13

Compared with Warburg’s mix of philological positivism and methodological modesty or scepticism, Weber’s work looks rather different, for all its sophistication. Weber worked with abstractions that combined the characteristics of the diverse phenomena of history, fully aware, at least in his methodological writings, that they never existed in pure form: he called these abstractions ‘ideal types’, and indeed ‘capitalism’ and ‘the Florentine bourgeoisie’ were two examples.14 He was also aware that the process of concept formation was rooted in the present and had no claim for absolute historical validity. The ‘ideal types’, he writes in the second edition of The Protestant Ethic, are ‘absolutely necessary, in order to bring out the characteristic differences’, but also ‘in a certain sense [do] violence to historical reality’.15 Such concepts were abstractions that unified and harmonized, that neatly packaged the past into unproblematic entities that simply did not exist. Weber was attuned to the risks of his conceptual tools, the trap of hypostatization, but parted company with orthodox neo-Kantians by seeing the types more as a concentrate of historical reality than the result of mere reflection. In Joachim Radkau’s, words the types were, for Weber, ‘structurally present within reality and not just projected into it by the human mind.’16 If for Warburg there was no one, fundamental ‘spirit’ of the Renaissance, or for that matter capitalism, it was precisely such a ‘spirit’ that Weber, Sombart and others at the time sought.

Indeed the orthodox art-historical approach based on the concept of style – the ‘ideal type’ par excellence – was often taken as a model by the economists of the younger Historical School of Political Economy and the sociologists who emerged from it. Weber discusses Riegl’s notion of the Kunstwollen extensively in his fundamental methodological essay ‘Der Sinn der “Wertfreiheit” der soziologischen und ökonomischen Wissenschaften’, written in 1913 and published in Logos in 1917/18. Though he found it productive, Weber finds problems in a history of art in which aesthetic judgments inevitably play havoc with causal accounts. This problem of the ‘heteronomous’ way in which the objects of art history are given to the knowing subject notwithstanding, he notes that ‘in the field of painting, the delicate modesty of the problematic in Wölfflin’s Classic Art is a quite outstanding example of the achievements possible in empirical work.’17 Sombart refers to the work of Wölfflin in writing that the task of the economist was to identify the ‘stylistic context’ of economic systems as art historians had identified the ‘spirit of the Gothic’,18 and Max Scheler praised Sombart’s success in discovering the ‘strict inner stylistic unity [Stileinheit]’ of historical economies.19 In his magisterial essay on the state of hermeneutics between the wars, published in the Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte in 1921/2, Karl Mannheim treats the work of Riegl, Sombart and Weber as related attempts to determine historical world views.20 For all his circumspection, Weber was working within this problematic; Warburg was not.

The argument that Warburg read in 1907 was, certainly, an extraordinary one. Weber saw the emergence of modern capitalism in the West as the result of a particular convergence. In his terms, the path to modernity was opened by the fact that means–end rationality, so characteristic of the modern economy and domination of nature, could lay claim to Western culture only when it became value-rational. The Calvinist belief in predestination, and in the signs of worldly success as evidence of God’s grace, led to a religious drive behind an ascetic, methodical organization of life combined with the ruthless quest for financial gain. And the argument led to extraordinary conclusions. First, Weber asserted that capitalism had irrational roots, or roots that were based on religion and not instrumental logic: the desire to display the signs of grace. And second, that capitalism had become irrational once again: once these two forms of rationality converged, leaving subjects locked into the need for a calling in the absence of other values, modern industrial society no longer needed the religious bases of its origin. The result was rationality and specialization, the ascetic drive for the accumulation of wealth without the belief in God’s grace or any other values, what Weber called the ‘iron cage’ of capitalism.

With its compelling logic and extraordinary derivation of a specifically modern form of alienation, the argument spoke to Warburg, though the art historian clearly rejected both Weber’s methodological presuppositions and indeed his conclusions. And we see in his work how Weber turned a deaf ear to Warburg’s implicit objections. The reasons are clearly the hermeneutic habits of thought that I have explored elsewhere as the result of romantic anti-capitalism, the positing of a unified spirit and culture in the past that was, in fact, a fantasy, a projection onto the past of precisely the qualities of life that were felt to be missing from an alienated present. Already in the first edition of The Protestant Ethic we see the search for a unified ‘spirit’ as a causal factor. We see the positing of a corresponding ‘style of life’ as the root of capitalism, not as the result of practical imperatives or opportunities (and here we must leave aside entirely the question of Weber’s complex engagement with Marx). In the book, Weber echoes the Kulturkritik of his time that bemoaned the loss of unity: Goethe, he writes, ‘tried to teach us the basic ascetic motive of the bourgeois style of life – if it is indeed to be Style and not its lack’.21 The lack of style of contemporary life, its failure to develop a unified spirit and culture, was of course a commonplace of contemporary thought. Cut off from values and from spirit, life was no longer, says Weber, the expression of a style. Style – an abstraction, a concept – was at some level very real for Weber. As attuned as he was to the risks of his conceptual tools, the risk of hypostatization, the ideal type had its own energy that led it to be taken by Weber as historical and social reality.22 In the second edition, Weber shows more such tendencies. For one, he removes the sceptical quotation marks around the notion of the ‘spirit’ of capitalism.23 And he inserts a long footnote on Leon Battista Alberti, the Florentine humanist and son of a businessman. In one of his responses to The Protestant Ethic, Sombart had pointed to Alberti’s simultaneous piety and practical economic attitude; Weber insists that his religion was merely formal, that he was ‘inwardly already emancipated from … the tradition of the Church’.24 The Renaissance figure as resolutely secular, with a clear-cut attitude and style of life: it is as if Weber had forgotten the case of Sassetti, Warburg’s lesson about how the things that matter in history and drive it are often those that make a mockery of ideal types and the concept of style, with their tendency to homogenize and hypostatize.

Yet significant though they are, these methodological differences should not blind us to larger and more significant implications of the brief meeting of minds between Weber and Warburg. Two points need to be made: first, that in his works on the Florentine bourgeoisie and on pagan-antique prophecy at the time of the Reformation, Warburg had wandered into a large debate on the origins of capitalism; and second, that he wanted absolutely no part in it. Studying the complex afterlife of antiquity in the Renaissance, Warburg was working from the same sources as, for example, Sombart in his Modern Capitalism, The Bourgeois, and other studies; in his work on Dürer and Luther, Warburg was covering much of the same ground as Weber and also Ernst Troeltsch, in his monumental work The Social Teachings of the Christian Churches of 1911;25 and in his work on the complex interrelations of religion, economies and culture, he was in the very same territory as Georg Simmel, whose Philosophy of Money appeared in 1900 and whose Religion appeared in 1906.26 And Warburg was surely aware that the common ground needed to be traversed very carefully. For as is now clear, the debates about capitalism were inseparable from debates about religion. With his sensitivity to anti-Semitism, for example, he knew well Sombart’s notorious The Jews and Economic Life of 1911, a book in which the author attributed the calculating and exploitative aspects of capitalism to a specifically Jewish ethic.27 Sombart’s book was later than the Sassetti essay, but it expanded on points Sombart had been making since 1903 while it fleshed out, with an extensive scholarly apparatus, the current tendency to equate Jews and the problems of a modern economy that was a mainstay of the anti-Semitism of the time. Thus another reason for Warburg’s resolute refusal to establish the sort of precise links between religious beliefs and economic ethos that are so obvious in the work of Weber.

Yet Warburg’s refusal to accept the terms of the debate that raged in this scholarly area came at a cost. His ‘Pagan-Antique Prophecy in Words and Images in the Age of Luther’, for example, looks dated compared with other writings of the time on the Reformation. Luther is the hero of Warburg’s account, remaining sceptical of Phillip Melanchthon’s intense engagement with astrology. For Warburg, Melanchthon’s attention to the astral arts reveals a ‘primitive, totemistic obsession with correspondences (as embodied in the pagan nativity cult)’, while Luther is cast as one of the ‘leaders of the struggle for historical objectivity’.28 Yet seeing Luther as the pioneer of an enlightened Christianity, answerable to individual thought and eschewing the pagan trappings and magical ritual of Catholicism, is a specifically nineteenth-century conception of the Reformation. It is a view espoused chiefly by perhaps the most influential theologian of the late nineteenth century, Albrecht Ritschl, who codified the view of Luther’s rejection of Rome as part of a German tradition of freedom of conscience; it is also in line with the nationalist, Prussian investment in Luther as representing a modern form of Christianity that was deeply implicated in Bismarck’s Kulturkampf.29 In Warburg’s time, Luther came to be cast in a much less favourable light. Ernst Troeltsch’s Reason and Revelation in Johann Gerhard and Melanchthon of 189130 was a first move in a new picture of Luther as a more ambiguous figure; and twenty years later in The Social Teachings of the Christian Churches, Troeltsch focused on Luther’s compromise with prevailing political powers and judged it harshly.31 Troeltsch’s work was key not only to Weber’s view of Protestantism,32 but also a line of thought that followed, privileging Thomas Münzer, opponent of Luther and rebel leader during the Peasants’ War, as the preeminent political theologian of Protestantism. Ernst Bloch, a student of Troeltsch and Weber, developed this critique of Luther in his expressionist Thomas Münzer as Theologian of the Revolution (1921), as did Hugo Ball in his left-wing but disturbingly anti-Semitic Critique of the German Intelligentsia (1919).33 Both works were acquired by Warburg’s library immediately upon publication; and if they arrived too late to be of use to Warburg, his lack of interest in Troeltsch’s earlier work implies that they might in any case never have been pressed into service.

And there is something else that separates Warburg (before his Kreuzlingen years) from the sociologists emerging from the Historical School of Political Economy and the critical theorists who followed. The project the sociologists set themselves was, in Weber’s words, to develop ‘historical and theoretical knowledge of the general cultural significance of capitalist development’, with the search for the origins of a modern economy the historical prerequisite of the enquiry.34 And the project was part and parcel of a critique of technological and economic progress. The discourse represented by figures such as Ferdinand Tönnies, Simmel, Weber and Troeltsch, so trenchantly labelled by Lukács as ‘romantic anti-capitalism’, was structured by a narrative of decline from pre-capitalist communities united by common values to an alienated capitalist society based only on the bonds of self-interest.35 The subtext of the historical projects was the feeling of cultural crisis at the turn of the century, which was also behind the urgency and pathos of the works of Weber and others. The potentially crude distinctions between the pre-capitalist and the present and the tendency toward an asymmetry of values in analysing cultures notwithstanding, such a standpoint was extraordinarily productive, especially in the subtle hands of Weber and Simmel. Weber’s thesis is typical: exploring the origins of the modern economic system, it allows a view of contemporary capitalism that reveals the causes of the alienation it engenders and the deeply irrational nature of its manifestations. Yet if the tone of the argument was very much of its time, Warburg’s thought again looks even more dated, often structured by simpler and unproblematized notions of enlightenment and myth. The will of Sassetti is analysed through a simple dichotomy of inward-looking piety and a secular, active approach to the world inspired by the ancients, with the latter privileged; and while Warburg establishes that Sassetti’s invocation of the figure of Fortuna and the pagan references in his impresa allow a complex negotiation of these conflicting beliefs, this tension is in no way simply overcome. Warburg shifts the terms somewhat in the Luther essay, with the Protestant form of Christianity and its alliance with an independent and enlightened approach to the world privileged over a backward belief in magic and a relinquishment of active control over the world. Here, too, Warburg’s work looks like a holdover from the previous century. He certainly believed that capitalist modernity represented an advanced, if always endangered, epistemological position, at least until the ‘Serpent Ritual’ lecture. In a statement of 1900 – he was writing to his brother Max, asking for funds for his library – he says that ‘capitalism is … capable of intellectual achievement of a scope which would not be possible otherwise’.36 Though framed triumphantly, it is an extraordinary statement, one that posits a link between the nature of knowledge and specific economic forms and that points to Weber’s theory of rationalism and rationalization, to Simmel’s exploration of modern intellectuality, and to Lukács’s analysis of reification. Yet we have a good sense of why it might have proved difficult for Warburg to develop this line of thought in a satisfactory way.

3 ‘Centaurus and Lupus’, from Christoph Semler, Coelum stellatum in quo asterismi (Magdeburg, 1731).

Thus, despite the subtlety of his micro-historical studies, Warburg’s terms remain ahistorical. It is the timeless starry sky that served Warburg as a figure for the transcendental ambivalence of both knowledge and the image in human thought, showing the possibilities of enlightenment always haunted by the tendency to fall into magical or mythic thought. ‘The celestial globe’, he said typically in a lecture of 1911, ‘the customary symbol of the heavenly vault, is a genuine product of Greek civilization arising from the dual gift of the ancient Greeks: their talent for the immediacy of a concrete poetic imagination and their power of mathematically abstract visualisation.’37 The gods the Greeks found in the sky, he writes in the ‘Pagan-Antique Prophecy’ essay, ‘were beings of sinister, ambivalent, and indeed contradictory powers: as star signs they expanded space, marking the way for the soul’s flight through the universe; as constellations they were also idols, with whom, as befitted the childlike nature of man, the mere creature might aspire to mystic union through devotional practices’.38

For Warburg here, the constellations were an ambivalent map of the heavens, the horizon of possible relations to the world. These differing possibilities, however, were transhistorical, not taking into account the specificities of modes of production and the varieties of political power. But for the two generations for whom capitalism came into focus as an object of study, one with its own very specific political, existential and epistemological puzzles, the skies were crowded with figures of thought, with Denkfiguren. Such figures give a sense of the various possibilities of knowledge in the terrain entered by Warburg, possibilities opened up by Weber and the debate over the emergence of economic modernity, but with the potential to point beyond the limitations of a merely romantic anti-capitalism. For the early Lukács, writing in the winter of 1914–15, however, there was as yet no contradiction in the heavens:

Happy are those ages for which the starry sky is the map of all possible paths – ages whose paths are illuminated by the light of the stars. Everything in such ages is new and yet familiar, full of adventure and yet their own. The world is wide and yet it is like a home, for the fire that burns in the soul is of the same essential nature as the stars; the world and the self, the light and the fire, are sharply distinct, yet they never become permanent strangers to one another, for fire is the soul of all light and all fire clothes itself in light. Thus each action of the soul becomes meaningful and rounded in this duality: complete in meaning – in sense – and complete for the senses; rounded because the soul rests within itself even while it acts; rounded because its action separates itself from it and, having become itself, finds a centre of its own and draws a closed circumference round itself.39

Here the mix of magic and calculation was an effective horizon for orientation. The anthropomorphic tendencies and the intermingling of the human and the divine created an adequate state of half-knowledge, allowing for the full unfolding of the subject; for all its irrationality it was preferable to a world drained of magic by the limitless instrumental knowledge of a calculable world, one understood through and dominated by means–end rationality. For the alternative was the knowledge of the lack of meaning. This is what had to be faced, in ‘manly’ fashion, by anyone who chose ‘Science as a Vocation’, the title of Weber’s famous speech to students at the University of Munich on 7 November 1917.40 But this lack of answers to the fundamental questions of life brought forth its own demons. Weber’s metaphors in this lecture are revealing; they hover between irony and argument. A world devoid of orientation was, said Weber, the ‘fate’ of modern man in a world he describes as one in which different world views, all equal and equally false in their denial of meaningless, fought for the allegiance of human subjects like the heathen gods.

Weber’s references to ‘fate’ here – a paradoxical characterization of a world devoid of magic – stands in sharp tension with his analysis of rationalism and complicates it. The relation between reason and conviction, however, takes place for him across a void and describes a sort of mise en abyme rather than generating a dialectic.

When Bloch looked to the heavens in Thomas Münzer, he seems to stay closer to Warburg’s than Weber’s interpretation but describes reason as politics instead of taking it as a reified category. Like Warburg, he saw in astrological habits a tendency that would undermine the positive energies of the Reformation. ‘Pagan pride’, he wrote, had played a role in the peasants’ revolt, but at a fateful moment, ‘their gazes went upwards, they sought to read [God’s] will in the stars.’42 The revolution fell prey to what Bloch in the second edition called (certainly after familiarity with Warburg) ‘this other side of the Renaissance, one not guided by the Muses but instead chiliastic’.43 This was his political commentary on Weber’s and Troeltsch’s Luther, one turned into a trenchant critique of capitalism. Luther’s ‘idolisation of the State’ led, he wrote, ‘to a new “religion”: capitalism as religion [which] inaugurated a veritable church of Satan’.44

‘Capitalism as religion’: this is the title of one of Walter Benjamin’s most compelling and mysterious writings, a fragment written in 1921 and inspired by Bloch’s phrase.45 We know from the bibliographical notes that are part of this fragment that it represents Benjamin’s reading of Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and Troeltsch’s Social Teachings of the Christian Churches.46 Benjamin seeks to turn the tables on Weber’s famous thesis: instead of seeing capitalism merely as religiously conditioned, he takes it to be a fundamentally religious phenomenon, a new religion in a godless world. In this he was perhaps simply following the metaphorics of Weber’s ‘Science as a Vocation’ to their conclusion, seeing the fate of capitalist rationality and disenchantment as inseparable from the revival of the pagan gods.47 In any case, capitalism creates simultaneously guilt and debt (both Schuld in German) and does so completely without dogma, but ‘serves essentially to allay the same anxieties, torments and disturbances to which the so-called religions offered answers’.48 Benjamin radicalizes Weber’s collapsing of the poles of rationality/capitalism and irrationality/religion but declines to prove his point, writing that, ‘We cannot draw closed the net in which we are caught. Later on, however, we shall be able to gain an overview of it.’49

‘We cannot draw closed the net in which we are caught’: this is a figure for a typical hermeneutical paradox, the impossibility of achieving knowledge from within a context and the simultaneous impossibility of escaping one’s own position as a place from which to know. But it is also an image that describes Warburg’s historical predicament particularly well. He was unable to address the tightly knotted questions of the relation of religion to capitalism, and capitalism to knowledge, because, as an assimilated Jew of a specific generation, he was caught in their net. In his Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiel (The origin of German tragic drama) of 1925/8, however, Benjamin would develop this paradox more fully and productively, interestingly enough using the Warburgian figure of the constellation that was thoroughly familiar to him. For the book, we know, was born under the ambivalent star of Warburg, intellectually productive but professionally a dead end.50 Many others have explored this elective affinity so I shall limit myself to a few comments. For one, Benjamin was no doubt impressed by the way Warburg managed to avoid the trap of the art-historical notion of style. Benjamin, too, had little use for bland concepts that subsumed complex works and reduced them to a common denominator. Style, or the ideal type, wrote Benjamin, was a fallacy: ‘As far as historical types and epochs in particular are concerned, it can, of course, never be assumed that the subject matter in question might be grasped conceptually with the aid of ideas such as that of the renaissance or the baroque.’51 Rejecting an easy approximation of concepts to the world to be known, he preferred an epistemology of the extreme:

It is … erroneous to understand the most general references which language makes as concepts, instead of recognizing them as ideas. It is absurd to attempt to explain the general as an average. The general is the idea. The empirical, on the other hand, can be all the more profoundly understood the more clearly it is seen as an extreme. The concept has its roots in the extreme.52

Benjamin gave limited credence to concepts in general, which were ‘spontaneous products of the intellect’ and not ‘ideas’, for which Benjamin claimed ontological validity.53 This was a distinction that broke the chains of neo-Kantianism in a way that created a speculative realm of thought instead of (like Weber) sinking into hypostatization.54

Like Warburg, Benjamin was interested in the way a work’s relation to its period exploded the ideal type. For while many have pointed out that Benjamin’s approach to the Baroque occurred in the wake of the contemporary art-historical rehabilitation of the period, they have not pointed to the way his work deviated from this tendency. If art historians such as Wölfflin and others found a proper style in the Baroque, one they said was equal to that of the Renaissance, Benjamin studies the work of this period as precisely not coalescing into a harmony, rather one that had no harmonizing principle because it was predicated on rupture, on the lack of coherence. It was the reverse projection of the romantic anti-capitalist plaint of the lack of unity in the modern age back onto previous centuries, a critique of the kind of thinking that served as the motor of the work of Wölfflin, Riegl, Weber and the early Lukács. And Benjamin worked out the anti-hermeneutical possibilities of knowledge by considering man’s relation to the heavens. ‘Ideas are to things’, he writes, ‘as constellations are to stars.’55

The conceptual space Benjamin opens up by his image of the stars is an extraordinarily complex one. He complicates Warburg’s sceptical sense of the constellation as a sort of map, one that gives orientation but whose image could assume an autonomous and threatening life of its own. For Benjamin, the stars or things have no meanings in themselves; this is to be found, as for the ancients, only in their configurations. But the constellation cannot tell us what the star is, just as the star has no power to determine its own position – it cannot see how we see it. The individual existence of the star is preserved, as the individual work of art is rescued from the reduction to style for Warburg. Yet the constellations are not simply there to grasp – they are too far away, empty without the stars and too dependent on the knowing subject’s own position. It is an image of knowledge in a world of fragments that cannot be reassembled into any easy form of meaning. It is balanced – or stranded – between the premodern plenitude of meaning and modern disenchantment, a position of debilitating stasis between different kinds of certainty. For Benjamin in the Trauerspiel book, this is the only epistemology possible under the conditions that Weber called – ironically? – the revival of the pagan gods’ fight for human allegiances.

4 Sandro Botticelli, Primavera, c. 1482, tempera on panel, 202 cm × 314 cm, detail. Uffizi, Florence.

Benjamin’s image of the stars was not the only such epistemological figure current in the wake of the sociologists’ account of the disenchantment of the world. In ‘The Mass Ornament’ of 1927, Siegfried Kracauer combines Weber’s account of rationalization with the traditional categories of art history in a new way.56 In the organic movement of the forms of the past, the ornaments of their dance, one could, Kracauer said, read the spirit of the age, the spiritual bonds of an organic community. One could do this in the present too – his example is the Tiller Girls – but such an exercise yielded another paradox: that the ornament had become autonomous, that it existed above the human subjects of which it was formed, that they no longer could see the ornament, understand their place within it. The search for spirit to be read in an unmediated way from form showed only the lack of spirit governing form in modernity.57

6 Albrecht Altdorfer, The Battle of Alexander, 1529, oil on panel, 158.4 cm × 120.3 cm, detail. Alte Pinakothek, Munich.

In these related figures of the limits of knowledge, both Kracauer and Benjamin are, no doubt, playing with a formulation of Nietzsche’s from The Birth of Tragedy: ‘It is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified – while of course our consciousness of our own significance hardly differs from that which the soldiers painted on canvas have of the battle represented on it. Thus all our knowledge of art is basically quite illusory.’58 But Benjamin and Kracauer lacked Nietzsche’s faith that allowed for the leap into the realm of the aesthetic.

Warburg was aware that progress was always precarious; by the time of the Serpent Ritual lecture, delivered in Ludwig Binswanger’s Kreuzlingen sanatorium, he saw that it was endangered from the inside. His description could come straight from Weber’s ‘Science as a Vocation’:

Our own technological age has no need of the serpent in order to understand and control lightning. Lightning no longer terrifies the city dweller.… Scientific explanation has disposed of mythological causation.… Whether this liberation from the mythological world view is of genuine help in providing adequate answers to the enigmas of existence is quite another matter.59

Indeed, the extraordinary fact is that the description might well have come from ‘Science as a Vocation’: letters show that Warburg was again reading Weber’s work while in Kreuzlingen.60 Like Weber, Warburg sees the risk that disenchantment itself could lead to the destruction of the distance he thought necessary to enlightenment: ‘The culture of the machine age destroys what the natural sciences, born of myth, so arduously achieved: the space for devotion, which evolved in turn into the space required for reflection’,61 into Denkraum. Like the constellations taken as gods, technology without Denkraum could become dangerously tangible, turning the transformative potential of science into the destructive forces once found in magic. In an essay of 1926 with the Warburgian title ‘To the Planetarium’, Benjamin described something similar. Like Warburg in the Serpent Ritual essay, and like him probably thinking about Weber, whose insights he valued but whose methodology he rejected, Benjamin saw a reversion to myth; like Warburg’s Melanchthon and Münzer’s peasants, he saw a return to the stars:

Nothing distinguishes the ancient from the modern man so much as the former’s absorption in a cosmic experience scarcely known to later periods.… [But] it is a dangerous error of modern men to regard this experience as unimportant and avoidable … it is not; its hour strikes again and again, and then neither nations nor generations can escape it, as was made terribly clear by the last war, which was an attempt at new and unprecedented commingling with the cosmic powers.62

7 Sternsaal in Hamburg Planetarium, c. 1930. Photo: Planetarium Hamburg.

Typically, he was ambivalent: the collective intoxication of cosmic experience had led to disaster but could nonetheless not be banished from modern culture. It could, however, become enlightened in the overthrow of the capitalist organization of this dangerous knowledge, redeemed by revolution. This was a different revolution from Bloch’s, one that kept a consistent view of the heavens as a guide for worldly action, however ambivalent, Janus-faced, Delphic.

The spectre of revolution was, we know, more than Warburg could handle, tainted as it was, so often, by anti-capitalism framed as anti-Semitism. But both the possibility of it and its failure were part of the complex moment of modernity that he, Weber, Benjamin and others were trying, over these decades, to grasp. It is a fascinating configuration of scholars who sought to determine the relationship of modernity to reason, deeply aware that the tools of reason were a net in which they stood but could not draw closed, scholars struggling for an overview but thematizing its impossibility. The view skywards gave no such overview, there was no map there of all possible paths. What we can say, however, is that even if Warburg only accidentally wandered underneath this sky, onto the terrain of a debate about the emergence of capitalism and the nature of knowledge possible under those conditions, there are ample signs that he did, nonetheless, leave his mark there.

My thanks to Claudia Wedepohl, Eckhart Marchand, Spyros Papapetros and Bernd Roeck, who sparked my interest in this topic in a lecture at the Warburg Institute many years ago.

1 Max Weber, ‘Die Protestantische Ethik und der ‘Geist’ des Kapitalismus’, Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, part 1, vol. 20, no. 1 (1904), pp. 1–54; part 2,: vol. 21, no. 1 (1905), pp. 1–110.

2 Quoted in Bernd Roeck, ‘Aby Warburg und Max Weber: Über Renaissance, Protestantismus und kapitalistischen Geist’, in Enno Rudolph (ed.), Die Renaissance und ihr Bild in der Geschichte, Die Renaissance als erste Aufklärung, vol. 3 (J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck]: Tübingen, 1998), pp. 189–205, here p. 205.

3 Ibid., p. 205.

4 Aby Warburg, ‘Francesco Sassettis letzwillige Verfügung’, in Kunstwissenschaftliche Beiträge August Schmarsow gewidmet (K. W. Hiersemann: Leipzig, 1907); Aby Warburg, Werke in einem Band (Suhrkamp: Frankfurt am Main, 2010); translated as ‘Fransesco Sassetti’s Last Injunctions to his Sons’, in Warburg, The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, trans. David Britt (Getty Research Institute: Los Angeles, 1999).

5 Roeck, ‘Aby Warburg und Max Weber’, op. cit.; Charlotte Schoell-Glass, Aby Warburg und der Antisemitismus: Kulturwissenschaft als Geistespolitik (Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag: Frankfurt am Main, 1998), pp. 109–16.

6 Sombart’s influential and widely read views on the origins of capitalism were complex and changing. In the first edition of his Der moderne Kapitalismus, he advocated a multi-causal view of these origins, arguing that the late medieval/early Renaissance Catholic Church created conditions in which merchant capitalism could thrive: Werner Sombart, Der moderne Kapitalismus, vol. 1, Die Genesis des Kapitalismus (Duncker and Humblot: Leipzig, 1902). He did not frame his views in terms of the importance of religion per se as the decisive factor in this development until one year later, in his Deutsche Volkswirtschaft im neunzehnten Jahrhundert, where he discussed specifically ‘the influence of quite immense proportions’ of the Jewish ‘spirit’ and ‘nature’ (Wesen) on the development of capitalism in Germany: Sombart, Die deutsche Volkswirtschaft im neunzehnten Jahrhundert (1903), 4th edn (Georg Bondi: Berlin, 1919), esp. pp. 112–19. He devoted an entire book in 1911 to his argument that the Jewish ‘spirit’ was key to the development of the capitalist ‘spirit’. The book was widely read, with 15,000 copies printed by the last (unchanged) edition of 1928. Sombart, Die Juden und das Wirtschaftsleben (1911) (Duncker and Humblot: Munich and Leipzig, 1928). In his 1913 Der Bourgeois, he specifically argues (now explicitly against Weber) that Catholicism was significantly more fertile ground for the development of capitalism than Puritanism: Sombart, Der Bourgeois: Zur Geistesgeschichte des modernen Wirtschaftsmenchen (Duncker and Humblot: Munich and Leipzig, 1913), passim. At the same time, however, he published studies on Luxus und Kapitalismus and Krieg und Kapitalismus (both Duncker and Humblot: Munich and Leipzig, 1913). Whether this palimpsest represents a subtle view of the complex interactions behind the development of a modern economy or is simply contradictory has been argued for the past century. Current appraisals of Sombart’s profuse and often belle-lettristic work tend towards the latter view. On the debate between Weber and Sombart regarding the origins of capitalism, see, from an extensive literature, Joachim Radkau, Max Weber: A Biography, trans. Patrick Camiller (Polity Press: Cambridge, 2011), pp. 204–7; Bernhard vom Brocke, ‘Werner Sombart, 1863–1941: Eine Einführung in Leben, Werk und Wirkung’, in Vom Brocke (ed.), Sombarts Moderner Kapitalismus’: Materialien zur Kritik und Rezeption (dtv: Munich, 1987), esp. p. 39ff; Hartmut Lehmann, ‘The Rise of Capitalism: Weber versus Sombart’, in Hartmut Lehmann and Guenther Roth (eds.), Weber’s Protestant Ethic: Origins, Evidence, Contexts (University of Cambridge Press: Cambridge, 1995); and Malcolm H. Mackinnon, ‘The Longevity of the Thesis: A Critique of the Critics’, in Weber’s Protestant Ethic.

7 ‘The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so. For when asceticism was carried out of monastic cells into everyday life, and began to dominate worldly morality, it did its part in building the tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order. This order is not bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which to-day determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force. Perhaps it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt. In [Richard] Baxter’s view the care for external goods should only lie on the shoulders of the “saint like a light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment”. But fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage.’ Weber, The Protestant Ethic, trans. Parsons, p. 181. See Radkau, Max Weber, op. cit., chapter 8; Gordon Marshall, In Search of the Spirit of Capitalism: An Essay on Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic Thesis (Hutchinson: London, 1982), and more generally Arthur Mitzman, The Iron Cage: An Historical Interpretation of Max Weber (Alfred A. Knopf: New York, 1969) and Lawrence A. Scaff, Fleeing the Iron Cage: Culture, Politics, and Modernity in the Thought of Max Weber (University of California Press: Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1989).

8 Roeck, ‘Aby Warburg und Max Weber’, op. cit., p. 205.

9 Ibid.

10 Wilhelm Hennis, Max Webers Fragestellung (J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck]: Tübingen, 1987) and Hennis, Max Webers Wissenschaft vom Menschen (J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck]: Tübingen, 1996).

11 I explore these issues in the first chapter of my book Blind Spots: Critical Theory and the History of Art in Twentieth-Century Germany (Yale University Press: New Haven and London, 2005).

12 Aby Warburg, ‘Heidnisch-antike Weissagung in Wort und Bild zu Luthers Zeiten’, Sitzungsberichte der Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philosophisch-historische Klasse, no. 26 (1920); ‘Pagan-Antique Prophecy in Words and Images in the Age of Luther’, in Warburg, The Revival of Pagan Antiquity, op. cit., p. 621.

13 This is explored most energetically (and controversially) in Georges Didi-Huberman, L’Image survivante: Histoire de l’art et temps des fantômes selon Aby Warburg (Les Éditions de Minuit: Paris, 2002).

14 The use of ‘ideal types’ is discussed most extensively in Max Weber, ‘Die “Objectivität” sozialwissenschaftlicher und sozialpolitischer Erkenntnis’ (1904), in Weber, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre (J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck]: Tübingen, 1922), pp. 146–214; ‘“Objectivity” in Social Science and Socal Policy’, in Weber, The Methodology of the Social Sciences, trans. and ed. Edward A. Shils and Henry A. Finch (The Free Press: New York, 1949), pp. 50–112. See also Hans Henrik Bruun, Science, Values and Politics in Max Weber’s Methodology (Ashgate: Aldershot, 2007), pp. 41–8, 207–38.

15 Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, op. cit., p. 233, n. 68.

16 Radkau, Max Weber, op. cit., p. 259. Radkau here draws on Helmuth Plessner’s brief but penetrating comments on the tensions within Weber’s epistemology: Plessner, ‘Erinnerungen an Max Weber’, in René König and Johannes Winckelmann (eds.), Max Weber zum Gedächtnis: Materialien und Dokumente zur Bewertung von Werk und Persönlichkeit (Westdeutscher Verlag: Cologne and Opladen, 1963), pp. 32–3.

17 Max Weber, ‘Der Sinn der “Wertfreiheit” der soziologischen und ökonomischen Wissenschaften’, in Weber, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre, p. 481ff, here p. 485. See also the slightly different translation of this passage in ‘The Meaning of “Ethical Neutrality” in Sociology and Economics’, in Weber, The Methodology of the Social Sciences, op. cit., p. 32.

18 Werner Sombart, Die drei Nationalökonomien: Geschichte und System der Lehre von der Wirtschaft (Duncker und Humblot: Munich, 1930), pp. 211–13, referring to Heinrich Wölfflin, ‘Das Problem des Stils in der bildenden Kunst’, Sitzungsberichte der Königlichen Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, vol. 31 (1912), pp. 572–8. On the relations between the ‘Younger Historical School’ of political economy and the historiography of art, see my The Werkbund: Design Theory and Mass Culture Before the First World War (Yale University Press: New Haven and London, 1996), pp. 75–81.

19 Max Scheler, ‘Der Bourgeois’, in Scheler, Abhandlungen und Aufsätze, vol. 2 (Verlag der Weissen Bücher: Leipzig, 1915), pp. 312–13.

20 Karl Mannheim, ‘On the Interpretation of “Weltanschauung”’ (1923), in Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge, ed. Paul Keckskemeti (Oxford University Press: New York, 1952). An interesting example of historical sociology that combines the historiography of art with the perspectives of Weber, Sombart, Simmel and Scheler is Alfred von Martin, Soziologie der Renaissance: Zur Physiognomik und Rhythmik bürgerlicher Kultur (Ferdinand Enke: Stuttgart, 1932); Eng. edn, Sociology of the Renaissance, trans. W. L. Luetkens (Kegan Paul: London, 1944).

21 ‘Daß die Beschränkung auf Facharbeit, mit dem Verzicht auf die faustische Allseitigkeit des Menschentums, welchen sie bedingt, in der heutigen Welt Voraussetzung wertvollen Handelns überhaupt ist, daß also “Tat” und ‘Entsagung’ einander heute unabwendbar bedingen: dies asketische Grundmotiv des bürgerlichen Lebensstils – wenn er eben Stil und nicht Stillosigkeit sein will – hat auf der Höhe seiner Lebensweisheit, in den “Wanderjahren” und in dem Lebensabschluß, den er seinem Faust gab, auch Goethe uns lehren wollen.’ Weber, ‘Die protestantische Ethik und der ‘Geist’ des Kapitalismus’, op. cit., pp. 107–8; see also the different translation in Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism and Other Writings, ed. and trans. Peter Baehr and Gordon C. Wells (Penguin: New York, 2002), p. 120. Weber is even more explicit in his response to one of his critics: ‘capitalism no longer appears to the most serious-minded people as the outward expression of a style of life founded on a final, single, and comprehensible unity of the personality’. Weber, ‘A Final Rebuttal of Rachfahl’s Critique of the “Spirit of Capitalism” (1910), in Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism and Other Writings, op. cit., p. 294.

22 And indeed, some of the most trenchant criticisms of Weber concern precisely this matter. Consider Joseph Schumpeter’s devastating dismissal: ‘So soon as we realize that pure Feudalism and pure Capitalism are equally unrealistic creations of our own mind, the problem of what it was that turned the one onto the other vanishes completely.’ Quoted in Peter Baehr and Gorden C. Wells, ‘Introduction’, in Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism and Other Writings, op. cit., p. xxviii.

23 As noted in Radkau, Max Weber, op. cit., p. 180.

24 Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, op. cit., pp. 196–8. Sombart discusses Alberti in Der Bourgeois, op. cit., pp. 278–9, 433. Weber and Sombart’s disagreement about Alberti is discussed in Marshall, In Search of the Spirit of Capitalism, op. cit., pp. 97–9.

25 Ernst Troeltsch, Die Soziallehren der christlichen Kirchen und Gruppen, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1 (J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck]: Tübingen, 1923); The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches, trans. Olive Wyon, 2 vols (Allen and Unwin: London, 1931).

26 Georg Simmel, Philosophie des Geldes (Duncker und Humblot: Leipzig, 1900). This is the first edition, which was acquired by Warburg; the second and final edition was published in 1907 and appeared in English as The Philosophy of Money, trans. Tom Bottomore and David Frisby (Routledge & Kegan Paul: London, 1978); Georg Simmel, Die Religion (1906; Rütten und Loenig: Frankfurt am Main, 1912).

27 The first edition in the Warburg Institute Library shows a few marks in Warburg’s hand. They are limited to the correction of typographical errors and a single ironic marginal comment on the putative recent decline in Jewish ‘sexual morals’.

28 Warburg, The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, op. cit., p. 611. Warburg recognizes, however, that Luther nonetheless believed in the significance of ‘natural’ portents.

29 Albrecht Ritschl, Die christliche Lehre von der Rechtfertigung and Versöhnung, 6 vols (Adolph Marcus: Bonn, 1870–4). Die christliche Lehre is not in Warburg’s library, though he did own Ritschl’s Fides implicita: eine Untersuchung über Köhlerglauben, Wissen und Glauben, Glauben und Kirche (Adolf Marcus: Bonn, 1890). In a recent exploration of Warburg’s ‘Pagan-Antique Prophecy’ and Benjamin’s Trauerspiel book, Jane O. Newman emphasizes Luther’s belief in portents and sees a significant compromise on his part, going on to construct a notion of a ‘Lutheran astrology’ in the Reformation. She also posits Warburg’s acceptance of what she sees as Luther’s position and the art historian’s belief ‘in the cohabitation of modernity with something like divine magic at a kind of primordial level in the German unconscious’, relating this to the Protestant war theology in the wake of Karl Barth’s interpretation of the position of the Church in the First World War. Though a fascinating and energetic reading of the material, I find it tends to distort Warburg’s position and also overcomplicates his understanding of Luther; as Newman writes, Warburg ‘does not explicitly rely on war theological claims’. Jane O. Newman, Benjamin’s Library: Modernity, Nation and the Baroque (Cornell University Press and Cornell University Library: Ithaca, 2011), chapter 3, here p. 164.

30 Ernst Troeltsch, Vernunft und Offenbarung bei Johannes Gerhard und Melanchthon: Untersuchung zur Geschichte der altprotestantischen Theologie (Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht: Göttingen, 1891).

31 See Troeltsch, The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches, vol. 2, pp. 467–515, 561–76. On Troeltsch’s revisions of the views of Ritschl, his teacher, see Harry Liebersohn, Fate and Utopia in German Sociology, 1870–1923 (MIT Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1988), pp. 45–51; on his social and political critique of Luther, pp. 58–60.

32 The relation between the thought of Ritschl, Troeltsch and Weber is discussed in W. R. Ward, ‘Max Weber and the Lutherans’ and in Friedrich Wilhelm Graf, ‘Friendship between Experts: Notes on Weber and Troeltsch’, in Wolfgang J. Mommsen and Jürgen Osterhammel (eds.), Max Weber and his Contemporaries (Unwin Hyman/The German Historical Institute: London, 1987) and in Graf, ‘The German Theological Sources and Protestant Church Politics’, in Hartmut Lehmann and Guenther Roth (eds.), Weber’s Protestant Ethic, op. cit.

33 Ernst Bloch, Thomas Münzer als Theologe der Revolution (Kurt Wolff: Munich, 1921; 2nd edn, Suhrkamp: Frankfurt am Main, 1972); Hugo Ball, Zur Kritik der deutschen Intelligenz (Der Freie Verlag: Bern, 1919); see Critique of the German Intelligentsia, trans. Brian L. Harris (Columbia University Press: New York, 1993).

34 ‘Geleitwort’, Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, vol. 19 (1904), p. v. The authorship of this text, published on Weber, Sombart and Edgar Jaffé’s assumption of the editorship of the Archiv, is discussed in Scaff, Fleeing the Iron Cage, op. cit., p. 84.

35 On romantic anti-capitalism, see Michael Löwy, Georg Lukács: From Romanticism to Bolshevism, trans. Patrick Camiller (NLB: London, 1979) and Michael Löwy and Robert Sayre, Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity (Duke University Press: Durham, North Carolina, 2001).

36 ‘Dass der Kapitalismus auch Denkarbeit auf breitester, nur ihm möglicher, Basis, leisten kann’: letter of 30 June 1900, quoted in E. H. Gombrich, Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography, 2nd edn (Phaidon: Oxford, 1986), p. 130.

37 Warburg, ‘Über astrologische Druckwerke aus alter und neuer Zeit’, lecture to the Gesellschaft der Bücherfreunde, Hamburg, 9 February 1911, quoted in Gombrich, Aby Warburg, op. cit., p. 199.

38 Warburg, The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, op. cit., p. 599.

39 Georg Lukács, Die Theorie des Romans: Ein geschichtsphilosophischer Versuch über die Formen der großen Epik (Paul Cassirer: Berlin, 1920), p. 9; and Lukács, The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature, trans. Anna Bostock (Merlin Press: London, 1971), p. 29 (translation modified).

40 Max Weber, ‘Wissenschaft als Beruf’, in Weber, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre, op. cit.; ‘Science as a Vocation’, in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. and trans. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (Oxford University Press: New York, 1958). On the date of the original lecture, see Radkau, Max Weber, op. cit., pp. 487–9.

41 Weber, ‘Wissenschaft als Beruf’, op. cit., pp. 546, 547, 551; ‘Science as a Vocation’, op. cit., pp. 148, 149, 152–3. The paradoxical relation of rationality and fate in Weber’s work is discussed in Peter Lassman and Irving Velody, ‘Max Weber on Science, Disenchantment and the Search for Meaning’, in Lassman and Velody (eds.), Max Weber’s ‘Science as a Vocation’ (Unwin Hyman: London, 1989), esp. pp. 175ff, 187ff. See also Bryan S. Turner, For Weber: Essays on the Sociology of Fate, 2nd edn (Sage: London, 1996), esp. chapter 1.

42 Bloch, Thomas Münzer, 2nd edn, op. cit., p. 57. Bloch refers here to the scene in the fifth act of Goethe’s Götz von Berlichingen, in which Metzler and Link, leaders of the revolting peasants, discuss the meaning of a comet and stars for their rebellion. Michael Löwy discusses Bloch’s and others’ responses to Weber’s Protestant Ethic in ‘Anticapitalist Readings of Weber’s Protestant Ethic: Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, György Lukacs, Erich Fromm’, Logos: A Journal of Modern Society and Culture, vol. 9, no. 1 (2010).

43 Bloch, Thomas Münzer, 2nd edn, op. cit., p. 59

44 Ibid., p. 123. The phrase ‘inaugurated a veritable church of Satan’ was replaced in the second edition by ‘brought a church of Mammon’.

45 Walter Benjamin, ‘Kapitalismus als Religion’, in Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, vol. 4 (Suhrkamp: Frankfurt am Main, 1985); ‘Capitalism as Religion’, in Benjamin, Selected Writings, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings, vol. 1 (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1996).

46 Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 1, p. 290. On this text, see Uwe Steiner, ‘Die Grenzen des Kapitalismus. Kapitalismus, Religion und Politik in Benjamins Fragment “Kapitalismus als Religion”’, in Dirk Baecker (ed.), Kapitalismus als Religion (Kadmos: Berlin, 2009); Michael Löwy, ‘Capitalism as Religion: Walter Benjamin and Max Weber’, Historical Materialism, no. 17 (2009); Werner Hamacher, ‘Guilt History: Benjamin’s Sketch “Capitalism as Religion”’, Diacritics, vol. 32, no. 3/4 (2002); Samuel Weber, ‘Closing the Net: “Capitalism as Religion”’, in Weber, Benjamin’s – abilities (Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2008); and Löwy, ‘Anticapitalist Readings of Weber’s Protestant Ethic’, op. cit.

47 I follow here Steiner’s argument in ‘Die Grenzen des Kapitalismus’.

48 Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 1, op. cit., p. 288.

49 Ibid.

50 One of the best accounts of the relation of Benjamin to the work of Warburg and his circle remains Wolfgang Kemp, ‘Fernbilder. Benjamin und die Kunstwissenschaft’, in Burkhardt Lindner (ed.), Walter Benjamin im Kontext, 2nd edn (Athenäum: Königstein im Taunus, 1985). On Warburg and Benjamin more generally, see Matthew Rampley, The Remembrance of Things Past: On Aby M. Warburg and Walter Benjamin (Harrassowitz: Wiesbaden, 2000).

51 Walter Benjamin, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (1928), in Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, vol. 1 (Suhrkamp: Frankfurt am Main, 1972); Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (NLB: London, 1977), p. 41.

52 Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, op. cit., p. 35. On Benjamin’s epistemological extremism, and also its relation to Weber’s notion of disenchantment, see Norbert Bolz, Auszug aus der entzauberten Welt: Philosophischer Extremismus zwischen den Weltkriegen (Fink: Munich, 1989).

53 Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, op. cit., p. 30.

54 Benjamin and the problems of Neo-Kantianism are discussed with great insight in Howard Caygill, Walter Benjamin: The Colour of Experience (Routledge: London, 1988).

55 Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, op. cit., p. 34.

56 Siegfried Kracauer, ‘The Mass Ornament’, in Kracauer, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1995).

57 For other complexities of Kracauer’s remarkable epistemological figure, see Schwartz, Blind Spots, op. cit., pp. 137–44.

58 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner, trans. Walter Kaufmann (Vintage: New York, 1967), p. 52 (Section 5).

59 Aby M. Warburg, Images from the Region of the Pueblo Indians of North America, trans. Michael P. Steinberg (Cornell University Press: Ithaca, 1995), p. 50.

60 Letter of 3 November 1921, Heinrich Sieveking and Rosa Sieveking to Mary Warburg: ‘On the whole we could not speak much about scholarly matters. Nonetheless, your dear husband showed us the works of Max Weber that he had acquired after our last conversation and apparently had also read.’ Warburg Institute Archive GC/29668.

61 Warburg, Images from the Region of the Pueblo Indians, op. cit., p. 54.

62 Walter Benjamin, ‘Zum Planetarium’, in Einbahnstrasse (Ernst Rowohlt: Berlin, 1928), pp. 80–1; ‘To the Planetarium’, in Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 1, op. cit., p. 486.