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Le capitalisme comme religion : Walter Benjamin et Max Weber

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Abstract

The fragment “Capitalism as Religion” written by Walter Benjamin in 1921 (and first published posthumously in the mid-1980s in his complete works) is one of his most intriguing – and “hermetic” – texts. Inspired by the works of Max Weber, which he cites, on the elective affinity between the Protestant Work Ethic and The Spirit of Capitalism, Benjamin goes much further than Weber: not only does capitalism have religious origins, it’s a religion in and of itself, a constant cult that is leading the world, sans merci, to the House of Despair. “Capitalism as Religion” is an anti-capitalist reading of Weber, of a piece with some of the writings of Georges Lukacs, Ernst Block and Erich Fromm.

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... A vast sense guilt that is unable to find relief seizes on the cult, not to atone for this guilt but to make it universal, to hammer it into the conscious mind… (Benjamin, ] 1996. Some scholars have already discussed this text, especially with reference to the recent and still ongoing debt crisis in European states, sharing its interpretation of capitalism as a religion that produces at the same time debt and guilt (Hamacher, 2003;Löwy, 2006;Steiner, 2006;Stimilli, 2011;Salzani, 2013;Agamben, 2013); the idea of capitalism as a system of indebtedness is also to be found in Lazzarato (2011). Benjamin himself notes the ambiguity of the German word Schuld: Schuld (consider the demonic ambiguity of this word) 1996). ...
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... Hace algún tiempo, Michael Löwy (2006) nos llamó la atención hacia ese texto, y sostuvo que debía ser leído como una radicalización de la tesis de Max Weber. Ahí mismo, Löwy señala que es evidente, a todas luces, que el texto se inspira en la obra de Weber, pero que reemplaza su "modo de andar 'axiológicamente neutral' por una fulminante denuncia anticapitalista [[…] surtout, il remplace sa dermarché 'axiologiquement neutre' (Wertfrei) par un fulminant réquisitoire anticapitaliste]." ...
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