Excavations


... nothing is more essential to public interest than the preservation of public liberty.

- David Hume



Sunday, January 29, 2012

Puritanism on Culture and the CBC: Max Weber decodes James Moore and Stephen Harper in 1904


Its attitude [Puritanism] was thus suspicious and often hostile to the aspects of culture without any religious value. …

Although we cannot here enter upon a discussion of the influence of Puritanism in all … directions, we should call attention to the fact that the toleration of pleasure in cultural goods, which contributed to purely aesthetic or athletic enjoyment, certainly ran up against one characteristic limitation: they must not cost anything.[1]



[1] Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, tr. Talcott Parsons (New York: Charles Scribner, 1958), pp. 168, 170.  This work first appeared in German in 1904-05.

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