by
Stuart Hall
- The essay works by means of what Weber calls an “elective affinity” between the structure of Puritan ideas (above all, of the Calvinist variant) and the structure of the rationalization of capital accumulation necessary to the development of capitalism. That is, it opposes any notion that economic change directly provides the content of capitalist ideas. Instead, it suggests that what is important is the “homology” between what capitalism needed in order to become a sanctioned system of regulated economic activity, and the impulse to planned and routinized “activity” in Puritanism. It adds to this a middle, mediating term: the Puritan/capitalist “character structure.” It is worth noting that the move from content to “homologies of structures” is the key theoretical advance represented in Goldmann’s Hidden God : and that the attention to “character structure” is an aspect to which both the “Frankfurt School” and Wilhelm Reich were, later, to pay considerable attention. 17 This approach, though radically departing from a Marxist theory of ideology, does not contest Marx’s proposition (in The German Ideology ) that “the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas”: it suggests, rather, one way in which, historically, this may have come about.