How can the most hedonistic consumer culture on the planet also be host to some of the most religious people in the world? Why hasnâ??t the bureaucratic rationality of corporate capitalism erased the last vestiges of faith in God, especially in the United States, still the farthest outpost of modern-industrial society? Chris Lehmann, a co-editor of Bookforum, has the answers in â??The Money Cult.â?
Heâ??s up against Max Weber, who also had North America in mind when he wrote â??The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.â? Weber argued that pious Puritans somehow became secular Yankees, who learned to lock themselves into an iron cage of a disenchanted world: â??In the field of its highest development, in the United States, the pursuit of wealth, stripped of its religious and ethical meaning, tends to become associated with purely mundane passions, which often actually give it the character of sport.â?
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