civilizations, especially in their sciences and technologies, its embodiment in
secular law, as in Rome or India, was quite rare. Patrimonialism (the unity
of family and State) was the typical form of administration; rationally orga-
nized, meritocratically staffed, bureaucratically regulated administration
carrying out the policies of political parties, was little developed elsewhere.^6
It was only in Renaissance Europe where rational commerce dependent on
rational law, rational administration and a rational culture came together to
foster the Reformation, and in turn, the Enlightenment, industrialization and
democratization.
For Weber, Hinduism and Confucianism, much like Islam, had various cul-
tural barriers to rational modernization and change. Neither Hindu India nor
Confucian China had a Reformation. Yet India and China have shorn them-
selves of the weight of tradition and are now at the leading edges of mod-
ern commerce and advanced technologies. But in Islamic societies, the limited
diffusion and subsequent encapsulation of rationality has meant economic
and scientific stagnation. More specifically, the traditionalist barriers to ratio-
nality in Hindu and Confucian religion tended to be limited to specific realms.
In India, the ascriptive-based caste system limited social intercourse, imposed
a heredity-based division of labor that thwarted individual talent and slowed
the emergence of the factory system, lest higher classes face ritual pollution.
Its pantheist Hinduism created a “magic garden”. It did not allow a secular,
demystified realm. In China, Confucianism, more a set of ritual practices than
a complex theology, did not have religious-based barriers to science or ratio-
nal commerce.^7 The emphasis on aesthetics and cultural learning required for
qualification as literati, the privileged stratum of “gentlemen administrators”,
thwarted the embrace of rational, meritocratic governance or commerce.
Further, the aristocracy maintained itself by limiting the emergence of other
classes such as merchants that might challenge its power and legitimacy.
From what has been said, a fundamental difference between Islam and
Protestantism, Hinduism and Confucianism, as well as Buddhism, has been
294 • Lauren Langman
(^6) For Weber (1978), the Turkish Janissaries, European born, yet trained in Turkey,
came close to a more rational form of administration, and indeed “Turkish Excep-
tionalism”, e.g., a multiparty Islamic Nation-state, with a modernizing economy, strong
ties to Israel, and Westward orientation reflects both geographic location and the his-
torical legacies of Turkey that markedly set it apart from the Arabic Middle East. 7
Indeed in the sixteenth century, with the growth of oceanic trade and incipient
industrialization, the Emperor abruptly halted these before they might engender polit-
ical classes that might challenge his authority.