Full Idea
The modern Occident has developed a very different form of capitalism: the rational capitalist organisation of free labour …which needed two other factors: the separation of the business from the household, and the closely connected rational book-keeping.
Gist of Idea
Modern western capitalism has free labour, business separate from household, and book-keeping
Source
Max Weber (The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism [1904], Author's Intro)
Book Reference
Weber,Max: 'Protestant Ethic and Spirit of Capitalism' [Routledge 2001], p.-7
A Reaction
For small businesses the separation has to be maintained by a ruthless effort of imagination. Book-keeping is because the measure of loss and profit is the engine of the whole game. Labour had to be dragged free of family and community.
Related Idea
Idea 20690 The state fostered individualism, to break the power of family and community [Harari]