My story takes it for granted that some men became so impelled and focuses instead on the reaction to the new phenomenon by what is called today the intellectual, managerial, and administrative elite. That reaction was favorable, not because the money-making activities were approved in themselves, but because they were thought to have a most beneficial side effect: they kept the men who were engaged in them “out of mischief,” as it were, and had, more specifically, the virtue of imposing restraints on princely caprice, arbitrary government, and adventurous foreign policies. Weber claims that
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