Critical Review of Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography

This study will provide a critical review of Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography, focusing on how that memoir sheds light on his entrepreneurial development. Franklin's life is a combination of individualism and conformity. The Autobiography ends before the Revolutionary years, covering his life to 1757, but the work does show how Franklin established himself in his community and nation as a leader, thinker, businessman, inventor and moralist. Editor Russel B. Nye seems intent on minimizing Franklin's economics-related aphorisms, as well as his money-making ambition in general: "Franklin's business career, successful as it was, was but a brief interlude in a long, full life" (Franklin xi). Nevertheless, for better or worse, Franklin's "spirit of capitalism," as Max Weber puts it, is clearly the major facet of Franklin's life as he himself portrays it in this book, his story of his own life. The central question with which Franklin clearly seems concerned is not spiritual, not philosophical, not even social or political, but economic. The memoir, then, is his account of his own triumph over "poverty and obscurity" (Franklin 1).

Franklin may be associated with moralistic aphorisms, and might tell himself and others to "Imitate Jesus and Socrates" (77), but in his youth he is not averse to pushing behavioral boundaries. He resists the authority of both his brother and father and admits "Perhaps I was too saucy and provoking" (Franklin 18). Franklin develops early his desire to

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ere afterthoughts designed to give the impression that Franklin is both a genius (as evidenced by his individual achievements) and deeply humble (as evidenced by his salting his memoir with a prayer here, a note of proper gratitude to God there). In any case, Weber is having none of it, cutting to the economic heart of the autobiography. However, to Weber, a lack of religion is not a lack of morality. After quoting two pages of Franklin's concentrated economic wisdom (Weber 48-50) and making Franklin sound thereby like a man obsessed with money and making and keeping it, Weber concludes: The peculiarity of this philosophy of avarice appears to be the ideal of the honest man of recognized credit, and above all the idea of a duty of the individual toward the increase of his capital, which is assumed as an end in itself. Truly what is preached here is not simply a means of making one's way in the world, but a peculiar ethic. . . . It is not mere business astuteness, . . . it is an ethos (Weber 51). In other words, morality is measured by the money a man has, in Weber's interpretation of Franklin's message. All the talk of virtuous behavior on Franklin's part, Weber sees as mere steps to capitalistic acquisition. Goodness is n

Category: History - C