The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

Basic concepts Although not a detailed study of Protestantism but rather an introduction to Weber's later studies of interaction between various religious ideas and economics (The Religion of China: Confucianism and Taoism 1915, The Religion of India: The Sociology of Hinduism and Buddhism 1916, and Ancient Judaism 1917), The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism argues that Puritan ethics and ideas influenced the development of capitalism. The 'spirit of capitalism' does not refer to the spirit in the metaphysical sense but rather a set of values, the spirit of hard work and progress. Religious devotion, Weber argues, is usually accompanied by a rejection of worldly affairs, including the pursuit of wealth and possessions. To illustrate his theory, Weber quotes the ethical writings of Benjamin Franklin: Weber notes that this is not a philosophy of mere greed, but a statement laden with moral language. Indeed, Franklin claims that God revealed the usefulness of virtue to him. The Reformation profoundly affected the view of work, dignifying even the most mundane professions as adding to the common good and thus blessed by God, as much as any "sacred" calling (German: ). A common illustration is that of a cobbler, hunched over his work, who devotes his entire effort to the praise of God. To emphasize the work ethic in Protestantism relative to Catholics, he notes a common problem that industrialists face when employing precapitalist laborers: Agricultural entrepreneurs will try to encourage time spent harvesting by offering a higher wage, with the expectation that laborers will see time spent working as more valuable and so engage it longer. However, in precapitalist societies this often results in laborers spending less time harvesting. Laborers judge that they can earn the same, while spending less time working and having more leisure. He also notes that societies having more Protestants are those that have a more developed capitalist economy. He further noted that the spirit of capitalism could be divorced from religion, and that those passionate capitalists of his era were either passionate against the Church or at least indifferent to it. Weber shows that certain branches of Protestantism had supported worldly activities dedicated to economic gain, seeing them as endowed with moral and spiritual significance. This recognition was not a goal in itself; rather they were a byproduct of other doctrines of faith that encouraged planning, hard work and self-denial in the pursuit of worldly riches. However, Weber saw the fulfillment of the Protestant ethic not in Lutheranism, which was too concerned with the reception of divine spirit in the soul, but in Calvinistic forms of Christianity. The trend was carried further still in Pietism. The Baptists diluted the concept of the calling relative to Calvinists, but other aspects made its congregants fertile soil for the development of capitalism—namely, a lack of paralyzing ascetism, the refusal to accept state office and thereby develop politically, and the doctrine of control by conscience which caused rigorous honesty. What Weber argued, in simple terms: • According to the new Protestant religions, an individual was religiously compelled to follow a secular vocation (German: ) with as much zeal as possible. A person living according to this world view was more likely to accumulate money. • The new religions (in particular, Calvinism and other more austere Protestant sects) effectively forbade wastefully hard earned money and identified the purchase of luxuries as a sin. Donations to an individual's church or congregation were limited due to the rejection by certain Protestant sects of icons. Finally, donation of money to the poor or to charity was generally frowned on as it was seen as furthering beggary. This social condition was perceived as laziness, burdening their fellow man, and an affront to God; by not working, one failed to glorify God. The manner in which this dilemma was resolved, Weber argued, was the investment of this money, which gave an extreme boost to nascent capitalism. Protestant work ethic in Weber's time By the time Weber wrote his essay, he believed that the religious underpinnings of the Protestant ethic had largely gone from society. He cited the writings of Benjamin Franklin, which emphasized frugality, hard work and thrift, but were mostly free of spiritual content. Weber also attributed the success of mass production partly to the Protestant ethic. Only after expensive luxuries were disdained could individuals accept the uniform products, such as clothes and furniture, that industrialization offered. In his conclusion to the book, Weber lamented that the loss of religious underpinning to capitalism's spirit has led to a kind of involuntary servitude to mechanized industry. Weber maintained that while Puritan religious ideas had significantly impacted the development of economic systems in Europe and United States, there were other factors in play, as well. They included a closer relationship between mathematics and observation, the enhanced value of scholarship, rational systematization of government administration, and an increase in entrepreneurship ventures. In the end, the study of Protestant ethic, according to Weber, investigated a part of the detachment from magic, that that could be seen as a unique characteristic of Western culture. Conclusions In the final endnotes Weber states that he abandoned research into Protestantism because his colleague Ernst Troeltsch, a professional theologian, had begun work on The Social Teachings of the Christian Churches and Sects. Another reason for Weber's decision was that Troeltsch's work already achieved what he desired in that area, which is laying groundwork for comparative analysis of religion and society. Weber moved beyond Protestantism with his research but would continue research into sociology of religion within his later works (the study of Judaism and the religions of China and India). This book is also Weber's first brush with the concept of rationalization. His idea of modern capitalism as growing out of the religious pursuit of wealth meant a change to a rational means of existence, wealth. That is to say, at some point the Calvinist rationale informing the "spirit" of capitalism became unreliant on the underlying religious movement behind it, leaving only rational capitalism. In essence then, Weber's "Spirit of Capitalism" is effectively and more broadly a Spirit of Rationalization. ==Reception==

The essay can also be interpreted as one of Weber's criticism of Karl Marx and his theories. While Marx's historical materialism held that all human institutions – including religion – were based on economic foundations, many have seen The Protestant Ethic as turning this theory on its head by implying that a religious movement fostered capitalism, not the other way around. Other scholars have taken a more nuanced view of Weber's argument. Weber states in the closing of this essay, "it is, of course, not my aim to substitute for a one-sided materialistic an equally one-sided spiritualistic causal interpretation of culture and history. Each is equally possible, but each if it does not serve as the preparation, but as the conclusion of an investigation, accomplishes equally little in the interest of historical truth." Weber's argument can be understood as an attempt to deepen the understanding of the cultural origins of capitalism, which does not exclude the historical materialist origins described by Marx: modern capitalism emerged from an elective affinity of 'material' and 'ideal' factors. ==Table of contents==

Table of contents from the 1958 Scribner's edition, with section titles added by Talcott Parsons: ==Criticism==

Methodology Weber's causal claim that the Protestant ethic led to capitalism has been criticized for endogeneity problems and case selection problems. Economic criticism The economist and historian Henryk Grossman criticises Weber's analysis on two fronts. Firstly, Grossman refers to Karl Marx's work to show that the stringent legal measures that were taken against poverty and vagabondage were a reaction to the massive population shifts caused by the enclosure of the commons, which evicted many peasants from the common land on which they had lived. Secondly, Grossman's own work shows how this "bloody legislation" against evicted peasants was implemented across Europe, especially in France. Grossman asserts that this legislation physically forced people from serfdom into wage-labor. This history is unrelated to Protestantism. Thus, capitalism came about largely by force, and not by any vocational training regarding an inner-worldliness of Protestantism. It remains possible that the "Protestant work ethic" socially legitimized or otherwise reinforced the legal measures that Grossman details, within a larger cultural context. In a 2015 study, Davide Cantoni tested Weber's Protestant hypothesis on German cities over the period 1300–1900, finding no effects of Protestantism on economic growth. Historian Laurence R. Iannaccone has written that "Ironically, the most noteworthy feature of the Protestant Ethic thesis is its absence of empirical support", citing the work of Swedish economic historian Kurt Samuelsson that "economic progress was uncorrelated with religion, or was temporally incompatible with Weber's thesis, or actually reversed the pattern claimed by Weber." Other recent scholarship has found some valid Protestant ethic effects both in historical and contemporary development patterns. Dudley and Blum, using city growth as a proxy for wages growth, write: Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson in their book Why Nations Fail reject the relationship between economic progress and Protestantism writing: Revisionist criticism Hector Menteith Robertson, in his book Aspects of Economic Individualism (1933), argued against the historical and religious claims of Weber. Robertson pointed out that capitalism began to flourish not in Britain, but in 14th-century Italy, so the rise of capitalism cannot be attributed to Adam Smith, the Protestant Reformation, etc. Robertson goes further, and states that what happened in Britain was rather a retrogression from what was achieved in Italy centuries earlier. Robertson shows that Adam Smith and David Ricardo did not found economic science de novo. In fact, liberal economic theory was developed by French and Italian Catholics, who were influenced by the Scholastics. According to other critics, British economic thought was rather a step backwards since it espoused the labor theory of value, which had been critiqued by the School of Salamanca. Other criticism It has recently been suggested that Protestantism has indeed influenced positively the capitalist development of respective social systems not so much through the "Protestant ethics" but rather through the promotion of literacy. Sascha Becker and Ludger Wossmann of LMU Munich showed that literacy levels differing in religious areas can sufficiently explain the economic gaps cited by Weber. The results were supported even under a concentric diffusion model of Protestantism using distance from Wittenberg as a model. The noted French historian Fernand Braudel, considered one of the greatest of the modern historians, vigorously criticized Weber's theory, noting its lack of foundation and veracity, stating: ==Support==

In 1958, American sociologist Gerhard Lenski conducted an empirical inquiry into "religion's impact on politics, economics, and family life" in the Detroit, Mich., area. It revealed, among other insights, that there were significant differences between Catholics on the one hand and (white) Protestants and Jews on the other hand with respect to economics and the sciences. Lenski's data supported basic hypotheses of Weber's work The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. According to Lenski, "the contribution of Protestantism to material progress have been largely unintended by-products of certain distinctive Protestant traits. This was a central point in Weber's theory." Lenski noted that more than a hundred years prior to Weber, John Wesley, one of the founders of the Methodist church, had observed that "diligence and frugality" made Methodists wealthy. "In an early era, Protestant asceticism and dedication to work, as noted both by Wesley and Weber, seem to have been important patterns of action contributing to economic progress. Both facilitated the accumulation of capital, so critically important to the economic growth and development of nations." German theologian Friedrich Wilhelm Graf notes: "Sociologists of religion like Peter L. Berger and David Martin have interpreted the Protestant revolution in Latin America as implicit support of basic elements of Weber's thesis. [...] At any rate, many pious persons there interpret their transition from the Roman Catholic church to Protestant Pentecostal congregations in terms of a moral idea that promises long-term economic gains through strong innerworldly asceticism. The strict ascetic self-discipline that has been successfully institutionalized in the Pentecostal congregations, the readiness to work more and with greater effort and to take less leisurely attitudes lead many Pentecostal Christians to believe that their new faith in God is supported by their economic successes." In a journal article published in 2019, scholar of religion Benjamin Kirby critiques Peter L. Berger's analysis for its over-emphasis on the influence of Holiness-oriented Pentecostal churches, neglecting the growing influence of neo-Pentecostal churches across the globe. Kirby argues that it is difficult to draw parallels between contemporary neo-Pentecostals and Weber's ascetic Protestants, specifically because the former group of practitioners, many of whom espouse Prosperity theologies, often do not exhibit the same commitment to "sober economic virtue" and "rational bourgeois economic life" as Weber's Calvinistic Puritans. Nevertheless, Kirby stresses that Weber's text remains important for understanding enduring affinities between Christianity and capitalism. Kirby posits a "new elective affinity" between contemporary Pentecostalism and neoliberal capitalism, suggesting that neo-Pentecostal churches may act as vehicles for embedding neoliberal economic processes, for instance by encouraging practitioners to become entrepreneurial, responsibilised citizens. ==See also==