Max Weber published two essays in 1904 and 1905 in the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik that became one of the most famous books in 20th-century social science: Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismusor The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (hereafter referenced as PE). Since the publication of its second part 120 years ago, PE has generated fierce controversies. Lynn White once described the heated debates over Weber’s thesis in the decades after 1905 as an “academic Thirty Years War.” In 2001, David Chalcraft wrote that, in fact, the debates were tantamount to an “academic ‘Hundred Years War.’”
Debates about the validity of the argument in PE, which continue today, concern the precise nature of the theological and historical relationship between Protestantism and economic development. There is undeniably a robust correlation between them. But is that correlation spurious—that is, are there other underlying commonalities across Protestant lands besides Protestantism that can account for their economic development? Or is the relationship between Protestantism and high levels of economic development a causal one? If the relationship is indeed causal, what are the characteristics unique to Protestantism that make it so? Are these characteristics foregrounded in Reformed theology (“Calvinism”), and if so, does the foregrounding have anything to do with doctrines of predestination?
The most fundamental question of the PE debates has been: What precisely is Weber’s argument? Different answers come down to different interpretations of key concepts such as “capitalism,” “spirit of capitalism,” and “ascetic Protestantism,” combined with varying conceptions of the strength, nature, and even overall direction of Weber’s causal claims. Interpretive differences have been compounded by the sheer volume of secondary literature. In some cases, debates about the “Weber thesis” have moved beyond Weber to influential secondary texts, such as R.H. Tawney’s 1922 Religion and the Rise of Capitalism or H.M. Robertson’s 1933 Aspects of the Rise of Economic Individualism. This has made it more difficult to retrieve Weber’s original argument.
Even as early as 1907, Weber complained that his critics dwelled excessively in their criticisms of PE rather than in the text itself, or, for that matter, in subsequent publications in which Weber attempted to clarify his intent, all the way up until his death in 1920. Weber accused his earliest critics, as David Chalcraft summarized, of “willful misreading, childishness, disciplinary patriotism … cliquishism, incompetence, ignorance, dishonor … pedantry, hair-splitting bookishness … and immature fixation on words and particular sentences.” Weber’s subsequent defenders advanced related, albeit less polemical, charges. As the sociologist Michael Hill once noted, “misunderstood” came to be one of the most common terms employed by Weber’s defenders.
As a very qualified advocate of Weber’s thesis myself, I too believe that Weber has been frequently misunderstood. Weber was undoubtedly incorrect about some important historical and theological issues. His multiple incorrect assertions, coupled with the provocative nature of his subject matter generally, make the real contributions of his argument easy to misconstrue—or miss entirely. But his broader thesis in PE, in my view, is correct, and it has significant implications for how we think about the interplay of economics, ethics, and religion to this day.
Capitalism and Causation
Consider a common rendering of Weber’s thesis: Protestantism caused capitalism. Whether this is a faithful statement of Weber’s argument depends entirely on how one takes the meanings of each term in the sentence. If by “capitalism” one simply means a largely decentralized economic system featuring private ownership, entrepreneurial capital investment, innovation, and financialization, then the statement Protestantism caused capitalism is clearly false. “Capitalism” in the sense just described predated the Reformation by centuries, perhaps many centuries.
A form of capitalism clearly flourished in the so-called commercial revolution in the Mediterranean region as early as the 13th century. This “revolution” entailed the development of expansive trade networks reaching eastward from Genoa, Venice, and Pisa into Byzantium and northwestward through the Low Countries and into England. New managerial and financial techniques, accompanied by relatively novel financial instruments such as bills of exchange, saw the growing dominance across these networks of what N.S. Gras described as “sedentary merchants.” These sedentary merchants relied for their operations on double-entry bookkeeping; they took advantage of burgeoning insurance markets; and they employed novel forms of commercial partnerships that legally permitted the pooling of risk and capital.
Weber was aware of 13th-century Mediterranean economic developments. In PE he discusses opportunities for “capitalistic acquisition” in the medieval Mediterranean, explicitly mentioning the commenda—a common legal arrangement employed then for joint commercial ventures. In Der modern Kapitalismus, published in three volumes beginning in 1902, Weber’s contemporary Werner Sombart had argued that “early-stage” capitalism first manifested in the Mediterranean basin in the 13th century, and there is no reason to think that Weber fundamentally disagreed.
Weber can only be taken to have asserted that Protestantism caused capitalism if we understand “capitalism” as something more than an economic system featuring decentralized markets, capital investment, and deliberate financial planning. Indeed, Weber is explicit throughout PE that he is attempting to account for the rise of “modern” or “Occidental capitalism.” The modern mode of capitalism that Weber describes is distinguished, he says, by the increasing prevalence of independent wage contracts and the monetization of labor, which allow for more extensive numerical representation and calculation in economic life; the spread and normalization of impersonal commercial transactions; and, crucially, the presumptive moral authorization of—and even imperative to pursue—monetary gain.
Whether what Weber calls modern capitalism broke sharply with the early-stage capitalism of the Mediterranean can be debated. Antony Black, for example, has argued that corporatist ideology was much less prevalent in the Middle Ages than commonly assumed, and that free labor under wage contracts was then not unheard of by the 13th century. Even if that is the case, free, contracted wage labor certainly became more common in the 18th and 19th centuries. The scale and scope of business enterprises expanded dramatically, moreover, changing the nature of economic organization.
It is also the case that the economies of northwestern Europe were suffused with a very different set of sensibilities about the dignity of commercial life than one finds in the Middle Ages. Innovation, profit-seeking, and capital accumulation were often discouraged throughout the Middle Ages. Although one finds discussions of the dignity of manual labor, husbandry, and craftsmanship in medieval Christian literature, commercial life was typically looked upon, at best, as socially necessary but morally dubious, and at worst as completely degenerate. An understanding of commerce as degenerate finds expression in a foundational document of canon law, Gratian’s Decretum. Gratian included in his work a quote from the sixth-century Christian statesman Cassiodorus: “Merchants are an abomination because they neglect the righteousness of God for an inordinate desire for money.” Compare that statement with one by Richard Baxter that asserted, in the 17th century, that each Christian has a duty to “labour in a manner as tendeth most to [his] success and lawful gain,” or to John Wesley’s exhortation that as a Christian you are to “Gain all you can,” “Save all you can,” and “Give all you can.”
What about the word caused in the statement Protestantism caused capitalism? Weber did not claim that there is a monocausal historical relationship between Protestantism and modern capitalism. He attempted to make this explicit in one of his early debates about PE with Felix Rachfahl: “The hypothesis of ‘deriving’ both the capitalist economic system and the capitalist ‘spirit’… solely from the Reformation [is] foolish,” he wrote to Rachfahl. Weber understood Protestantism to be neither necessary nor sufficient for economic growth in the abstract. He believed, rather, that Protestantism provided individuals with one of many possible metaphysical orientations that might, in the appropriate historical context, give rise to a modern capitalistic order.
Certain forms of Protestantism, Weber wrote to Rachfahl, placed “psychological premiums” on various social practices that, as it were, breathed a certain life into commercial culture, creating “the ‘soul’ [ideal interests or metaphysical orientation] needed to unite the ‘spirit’ [work ethic, authorization of honest income, etc.] with ‘form’ [formal political and economic institutions].” In other words, the necessary institutional building blocks or requisite “form” of commercial society or capitalism may have existed in different places throughout history, as in the Mediterranean economy of the 13th century. But in the 18th and 19th centuries, in America and northwestern Europe, Protestant sensibilities catalyzed a peculiar synergy between “soul,” “spirit,” and “form” that contributed to the unique economic experience of modernity.
Weber, it should also be mentioned, is much more agnostic on issues of causal direction than typically assumed. He evidently rejected Marx’s economic determinism. But he had no wish to substitute in its place an ideational determinism. As the scholar Niles Hansen wrote, Weber “makes no claim to have found Marx standing on his head and turned him right side up with the help of Calvin.” Weber himself wrote in PE that it was not his aim to “substitute for a one-sided materialistic an equally one-sided spiritualistic causal interpretation of culture and of history.” The Weberian approach is to examine complex synergies between material, ethical, and religious elements in historical context and to extricate variables that have catalyzed important shifts.
What Weber Got Wrong
Weber is at his least convincing when discussing the specific mechanisms by which Protestantism facilitated what he calls “this-worldly asceticism”: a view that one should carry out ascetic religious duties through active worldly engagement, success, and self-control, rather than withdrawal, especially through diligent and calculative commercial application, the deferral of consumption, and profit.
His account of the emergence of Protestant “this-worldly asceticism” begins with his claim that Luther laicized the doctrine of vocation. No longer was the notion of vocation or calling, according to Luther on Weber’s telling, confined to the clergy. Each Christian receives a general calling to faith in Christ and a particular calling to a set of earthly duties, which are to be carried out for the good of our neighbors and the glory of God. In Christ, the farmer, the craftsman, and even the merchant could understand themselves as members of Luther’s “priesthood of all believers.”
The hinge of Weber’s account is the interaction of the idea of particular callings with the doctrine of predestination, especially in the Reformed theology of the English and American Puritans. Bereft of the traditional Roman institutions of mediation and assurance, and confronted with the stark realities of predestination—that God had foreordained one’s salvation or damnation before the foundations of the earth—the Reformed Protestant, Weber theorized, inclined toward a state of fear and uncertainty. Commercial application and the pursuit of worldly success became a means for him to signal to himself and to others that he was, in fact, a member of God’s elected people by demonstrating his commitment to a particular earthly calling for the good of others and the glory of God. “Intense worldly activity,” Weber writes, “is recommended as the most suitable means [of confirming to one’s self one’s election]. It and it alone disperses religious doubts and gives the certainty of grace.”
Weber perhaps overemphasizes the uniqueness of Luther’s notion of calling. The Reformation generally evidently contributed to what Charles Taylor describes as the “affirmation of ordinary life,” and Luther clearly played a part here, although the precise details of that part can be debated. But Weber’s characterization of the psychological effects of Reformed theology is simply not persuasive. It does not accord with any teachings found in the early magisterial Reformers, including those of Calvin, nor is there a trace of it in the teachings of 18th-century Anglo-American Puritans. It is simply a nonfalsifiable exercise in psychologization.
The Enduring Value of PE
If Weber was wrong, at least in my view, at a crucial juncture of his argument, what then is the enduring value of PE?
I take the fundamental contribution—and the broad thesis—of PE to be the point that metaphysical orientations matter for economic outcomes. The modern capitalist order—what I would describe as free, commercial society—is not simply a function of material interests but rather of ethical sensibilities; practical ethical sensibilities, in turn, derive in large part from metaphysical understandings. Weber, in my view, advanced an understanding of economic sociology not so different from that championed by Deirdre McCloskey across her Bourgeois Trilogy. (It should be noted that McCloskey goes to lengths to vigorously refute Weber, and the wider claim that Christianity had anything much to do with the rise of the bourgeois virtues, but I think her efforts on these fronts are mostly misguided.) Weber described in the early pages of PE that he sought to discern the “influence of … psychological sanctions which, originating in religious belief and the practice of religion, gave a direction to practical conduct and held the individual to it.” Economic behavior depends on ethical formation, which depends on religious faith and practice.
Weber correctly understood that certain manifestations of Protestantism had something to do with the commercial spirit that came forth in early modern northwestern Europe, although he mostly failed in his attempt to explain the connection. He failed to recognize the degree of continuity between Reformed commercial ethics and earlier Christian traditions. He neglected the more obvious spiritual motivation for diligent commercial application: the duty to carry out one’s calling effectively for the love of neighbor, and the role of developments in early modern economic thought in informing judgments of effectiveness. As R.H. Tawney argued in 1922, “The progress of economic thought fortified the economic virtues” in the Puritan mind. This process of fortification—the interplay between moral theology and developments in economic theory—contributed much more fundamentally to the British and American commercial spirit than uncertainties flowing from ideas about predestination.
But Weber nonetheless deserves recognition for advancing the insight that there are moral and therefore spiritual preconditions for economic development. Although clearly not without its flaws, PE deserves to be read and pondered 120 years after its publication as a foundational work in economic sociology and an important touchstone for reflections on the interpenetration of economics, ethics, and religion.
