The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, (1904–05), thesis by Max Weber that asserts a connection between success in capitalist ventures and the accidental psychological consequences of Calvinist Christian doctrines, especially predestination.

Theory and content

Weber began his thesis by noting the statistical correlation in Germany between interest and success in capitalist ventures on the one hand and Protestant background on the other. He then attributed this relationship between capitalism and Protestantism to certain accidental psychological consequences of the notions of predestination and calling in Puritan theology.

John Calvin’s formulation of the doctrine of predestination stated that sinful humanity could know neither why nor to whom God had extended the grace of salvation. Weber inferred that the psychological insecurity that this doctrine had imposed on Calvin’s followers, stern believers in hellfire, was such that they began to look for signs indicating the direction of God’s will in daily life. The consequence was an ethic of unceasing commitment to one’s worldly calling (any lapse would indicate that one’s state of grace was in doubt) and ascetic abstinence from any enjoyment of the profit reaped from such labours. The practical result of such beliefs and practices was, in Weber’s estimation, the most rapid possible accumulation of capital.

Context of Weber’s composition

To some degree, Weber’s thesis reflects his lived experience and personal environment. The sociologist’s mother was raised in Calvinist orthodoxy, and she maintained a Puritan morality throughout her life. By contrast, Weber’s father was an aspiring liberal politician who established himself as a fixture of the Berlin social milieu and entertained prominent politicians and scholars in the Weber household, bringing behaviour into the home that was directly at odds with the ethics favoured by his wife. He adopted a traditionally authoritarian manner at home and demanded absolute obedience from his wife and children.

Despite a brief period away from home early in his adulthood, Weber remained immersed in the conflict of his childhood home well into his adulthood. He left home in 1882 to study at the University of Heidelberg, but he interrupted his studies in 1883–84 to fulfill military service in Strassburg (Strasbourg). At that time he became very close to the family of his maternal aunt, Ida Baumgarten, and to her husband, the historian Hermann Baumgarten, who had a profound influence on Weber’s intellectual development. When Weber returned to his studies in 1884, his father, perhaps concerned that the Baumgartens’ influence on him had been subversive, persuaded him to live at home in Berlin.

Weber remained at his parents’ home, subjected to their conflicting interests, until 1893, and he developed a compulsive work regimen that he maintained after leaving home and marrying that year. Only through such disciplined labour, believed Weber, could he stave off a natural tendency to self-indulgence and laziness, which could lead to an emotional and spiritual crisis. Weber’s great capacity for disciplined intellectual effort, together with his unquestionable brilliance, led to his meteoric professional advance. By 1894, only a year into his paid career, he had been appointed a full professor in political economy at the University of Freiburg. A year later he attained that position at Heidelberg.

However, Weber suffered a nervous collapse several months after his father’s death in 1897. By mid-1898 he had become incapacitated, and he was intermittently institutionalized over a span of five years. In 1903, at the height of his illness, Weber resigned his position at Heidelberg. He did not teach again until after World War I, and he never returned to lecturing full-time.

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But it was after his resignation that Weber produced his most important work. His prolonged agony had led him to develop brilliant insights into the relationship between Calvinist morality and compulsive labour, into the relationship between various religious ethics and social and economic processes, and into many other questions of lasting importance. Weber soon formulated The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, which became his best-known and most controversial work. In this and other works, he sought to take a scientific approach to the social sciences that would overcome deficiencies he perceived in the field’s intellectual traditions. However, he never fully defined a systematic research program explaining his comparative methodology.

Reception and legacy

Weber’s thesis, which challenged current assumptions within German schools of sociology that economic needs drove religious and social impulses, was met with controversy from the time of its publication. Critics of Weber countered that highly developed capitalist enterprises had existed centuries before Calvin, a claim Weber never denied in his rebuttals. Weber also acknowledged counterarguments that other preconditions, both material and psychological, had contributed to the development of modern capitalism. He responded to such criticisms by arguing that before Calvinism, capitalist enterprise and wealth accumulation had always been fettered by the passive or active hostility of the prevalent religious order. If some capitalists had, by virtue of their skepticism, been able to escape the feelings of guilt that the predominant religious ethos dictated, it was nevertheless a fact that no other religious tradition had ever caused people to see the accumulation of capital (saving money) as a sign of God’s everlasting grace.

Among the most well-known responses to The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism was the Swedish economic historian Kurt Samuelsson’s Religion and Economic Action (1957), which directly critiqued Weber’s thesis. The English economic historian Richard Henry Tawney, although accepting Weber’s general thesis, shifted and expanded the emphasis in his Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926) by arguing that Calvinist theology merely set the stage for the ethic of hard work and the spirit of individualism, which were more-direct factors in the development of capitalism than was Calvinist theology.