Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

* Book: The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism by Max Weber, 1905.

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Discussion

Benjamin Suriano:

"In his influential work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Weber famously spells out how the modern valorization of labor was made possible by a unique belief system around predestination peculiar to Calvinism and its 18th century Puritanical forms of religious asceticism.73 For Calvinism the idea that God has already predetermined within his inscrutable will the eternal fate of every member of humanity left the religious believer with an anxious psychological state of uncertainty. Rather than waiver in their faith and despair over unknowing, Calvinists sought to divert the turmoil of their inner spirit and its unproductive energies through an obsessive asceticism of hard work, diligence, and abstemiousness. Refocusing the inner spirit toward a greater interest in and valuation of the external world of work, these virtues of dutifulness not only helped avoid the sins of slothfulness and idleness wherein doubts and anxieties often needlessly fester, but through their frugality and orderliness they also helped yield great commercial profit. Labor then was not only valorized as an arena for keeping the inner spirit preoccupied with methodical activity, but its methodically organized form, which efficiently brought about commercially successful results, now supplied the inner spirit with a tangible means of proving one’s salvation.

For Weber, however, this inner spirituality, which manifested itself outwardly through a methodical control of its laboring body toward rigorously efficient applications, was not unprecedented within Western civilization. He finds a precedent within the medieval monastic institutions of Western Christianity insofar as they developed successful commercial practices according to a conception of “industria” oriented around “a systematic method of rational conduct with the purpose of overcoming the status naturae, to free man from the power of irrational impulses and his dependence on the world and on nature.” With the arrival of modernity, however, and the dissolution of the social import of monastic institutions, “the Reformation took rational Christian asceticism and its methodical habits out of the monasteries and placed them in the service of active life in the world.” Thus the transference of labor’s rationalization from monasticism to its wider social import through Calvinism took place at the level of transferring a spirituality of “innerworldly asceticism,” once practiced only by a narrow segment of the population for otherworldly ends, to now its practice by an entire lay population within and for everyday life.

While Weber was never able to provide a more complete assessment of the medieval valorization itself he nonetheless provided an influential lens by which later interpreters extended his analysis."

(https://epublications.marquette.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?params=/context/dissertations_mu/article/1643/&path_info=Suriano_marquette_0116D_11069.pdf)

Excerpts

Religious Affiliation and Social Stratification

Max Weber:

"A glance at the occupational statistics of any country of mixed religious composition brings to light with remarkable frequency a situation which has several times provoked discussion in the Catholic press and literature [editors note: as far back as the 17th century in fact]... , namely, the fact that business leaders and owners of capital, as well as the higher grads of skilled labour, and even more the higher technically and commercially trained personnel of modern enterprises, are overwhelmingly Protestant.

....what has often been forgotten, that the Reformation meant not the elimination of the Church’s control over everyday life, but rather the substitution of a new form of control for the previous one. It meant the repudiation of a control which was very lax, at that time scarcely perceptible in practice, and hardly more than formal, in favour of a regulation of the whole of conduct which, penetrating to all departments of private and public life, was infinitely burdensome and earnestly enforced.

On superficial analysis... one might be tempted to express the differrence by saying that the greater other-wordliness of Catholicism, the ascetic character of its highest ideals, must have brought up its adherents to a greater indifference toward the good things of this world. Such an explanation fits the popular tendency in the judgement of both religions. On the Protestant side it is used as a basis of criticism of those... ascetic ideals of the Catholic way of life, while the Catholics answer with the accusation that materialism results from the secularization of all ideals through Protestantism.

...the supposed conflict between other-worldliness, asceticism, and ecclesiastical piety on the one side, and participation in capitalistic acquisition on the other, might actually turn out to be an intimate relationship.

If any inner relationship between certain expressions of the old Protestant spirit and modern capitalistic culture is to be found, we must attempt to find it, for better or worse, not in its alleged more or less materialistic or at least anti-ascetic joy of living, but in its purely religious characteristics. Montesquieu says (Esprit des Lois, Book XX, chap. 7) of the English that they "had progressed the farthest of all peoples of the world in three important things: in piety, in commerce, and in freedom."

(http://ahistoryofthepresentananthology.blogspot.com/search/label/Weber)