The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

Contents

1. Translator’s Preface 4 min 6

   Talcott Parsons explains what he has translated. The essay first appeared in the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik in 1904–5 and was reprinted, with considerable changes and long new footnotes answering critics, in 1920 as the first study of Weber’s unfinished Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie. The translation follows the 1920 text and keeps every note. Parsons has placed Weber’s 1920 Introduction to the whole series before the essay, to head off the misreadings that had dogged the German debate, and he lists the other studies of Confucianism, Hinduism, Buddhism and ancient Judaism.

2. Foreword 24 min 14

   R. H. Tawney introduces Weber and his question: what psychological conditions made modern capitalism, the organisation of free wage labour for profit, possible? Weber rejects explanations from precious metals, trade or greed and traces the new ethic to Calvinism, which turned money-making into a duty and a calling. Tawney grants that contemporaries saw the link but argues that Weber overstates the role of ideas, simplifies “capitalism”, and treats Calvinism as uniform. Calvin’s Geneva was collectivist; only the later, individualistic Puritanism fits Weber’s picture. Religion and economic life, he concludes, shaped each other.

3. Author’s Introduction 36 min 21

   Weber’s 1920 introduction to his studies of the world religions asks why science, law, music, the bureaucratic state and above all rational capitalism developed fully only in the West. Capitalism is not greed, which is universal, but the continuous, calculated pursuit of profit; adventurer and political capitalism have existed everywhere, but the rational organisation of formally free labour, with bookkeeping and the separation of business from household, is modern and Western. Western rationalism depends on economic conditions but also on people’s disposition to rational conduct, which religious ideas shaped. These studies trace one side of that causal chain, provisionally and without value judgements.

4. I Religious Affiliation and Social Stratification 21 min 31

   Weber starts from statistics, chiefly from Baden: business owners, managers and skilled workers in modern Germany are disproportionately Protestant. Inherited wealth explains part of this, but not the different schooling Catholic and Protestant parents choose, nor why Catholics, unlike other subordinate minorities, have not turned to business. Popular contrasts of Catholic otherworldliness with Protestant worldliness fail, since the Puritans were ascetics. Calvinists, Pietists, Quakers and Mennonites combined intense piety with business acumen. If old Protestantism is linked to capitalism, the link must lie in its religious characteristics.

5. II The Spirit of Capitalism 59 min 47

   Weber illustrates the “spirit of capitalism” with Benjamin Franklin’s maxims (“time is money”), whose novelty is that making money is a duty and an end in itself, unlike Jacob Fugger’s morally neutral appetite. Greed is universal; the new spirit’s great enemy was traditionalism, in workers who work less when piece rates rise and in comfortable putting-out merchants displaced by disciplined newcomers. The spirit appeared before capitalist conditions, in New England, and was honoured in backwoods Pennsylvania though condemned in rich Florence, so it cannot simply reflect material conditions. Weber will seek the source of this irrational devotion to a calling.

6. III Luther’s Conception of the Calling. Task of the Investigation 25 min 46

   Weber traces the idea of the calling (Beruf), a task set by God in worldly work, to Luther’s Bible translation. Luther valued work in the world above monastic withdrawal, but after the Peasants’ War his idea of the calling became traditionalistic: each person should stay in the station Providence assigned. The real break, Weber argues, came with Calvinism and the Puritan sects, illustrated by the close of Milton’s Paradise Lost. He ends by disclaiming any claim that capitalism was a product of the Reformation. He asks only how far religious forces shaped the spirit of capitalism, often as unintended results of the reformers’ purely religious aims.

7. IV The Religious Foundations of Worldly Asceticism 1 h 52 min 210

   Weber examines four forms of ascetic Protestantism: Calvinism, Pietism, Methodism and the Baptist sects. Calvin’s doctrine of predestination, quoted from the Westminster Confession, left each believer in “unprecedented inner loneliness” before an unalterable decree. Pastoral practice answered the resulting anxiety by treating disciplined activity in a calling as the sign, not the cause, of election. Life became a methodical system, monastic asceticism carried into the world. Pietism and Methodism kept this method on weaker, more emotional foundations. The Baptists and Quakers reached similar conduct through the idea of a sect of the reborn and the inner testimony of conscience.

8. V Asceticism and the Spirit of Capitalism 55 min 136

   Using Richard Baxter as his main witness, Weber shows how Puritan ethics condemned idleness, waste of time and the enjoyment of wealth while sanctifying hard work in a fixed calling and treating profit as a sign of God’s blessing. Restricted consumption combined with released acquisition produced accumulation through compulsory saving. It also gave employers disciplined workers and a good conscience. As the religious roots died, the ethic survived as Franklin’s utilitarian spirit of capitalism. Machine capitalism no longer needs it: Baxter’s light cloak has become an “iron cage”. Weber closes by denying that he means to replace a one-sided materialist interpretation with a spiritualist one.