SINCE the appearance of this book ten years ago, the literature on its subject has considerably increased. The learned work of Troeltsch, the best introduction to the historical study of religious thought on social issues, can now be read in an English translation, as can also the articles of Weber on The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. The omission from my book of any reference to post-Reformation Catholic opinion was a serious defect, which subsequent writers have done something to repair. The development of economic thought in medieval Italy; the social forces at work in the Germany of Luther, and his attitude to them; the economic doctrines of Calvin; the teaching of the Jesuits on usury and allied topics; English social policy during the Interregnum; the religious and social outlook of the French bourgeoisie of the same period; the attitude of Quakers, Wesleyans, and other bodies of English Nonconformists to the changing economic world which confronted them in the eighteenth century, have all had books devoted to them. In the somewhat lengthy list of articles on these and kindred subjects, those by the late Professor See, M. Halbwachs, and Mr Parsons, and an article by Mr Gordon Walker which has just appeared in The Economic History Review, specially deserve attention.1
It will be seen, therefore, that the problems treated in the following pages, if they continue to perplex, have not ceased to arouse interest. What conclusions, if any, emerge from the discussion?
The most significant are truisms. When this book first appeared, it was possible for a friendly reviewer, writing in a serious journal, to deprecate in all gravity the employment of the term ‘Capitalism’ in an historical work, as a political catch-word, betraying a sinister intention on the part of the misguided author. An innocent solecism of the kind would not, it is probable, occur so readily today. Obviously, the word ‘Capitalism’, like ‘Feudalism’ and ‘Mercantilism’, is open to misuse. Obviously, the time has now come when it is more important to determine the different species of Capitalism, and the successive phases of its growth, than to continue to labour the existence of the genus. But, after more than half a century of work on the subject by scholars of half a dozen different nationalities and of every variety of political opinion, to deny that the phenomenon exists; or to suggest that, if it does exist, it is unique among human institutions, in having, like Melchizedek, existed from eternity; or to imply that, if it has a history, propriety forbids that history to be disinterred, is to run wilfully in blinkers. Verbal controversies are profitless; if an author discovers a more suitable term, by all means let him use it. He is unlikely, however, to make much of the history of Europe during the last three centuries, if, in addition to eschewing the word, he ignores the fact.
The more general realization of the role of Capitalism in history has been accomplished by a second change, which, if equally commonplace, has also, perhaps, its significance. ‘Trade is one thing, religion is another’: once advanced as an audacious novelty, the doctrine that religion and economic interests form two separate and coordinate kingdoms, of which neither, without presumption, can encroach on the other, was commonly accepted by the England of the nineteenth century with an unquestioning assurance at which its earliest exponents would have felt some embarrassment. An historian is concerned less to appraise the validity of an idea than to understand its development. The effects for good or evil of that convenient demarcation, and the forces which, in our own day, have caused the boundary to shift, need not here be discussed. Whatever its merits, its victory, it is now realized, was long in being won. The economic theories propounded by Schoolmen; the fulminations by the left wing of the Reformers against usury, land-grabbing, and extortionate prices; the appeal of hard-headed Tudor statesmen to traditional religious sanctions; the attempt of Calvin and his followers to establish an economic discipline more rigorous than that which they had overthrown; are bad evidence for practice, but good evidence for thought. All rest on the assumption that the institution of property, the transactions of the market-place, the whole fabric of society, and the whole range of its activities, stand by no absolute title, but must justify themselves at the bar of religion. All insist that Christianity has no more deadly foe than the appetitus divitiarum infinitus, the unbridled indulgence of the acquisitive appetite. Hence the claim that religion should keep its hands off business encountered, when first formulated, a great body of antithetic doctrine, embodied not only in literature and teaching, but in custom and law. It was only gradually, and after a warfare not confined to paper, that it affected the transition from the status of an odious paradox to that of an unquestioned truth.
The tendency of that transition is no longer in dispute. Its causation and stages remain the subject of debate. The critical period, especially in England, was the two centuries following the Reformation. It is natural, therefore, that most recent work on the subject of this book should have turned its high lights on that distracted age. The most striking attempt to formulate a theory of the movement of religious thought on social issues which then took place was made at the beginning of the present century by a German scholar, Max Weber,2 in two articles published in 1904 and 1905. Hence it is not less natural that much of that work should, consciously or unconsciously, have had Weber as its starting point.
What exactly was the subject with which he was concerned? That question is obviously the first which should be asked, though not all his critics ask it. He was preparing to undertake the comparative study of the social outlook and influence of different religions, the incomplete results of which appeared in three volumes in 1920, under the name of Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie. The articles, Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus, were a first step towards that larger work, and subsequently, corrected and amplified, formed part of its first volume. Weber thought that western Christianity as a whole, and in particular certain varieties of it, which acquired an independent life as a result of the Reformation, had been more favourable to the progress of Capitalism than some other great creeds. His articles were an attempt to test that generalization.
Their scope is explained in an introduction written later to the Religionssoziologie. His object was to examine – the abstractions fall with a mournful thud on English ears – ‘the influence of certain religious ideas on the development of an economic spirit or the ethos of an economic system’. He hoped – O sancta simplicitas! – to avoid misunderstanding by underlining somewhat heavily the limitations of his theme. He formulated no ‘dogma’; on the contrary, he emphasized that his articles were to be regarded as merely a Vorarbeit,3 a preparatory essay. He did not seek ‘a psychological determination of economic events’4; on the contrary, he insisted on ‘the fundamental importance of the economic factor’.5 He did not profess to offer a complete interpretation even of the religious attitude discussed in his articles; on the contrary, he urged the necessity of investigating how that attitude itself ‘was in turn influenced in its development and character by the totality of social conditions, especially the economic ones’.6 So far from desiring – to quote his own words – ‘to substitute for a one-sided “materialistic” an equally one-sided “spiritual” interpretation of civilization and history’,7 he expressly repudiated any intention of the kind.
In view of these disclaimers, it should not be necessary to point out that Weber made no attempt in the articles in question to advance a comprehensive theory of the genesis and growth of Capitalism. That topic had been much discussed in Germany since Marx opened the debate, and the first edition of the most massive of recent books on the subject, Sombart’s Der Moderne Kapitalismus, had appeared two years before. The range of Weber’s interests, and the sweep of his intellectual vision, were, no doubt, unusually wide; but his earliest work had been done on economic history, and he continued to lecture on that subject till his death in 1920. If he did not in his articles refer to economic consequences of the discovery of America, or of the great depreciation, or of the rise to financial pre-eminence of the Catholic city of Antwerp, it was not that these bashful events had at last hit on an historian whose notice they could elude. Obviously, they were epoch-making; obviously, they had a profound effect, not only on economic organization, but on economic thought. Weber’s immediate problem, however, was a different one. Montesquieu remarked, with perhaps excessive optimism, that the English ‘had progressed furthest of all people in three important things, piety, commerce, and freedom’. The debt of the third of these admirable attributes to the first had often been emphasized. Was it possible, Weber asked, that the second might also owe something to it? He answered that question in the affirmative. The connecting link was to be found, he thought, in the influence of the religious movement whose greatest figure had been Calvin.
Since Weber’s articles are now available in English, it is needless to recapitulate the steps in his argument. My own views upon it, if I may refer to them without undue egotism, were summarized in a note – too lengthy to be read – to the first edition of the present work, and were later restated more fully in the introduction to the English translation to the articles which appeared in 1930.8 Weber’s generalizations had been widely discussed by continental scholars for more than twenty years before this book appeared. The criticisms contained in it, therefore, had no claim to originality – unless, indeed, to be less anxious to refute an author than to understand him is in itself to be original.
The first of them – that ‘the development of Capitalism in Holland and England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was due, not to the fact that they were Protestant Powers, but to large economic movements, in particular the Discoveries and the results which flowed from them’ – has since been developed at some length by Mr Robertson; but it was not, perhaps, quite just. Weber would have replied, no doubt, that such a remark, however true, was, as far as his articles were concerned, an ignoratio elenchi. To meet him fairly, he would have said, one should meet him on his own ground, which at the moment was that, not of general economic history, but of religious thought on social issues. My second comment, already made by Brentano – that more weight should have been given to the political thought of the Renaissance – had been anticipated by Weber,9 and I regret that I overlooked his observations on that point. His gravest weaknesses in his own special field, where alone criticism is relevant, are not those on which most emphasis has usually been laid. The Calvinist applications of the doctrine of the ‘Calling’ have, doubtless, their significance; but the degree of influence which they exercised, and their affinity or contrast with other versions of the same idea, are matters of personal judgement, not of precise proof. Both Weber and his critics have made too much of them, as I did myself. His account of the social theory of Calvinism, however, if it rightly underlined some points needing emphasis, left a good deal unsaid. The lacunae in his argument cannot here be discussed, but two of them deserve notice. Though some recent attempts to find parallels to that theory in contemporary Catholic writers have not been very happy, Weber tended to treat it as more unique than it was.10 More important, he exaggerated its stability and consistency. Taking a good deal of his evidence from a somewhat late phase in the history of the movement, he did not emphasize sufficiently the profound changes through which Calvinism passed in the century following the death of Calvin.
The last point is of some moment. It suggests that the problem discussed by Weber requires to be restated. It is natural, no doubt, that much of the later work on the subject should have taken him for its target, and probably inevitable – such is the nature of controversy – that a theory which he advanced as a hypothesis to explain one range of phenomena, and one alone, should have been clothed for the purpose of criticism with the uncompromising finality of a remorseless dogma. His mine has paid handsome dividends; but, whatever its attractions, that vein, it may be suggested, is now worked out. The important question, after all, is not what Weber wrote about the facts, still less what the epigoni who take in his washing have suggested that he wrote, but what the facts were. It is an illusion to suppose that he stands alone in pointing to a connexion between the religious movements of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the outburst of economic energy which was remaking society in the Netherlands and England. Other students have reached, independently of him, that not recondite conclusion.11 How much truth does it contain?
To attempt a reply to that question would expand a preface into a book. The materials for answering it are, however, abundant. If contemporary opinion on the point is not easily cited, the difficulty arises, not from lack of evidence to reveal it, but from the embarras de richesses which it offers for quotation. Its tenor is not doubtful. The truth is that the ascription to different confessions of distinctive economic attitudes was not exceptional in the seventeenth century; among writers who handled such topics it was almost common form. It occurs repeatedly in works of religious controversy. It occurs also in books, such as those of Temple, Petty, and Defoe, and numerous pamphlets, by men whose primary interest was, not religion, but economic affairs. So far, in fact, from being, as has been suggested12 with disarming naïveté, the sinister concoction of a dark modern conspiracy, designed to confound Calvinism and Capitalism, godly Geneva and industrious Manchester, in a common ruin, the existence of a connexion between economic Radicalism and religious Radicalism was to those who saw both at first hand something not far from a platitude. Until some reason is produced for rejecting their testimony, it had better be assumed that they knew what they were talking about.
How precisely that connexion should be conceived is, of course, a different question. It had, obviously, two sides. Religion influenced, to a degree which today is difficult to appreciate, men’s outlook on society. Economic and social changes acted powerfully on religion. Weber, as was natural in view of his special interests, emphasized the first point. He did so with a wealth of knowledge and an intellectual force which deserve admiration, and not least the admiration of those who, like myself, have ventured to dissent from some of his conclusions. He touched the second point only en passant. There is truth in the criticism of Mr Gordon Walker that Weber did not inquire how far the Reformation was a response to social needs, or investigate the causes, as well as the consequences, of the religious mentality which he analysed with so much insight.
It is that aspect of the subject which most needs work today. In the triple reconstruction, political, ecclesiastical, and economic, through which England passed between the Armada and the Revolution, every ingredient in the cauldron worked a subtle change in every other. There was action and reaction. ‘L’esprit calviniste’, and ‘l’esprit des hommes nouveaux que la revolution économique du temps introduit dans la vie des affaires’,13 if in theory distinct, were in practice intertwined. Puritanism helped to mould the social order, but it was also itself increasingly moulded by it. Of the influence of the economic expansion of the age on English religious thought something is said in the following pages. I hope that their inadequacies may prompt some more competent writer to deal with the subject as its importance deserves.
R. H. TAWNEY