Society and the economy
Max Weber (1864–1920)
1517 Martin Luther publishes The Ninety-Five Theses, starting the religious conflict that leads to the Reformation.
1688 The Glorious Revolution ends any chance of Catholicism returning to Britain and paves the way for the world’s first Industrial Revolution.
1993 Swedish social scientist Kurt Samuelsson argues that Puritan leaders did not truly endorse capitalistic behavior.
2009 Harvard economist Davide Cantoni publishes The Case of Protestantism in 16th Century Germany, in which he claims to find “no effects of Protestantism on economic growth.”
The German sociologist Max Weber was interested in the contrasting levels of economic success in various countries during the 16th to 19th centuries. In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, he argued that northern Europe and the US had fared better than the Catholic societies of South America and the Mediterranean because of Protestant beliefs in predestination, vocation, and the work ethic.
For Catholics divine reckoning is a future event: one must live a decent life and perform good deeds in order to be saved. But Protestant teachings, especially those stemming from Calvinist Protestantism, claimed that there was a pre-selected “elect” destined to be saved, who would live a virtuous life as a consequence of being part of the elect. Their actions in this physical life would not lead to their salvation, but merely show that they were already destined for heaven. The Bible encourages hard work and frugality, so Protestants aimed to embody these qualities and demonstrate that they were among the saved, while everyone else faced damnation. Forbidden to buy luxuries, they reinvested their profits back into their business.
The village blacksmith held an important place in the community, according to Max Weber, because he dealt frequently with many people in the course of his God-given vocation.
Catholicism held that the only God-given vocation was priesthood, but Protestants thought that people could be called to any of the secular crafts and trades. The belief that they were serving God encouraged them to work with religious fervor, leading them to produce more goods and make more money.
Weber believed that the Protestant faith led inevitably to a capitalist economic society because it gave believers the chance to view the pursuit of profit as evidence of devotion, rather than of morally suspect motives such as greed and ambition. The idea of predestination also meant that believers need not worry about social inequalities and poverty, because material wealth was a sign of spiritual wealth.
"God helps those who help themselves."
Max Weber
Weber’s argument can be challenged, however. The leading European power in the 16th and 17th centuries, and the first global superpower, was the thoroughly Catholic Spanish Empire. Other conflicting cases can also be found in the rise of Asian countries that have never been Protestant, or even Christian. Japan is the third largest economy in the world, and China is growing fast.
Karl Emil Maximilian Weber was one of the founding fathers of modern social science as well as an economist. He was born in 1864 in Erfurt, Germany, and was brought up in a prosperous, cosmopolitan, and intellectual family. His father was an outgoing civil servant, while his mother was a strict Calvinist Protestant.
Weber studied law at the universities of Heidelberg and Berlin, then held professorships in economics at various German universities until his father’s death in 1897 left him too depressed to teach. After volunteering for service in World War I he changed his political views and became a prominent critic of the Kaiser. Weber commanded widespread respect in the political establishment and after the war helped write the Weimar Republic’s constitution. He resumed teaching, but in 1920 died of Spanish flu.
1904–05 The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
1919 Politics as a Vocation
1923 General Economic History