Weber: The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

In one line

Weber argued that a religious idea, the Protestant conception of a calling, unintentionally produced the disciplined, calculating attitude to work and money that modern capitalism required.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, published in 1904 and 1905, Weber argued that modern rational capitalism required not merely capital and technology but a distinctive ethic: the systematic, disciplined and calculating pursuit of profit as an end in itself and as a duty, combined with the avoidance of enjoyment of what is gained. He traced the origin of that ethic to ascetic Protestantism, and particularly to the Calvinist doctrines of the calling and of predestination, whose unintended psychological consequence was methodical worldly labour and the reinvestment rather than consumption of its fruits.

The problem he was addressing

The observation. Weber began from a statistical observation of his time: that in mixed regions of Europe, business leaders, owners of capital and the higher grades of skilled labour were overwhelmingly Protestant. The question was why.

The theoretical target. He was answering the materialist account in [Marx: Historical and Dialectical Materialism], which treats religion as superstructure resting on an economic base. His claim is not the reverse of Marx's, that ideas cause economies, but the more limited one that ideas are an independent causal factor and that a purely economic explanation is incomplete. He said so expressly, and any answer that presents him as claiming that religion caused capitalism has misrepresented him.

The spirit of capitalism

What it is. Not greed, and this is the first correction. The desire for gain is universal and is found in every society and period. What is distinctive about modern capitalism is the attitude: the pursuit of profit rationally, systematically and continuously, treated as a duty and as an end in itself, combined with asceticism, the refusal to enjoy what is earned.

Its features: work as a duty and an end in itself; time treated as a resource not to be wasted; systematic accounting and calculation; honesty and punctuality as useful virtues; and the reinvestment rather than the consumption of profit.

Why it is puzzling. From the point of view of personal happiness the conduct is irrational: a person works incessantly, accumulates, and does not enjoy the accumulation. Something must explain how such an attitude became a duty, and that is the question the thesis answers.

Benjamin Franklin's maxims, which Weber quoted at length, are his illustration of the spirit in its purest and most secular form: time is money, credit is money, industry and frugality are duties.

The Protestant ethic

The Calvinist doctrines.