THE THEMES OF THE PROTESTANT ETHIC
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism undoubtedly ranks as
one of the most renowned, and controversial, works of modern
social science. First published as a two-part article in 1904–5, in
the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, of which Weber was
one of the editors, it immediately provoked a critical debate, in
which Weber participated actively, and which, some seventy
years later, has still not gone off the boil. This English translation
is in fact taken from the revised version of the work, that first
appeared in Weber’s Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie (Collected
Essays on the Sociology of Religion), published in 1920–1 just after
Weber’s death, and thus contains comments on the critical literature
to which its initial appearance had given rise.
Weber wrote The Protestant Ethic at a pivotal period of his intellectual
career, shortly after his recovery from a depressive illness
that had incapacitated him from serious academic work for a
period of some four years. Prior to his sickness, most of Weber’s
works, although definitely presaging the themes developed in
the later phase of his life, were technical researches in economic history, economics and jurisprudence. They include studies of
mediaeval trading law (his doctoral dissertation), the development
of Roman land-tenure, and the contemporary socioeconomic
conditions of rural workers in the eastern part of
Germany. These writings took their inspiration in some substantial
part from the so-called ‘historical school’ of economics
which, in conscious divergence from British political economy,
stressed the need to examine economic life within the context of
the historical development of culture as a whole. Weber always
remained indebted to this standpoint. But the series of works he
began on his return to health, and which preoccupied him for
the remainder of his career, concern a range of problems much
broader in compass than those covered in the earlier period. The
Protestant Ethic was a first fruit of these new endeavours.
1. THE BACKGROUND
German philosophy, political theory and economics in the nineteenth
century were very different from their counterparts in
Britain. The dominant position of utilitarianism and classical
political economy in the latter country was not reproduced in
Germany, where these were held at arm’s length by the influence
of Idealism and, in the closing decades of the nineteenth
century, by the growing impact of Marxism. In Britain, J. S.
Mill’s System of Logic (1843) unified the natural and social sciences
in a framework that fitted comfortably within existing traditions
in that country. Mill was Comte’s most distinguished British
disciple, if sharply critical of some of his excesses. Comte’s.
positivism never found a ready soil in Germany; and Dilthey’s
sympathetic but critical reception of Mill’s version of the ‘moral
sciences’ gave an added impulse to what came to be known as
the Geisteswissenschaften (originally coined precisely as a translation
of ‘moral sciences’). The tradition of the Geisteswissenschaften, or
the ‘hermeneutic’ tradition, stretches back well before Dilthey,
and from the middle of the eighteenth century onwards was
intertwined with, but also partly set off from, the broader stream
of Idealistic philosophy. Those associated with the hermeneutic
viewpoint insisted upon the differentiation of the sciences of
nature from the study of man. While we can ‘explain’ natural
occurrences in terms of the application of causal laws, human
conduct is intrinsically meaningful, and has to be ‘interpreted’
or ‘understood’ in a way which has no counterpart in nature.
Such an emphasis linked closely with a stress upon the centrality
of history in the study of human conduct, in economic action as
in other areas, because the cultural values that lend meanings to
human life, it was held, are created by specific processes of social
development.
Just as he accepted the thesis that history is of focal importance
to the social sciences, Weber adopted the idea that the
‘understanding’ (Verstehen) of meaning is essential to the explication
of human action. But he was critical of the notions of ‘intuition’,
‘empathy’, etc. that were regarded by many others as
necessarily tied to the interpretative understanding of conduct.
Most important, he rejected the view that recognition of the
‘meaningful’ character of human conduct entails that causal
explanation cannot be undertaken in the social sciences. On the
level of abstract method, Weber was not able to work out a
satisfactory reconciliation of the diverse threads that he tried to
knit together; but his effort at synthesis produced a distinctive
style of historical study, combining a sensitivity to diverse cultural
meanings with an insistence upon the fundamental causal
role of ‘material’ factors in influencing the course of history.
introduction ix
It was from such an intellectual backgro.
It was from such an intellectual background that Weber
approached Marxism, both as a set of doctrines and a political
force promoting practical ends. Weber was closely associated
with the Verein für Sozialpolitik (Association for Social Policy), a
group of liberal scholars interested in the promotion of progressive
social reform.1
He was a member of the so-called ‘younger
generation’ associated with the Verein, the first group to acquire a
sophisticated knowledge of Marxist theory and to attempt to
creatively employ elements drawn from Marxism – without ever
accepting it as an overall system of thought, and recoiling from
its revolutionary politics. While acknowledging the contributions
of Marx, Weber held a more reserved attitude towards
Marxism (often being bitterly critical of the works and political
involvements of some of Marx’s professed followers) than did
his illustrious contemporary, Sombart. Each shared, however, a
concern with the origins and likely course of evolution of industrial
capitalism, in Germany specifically and in the West as a
whole.2
Specifically, they saw the economic conditions that Marx
believed determined the development and future transformation
of capitalism as embedded within a unique cultural totality.3
Both devoted much of their work to identifying the emergence
of this ‘ethos’ or ‘spirit’ (Geist) of modern Western capitalism.
In seeking to specify the distinctive characteristics of modern
capitalism in The Protestant Ethic, Weber first of all separates off
capitalistic enterprise from the pursuit of gain as such. The
desire for wealth has existed in most times and places, and has in
itself nothing to do with capitalistic action, which involves a
regular orientation to the achievement of profit through (nominally
peaceful) economic exchange. ‘Capitalism’, thus defined,
in the shape of mercantile operations, for instance, has existed in
various forms of society: in Babylon and Ancient Egypt, China,
x introduction
India and mediaeval Europe. But only in the West, and in relatively
recent times, has capitalistic activity become associated
with the rational organisation of formally free labour.
4
By ‘rational organisation’
of labour here Weber means its routinised, calculated
administration within continuously functioning enterprises.
A rationalised capitalistic enterprise implies two things: a disciplined
labour force, and the regularised investment of capital.
Each contrasts profoundly with traditional types of economic
activity. The significance of the former is readily illustrated by
the experience of those who have set up modern productive
organisations in communities where they have not previously
been known. Let us suppose such employers, in order to raise
productivity, introduce piece-rates, whereby workers can
improve their wages, in the expectation that this will provide the
members of their labour force with an incentive to work harder.
The result may be that the latter actually work less than before:
because they are interested, not in maximising their daily wage,
but only in earning enough to satisfy their traditionally established
needs.
A parallel phenomenon exists among the wealthy
in traditional forms of society, where those who profit from
capitalist enterprise do so only in order to acquire money for the
uses to which it can be put, in buying material comfort, pleasure
or power. The regular reproduction of capital, involving its continual
investment and reinvestment for the end of economic
efficiency, is foreign to traditional types of enterprise. It is
associated with an outlook of a very specific kind: the continual
accumulation of wealth for its own sake, rather than for the
material rewards that it can serve to bring. ‘Man is dominated by
the making of money, by acquisition as the ultimate purpose of
his life. Economic acquisition is no longer subordinated to man
as the means for the satisfaction of his material needs’ (p. 18).
This, according to Weber, is the essence of the spirit of modern
capitalism.
What explains this historically peculiar circumstance of a
introduction xi
drive to the accumulation of wealth conjoined to an absence of
interest in the worldly pleasures which it can purchase? It would
certainly be mistaken, Weber argues, to suppose that it derives
from the relaxation of traditional moralities: this novel outlook
is a distinctively moral one, demanding in fact unusual selfdiscipline.
The entrepreneurs associated with the development
of rational capitalism combine the impulse to accumulation with
a positively frugal life-style. Weber finds the answer in the ‘thisworldly
asceticism’ of Puritanism, as focused through the concept
of the ‘calling’. The notion of the calling, according to
Weber, did not exist either in Antiquity or in Catholic theology;
it was introduced by the Reformation. It refers basically to the
idea that the highest form of moral obligation of the individual
is to fulfil his duty in worldly affairs. This projects religious
behaviour into the day-to-day world, and stands in contrast to
the Catholic ideal of the monastic life, whose object is to transcend
the demands of mundane existence. Moreover, the moral
responsibility of the Protestant is cumulative: the cycle of sin,
repentance and forgiveness, renewed throughout the life of the
Catholic, is absent in Protestantism.
Although the idea of the calling was already present in
Luther’s doctrines, Weber argues, it became more rigorously
developed in the various Puritan sects: Calvinism, Methodism,
Pietism and Baptism. Much of Weber’s discussion is in fact concentrated
upon the first of these, although he is interested not
just in Calvin’s doctrines as such but in their later evolution
within the Calvinist movement. Of the elements in Calvinism
that Weber singles out for special attention, perhaps the most
important, for his thesis, is the doctrine of predestination: that
only some human beings are chosen to be saved from damnation,
the choice being predetermined by God. Calvin himself
may have been sure of his own salvation, as the instrument of
Divine prophecy; but none of his followers could be. ‘In its
extreme inhumanity’, Weber comments, ‘this doctrine must
xii introduction
above all have had one consequence for the life of a generation
which surrendered to its magnificent consistency . . . A feeling
of unprecedented inner loneliness’ (p. 60). From this torment,
Weber holds, the capitalist spirit was born. On the pastoral level,
two developments occurred: it became obligatory to regard oneself
as chosen, lack of certainty being indicative of insufficient
faith; and the performance of ‘good works’ in worldly activity
became accepted as the medium whereby such surety could be
demonstrated. Hence success in a calling eventually came to be
regarded as a ‘sign’ – never a means – of being one of the elect.
The accumulation of wealth was morally sanctioned in so far as
it was combined with a sober, industrious career; wealth was
condemned only if employed to support a life of idle luxury or
self-indulgence.
Calvinism, according to Weber’s argument, supplies the
moral energy and drive of the capitalist entrepreneur; Weber
speaks of its doctrines as having an ‘iron consistency’ in the
bleak discipline which it demands of its adherents. The element
of ascetic self-control in worldly affairs is certainly there in the
other Puritan sects also: but they lack the dynamism of Calvinism.
Their impact, Weber suggests, is mainly upon the formation
of a moral outlook enhancing labour discipline within the lower
and middle levels of capitalist economic organisation. ‘The
virtues favoured by Pietism’, for example, were those ‘of the
faithful official, clerk, labourer, or domestic worker’ (p. 88).
.
3. THE PROTESTANT ETHIC IN THE CONTEXT OF
WEBER’S OTHER WRITINGS
For all its fame, The Protestant Ethic is a fragment. It is much shorter
and less detailed than Weber’s studies of the other ‘world religions’:
ancient Judaism, Hinduism and Buddhism, and Confucianism
(Weber also planned, but did not complete, a full-scale
study of Islam). Together, these form an integrated series of
works.5
Neither The Protestant Ethic nor any of the other studies was
conceived of by Weber as a descriptive account of types of
religion. They were intended as analyses of divergent modes
of the rationalisation of culture, and as attempts to trace out
the significance of such divergencies for socio-economic
development.
In his study of India, Weber placed particular emphasis upon
the period when Hinduism became first established (about four
or five centuries before the birth of Christ). The beliefs and
practices grouped together as ‘Hinduism’ vary considerably.
Weber singles out as especially important for his purposes the
doctrines of reincarnation and compensation (Karma), each tied
in closely to the caste system. The conduct of an individual in
any one incarnation, in terms of the enactment of his caste
obligations, determines his fate in his next life; the faithful can
contemplate the possibility of moving up a hierarchy towards
divinity in the course of successive incarnations. There is an
important emphasis upon asceticism in Hinduism, but it is, in
Weber’s term, ‘other-worldly’: that is to say, it is directed
towards escaping the encumbrances of the material world rather
than, as in Puritanism, towards the rational mastery of that world
itself. During the same period at which Hinduism became systematised,
trade and manufacture reached a peak in India. But
the influence of Hinduism, and of the emergent caste system
which interlaced with it, effectively inhibited any economic
development comparable to modern European capitalism. ‘A
ritual law,’ Weber remarks, ‘in which every change of occupation,
every change in work technique, may result in ritual
degradation is certainly not capable of giving birth to economic
and technical revolutions from within itself . . .’6
The phrase
‘from within itself’ is a vital one: Weber’s concerns were with
the first origins of modern capitalism in Europe, not with its
subsequent adoption elsewhere.
As in India, in China at certain periods trade and manufacture.
reached a fairly high level of evolution; trade and craft guilds
flourished; there was a monetary system; there existed a
developed framework of law. All of these elements Weber
regards as preconditions for the development of rational capitalism
in Europe. While the character of Confucianism, as Weber
portrays it, is very different from Hinduism, it no more provided
for ‘the incorporation of the acquisitive drive in a thisworldly
ethic of conduct’7
than did Hinduism. Confucianism is,
in an important sense, a ‘this-worldly’ religion, but not one
which embodies ascetic values. The Calvinist ethic introduced
an activism into the believer’s approach to worldly affairs, a
drive to mastery in a quest for virtue in the eyes of God, that
are altogether lacking in Confucianism. Confucian values do
not promote such a rational instrumentalism, nor do they sanctify
the transcendence of mundane affairs in the manner of
Hinduism; instead they set as an ideal the harmonious adjustment
of the individual to the established order of things. The
religiously cultivated man is one who makes his behaviour
coherent with the intrinsic harmony of the cosmos. An ethic
which stresses rational adjustment to the world ‘as it is’ could
not have generated a moral dynamism in economic activity
comparable to that characteristic of the spirit of European
capitalism.
Weber’s other completed study of the ‘world religions’, that
of ancient Judaism, is also an important element of his overall
project. For the first origins of Judaism in ancient Palestine mark
the nexus of circumstances in which certain fundamental differences
between the religions of the Near and Far East became
elaborated. The distinctive doctrines forged in Judaism were
perpetuated in Christianity, and hence incorporated into Western
Culture as a whole. Judaism introduced a tradition of ‘ethical
prophecy’, involving the active propagation of a Divine mission,
that contrasts with the ‘exemplary prophecy’ more characteristic
of India and China. In the latter type, the prophet offers the
example of his own life as a model for his followers to strive
after: the active missionary zeal characteristic of ethical
prophecy is lacking in the teachings of the exemplary prophets.
Judaism and Christianity rest on the tension between sin and
salvation and that gives them a basic transformative capacity
which the Far Eastern religions lack, being more contemplative
in orientation. The opposition between the imperfections of the
world and the perfection of God, in Christian theodicy, enjoins
the believer to achieve his salvation through refashioning the
world in accordance with Divine purpose. Calvinism, for Weber,
both maximises the moral impulsion deriving from the active
commitment to the achievement of salvation and focuses it upon
economic activity.
The Protestant Ethic, Weber says, traces ‘only one side of the
causal chain’ connecting Puritanism to modern capitalism
(p. xxxix). He certainly does not claim that differences in the
rationalisation of religious ethics he identifies are the only significant
influences that separate economic development in the
West from that of the Eastern civilisations. On the contrary, he
specifies a number of fundamental socio-economic factors
which distinguish the European experience from that of India
and of China, and which were of crucial importance to the
emergence of modern capitalism. These include the following:
1. The separation of the productive enterprise from the household
which, prior to the development of industrial capitalism,
was much more advanced in the West than it ever became elsewhere.
In China, for example, extended kinship units provided
the major forms of economic co-operation, thus limiting the
influence both of the guilds and of individual entrepreneurial
activity. 2. The development of the Western city. In postmediaeval
Europe, urban communities reached a high level of
political autonomy, thus setting off ‘bourgeois’ society from
agrarian feudalism. In the Eastern civilisations, however, partly
because of the influence of kinship connections that cut across.
the urban-rural differentiation, cities remained more embedded
in the local agrarian economy. 3. The existence, in Europe, of an
inherited tradition of Roman law, providing a more integrated
and developed rationalisation of juridical practice than came
into being elsewhere. 4. This in turn was one factor making
possible the development of the nation-state, administered by
full-time bureaucratic officials, beyond anything achieved in the
Eastern civilisations. The rational-legal system of the Western
state was in some degree adapted within business organisations
themselves, as well as providing an overall framework for the
co-ordination of the capitalist economy. 5. The development of
double-entry bookkeeping in Europe. In Weber’s view, this was
a phenomenon of major importance in opening the way for the
regularising of capitalistic enterprise. 6. That series of changes
which, as Marx emphasised, prepared the way for the formation
of a ‘free’ mass of wage-labourers, whose livelihood
depends upon the sale of labour-power in the market. This
presupposes the prior erosion of the monopolies over the disposal
of labour which existed in the form of feudal obligations
(and were maximised in the East in the form of the caste
system).
Taken together, these represent a mixture of necessary and
precipitating conditions which, in conjunction with the moral
energy of the Puritans, brought about the rise of modern Western
capitalism. But if Puritanism provided that vital spark igniting
the sequence of change creating industrial capitalism, the
latter order, once established, eradicates the specifically religious
elements in the ethic which helped to produce it:
When asceticism was carried out of monastic cells into everyday
life, and began to dominate worldly morality, it did its part
in building the tremendous cosmos of the modern economic
order . . . victorious capitalism, since it rests on mechanical
foundations, needs its support no longer . . . the idea of duty in
one’s calling prowls about in our lives like the ghost of dead
religious beliefs.
(pp. 123–4)
Here The Protestant Ethic, concerned above all with the origins of
modern capitalism, connects up with Weber’s sombre indictment
of the latter-day progression of contemporary industrial
culture as a whole. Puritanism has played a part in creating the
‘iron cage’ in which modern man has to exist – an increasingly
bureaucratic order from which the ‘spontaneous enjoyment
of life’ is ruthlessly expunged. ‘The Puritan’, Weber concludes,
‘wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so’ (p. 123).
.
4. THE CONTROVERSY
The Protestant Ethic was written with polemical intent, evident in
various references Weber makes to ‘Idealism’ and ‘Materialism’.
The study, he says, is ‘a contribution to the understanding of the
manner in which ideas become effective forces in history’, and
is directed against economic determinism. The Reformation, and
the development of the Puritan sects subsequently, cannot be
explained as ‘a historically necessary result’ of prior economic
changes (pp. 48–9). It seems clear that Weber has Marxism in
mind here, or at least the cruder forms of Marxist historical
analysis which were prominent at the time.8
But he is emphatic
that he does not want to substitute for such a deterministic
Materialism an equally monistic Idealist account of history (cf.
p. 125). Rather the work expresses his conviction that there are
no ‘laws of history’: the emergence of modern capitalism in the
West was an outcome of an historically specific conjunction of
events.
The latent passion of Weber’s account may be glimpsed in the
comments on Puritanism and its residue with which The Protestant
Ethic concludes. The ‘iron cage’ is imagery enough to carry
Weber’s distaste for the celebration of the mundane and the
routine he thought central to modern culture. He adds, however,
a quotation from Goethe: ‘Specialists without spirit, sensualists
without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of
civilisation never before achieved.’ (p. 124) Such sweeping
evaluation contrasts oddly with the cautious way in which
Weber surrounds the main theses of the book with a battery of
qualifications. Perhaps it is this contrast, unexplicated in the
book itself, although clarified when the work is regarded as one
element in Weber’s project as a whole, that helped to stimulate
the controversy to which its publication gave rise. But what
explains the intensity of the debate which it has aroused; and
why has the controversy been actively carried on for so long?
The most important reason for the emotional intensity provoked
by the book is no doubt the fact that the two major terms
in Weber’s equation, ‘religion’ and ‘capitalism’, were each
potentially explosive when applied to the interpretation of
the origins of the modern Western economy. Weber argued for
the transformative force of certain religious ideas, thus earning
the opposition of most contemporary Marxists; his characterisation
of Catholicism as lacking in mundane discipline, and as a
retarding rather than a stimulating influence upon modern economic
development, ensured the hostility of many Catholic historians;
and his analysis of Protestantism, emphasising the role
of the Puritan sects (whose influence is in turn linked to the
‘iron cage’ of modern culture), was hardly likely to meet a universal
welcome from Protestant thinkers. Finally, the use of the
term ‘capitalism’ was controversial in itself: many were, and
some still are, inclined to argue that the notion has no useful
application in economic history.
The very diversity of responses thus stimulated by The Protestant
Ethic helps to explain the protracted character of the debate. But
there are other significant underlying factors. The intellectual
power of Weber’s arguments derives in no small part from his.
disregard of traditional subject-boundaries, made possible by
the extraordinary compass of his own scholarship. Consequently,
his work can be approached on several levels: as a
specific historical thesis, claiming a correlation between Calvinism
and entrepreneurial attitudes; as a causal analysis of the
influence of Puritanism upon capitalistic activity; as an interpretation
of the origins of key components of modern Western society
as a whole; and, set in the context of Weber’s comparative
studies, as part of an attempt to identify divergent courses in the
rationalisation of culture in the major civilisations of West and
East. The controversy over The Protestant Ethic has moved back and
forward between these levels, embracing along the way not only
such substantive themes, but also most of the methodological
issues which Weber wrote the book to help illuminate; and it has
drawn in a dazzling variety of contributors from economics,
history and economic history, comparative religion, anthropology
and sociology. Moreover, through the works of others who
have accepted some or all of Weber’s analysis and tried to extend
elements of it, secondary controversies have sprung into being –
such as that surrounding R. K. Merton’s account of the influence
of Protestantism on science in seventeenth-century England.9
It would be difficult to deny that some of the critical responses
to The Protestant Ethic, particularly immediately following its original
publication in Germany, and on the first appearance of this
translation in 1930, were founded upon either direct misunderstandings
of the claims Weber put forward, or upon an
inadequate grasp of what he was trying to achieve in the work.
Some such misinterpretations by his early critics, such as Fischer
and Rachfahl, were accepted by Weber as partly his responsibility.10
These critics, of course, did not have the possibility of
placing The Protestant Ethic in the context of Weber’s broad range
of comparative analyses. They can perhaps be forgiven for not
appreciating the partial character of the study, even if Weber did
caution his readers as to the limitations on its scope. But it is less
