The Protestant work ethic: Is it really Protestant? Is it even ethical?

Did hard-working Calvinistic Protestants kick-start modern capitalism? Max Weber thought so

By DAVID MYTON

Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, first published more than 100 years ago, immediately sparked controversy and debate that continues to this day. Did hard-working Calvinistic Protestants really kick-start modern capitalism? Did they turn work into some kind of secular cult? What on earth was Weber on about?

The Protestant Ethic, originally written as a two-part article for a German academic journal in 1904-05, eventually was published in English in 1921 shortly after Weber’s death. Very few academics agree with his thesis.  

Maximilian Weber, one of the major founders of modern sociology, was born into a solid bourgeois family in April 1864 in Erfurt, Thuringia, moving with them to Berlin in 1869 where he attended an elite high school.

Bright and ambitious, he went on to study law and history at top universities in Heidelberg, Berlin and Gottingen and earned his keep working as a lecturer and lawyer. He qualified to practice law in both the US and in Britain, and in 1889 he was awarded his doctorate in law. Weber died from pneumonia in June 1920 after contracting flu in the great influenza pandemic that was then sweeping the world.

He left behind a massive oeuvre of work that’s still influential, remaining much studied today in university sociology, economics, and history faculties. In the words of the academic author Professor Jack Barbalet “serious scholars treat Weber with a good deal of respect. His contribution to our intellectual heritage is enormous”.

The world of industrial capitalism

Weber was primarily a sociologist, not a historian. He fully engaged in the political and economic debates of his day, but he rejected the revolutionary aims of the then-burgeoning Marxism.

Weber's great achievement, I think, was to bring together, and to move between, the hitherto separated disciplines of sociology, politics, religion, economics, philosophy and history - helping to shed new light on developments in Western society.

The leading Weber scholar Stephen Kalberg says Weber “lived fully and actively within the world of industrial capitalism rejecting as futile and utopian all calls for its overthrow”.

Weber writes that he intended the Protestant Ethic to be “a contribution to the understanding of the manner in which ideas become effective forces in history” – and rejected the economic determinism implicit in Marxism's base and superstructure model, at that time fashionable among certain radical types.

Weber says the capitalistic economy of his day was “an immense cosmos” into which the individual is born and which presents itself “as the unalterable order of things”.

It forces the individual to conform to capitalistic rules of action: so the manufacturer who runs counter to these norms, for example, would inevitably be eliminated from the economic scene; and the worker who couldn’t or wouldn’t adapt to capitalism's rules would be thrown into the streets without a job. But life wasn't always like this, he says.

Prior to the 16^th-17^th century Protestant Reformation in Europe, work was just a thing you did according to where you were born and your place in the hierarchy of society. Money-making as an end in itself, he argues, was contrary to the ethical feelings of entire epochs. Of course, some people did accrue wealth, they were industrious and creative - but that was not seen as an end in itself.

Give us this day our daily bread

The Old Testament seemed to teach that people should pursue “righteousness, godliness, faith, love and gentleness”. Jesus asked only that God give us this day our daily bread - with which we should be satisfied. The Christianity of Saint Paul looked upon worldly activity with indifference, or was just accepted according to tribal tradition.

In this view, the pursuit of material gain beyond personal needs was a symptom of a lack of grace, and since it could only be obtained at the expense of others, was directly reprehensible.

Making money and amassing capital as in, say, the powerhouse that was Florence in the 14th and 15th centuries, was ethically tolerated but in no sense was it regarded, Weber argues, as a God-blessed enterprise.

Even the uber-Puritan Oliver Cromwell in September 1650 wrote to England’s Parliament directing them to “reform the professions” and “if there be anyone that makes many poor to make a few rich that suits not a Commonwealth”.

All this, argues Weber, began to change after the Reformation which brought with it a new way of thinking about Scripture, influenced first by Martin Luther, but especially later by John Calvin.

And following the Reformation, Europe's economic centre of gravity began to move from Catholic countries such as France, Spain and Italy, towards the Protestant heartlands in Germany, the Netherlands, England and Scotland.

Societies in which Protestants were ascendant tended to develop successful capitalist economies – and, elsewhere, most successful business leaders were Protestants. Why so?

From his reading of the Bible, Calvin derived the notion of what he termed a “calling” - it wasn't enough to be a member of a church; each individual had to take action as an indication of their salvation.

This was not “salvation by good works”, which is frowned upon by Protestants, but rather acting as if one had already been saved and so was working to the glory of God.

This flows, argues Weber, from the Protestant notion of Predestination, in which a select few are saved whilst all others are condemned. But, as no-one knows which group they belong in, so all must act as if they are saved. This is not for their own sakes, but for the glory of God.

The power of religious asceticism

The God of Calvinism demanded of believers not single “good works” but a life of “good works” combined into a unified system that was disciplined and ascetic - out of which flowed a bourgeois work ethic. Where, as Weber writes, with “the consciousness of standing in the fullness of God's grace and being visibly blessed by him, the bourgeois businessman - as long as his moral conduct was spotless and the use to which he put his wealth was not objectionable - he could follow his pecuniary interests and feel that he was fulfilling a duty in doing so”.

The power of religious asceticism provided the believing businessman, in addition, with sober, conscientious and unusually-industrious workmen “who come to their work as to a life purpose willed by God”.

Finally, it gave him the comforting assurance that the unequal distribution of the goods of this world was a special dispensation of divine providence. And the treatment of labour as a calling became as characteristic of the modern worker as the corresponding attitude towards acquisition of the businessman.

And so, says Weber, over time asceticism began to dominate worldly morality and helped to build what he called the “tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order” - an order now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production, which now determined the lives of all people.

“Material goods have gained an increasing and finally inexorable power over the lives of men as at no previous period in history,” Weber writes.

The highest development of this new order was the United States, Weber declares - remember he was writing early in the 20th century - and there, he says, the pursuit of wealth stripped of its religious and ethical meaning but fired by the Protestant Ethic, had the characteristic of something like sport.

Weber’s thesis has been much criticised - for example, scholars point out that the roots of capitalism go way back at least to the 9th Century when monastic estates resembled well-organised and stable firms; and that, for example, places such as medieval Florence had become a monument to the productive capacities of capitalism. There was also a booming woollen industry in northern Europe centred on Bruges, Ghent and Antwerp.

The esteemed British sociologist Gordon Marshall says Weber offers little or no independent evidence concerning the motives and world view of either modern or medieval businessmen and labourers.

Weber's thesis, he says is, “empirically unverified and possibly in practice unverifiable”.

To me, Weber's book reads like a work in progress, and is limited in its scope to a certain extent. I think he’s in fact trying to delineate a spirit of capitalism and not the spirit of capitalism. Specifically I think it is a spirit of capitalism that he found in North America.

Why should money be made out of men?

Weber visited the US in 1904, travelling through the east, south and Midwest. As Stephen Kalberg writes, here he gained an appreciation of America's dynamism, energy and uniqueness as well as the self-reliance and distrust of authority that was widespread in the US.

Weber developed an interest in the so-called ascetic Protestantism of the American Quaker, Methodist, Presbyterian and Baptist churches.

He was also fascinated by the work of one of America’s founding fathers, the polymathic genius and statesman Benjamin Franklin.

Franklin’s answer to the question - why should money be made out of men? - was with a quotation from the Bible, specifically from The Proverbs, which his strict Calvinistic father had drummed into him in his youth  -  “Seest thou a man diligent in his business; He shall stand before kings” (Proverbs 22:29)

To Franklin, writes Weber, the earning of money within the modern economic order is good so long as it is done legally and is the result of and the expression of virtue and proficiency in a calling.

The spirit of capitalism was present in Massachusetts, Franklin's place of birth, long before there was a capitalistic order, Weber writes. The New England colonies were home to preachers and seminary graduates who brought with them their Calvinistic or Puritan theology.

This link intrigued Weber and inspired his quest to see if there was a Protestant ethic behind their spirit of capitalism.

Weber says it was not his aim to present a one-sided, spiritualistic, causal interpretation of culture and of history – “that would accomplish little in the interests of historical truth”.

REFERENCES

Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Translated by Talcott Parsons, Unwin Paperbacks, London, 1985.

Jack Barbalet, Weber, Passion and Profits. ‘The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism in Context’, Cambridge University Press, 2008.

Stephen Kalberg, ed, Max Weber. Readings and Commentary on Modernity, Blackwell, 2005.

Rodney Stark, The Victory of Reason, How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success, Random House, New York, 2006.

Kim, Sung Ho, ‘Max Weber’, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Summer 2021 Edition, Edward N. Zalta (ed), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/s...

Legacy of Max Weber - https://www.britannica.com/biography/...