The “Protestant Ethic“ in the Weberian sense is a set of values and norms specific to the Protestant religion that developed after the Reformation but more specifically in Calvinism as a branch of Protestantism. The idea of a ‘calling’ in Calvin’s doctrine is crucial to understand the ethic that derived from his thoughts. K. Morrison argues in his book that “In contrast to Catholic theology, Protestants interpreted the ‘calling’ to signify service to wordly rather than otherworldly duties“. This idea of ‘calling’ is closely linked to the other very important idea of predestination in Calvinism. Predestination means that God has already chosen which people will be “graced“ by God and sent to Paradise and those who will be “doomed“ and send to Hell, and that there is nothing any human could do to alter God’s judgement. This completely different view of divine grace and salvation meant that no matter what men did on earth, they were either part of the elect or not and that they could not know their position until their death. Weber outlined the effect that this doctrine had on people : that it created a “feeling of unprecedented inner loneliness“ (1974, p.104) in believers and that they had to reconsider their relationship with God. This doctrine created feelings of isolation and abandonment in Protestants and most of all of inner doubt and anxiety about their place in the world. This is why in this part of the Protestant population, hard work and an ascetic manner of living ; where frugality, prudence and modesty were central ; were seen as a way to fight these inner feelings of anxiety and isolation.
The Spirit of Capitalism in the other hand, is as Weber puts it “a complex of elements associated in historical reality which we unite into a conceptual whole form the standpoint of their cultural significance“(1974, p.231) : he is clearly pointing out the fact that the spirit of capitalism he is referring to throughout his essay is a purely constructed notion. In order to define in the most exact way possible this spirit, Weber refers to Benjamin Franklin’s work on one hand and also highlights the distinction between modern and traditionnal form of capitalism on the other. In Franklin’s work, Weber is looking for the core of what makes up this spirit and what values it is conveying. In his book Advice to a Young Tradesman, Franklin sums up how newly capitalist people saw their relationship to the world, time and money. He says “ Remember that time is money. (…) Remember that money is of the prolific, generating nature. And that money can beget money“ (1748), therefore showing how rationality and the measure of time had shaped human behaviours at that time and changed them into calculative, economically rational people for whom the accumulation of profit was the ultimate goal. Larry Ray defines the spirit of capitalism as being “a set of motivational dispositions that govern the constant accumulation of capital as an end in itself“. This is where modern and traditional capitalisms differ according to Weber. In his work, Weber takes the example of a man working for a certain wage, if we increase his wage in the traditionnal capitalist theory he will work less to keep the same wage at which he is satisfied and he can satisfy his basic needs. In the modern capitalism, the worker would work more for his love of accumulating money. Therefore, Weber creates here a more complete image of what he refers to as this “spirit of modern capitalism“, that he can then link to the protestant ethic I was discussing before.
Weber never intended to prove the existence of a causal relationship between the Spirit of Capitalism and the Protestant Ethic, he wanted to highlight the fact that for this spirit to emerge there were preconditions necessary and that at the most a correlation between the values conveyed by Protestantism and the ones necessary for capitalism to prosper existed. His basic assumption was that to overthrow the old economic system, religious beliefs may have be needed with all the power religion had on people at that time. In his book Weber : a short introduction, Poggi argues that “The genesis of modern capitalism required among other conditions of a very different nature, the formation of a spirit compatible with or indeed conducive to this new way of managing economic activities“ (2006, p.73). Weber believed that Protestantism provided that new set of values and the spirit deriving from them. Modern capitalism was based on two apparently contradictory motives which were the devotion of amassing wealth and the avoidance of the use of wealth for personal pleasure. Both of these activities were proper to Calvinist believers as they thought that being wealthy and rich was a ‘calling’ and that it meant that they were one of the “elect“ chosen for eternal afterlife. The second one is also very much linked to the protestant ethic as it is close to asceticism which was central to the Calvinist doctrine. Ascesticism is rigorous self denial and renunciation of worldly pleasure with the aim of reaching a valued goal of a higher moral state, and Protestants interpreted work as being their moral duty therefore creating a set of values positive for the development of a capitalist spirit.
One of the major reasons Weber was so interested in the link between the economy and religion lays in his own relation to Germany at his time. Germany was undergoing serious economic and social problems, the first one being the lack of a bourgeois revolution in contrast with other European powers ; and therefore he wanted to look at the reasons for this different way of development through industrialisation and urbanisation. He was also interested in the reason for the development of modern capitalism in the West while in other places of the world, capitalism had thrived but never at this level of modernity.
To conclude, Weber in my opinion was successful in demonstrating a sort of connection between the Spirit of Capitalism and the Protestant Ethic. By creating these two “ideal types“, which are simplified and sometimes purposefully exaggerated accounts of a side of the social reality, he describes two sets of values and norms which are not the same but have striking similarities. Weber doesn’t argue for establishing a causal relationship between the two phenomenon, he seeks to establish a set of preconditions for the spirit of capitalism to thrive and through empirical research on the different countries in Western Europe he seems to find a pattern stating that Protestant people are usually more wealthy and engaged in the economic life of their society. His reasons for establishing a connection between the two “ideal types“ are on one hand to understand the difference in Germany’s capitalistic and social development and the rest of Western Europe but also more broadly to understand the reasons for the development of modern capitalism in the West particularly.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
“Chapter 4 : The Protestant Ethic Debate“ in Anderson, R. J., J. A. Hughes, and W. W. Sharrock. Classic Disputes in Sociology. London: Allen & Unwin, 1987. Print.
Franklin, Benjamin. Advice to a Young Tradesman. Boston, 1940. Print.
Morrison, Ken. Marx, Durkheim, Weber: Formations of Modern Social Thought. London: Sage, 1995. Print.
Poggi, Gianfranco. Weber: a Short Introduction. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2006. Print.
Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. New York: Scribner, 1958. Print.