What was the main point of Max Webers study of Protestantism and the development of capitalism?

Max Weber published his highly-influential work The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism in 1904. The focus of Weber's study was that religion was an engine of social change. Weber identified features of the Calvinist protestant religion which he argued had the unintended consequence of playing a major role in kick-starting capitalism.

Calvinism was a protestant religious movement from the 16th century. The two features of Calvinism that Weber considered to be especially influential in the development of capitalism were ascetism and predestination.

Ascetism is a philosophy of self-denial: the idea that Christians should lead an austere life, without luxuries. This may seem an odd philosophy to kick-start an economic system based on the accumulation of ever greater wealth, but it does make sense – wait for it!

Predestination is the idea that it has already been decided who will go to heaven and who will go to hell and there is nothing you can do about this during your time on Earth. Good deeds, repentance, penance: none of this will save you: God had already decided your fate before you were born. The problem with this belief is that it fails to perform many of the functions that sociologists like Parsons or Malinowski suggested religion should perform, because it offers little comfort. Indeed, people were leading these ascetic, joyless lives without knowing if they were to receive any reward in heaven. This contributed to a sense of anxiety, sometimes described as salvation panic. This led to Calvinists looking for signs from God that they were indeed among the elect (those who would go to heaven). They increasingly came to see success as a sign, and therefore threw themselves into their work.

Because of ascetism and the idea that people should make themselves useful and follow a “calling”, it was business at which Calvinists might be successful, and when they were successful, instead of spending the money on luxury items, they reinvested the money into their businesses. Making money and reinvesting it in order to make more money was the origin of the values and spirit of capitalism.

Evaluating Weber

Even Weber himself acknowledged that Calvinism was not the only factor responsible for the development of capitalism. He believed it to be a significant factor, but acknowledged that there would have been others (outside the scope of his study).
Weber has been accused of holding a ‘debate with the ghost of Marx’. While Marx saw capitalism as the product of material relationships and religion as something which reflected those material interests, Weber sought to turn it on its head, by suggesting that economic change could be driven by religious beliefs and values.
Weber’s conclusions have received some criticism. Eisenstadt (1968) argues that capitalism did occur in places where there was no Calvinism and indeed pre-dated Calvinism in some places. He pointed to Roman Catholic Italy, for example.
R.H. Tawney concluded that capitalism helped create Protestantism at least as much as the other way around. He thought that early protestants embraced features of the new capitalism as fitting with their world-view and ethic. It was rationalism, rather than salvation panic, that brought the two together.
Others have pointed out that there were places were Calvinism was very strong where there was very little development of capitalism and indeed hostility to commerce. The clearest example of this was Scotland, which remained very poor while Calvinism was dominant.
Finally, some have questioned Weber’s understanding of Calvinism and other religions and therefore his explanation is incorrect on a theological level.

Learning Objectives

Summarize Weber’s view on the relationship between Protestantism and capitalism

Max Weber was a German sociologist and political economist who profoundly influenced social theory, social research, and the discipline of sociology itself. In 1919, he established a sociology department at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.

Along with Marx and Durkheim, Weber is considered one of the three principal forefathers of modern social science. That being said, Weber developed a unique methodological position that set him apart from these other sociologists. As opposed to positivists like Comte and Durkheim, Weber was a key proponent of methodological antipositivism. He presented sociology as a non-empiricist field whose goal was not to gather data and predict outcomes, but instead to understand the meanings and purposes that individuals attach to their own actions.

In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, his most famous text, Weber proposed that ascetic Protestantism was one of the major “elective affinities” associated with the rise of capitalism, bureaucracy, and the rational-legal nation-state in the Western world. Although some consider Weber’s argument to be a study of religion, it can also be interpreted as an introduction to his later works, especially his studies of the interaction between various religious ideas and economic behavior. In contrast to Marx’s “historical materialism,” Weber emphasized how the cultural influences embedded in religion could be a means for understanding the genesis of capitalism. Weber viewed religion as one of the core forces in society.

Weber proposed that ascetic Protestantism had an elective affinity with capitalism, bureaucracy, and the rational-legal nation-state in the Western world. By elective affinity, Weber meant something less direct than causality, but something more direct than correlation. In other words, although he did not argue that religion caused economic change, Weber did find that ascetic Protestantism and modern capitalism often appeared alongside one another in societies. Additionally, Weber observed that both ascetic Protestantism and capitalism encouraged cultural practices that reinforced one another. He never claimed that religion was the complete, simple, isolated cause of the rise of capitalism in the West. Instead, he viewed it was part of a cultural complex that included the following:

rationalism of scientific pursuit
the merging of observation with mathematics
an increasingly scientific method of scholarship and jurisprudence
the rational systemization of government administration and economic enterprise
increasing bureaucratization

In the end, the study of the sociology of religion, according to Weber, focused on one distinguishing fact about Western culture, the decline of beliefs in magic. He referred to this phenomena as the “disenchantment of the world. ”

As evidence for his study, Weber noted that ascetic Protestantism and advanced capitalism tended to coincide with one another. Weber observed that, after the Reformation, Protestant countries such as the Netherlands, England, Scotland, and Germany gained economic prominence over Catholic countries such as France, Spain, and Italy. Furthermore, in societies with different religions, the most successful business leaders tended to be Protestant.

John Calvin, the first capitalist?: Weber saw an elective affinity between capitalism and Protestantism, especially Calvinism.

To explain these observations, Weber argued that Protestantism, and especially the ascetic Protestant or Calvinist denominations, had redefined the connection between work and piety. Historically, Christian religious devotion had been accompanied by a rejection of mundane affairs, including economic pursuits. In contrast, Weber showed that certain types of Protestantism, notably Calvinism, supported worldly activities and the rational pursuit of economic gain. Because of the particularly Calvinist view of the world, these activities became endowed with moral and spiritual significance. In these religions, believers expressed their piety towards God through hard work and achievement in a secular vocation, or calling. Because of this religious orientation, human effort was shifted away from the contemplation of the divine and towards rational efforts aimed at achieving economic gain. Furthermore, the Protestant ethic, while promoting the pursuit of economic gain, eschewed hedonistic pleasure. Thus, believers were encouraged to make money, but not to spend it. This motivated believers to work hard, to be successful in business, and to reinvest their profits rather than spend them on frivolous pleasures. The Calvinist notion of predestination also meant that material wealth could be taken as a sign of salvation in the afterlife. Predestination is the belief that God has chosen who will be saved and who will not.

Protestant believers thus reconciled, even encouraged, the pursuit of profit with religion. Instead of being viewed as morally suspect, greedy, or ambitious, financially successful believers were viewed as being motivated by a highly moral and respectable philosophy, the “spirit of capitalism. ” Eventually, the rational roots of this doctrine outgrew their religious origins and became autonomous cultural traits of capitalist society. Thus, Weber explained the rise of capitalism by looking at systems of culture and ideas. This theory is often viewed as a reversal of Marx’s thesis that the economic “base” of society determines all other aspects of it.

Key Points

Max Weber was a German sociologist and political economist who profoundly influenced social theory, social research, and the discipline of sociology itself.
In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, his most enduring text, Weber proposed that ascetic Protestantism was one of the major “elective affinities ” associated with the rise of capitalism, bureaucracy, and the rational-legal nation- state in the Western world.
Weber argued that Protestantism, and especially the ascetic Protestant or Calvinist denominations, had redefined the connection between work and piety.
Weber tried to explain social action in modern society by focusing on rationalization and secularization.
Weber also developed a theory of political authority and the modern state, defining three types of authority: traditional, charismatic, and rational-legal.

Key Terms

predestination: The doctrine that everything has been foreordained by a God, especially that certain people have been elected for salvation, and sometimes also that others are destined for reprobation.
Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism: A book written by Max Weber, arguing that the rise in ascetic Protestantism, particularly denominations like Calvinism, was associated with the rise of modern capitalism in the West.
secularization: The transformation of a society from close identification with religious values and institutions toward non-religious (or “irreligious”) values and secular institutions.
rationalization: the process, or result of rationalizing