The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

Overview

About two hundred and fifty pages, an essay published in 1904 and 1905 and revised in 1920, asking why modern capitalism, with its disciplined pursuit of profit as a duty, arose in the Protestant regions of Europe. Weber argues that Luther’s idea of the calling and above all Calvinist predestination, which left believers anxious for signs of election, produced an inner-worldly asceticism of hard work, thrift and reinvestment.

Franklin’s maxims illustrate the resulting spirit. Once established, the system no longer needs the faith that produced it, and the modern person is caught in what Weber calls a steel-hard casing, often translated as the iron cage.

What happens

The problem. Weber observes that in mixed regions of Germany the Protestants are the business owners, the skilled workers and the technically trained, and asks why a faith that made worldly life harder should produce people so successful in it.

The spirit of capitalism. Using Franklin’s maxims, he defines the spirit as the pursuit of gain as an end in itself and an ethical duty, and distinguishes it from the mere greed that has existed everywhere and the traditionalism that works only until its wants are met.

Luther’s calling. The Reformation gave worldly work a religious dignity by making the ordinary occupation a calling from God, but Luther’s own traditionalism could not have produced the capitalist spirit.

Calvinism and predestination. The decisive step was Calvin’s doctrine that God has chosen the elect from eternity and nothing can change it, which left believers in unprecedented loneliness and anxiety, and led their pastors to counsel tireless labour in a calling as the way to certainty of grace.

Worldly asceticism. Weber follows the doctrine through Pietism, Methodism and the Baptist sects, and shows how the monastic discipline of time and appetite was carried into the world, producing people who worked hard, spent little and reinvested the rest.

The iron cage. Once the system was built, it ran on its own: the Puritan wanted to work in a calling, and we are forced to, the light cloak of worldly care become a steel-hard casing from which the spirit of religion has fled.

How to read it

Read the opening statistics and the closing image together, since the essay moves from an observed correlation to a tragedy, and the method of the middle is what connects them.

Pay close attention to the argument about predestination, and to the irony that a doctrine denying all human merit produced the most industrious people in history.

Notice the use of Franklin, and of documents rather than statistics throughout, and understand the ideal type as a method that describes what a spirit would be in its purest form rather than what any one person was.

Consider the close, the calling become compulsion and the cage that outlived the faith, and ask whether Weber is describing a fate or a warning.

Read this essay alongside Marx’s Capital to see the argument about religion and economic life run in opposite directions, and decide whether the two accounts contradict each other or describe different things.

Questions it raises

• Does the essay claim that Protestantism caused capitalism, and if not, what is the weaker claim it does make, and does it hold?
• Is the psychology of the anxious Calvinist, proving election through work, a historical finding or a plausible story, and how would one tell?
• What does Weber’s method of ideal types allow that statistics would not, and what does it permit him to ignore?
• Is the iron cage a description of modern life or a mood of 1905, and has the casing loosened or hardened since?
• How does the essay’s argument fare against the century of criticism it provoked, from Tawney’s reversal to the historians who found capitalism in Catholic Italy?
• Why has the phrase iron cage outlived the argument, and what do people mean by it who have never read the book?