Max Weber

In The Protestant Ethic, Max Weber opposes the Marxist concept of dialectical materialism and relates the rise of the capitalist economy to the Calvinist belief in the moral value of hard work and the fulfillment of one's worldly duties. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

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The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

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Second, they were encouraged to assume that “tireless labor in a calling was . . . the best possible means of attaining this self-assurance.” This enduring crisis of “proof”—of demonstrating to oneself that one was among the chosen spiritual elite—fashioned a distinctive kind of individual, Weber maintained. Unable to find solace in the sacraments or in the image of a kindly God, aware that their neighbors, even their family, may be among the perpetually condemned, Calvinist believers were psychologically isolated. Their distance from God could only be precariously bridged, and their inner tensions only partially relieved, by unstinting, purposeful labor.

Today, even peoples of thoroughly modern economic character can tolerate the rule of the Catholic Church—“punishing heretics, but treating sinners gently,” a principle that applied even more strongly in the sixteenth century than it does today; but the rule of Calvinism, as exercised in the sixteenth century in Geneva and Scotland, at the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in large parts of the Netherlands, in the seventeenth century in New England, and at times even in England, would be for us simply the most unbearable form of ecclesiastical control over the individual that it would be possible to imagine.

This view leads Protestants to criticize those (real or alleged) ascetic ideals of the Catholic conduct of life while Catholics respond with the accusation of “materialism,” which they believe to be the consequence of the way Protestantism has secularized every aspect of life.

At the outset of their development, Calvinism and the Baptist movement were sharply opposed, but the Baptist movement of the later seventeenth cen “century came close to Calvinism, and indeed in the Independent sects of England and Holland at the beginning of the seventeenth century the distinction between them had become blurred. There was also a gradual transition between Pietism and Lutheranism, and the same can be said of Calvinism and the Anglican Church, which in its outward character and the spirit of its most loyal members was close to Catholicism.

For the reprobate, for example, to complain about their fate as undeserved would be like the animals complaining because they were not born as men. For every creature was separated from God by an unbridgeable gulf and deserved only eternal death except in so far as he, for the greater glory of his majesty, had willed differently. All we could know was that one section of humanity would be saved, and the rest damned. To assume that human merit or fault had any influence on one’s fate would be to regard God’s absolutely free decisions, which had stood for all eternity, as capable of being changed by human influence—an impossible idea.

This doctrine, with all the pathos of its inhumanity, had one principal consequence for the mood of a generation which yielded to its magnificent logic: it engendered, for each individual, a feeling of tremendous inner loneliness.

He fundamentally rejects the assumption that one can tell from the behavior of others whether they are elect or reprobate, calling it a presumptuous attempt to penetrate the mysteries of God. In this life the elect are indistinguishable from the reprobate [90], and even the subjective experiences of the elect—as “ludibria spiritus sancti”12—are possible for the reprobate too, with the sole exception of that persevering, faithful trust, finaliter. So the elect are and remain God’s invisible church.

“Psychologically, however—since predestination is rejected—the specifically methodical character of Baptist morality rests above all on the idea of “waiting” upon the working of the spirit, which even to day characterizes the Quaker “meeting”39 and is finely analyzed by Barclay: the purpose of this silent waiting is the overcoming of the instinctive and irrational, the passions and subjectivity of the “natural” man, who should be silent, in order to create that quietness in his soul in which alone God can speak. Admittedly, the effect of this “waiting” can result in hysterical states,40 prophecy, and, where eschatological hopes are cherished, even to an outbreak of fanatical reforming zeal, as occurred in the Münster movement, which was crushed. But as Baptist ideas began to infiltrate normal secular life, the belief that God only speaks when the creature is silent evidently led to the calm consideration of actions and to the basing of these on careful individual searching of the conscience.

Above and beyond this, however, work is the end and purpose of life commanded by God. [240] The Pauline principle “He who will not work, shall not eat,” applies absolutely and to everyone. [241] Unwillingness to work is a symptom of the absence of the state of grace. [242] There is a clear departure here from the medieval doctrine. According to Thomas Aquinas’s interpretation of the Pauline principle [243], work is only necessary “naturali ratione” for the preservation of the life of the individual and the community. Where this purpose is missing, the validity of the command ceases along with it. It applies only to mankind in general, not to each individual. It does not apply to anyone who can live off his possessions without having to work, and similarly, of course, contemplation as a spiritual form of work for the kingdom of God is outside the scope of the command in its literal interpretation. 

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