‘The Protestant Ethic’

This year is the 500th anniversary of the Protestant reformation, one of the most important religious and political movements in all of history.

I’m sure this topic will get its due discussion on the religion page and elsewhere. Others are more qualified than I am to discuss the impact of Martin Luther and his 95 theses, or Calvin, or many of the other Protestant leaders and the virtues and imperfections of the movement they led and inspired.

But, I majored in sociology, not theology or philosophy. In my field, one of the founding works of the discipline was written about the reformation by German sociologist Max Weber. It is called “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.”

Weber’s book came to the attention of American sociologists largely through the work of Talcott Parsons of Harvard University. Himself one of the premier theorists of American sociology, Parsons also contributed by translating the work of Weber and Emile Durkheim, another of the early sociological leaders. Among them, these sociologists helped show that human social systems could be analyzed systemically. But back to Weber and his influential book. Weber examined, among other things, the writings of Benjamin Franklin, which were laden with discussions of the value of work, leisure, and the time spent doing each. “A penny saved is a penny earned” is the saying he is alleged to have coined. Franklin cast these issues in strikingly moral terms. What happened with the reformation was that with the waning authority of the Catholic church, Protestants began looking for affirmation of their salvation in other places, particularly in work. To some extent, material success became an outward sign of one’s predestined selection for heaven. This, in some sense, is Weber’s “spirit of capitalism.”

Today, we see perversions of that tenet in the “prosperity gospel” preached by Joel Osteen and others. A topic, perhaps for another day.

But it wasn’t just wealth that became a sign of faith, it was work itself. Protestants, and more importantly, nations that adopted Protestantism, adapted an ethos of hard work as a testament of faith and to view asceticism as a virtue. Hard work, saving, and thrift became virtues as well. Work became a calling; waste and idleness an affront to God.

Devotion to one’s craft, whatever that might be, was critical in the development of early capitalism. Not only did it impact individual work ethic, but the specialization that became a feature of capitalist societies benefited from workers who viewed their activities with religious devotion.

Weber noted this theme in the writings, not only of Franklin and Calvin, but others like Keats and Montesquieu.

One of the important contributions of Weber’s work was that it was comparative. He contrasted Protestant nations, particularly the United States and northern Europe, with those that remained Catholic and noted that capitalism developed more fully and more quickly in the former than the latter. Further, Protestant countries tended to focus more on mathematics, and greater value was placed on academics, organized governmental structures, and entrepreneurship.

The impact of these differences cannot be overstated. Capitalism spread more thoroughly through Protestant countries, leading to more rapid economic development and greater wealth accumulation, not only for individuals, but for entire nations.

In one sense, Weber’s work is a response to Karl Marx, who tended to be dismissive of religion, famously referring to it as the “opium of the people.” For, as Marx had viewed religion as something which was largely a function of the economic system, and as such, an institution that would likely disappear with the development of his utopian socialist world, Weber turned the idea on its head, showing that religion could impact economic structures just as much as those structures influenced religion.

In his book, Weber goes into greater detail, examining the influences and differences of various sects of Protestantism, from Calvinists to Puritans to, of course, Lutherans. His work influenced both sociology and economics and has created greater understanding of the history of both religion and capitalism in both.

For those of us who study his work, Weber and his kindred made a greater contribution. He showed that human societies, with all of their complexity, can be studied systematically and the results shared in a way that provides greater understanding to those who seek it.