The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

by Max Weber

  This manner of proceeding is characteristic of the Catholic Church. As in the Middle Ages, it tolerates (while in no way positively approving), temporum ratione habita the factual existence of capitalist activity, but reserves the right to punish certain forms employed by capitalism, and thus also the use of these forms. By contrast, Protestant asceticism has created for capitalism the positive ethic, or “soul,” required by that activity in order that “spirit” and “form” might become united.

  20) I once compared the creditworthiness so gained to that of a member of a German fraternity [Verbindungsstudent] (in my day one could live almost “free of charge” when one had “received one’s colors”—the creditors would pay a freshman’s matriculation fees). It could also be compared to the creditworthiness of the clergy in the Middle Ages (because the threat of excommunication hovered over him), or the often rather dubious creditworthiness of the modern young army officer, who is subject to the threat of dismissal. However, the sociologically very important difference lies in the fact that in all these cases it is not, as it is with the sect, that creditworthiness as a subjective quality of the personality (through selection for membership following appropriate training) is demanded, but only (and this is something that was, incidentally, true of the sects as well) that the objective guarantee for the creditors is increased.

  The Methodist institution of youth “training” has fallen into disuse, but was once highly significant. Equally characteristic of the Methodists was the custom of coming together in small groups for the purpose of regular mutual examination of the state of one’s soul, a kind of relatively public confession. Of course, since this was addressed to a majority of one’s personal equals, unlike Catholic confession, which took place behind a barred window, it represented a quite different psychological situation.

  21) An emphasis on modern subjects [“Realien”] is an old principle of Pietist education, which, as I have indicated, has a strong religious foundation; the same principle applied among the Quakers and the Baptists from the start; in the Reformed Church it is not infrequently evident even today, for example, in the denominational distribution across Realschulen and other school types, and in the choice of profession.

  These points are undoubtedly very important for an understanding of the connections between these forms of religiosity and the development of modern capitalism. Similarly, the well-known achievements of the Reformation in general in the area of the elementary school are certainly important. But these latter quite general connections had their limits: the achievements of the Prussian state in the area of the elementary school were absent in the country with the most advanced capitalist development, England. The “good elementary school” as such and capitalist development did not proceed in parallel.

  Incidentally, the idea expressed by R. (vol. 3, col. 1331) that there was no concern about expanding popular education, is also a serious exaggeration, especially in relation to our solidly Protestant East Elbians. In my essay I indicated the connection between a certain level of denominationally determined choice of school type and the attitude toward “fides implicita.”

  22) As recently as thirty years ago, in the denominationally mixed Westphalian territories, there was constant banter among confirmation candidates between the Lutherans, who “dragged the Savior through the gutter” (that is, the intestinal tract—because of the words: hoc “est” corpus meum) and the Reformed “holy hypocrites” [heuchlerische Werkheiligen].

  23) The Missouri Lutheran Church has retained its special character, in marked distinction to the other denominations.

  24) This is typical of R. On the one hand, he makes the greatest efforts to “discredit” this expression (for this is all his kind of so-called critique amounts to), and not only this expression but also, as he himself insists, the substantial thesis corresponding to it, namely, the inner affinity with rational monastic asceticism. On the other hand, though, he informs me that, in the opinion of respected Church historians, those specifics of ascetic Protestant religiosity signify an “as yet incomplete” break with Catholicism. The words “as yet,” however, conceal a developmental construction based on a value judgment (subjectively quite unassailable, of course) which, for example, regards Lutheranism, which rejects all “justification by works” [Werk-heiligkeit], as quite simply the “highest” form of Protestantism, and then constructs a series of steps leading up to it. Historically, however, the development of innerworldly asceticism is a product of the post-Reformation period, in other words, more a revival of religious motives that Catholicism also cultivated, but in a quite different manner and with different effects.

  25) I have already indicated elsewhere, as far as circumstances permitted (“Agrarverhältrisse im Altertum” Handwörterbuch der Staatswissenschaften, 3rd ed.), that certain quite definite objective conditions favored the rise of “homo oeconomicus.” (Incidentally, the culture of the Middle Ages contrasted unfavorably with that of antiquity in respect to geographic, political, social, and other conditions.) The extent to which modern science should be numbered among these causal “conditions” has been closely examined by Sombart.

  25a) Compare, for example, the letter from John Keats to his brother Thomas (July 3, 1818): “These Kirkmen” have “formed Scotland into Phalanges of savers and gainers” (in contrast to Ireland, from where he is writing).

  26) But not, of course, by the political upper strata, the majority of whom were Arminians, or simply indifferent (as I mentioned in my essay). The same phenomenon can be found elsewhere, and in Holland too it is mostly these upper strata who, through the “ennobling” of their wealth (purchase of manors, as in England), sought to move out of capitalist activity (at least partially). The fact that R., despite my explicit comment on Arminianism in my essay, chose to allege that these well-known matters were unknown to me, and even now, after I have reminded him of what I said, finds it appropriate to repeat the allegation to his readers, simply confirms everything that I feel about him but have no wish to keep on repeating.

  27) To avoid any misunderstanding: this stagnation certainly had very significant political causes (external and internal). This is not to say, of course, that the breakdown of ascetic characteristics was completely without influence. I myself cannot pretend to be able to answer this question definitively at the moment—and I suspect that others cannot either.

  28) It gives me considerable satisfaction, in the interests of the subject, that my efforts have been, in principle, not unkindly or indifferently received by a number of respected theological colleagues. I fully understand that this attempt to relate certain sets of religious motives to their consequences for bourgeois [bürgerlich] life must appear to fail to do justice to the ultimate value of the forms of religiosity with which we are concerned. These motives are (in terms of their religious value) the rough and external aspect of the actual religious content, and for persons with inner religious convictions, they are on the margins of this content. This is indeed true. But this merely “sociological” work (and Troeltsch himself is the theologian who chiefly undertakes this work) must also be done. Naturally, it is best left to the specialists themselves. All we outsiders can do is perhaps to suggest to them, irrespective of whether their attitude is supportive or critical, alternative problematics (Fragestellungen) based on our perspectives. This is what I had hoped to do, and from those quarters, though not from meddling faultfinders like R., I expect fruitful and instructive criticism.

  29) This would require closer interpretation, of course, which I am not able to give at this juncture. From an objective point of view, an entrepreneurial risk, however daring, does not necessarily represent an “adventure,” if it is part of a rationally calculated business enterprise and is required by the “matter in hand.”

  30) If one compares his earlier pronouncements with his present ones, one is bound to suspect that the latter are more a kind of “punishment” for my admittedly very disrespectful attitude than anything else.

  ED
ITORS’ NOTES

  1. “Antikritisches Schlusswort zum ‘Geist des Kapitalismus,’” Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik 31 (1910), pp. 554–99.

  2. The abbreviation of Rachfahl’s name to the letter “R.,” here, and in what follows, is Weber’s usage.

  3. The subtitles in square brackets have been inserted by the editors to assist the reader. They are not found in the German original.

  4. See Weber’s note 5 of his second rejoinder to Fischer, this volume, here.

  5. The Greek expression means (roughly) “par excellence.”

  6. Occasionally in this essay, Weber resorts to vernacular English. To make this clear to the reader, we have placed English words and phrases in bold type.

  7. The abbreviation of Rachfahl’s name to the letter “R.,” here, and in what follows, is Weber’s usage.

  8. 1 Corinthians 11.9 (Authorized Version).

  9. On Kuyper and the “schism,” see Editors’ note 9, in the first of Weber’s replies to Rachfahl, p. 278 above.

  10. Ecclesiastical court.

  11. See Georg Simmel, “Philosophie des Abenteuers,” Der Tag, Berlin, 7, 8 June 1910. Also “Das Abenteuer” in Philosophische Kultur: Gesammelte Essais (Leipzig: W. Klinkhardt, 1911), pp. 11–28.

  12. The term “actors” is used not, of course, in the sense of stage actors, but in the sense of being actively involved.

  13. “Miden” means “nothing,” whereas “midena” means “no one.” In the majority of ancient manuscripts, the form “miden apelpitsontes” appears in Luke 6.35 as “lend, expecting nothing in return” (Revised Standard Version). Such a meaning is, however, grammatically impossible, and the spelling of “miden” is probably due to a scribe’s error. It actually translates as “lend, causing nothing to despair,” which makes no sense. On the other hand, the other reading, which exists in a minority of ancient manuscripts, is grammatically correct and means “lend, causing no one to despair.” The difference is important for Weber’s argument. Whereas the first reading implies a total ban on lending at interest, the second only forbids excessive interest that would drive the debtor to ruin. Weber has a footnote on this in the revised edition of Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus, “Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie,” 2nd ed. (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1922), p. 59. (The editors are grateful to Dr. Hans Schleiff for additional elucidation of this point.)

  APPENDIX I: REJOINDERS TO WERNER SOMBART AND LUJO BRENTANO

  In the summer of 1919, Weber revised The Protestant Ethic, taking into account the criticisms that Werner Sombart and Lujo Brentano had made of the essay’s first version (1905). The new edition of The Protestant Ethic was published in 1920 in volume 1 of Weber’s Collected Essays in the Sociology of Religion. Below, we present the most relevant passages of Weber’s responses to Sombart and Brentano that appeared in the 1920 version so that readers of this Penguin Classic edition of The Protestant Ethic can have an overview of the career of the debate from 1907 (the joust with H. Karl Fischer) until Weber’s death in 1920.

  Werner Sombart (1863–1941) was educated at Pisa, Berlin, and Rome, studying law, economics, history, and philosophy. Although appointments at the Universities of Freiburg, Heidelberg, and Karlsruhe were vetoed by the Grand Duke of Baden on the grounds of his left-wing leanings, Sombart was eventually appointed professor of economics at the Handelshochschule in Berlin in 1906, and then in 1917 he accepted a professorial position at the University of Berlin.

  In common with Marx, whom he regarded as the greatest social philosopher of the nineteenth century, Sombart saw capitalism as giving way to socialism, but believed that this would occur through evolution rather than revolution. His attitude toward Marx, as expressed in his book Sozialismus und soziale Bewegung im 19. Jahrhundert I (Socialism and the Social Movement in the Nineteenth Century, 1st ed., 1896), was one of critical solidarity. The twenty-four editions of this widely read work, however, chart the author’s gradual progression from Kathedersozialist (moderate academic socialist) to outspoken antagonist of Marxism. The tenth edition, entitled Der proletarische Sozialismus (Proletarian Socialism; 1924), together with the later Deutscher Sozialismus (German Socialism; 1934) contributed to the ideological climate of National Socialism. Despite this, however, the regime viewed him with suspicion, and students were warned against attending his lectures. Sombart later distanced himself from National Socialist thinking in Der Mensch (Man; 1938).

  In the work for which he is best remembered, Der moderne Kapitalismus (Modern Capitalism; 2 vols., 1902), which brilliantly combines historical research with economic theory, Sombart propounds his evolutionary view of capitalism, which he sees as passing through the three stages of early, high, and late capitalism.

  Sombart was actively involved in both the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Soziologie (of which he was a cofounder) and the Verein für Sozialpolitik, until their demise in 1933 and 1936, respectively.

  Other works by Sombart include Die Juden und das Wirtschafts-leben (The Jews and Economic Life; 1911) and Der Bourgeois (1913), both of which, as well as Der moderne Kapitalismus, Weber addresses in the footnotes that we translate below.

  Lujo Brentano (1844–1931) was a prominent figure in the German reformist school of socialism (Kathedersozialismus) and a member of the Younger Historical School of economics. He gained his doctorate in 1867 at the University of Göttingen. Including his years as emeritus, he was professor of political science from 1871 until his death in 1931 at the Universities of Berlin, Breslau, Strasbourg, Vienna, Leipzig, and Munich. When Brentano retired from the University of Munich in 1919, Weber replaced him.

  In 1868, Brentano commenced a study of trade unionism in England which resulted in his Die Arbeitergilden der Gegenwart (The Workers’ Guilds of Today; 2 vols., 1871–72). In it he argued that modern trades unions were the successors of the medieval guilds; it soon became an authoritative source on modern associations of workmen. Brentano was also engaged in a polemic with Marx, prompted initially by Brentano’s claim that Marx had misquoted, indeed deliberately falsified, part of a budget speech delivered by Gladstone on April 16, 1863, when Gladstone was chancellor of the Exchequer. (The dispute led to Engels’s defense of Marx, first in the preface to the fourth edition of Capital, volume 1, and, following a rejoinder by Brentano in 1890, in a pamphlet that was published a year later.) Brentano wrote, among many other works, Eine Geschichte der wirtschaftlichen Entwicklung Englands (A History of Economic Development in England; 3 vols., 1927–29).

  Lujo Brentano ardently opposed the rise of German militarism and was for many years an outspoken pacifist. He belonged to a distinguished family line, which included the Romantic poet Clemens Brentano and Adenauer’s foreign minister in the 1950s, Heinrich Brentano.

  a)

  [Editors’ note: In this opening footnote to the 1920 edition of The Protestant Ethic, Weber comments that Brentano was apparently unaware of his (Weber’s) controversy with Rachfahl, as he (Brentano) makes no reference to it. He then continues . . .] I have not included in this edition anything from the inevitably rather fruitless polemic against Rachfahl, who—although he is a scholar whom I otherwise respect—had ventured on to a field with which he was not really familiar. I have merely added the (very few) supplementary quotations from my rebuttal [Antikritik] and attempted to rule out all possible misunderstandings for the future by inserting sentences or comments. I should also like to mention: Werner Sombart’s Der Bourgeois (Munich and Leipzig, 1913), to which I shall return in footnotes below. Finally: Lujo Brentano in the second article in the appendix to his Munich speech (Academy of Sciences, 1913) on: The Beginnings of Modern Capitalism (Munich, 1916, in a separate edition comprising additional material). I shall refer to this criticism too in special footnotes at the appropriate juncture.

  If anyone should be sufficiently interested to do so (an unlikely eventuality), they are welcome to compare the two editions of these essays and satisfy themselves that not one single sentence that
contains any materially essential statement has been cut, reinterpreted, or moderated. Nor have any materially differing statements been added. There was no occasion whatever to do so, and as the exposition proceeds, any doubts remaining cannot fail to be dispelled.

  The two last-named scholars are even more seriously at odds with each other than they are with me. Brentano’s criticism of Werner Sombart’s work Die Juden und das Wirtschaftsleben I regard as justified in many factual aspects, and yet as frequently very unfair, quite apart from the fact that even Brentano seems not to be aware of the crucial factors regarding the Jewish problem [Judenproblem] (of which more later). I myself have not dealt with it in these essays.

  Theologians have offered numerous valuable suggestions in response to this work, and reception has been on the whole favorable, and most impartial, even where opinions differed in individual cases. This is especially welcome as I should not have been surprised if there had been a certain antipathy toward the manner in which I treated these matters (which could not be ignored). That which is most valued by the theologian whose religion is dear to him cannot, in the nature of things, be given due weight here. In terms of religious value, we are often dealing with quite external and crude aspects of the religious life, but the fact remains that these aspects did exist too, and often, simply because they were crude and external, had the strongest external effects.