The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

"This is one of the most famous and influential works of sociology ever written and one of the founding texts of economic sociology. I’ve always found it inspirational. I’m fascinated by the fact that it recognises that our relationship to capitalism requires our consent and our engagement but that it is not one that makes us happy: we’re not necessarily forced to do anything or exploited in the way that some Marxists might assume, but we are compelled in certain psychological and moral ways that are internal to us. Capitalism harnesses what Kant called the ‘moral law within me’ in order to drive me to accumulate. Weber’s contention — although it’s been contested by historians — is that capitalism as we know it began in areas of northern Europe where Protestantism was strongest. His interpretation is that under Protestantism there is a constant problem of how to prove oneself worthy in the eyes of God. He argues that the way in which Protestants dealt with this loneliness, this inability to achieve worldly recognition, was to work harder than they needed to. And it is in a religious ethic which said that work is good in and of itself that the beginnings of accumulation are found, because if you lived purely for what you needed you would stop after you had enough. “ Weber argued that Protestantism compelled people to work beyond mere economic necessity” Weber argued that Protestantism imposed moral constraints that operate at the level of the psyche, of morality and theology, that it compelled people to work beyond mere economic necessity. I think this is a devastating critique of a purely economic world view. It upsets some core economistic fallacies and assumption about human beings because it ultimately says that even when we are acting in our most industrious fashion we are also being governed by some moral and metaphysical framework of belief. It also grounds the history of capitalism and modernity in a particular time and place – in northern Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries. And it denaturalises the attitude of the capitalist by showing there is actually something rather strange about the psychology and drive to accumulate — that there’s nothing remotely natural about it, that it is not even necessarily an economic mentality but is actually a somewhat self-punishing mentality. What Weber does — and Emile Durkheim does this too — is debunk the idea that there is a sphere of rational activity — whether that be in financial markets, factories or wherever that might be — that stands alone. There is no Homo economicus — no purely hedonistic rational actor that someone like Jeremy Bentham built his whole philosophy and vision of law upon on. Think, for instance, of how a financial product like a pension gets sold. It doesn’t get sold in terms of it is a rational investment that will maximise your return, though it might include that. It will also include images of happy old age, of playing with grandchildren, of living by the sea or whatever. Internal to the promises of accumulation are certain ideals, norms — ideas of what is a worthwhile human being. That ultimately is the question that Weber poses for us. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Ultimately he shows that instrumental economic rationality and moral ideals are entangled in each other in everyday life. We are always carrying around with us private ideas of what a good life is, and these are in play in the way we set about investing, exchanging working and so on. It helps to explain, for example, why sustainability is proving so hard to achieve. We all know our current model is unsustainable — or at least that has been argued for about forty years — and yet our notions of how we prove ourselves to be good people are tied up with consumption and displays of wealth. Viewed purely as an economic problem, climate change could be dealt with purely through altering incentives and accounting frameworks. But we are lodged in a dysfunctional moral economy."