Now compare all this with the ethic and manner of life of Benjamin The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism Franklin, and especially of his Puritan ancestors; the works of the Renaissance litterateur addressing himself to the humanistic aris- tocracy, with Franklin's works addressed to the masses of the lower middle class (he especially mentions clerks) and with the tracts and sermons of the Puritans, in order to comprehend the depth of the difference. The economic rationalism of Alberti, everywhere supported by references to ancient authors, is most clearly related to the treat- ment of economic problems in the works of Xenophon (whom he did not know), of Cato, Varro, and Columella (all of whom he quotes), except that especially in Cato and Varro, acquisition as such stands in the foreground in a different way from that to be found in Alberti. Furthermore, the very occasional comments of Alberti on the use of t\\e. fattori, their division of labour and discipline, on the unreliability of the peasants, etc., really sound as if Cato's homely wisdom were taken from the field of the ancient slave-using household and applied to that of free labour in domestic industry and the metayer system. When Sombart (whose reference to the Stoic ethic is quite mis- leading) sees economic rationalism as "developed to its farthest conclusions" as early as Cato, he is, with a correct interpretation, not entirely wrong. It is possible to unite the diligens pater familias of the Romans with the ideal of the massajo of Alberti under the same category. It is above all characteristic for Cato that a landed estate is valued and judged as an object for the investment of consumption funds. The concept of industria, on the other hand, is differently coloured on account of Christian influence. And there is just the difference. In the conception of industria, which comes from monastic asceticism and which was developed by monastic writers, lies the seed of an ethos which was fully developed later in the Protestant worldly asceticism. Hence, as we shall often point out, the relationship of the two, which, however, is less close to the official Church doctrine of St. Thomas than to the Florentire and Siennese mendicant- moralists. In Cato and also in Alberti 's own writings this ethos is lacking; for both it is a matter of worldly wisdom, not of ethic. In Franklin there is also a utilitarian strain. But the ethical quality of the sermon to young business men is impossible to mistake, and that is the characteristic thing. A lack of care in the handling of money means to him that one so to speak murders capital embryos, and hence it is an ethical defect.
An inner relationship of the two (Alberti and Franklin) exists in fact only in so far as Alberti, whom Sombart calls pious, but who actually, although he took the sacraments and held a Roman benefice, like so many humanists, did not himself (except for two quite colourless passages) in any way make use of religious motives as a justification of the manner of life he recommended, had not yet, Franklin on the other hand no longer, related his recommendation of economy to religious conceptions. Utilitarianism, in Alberti's preference for 196 I Notes wool and silk manufacture, also the mercantilist social utilitarianism "that many people should be given employment" (see Alberti, op. cit., p. 292), is in this field at least formally the sole justification for the one as for the other. Alberti 's discussions of this subject form an excellent example of the sort of economic rationalism which really existed as a reflection of economic conditions, in the work of authors interested purely in "the thing for its own sake" everywhere and at all times; in the Chinese classicism and in Greece and Rome no less than in the Renaissance and the age of the-.Enlightenment. There is no doubt that just as in ancient times with Cato, Varro, and Columella, also here with Alberti and others of the same type, especially in the doctrine of industria, a sort of economic rationality is highly developed. But how can anyone believe that such a literary theory could develop into a revolutionary force at all comparable to the way in which a religious belief was able to set the sanctions of salvation and damnation on the fulfillment of a particular (in this case methodically rationalized) manner of life? What, as compared with it, a really religiously oriented rationalization of conduct looks like, may be seen, outside of the Puritans of all denominations, in the cases of the Jains, the Jews, certain ascetic sects of the Middle Ages, the Bohemian Brothers (an offshoot of the Hussite movement), the Skoptsi and Stundists in Russia, and numerous monastic orders, however much all these may differ from each other.
The essential point of the difference is (to anticipate) that an ethic based on religion places certain psychological sanctions (not of an economic character) on the maintenance of the attitude prescribed by it, sanctions which, so long as the religious belief remains alive, are highly effective, and which mere worldly wisdom like that of Alberti does not have at its disposal. Only in so far as these sanctions work, and, above all, in the direction in which they work, which is often very different from the doctrine of the theologians, does such an ethic gain an independent influence on the conduct of life and thus on the economic order. This is, to speak frankly, the point of this whole essay, which I had not expected to find so completely overlooked.
Later on I shall come to speak of the theological moralists of the late Middle Ages, who were relatively friendly to capital (especially Anthony of Florence and Bernhard of Siena), and whom Sombart has also seriously misinterpreted. In any case Alberti did not belong to that group. Only the concept of industria did he take from monastic lines of thought, no matter through what intermediate links. Alberti, Pandolfini, and their kind are representatives of that attitude which, in spite of all its outward obedience, was inwardly already enianci- pated from the tradition of the Church. With all its resemblance to the current Christian ethic, it was to a large extent of the antique pagan character, which Brentano thinks I have ignored in its significance for the development of modern economic thought (and 197 The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism also modern economic policy). That I do not deal with its influence here is quite true. It would be out of place in a study of the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism. But, as will appear in a different connection, far from denying its significance, I have been and am for good reasons of the opinion that its sphere and direction of influence were entirely different from those of the Protestant ethic (of which the spiritual ancestry, of no small practical importance, lies in the sects and in the ethics of Wyclif and Hus). It was not the mode of life of the rising bourgeoisie which was influenced by this other attitude, but the policy of statesmen and princes; and these two partly, but by no means always, convergent lines of development should for purposes of analysis be kept perfectly distinct. So far as Franklin is concerned, his tracts of advice to business men, at present used for school reading in America, belong in fact to a category of works which have influenced practical life, far more than Alberti's large book, which hardly became known outside of learned circles. But I have expressly denoted him as a man who stood beyond the direct influence of the Puritan view of life, which had paled considerably in the meantime, just as the whole English enlightenment, the relations of which to Puritanism have often been set forth.
13. Unfortunately Brentano {op. cit.) has throvvn every kind of struggle for gain, whether peaceful or warlike, into one pot, and has then set up as the specific criterion of capitalistic (as contrasted, for instance, with feudal) profit-seeking, its acquisitiveness of money (instead of land). Any further differentiation, which alone could lead to a clear conception, he has not only refused to make, but has made against the concept of the spirit of (modern) capitalism which we have formed for our purposes, the (to me) incomprehensible objection that it already includes in its assumptions what is supposed to be proved.
14. Compare the, in every respect, excellent observations of Som- bart, Die deutsche Volkswirtschaft im igten Jahrhundert, p. 123. In general I do not need specially to point out, although the following studies go back in their most important points of view to much older work, how much they owe in their development to the mere existence of Sombart's important works, with their pointed formulations and this even, perhaps especially, where they take a different road. Even those who feel themselves continually and decisively disagreeing with Sombart's views, and who reject many of his theses, have the duty to do so only after a thorough study of his work.
15. Of course we cannot here enter into the question of where these limits lie, nor can we evaluate the familiar theory of the relation between high wages and the high productivity of labour which was first suggested by Brassey, formulated and maintained theoretically by Brentano, and both historically and theoretically by Schulze- Gaevemitz. The discussion was again opened by Hasbach's pene- trating studies {Schmollers Jahrbuch, 1903, pp. 385-91 and 417 ff.), 198 Notes and is not yet finally settled. For us it is here sufficient to assent to the fact which is not, and cannot be, doubted by anyone, that low wages and high profits, low wages and favourable opportunities for industrial.development, are at least not simply identical, that generally speaking training for capitalistic culture, and with it the possibility of capitalism as an economic system, are not brought about simply through mechanical financial operations. All examples are purely illustrative, 1 6. It must be remembered that this was written twenty-five years ago, when the above statement was by no means the common- place that it is now, even among economists, to say nothing of business men. — Translator's Note.
17. The establishment even of capitalistic industries has hence often not been possible without large migratory movements from areas of older culture. However correct Sombart's remarks on the difference between the personal skill and trade secrets of the handi- craftsman and the scientific, objective modern technique may be, at the time of the rise of capitalism the difference hardly existed. In fact the, so to speak, ethical qualities of the capitalistic workman (and to a certain extent also of the entrepreneur) often had a higher scarcity value than the skill of the craftsman, crystallized in traditions hundreds of years old. And even present-day industry is not yet by any means entirely independent in its choice of location of such qualities of the population, acquired by long-standing tradition and education in intensive labour. It is congenial to the scientific prejudices of to-day, when such a dependence is observed to ascribe it to congenital racial qualities rather than to tradition and education, in my opinion with very doubtful validity.
18. See my "Zur Psychophysik der gewerblichen Arbeit", Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, XXVIII.
19. The foregoing observations might be misunderstood. The tendency of a well-known type of business man to use the belief that "religion must be maintained for the people" for his own purpose, and the earlier not uncommon willingness of large numbers, especially of the Lutheran clergy, from a general sympathy with authority, to offer themselves as black police when they wished to brand the strike as sin and trade unions as furtherers of cupidity, all these are things with which our present problem has nothing to do. The factors discussed in the text do not concern occasional but very common facts, which, as we shall see, continually recur in a typical manner.
20. Der moderne Kapitalismus, first edition, I, p. 62.
21. Ibid., p. 195.
22. Naturally that of the modern rational enterprise peculiar to the Occident, not of the sort of capitalism spread over the world for three thousand years, from China, India, Babylon, Greece, Rome, Florence, to the present, carried on by usurers, military contractors 199 The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism traders in offices, tax-farmers, large merchants, and financial mag- nates. See the Introduction.
23. The assumption is thus by no means justified a priori, that is all I wish to bring out here, that on the one hand the technique of the capitalistic enterprise, and on the other the spirit of professional work which gives to capitalism its expansive energy, must have had their original roots in the same social classes. Similarly with the social relationships of religious beliefs. Calvinism was historically one of the agents of education in the spirit of capitalism. But in the Nether- lands, the large moneyed interests were, for reasons which will be discussed later, not predominately adherents of strict Calvinism, but Arminians. The rising middle and small bourgeoisie, from which entrepreneurs were principally recruited, were for the most part here and elsewhere typical representatives both of capitalistic ethics and of Calvinistic religion. But that fits in very well with our present thesis: there were at all times large bankers and merchants. But a rational capitalistic organization of industrial labour was never known until the transition from the Middle Ages to modern times took place.
24. On this point see the good Zurich dissertation of J. Maliniak (1913)- 25. The following picture has been put together as an ideal type from conditions found in different industrial branches and at different places. For the purposes of illustration which it here serves, it is of course of no consequence that the process has not in any one of the examples we have in mind taken place in precisely the manner we have described.
26. For this reason, among others, it is not by chance that this first period of incipient (economic) rationalism in German industry was accompanied by certain other phenomena, for instance the catastrophic degradation of taste in the style of articles of everyday use.
27. This is not to be understood as a claim that changes in the supply of the precious metals are of no economic importance.
28. This is only meant to refer to the type of entrepreneur (busmess man) whom we are making the object of our study, not any empirical average type. On the concept of the ideal type see my discussion in the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, XIX, No. i. (Republished since Weber's death in the Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre. The concept was first thoroughly developed by Weber himself in these essays, and is likely to be unfamiliar to non- German reader-;. It is one of the most important aspects of Weber's methodological work, referred toin a noteabove. — Translator's Note.)
29. This is perhaps the most appropriate place to make a few remarks concerning the essay of F. Keller, already referred to (volume 12 of the publications of the Görres-Gesellschaft), and Sombart's observations {Der Bourgeois) in following it up, so far as they are relevant in the present context. That an author should 200 Notes criticize a study in which the canonical prohibition of interest (except in one incidental remark which has no connection with the general argument) is not even mentioned, on the assumption that this pro- hibition of interest, which has a parallel in almost every religious ethic in the world, is taken to be the decisive criterion of the difference between the Catholic and Protestant ethics, is almost inconceivable. One should really only criticize things which one has read, or the argu- ment of which, if read, one has not already forgotten. The campaign against usurarta pravitas runs through both the Huguenot and the Dutch Church history of the sixteenth century; Lombards, i.e. bankers, were by virtue of that fact alone often excluded from com- munion fsee Chap. I, note 17). The more liberal attitude of Calvin (which did not, however, prevent the inclusion of regulations against usury in the first plan of the ordinances) did not gain a definite victory until Salmasius. Hence the difference did not lie at this point; quite the contrary. But still worse are the author's own argu- ments on this point. Compared to the works of Funck and other Catholic scholars (whjch he has not, in my opinion, taken as fully into consideration as they desers'e), and the investigations of Ende- mann, which, however obsolete in certain points to-day, are still fundamental, they make a painful impression of superficiality. To be sure, Keller has abstained from such excesses as the remarks of Som- bart (Der Bourgeois, p. 321) that one noticed how the "pious gentle- men" (Bernard of Siena and Anthony of Florence) "wished to excite the spirit of enterprise by every possible means", that is, since they, just like nearly everyone else concerned with the prohibition of interest, interpreted it in such a way as to exempt what we should call the productive investment of capital. That Sombart, on the one hand, places the Romans among the heroic peoples, and on the other, what is for his work as a whole an impossible contradiction, considers economic rationalism to have been developed to its final consequences in Cato (p. 267), may be mentioned by the way as a symptom that this is a book with a thesis in the worst sense.
He has also completely misrepresented the significance of the prohibition of interest. This cannot be set forth here in detail. At one time it was often exaggerated, then strongly underestimated, and now, in an era which produces Catholic millionaires as well as Protestant, has been turned upside down for apologetic purposes. As is well known, it was not, in spite of Biblical authority, abolished until the last century by order of the Congregatio S. Officii, and then only temporum ratione habita and indirectly, namely, by forbidding confessors to worry their charges by questions about usur aria pravitas, even though no claim to obedience was given up in case it should be restored. Anyone who has made a thorough study of the extremely complicated history of the doctrine cannot claim, considering the endless controversies over, for instance, the justification of the p 201 The Protestafit Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism purchase of bonds, the discounting of notes and various other contracts (and above all considering the order of the Congregatio S. Officii^ mentioned above, concerning a municipal loan), that the prohibition of interest was only intended to apply to emergency loans, nor that it had the intention of preserving capital, or that it was even an aid to capitalistic enterprise (p. 25). The truth is that the Church came to reconsider the prohibition of interest comparatively late. At the time when this happened the forms of purely business investment were not loans at fixed interest rate, but th&fcenus nauticum, commenda, societas maris, and the dare ad proficuum de mart (a loan in which the shares of gain and loss were adjusted according to degrees of risk), and were, considering the character of the return on loans to pro- ductive enterprise, necessarily of that sort. These were not (or only according to a few rigorous canonists) held to fall under the ban, but when investment at a definite rate of interest and discounting became possible and customary, the first sort of loans also encountered very troublesome difficulties from the prohibition, which led to various drastic measures of the merchant guilds (black lists). But the treatment of usury on the pari of the canonists was generally purely legal and formal, and was certainly free from any such tendency to protect capital as Keller ascribes to it. Finally, in so far as any attitude towards capitalism as such can be ascertained, the decisive factors were: on the one hand, a traditional, mostly inarticulate hostility towards the growing power of capital which was impersonal, and hence not readily amenable to ethical control (as it is still reflected in Luther's pronouncements about the Fuggers and about the banking business); on the other hand, the necessity of accommodation to practical needs. But we cannot discuss this, for, as has been said, the prohibition of usury and its fate can have at most a symptomatic significance for us, and that only to a limited degree.
The economic ethic of the Scotists, and especially of certain mendicant theologians of the fourteenth century, above all Bernhard of Siena and Anthony of Florence, that is monks with a specifically rational type of asceticism, undoubtedly deserves a separate treatment, and cannot be disposed of incidentally in our discussion. Otherwise I should be forced here, in reply to criticism, to anticipate what I have to say in my discussion of the economic ethics of Catholicism in its positive relations to capitalism. These authors attempt, and in that anticipate some of the Jesuits, to present the profit of the merchant as a reward for his indiistria, and thus ethically to justify it. (Of course, even Keller cannot claim more.)
The concept and the approval of industria come, of course, in the last analysis from monastic asceticism, probably also from the idea of masserizia, which Alberti, as he himself says through the mouth of Gianozzo, takes over from clerical sources. We shall later speak more fully of the sense in which the monastic ethics is a forerunner 202 Notes 202 Notes of the worldly ascetic denominations of Protestantism. In Greece, among the Cynics, as shown by late-Hellenic tombstone inscriptions, and, with an entirely different background, in Egypt, there were suggestions of similar ideas. But what is for us the most important thing is entirely lacking both here and in the case of Alberti. As we shall see later, the characteristic Protestant conception of the proof of one's own salvation, the certitudo salutis in a calling, provided the psychological sanctions which this religious belief put behind the industria. But that Catholicism could not supply, because its means to salvation were different. In effect these authors are concerned with an ethical doctrine, not with motives to practical action, de- pendent on the desire for salvation. Furthermore, they are, as is very easy to see, concerned with concessions to practical necessity, not, as was worldly asceticism, with deductions from fundamental religious postulates. (Incidentally, Anthony and Bernhard have long ago been better dealt with than by Keller.) And even these concessions have remained an object of controversy down to the present. Nevertheless the significance of these monastic ethical conceptions as symptoms is by no means small.
But the real roots of the religious ethics which led the way to the modern conception of a calling lay in the sects and the heterodox movements, above all in Wyclif; although Brodnitz (Etiglische Wirt- schaftsgeschichte), who thinks his influence was so great that Puritanism found nothing left for it to do, greatly overestimates his significance. All that cannot be gone into here. For here we can only discuss in- cidentally whether and to what extent the Christian ethic of the Middle Ages had in fact already prepared the way for the spirit of capitalism.
30. The words /DjOev äTTeXviQovTeg (Luke vi. 35) and the translation of the Vulgate, nihil inde sperantes, are thought (according to A. Merx) to be a corruption of nr]6eva dTTeATTL^ovTsg (or meminem des- perantes), and thus to command the granting of loans to all brothers, including the poor, without saying anything at all about interest. The passage Deo placere vix potest is now thought to be of Arian origin (which, if true, makes no difference to our contentions).
3 1. How a compromise with the prohibition of usury was achieved is shown, for example, in Book I, chapter 65, of the statutes of the Arte di Calimala (at present I have only the Italian edition in Emiliani- Guidici, Stor. dei Com. Ital., Ill, p. 246). "Procurino i consoli con quelli frate, che parrä loro, che perdono si faccia e come fare si possa il meglio per I'amore di ciascuno, del dono, merito o guider- dono, ovvero Interesse per I'anno presente e secondo che altra volta fatto fue." It is thus a way for the guild to secure exemption for its members on account of their official positions, without defiance of authority. The suggestions immediately following, as well as the immediately preceding idea to book all interest and profits as gifts, are very characteristic of the amoral attitude towards profits on 203 The Protjstant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism capital. To the present stock exchange black list against brokers who hold back the difference between top price and actual selling price, often corresponded the outcry against those who pleaded before the ecclesiastical court with the exceptio usiirarice pravitatis.
CHAPTER III I. Of the ancient languages only Hebrew has any similar concept. Most of all in the word '"'?'*f9' It is used for sacerdotal funntions (Exod. XXXV. 2t; Neh. xi. 22; i Chron. ix. 13; xxiii. 4; xxvi. 30), for business in the service of the king (especially i Sam. viii. 16; I Chron. iv. 23; xxix. 6), for the service of a royal official (Esther iii. 9; ix. 3), of a superintendant of labour (2 Kings xii. 12), of a slave (Gen. xxxix. 1 1), of labour in the fields (i Chron. xxvii. 26), of crafts- men (Exod. xxxi. 5; XXXV. 21; Kings vii. 14), for traders (Psa. cvii. 23), and for worldly activity of any kind in the passage, Sirach xi. 20, to be discussed later. The word is derived from the root "^X?, to send, thus meaning originally a task. That it originated in the ideas current in Solomon's bureaucratic kingdom of serfs (Fronstaat), built up as it was according to the Egyptian model, seems evident from the above references. In meaning, however, as I learn from A. Merx, this root concept had become lost even in antiquity. The word came to be used for any sort of labour, and in fact became fully as colourless as the German Beruf, with which it shared the fate of being used primarily for mental and not manual functions.
The expression (pn), assignment, task, lesson, which also occurs in Sirach xi. 20, and is translated in the Septuagint with öiaOi^Krj, is also derived from the terminology of the servile bureaucratic regime of the time, as is Ql^""*?"! (Exod. v. 13, cf. Exod. v. 14), where the Septuagint also uses öiaOi^Krj for task. In Sirach xliii. 10 it is rendered in the Septuagint with Kpi/na. In Sirach xi. 20 it is evidently used to signify the fulfillment of God's commandments, being thus related to our calling. On this passage in Jesus Sirach reference may here be made to Smend's well-known book on Jesus Sirach, and for the words öiaOi'jKi], epyov, v6i>og, to his Index zur Weisheit des Jesus Sirach (Berlin, 1907). As is well known, the Hebrew text of the Book of. Sirach was lost, but has been rediscovered by Schechter, and in part supplemented by quotations from the Talmud. Luther did not possess it, and these two Hebrew concepts could not have had any influence on his use of language. (See below on Prov. xxii. 29.)
In Greek there is no term corresponding in ethical connotation to the German or English words at all. Where Luther, quite in the spirit of the modern usage (see below), translates Jesus Sirach xi. 20 and 21, bleibe in deinem Beruf, the Septuagint has at one point epyov, at the other, which however seems to be an entirely corrupt passage, 204 Notes vovoQ (the Hebrew original speaks of the shining of divine help!). Otherwise in antiquity to Ttpoai^Kox-xo is used in the general sense of duties. In the works of the Stoics Kafiarog occasionally carries similar connotations, though its linguistic source is indifferent (called to my attention by A. Dieterich). All other expressions (such as rd^ic, etc.) have no ethical implications.