Introduction development of rational economic conduct has also met serious inner resistance. The magical and religious forces, and the ethical ideas of duty based upon them, have in the past always been among the most important formative influences on conduct. In the studies collected here we shall be concerned with these forces.^ Two older essays have been placed at the beginning whicE attempt, at one important point, to approach the side of the problem which is generally most difficult to grasp: the influence of certain religious ideas on the development of aneconomic spirit,_or the eitte of an economic_system. In this case we are dealing with the connection of the spirit of modern economic life with the rational ethics of ascetic Protestantism. Thus we treat here only one side of the causal chain. The later studies on the Economic Ethics of the World Religions attempt, in the form of a survey of the relations of the most important religions to economic life and to the social stratification of their environment, to follow out both causal relationships, so far as it is necessary in order to find points of comparison with the Occidental development. For only in this way is it possible to attempt a causal evaluation of those elements of the economic ethics of the Western religions which differ- entiate them from others, with a hope of attaining even a tolerable degree of approximation. Hence these ' studies do not claim to be complete analyses of cultures, however brief. On the contrary, in every culture they quite deliberately emphasize the elements in which it differs from Western civilization. They are, hence, definitely oriented to the problems which seem im- portant for the understanding of Western culture from 27 The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism this view-point. With our object in view, any other procedure did not seem possible. But to avoid mis- understanding we must here lay special emphasis on the limitation of our purpose.
In another respect the uninitiated at least must be warned against exaggerating the importance of these investigations. The Sinologist, the Indologist, the Semitist, or the Egyptologist, will of course find no. facts unknown to him. We only hope that he will find nothing definitely wrong in points that are essential. How far it has been possible to come as near this ideal as a non-specialist is able to do, the author cannot know. It is quite evident that anyone who is forced to rely on translations, and furthermore on the use and evaluation of monumental, documentary, or literary sources, has to rely himself on a specialist literature which is often highly controversial, and the merits of which he is unable to judge accurately. Such a writer must make modest claims for the value of his work. All the more so since the number of available translations of relal sources (that is, inscriptions and documents) is, especially for China, still very small in comparison with what exists and is important. From all this follows the definitely provisional character of these studies, and especially of the parts dealing with Asia.^ Only the specialist is entitled to a final judgment. And, naturally, it is only because expert studies with this special purpose and from this particular view-point have not hitherto been made, that the present ones have been written at all. They are destined to be superseded in a much more important sense than this can be said, as it can be, of all scientific work. But however objection- 28 Introduction able it may be, such trespassing on other special fields cannot be avoided in comparative work. But one must take the consequences by resigning oneself to con- siderable doubts regarding the degree of one's success.
Fashion and the zeal of the literati would have us think that the specialist can to-day be spared, or degraded to a position subordinate to that of the seer. Almost all sciences owe something to dilettantes, often very valuable view-points. But dilettantism as a leading principle would be the end of science. He who yearns for seeing should go to the cinema, though it will be offered to him copiously to-day in literary form in the present field of investigation also.^® Nothing is farther from the intent of these thoroughly serious studies than such an attitude. And, I might add, whoever wants a sermon should go to a conventicle. The question of the,^ elative value of the cultures which are compared herg/ not receive a single word. It is true that the path of human destiny cannot but appall him who surveys a section of it. But he will do well to keep his small personal commentaries to himself, as one does at the sight of the sea or of majestic mountains, unless he knows himself to be called and gifted to give them expression in artistic or prophetic form. In most other cases the voluminous talk about intuition does nothing but conceal a lack of perspective toward the ob'ect, which merits the same judgment as a similar lack of perspective toward men.
Some justification is needed for the fact that ethno- graphical material has not been utilized to anything like the extent which the value of its contributions naturally demands in any really thorough investigation, 29 •xelati ywillj The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism especially of Asiatic religions. This limitation has not only been imposed because human powers of work are restricted. This omission has also seemed to be per- missible because we are here necessarily dealing with the religious ethics of the classes which were the culture- bearers of their respective countries. We are concerned with the influence which their conduct has had. Now it is quite true that this can only be completely known in all its details when the facts from ethnography and folk-lore have been compared with it. Hence we must expressly admit and emphasize that this is a gap to which the ethnographer will legitimately object. I hope to contribute something to the closing of this gap in a systematic study of the Sociology of Religion.^^ But such an undertaking would have transcended the limits of this investigation with its closely circumscribed purpose. It has been necessary to be content with bringing out the points of comparison with our Occi- dental religions as well as possible.
Finally, we may make a reference to the anthropo- logical side of the problem. When we find again and again that, even in departments of life apparently mutually independent, certain types of rationalization have developed in the Occident, and only there, it would be natural to suspect that the most important reason lay in differences of heredity. The author admits that he is inclined to think the importance of biological heredity very great. But in spite of the notable achieve- ments of anthropological research, I see up to the present no way of exactly or even approximately measuring either the extent or, above all, the form of its influence on the development investigated here. 30 Introduction Introduction It must be one of the tasks of sociological and historical investigation first to analyse all the influences and causal relationships which can satisfactorily be ex- plained in terms of reactions to environmental condi- tions. Only then, and when comparative racial neurology and psychology shall have progressed beyond their present and in many ways very promising beginnings, can we hope for even the probability of a satisfactory answer to that problem.^^ In the mean- time that condition seems to me not to exist, and an appeal to heredity would therefore involve a premature renunciation of the possibility of knowledge attainable now, and would shift the problem to factors (at present) still unknown.
31 PART I THE PROBLEM ^>J CHAPTERI ^ RELIGIOUS AFFILIATION AND SOCIAL STRATIFICATION!
A GLANCE at the occupational statistics of any country bf mixed religious composition brings to light with remarkable frequency^ a situation which has several times provoked discussion in the Catholic press and literature,^ and in Catholic congresses in Germany, namely, the fact that business leaders and owners of capital, as well as the higher grades of skilled labour, and even more the higher technically and commercially trained personnel of modem enterprises, are over- whelmingly Protestant."* This is true not only in cases where the difference in religion coincides with one of nationality, and thus of cultural development, as in Eastern Germany between Germans and Poles. The same thing is shown in the figures of religious affiliation almost wherever capitalism, at the time of its great expansion, has had a free hand to alter the social distribution of the population in accordance with its needs, and to determine its occupational structure. The more freedom it has had, the more clearly is the effect shown. It is true that the greater relative par- ticipation of Protestants in the ownership of capital,^ in management, and the upper ranks of labour in great modem industrial and commercial enterprises,® may in part he explained in terms of historical circumstances' which extend far back into the past, and in which religious affiliation is not a cause of the economicV conditions, but to a certain extent appears to be a result/ The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capita^ m ^ of them. Participation in the above economic funr in ^\ usually involves some previous ownership of c.'- m and generally an expensive education; often both. T. nesv. are to-day largely dependent on the possession of in- herited wealth, or at least on a certain degree of material well-being. A number of those sections of the old Empire which were most highly developed economic- ally and most favoured by natural resources and situation, in particular a majority of the wealthy towns, went over to Protestantism in the sixteenth century. The results of that circumstance favour the Protestants even to-day in their struggle for economic existence. There arises thus the historical question: why were the districts of highest economic development at the same tnpe particulprly favniirablp tn a rpvf>]i^finn in the Church? The answer is by no means so simple as one might think.
The emancipation from economic traditionalism appears, no doubt, to be a factor which would greatly gfrfpg^^^" ^hp tpnHpncy to doubt the sanctity ofthe religious traditinn, as of all traditional authoritiesQBut it is necessary to note, what has often been forgotten, Ahat the Reformation meant not the elimination of j the Churches control over everyday life, but ratherthe -J substitution of a new form of control for the previous ' one. It meant the repudiation of a control which was Wery lax, at that time scarcely perceptible in practice, / and hardly more than formal, in favour of a regulation ^\ of the whole of conduct which, penetrating to all >^ departments of private and public life, was infinitely y/\ burdensome and earnestly enforced]) The rule of the I Catholic Church, "punishing the heretic, but indulgent ^36 Religious Affiliation and Social Stratification ^ the sinner", as it was in the past even more than 0-day, is now tolerated by peoples of thoroughly modem economic character, and was borne by the richest and economically most advanced peoples on earth at about the turn of the fifteenth century., The^rule of Calvinism, on the other hand, as it was enforced in the sixteenth century in Geneva and in Scotland, at the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in large parts of the Netherlands, in the seventeenth in New England, and for a time in England itself, wouldbe^or u&_the most absolutely unbearable form of eccfcsiastical con- trol of the individual which could possibly exist. That was^xactly what largeliumberi~oF the old commercial aristocracy of those times, in Geneva as well as in Holland and England, felt about it. And what the reformers complained of in those areas of high eco- nomic development was not too much supervision of life on the part of the Church, but too little fNow how does it happen that at that time those countries which were most advanced economically, and within them the rising bourgeois middle classes, not only failed to resist this imexampled tyranny of Puritanism, but even developed a heroism in its defence.'' For bourgeois classes as such have seldom before and never since displayed heroism. It was "the last of our heroisms", as Carlyle, not without reason, has said.
But further, and especially important: it may be, as has been claimed, that the greater partiripatinn _q£ Protestants injhe^positions of ownership andLmanag&r ment in modern economic^jife^may to-day be under- stood, in part at least, simply as a^e^lt of thegreater matemTwealth^J^yllE^fc inherited,. But there are 37/ The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism certain other phenomena which cannot be explained in the same way. Thus, to mention only a few facts: there is a great difference discoverable in Baden, in Bavaria, in Hungary,, in the type of higher education which Catholic parents, as opposed to Protestant, give their children. That the percentage of Catholics among the students and graduates of higher educational institutions in general lags behind their proportion of the total population,^.may, to be sure, be largely explicable in terms o^ inherited differences of wealth. But among the Catholic graduates themselves the per- centage of those graduating from the institutions pre- paring, in particular, for technical studies and industrial and commercial occupations, but in general from those preparing for middle-class business life, lags still farther behind the percentage of Protestants.^ On the other hand. Catholics prefer the sort of training which the humanistic Gymnasium affords. That is a circum- stance to which the above explanation does not apply, but which, on the contrary, is one reason why so few Catholics are engaged in capitalistic enterprise.
Even more striking is a fact which partly explains the smaller proportion of Catholics among the skilled labourers of modern industry. It is well known that- the factory has taken its skilled labour to a large extent from young men in the handicrafts; but this is much more true of Protestant than of Catholic journeymen. Among journeymen, in other words, the Catholics show a stronger propensity to remain in their crafts, that is they more often become master craftsmen, whereas the Protestants are attracted to a larger extent into the factories in order to fill the upper ranjcs of 38 Religious Affiliation and Social Stratification skilled labour and administrative positions.^® The explanation of these cases is undoubtedly that the mental and spiritual peculiarities acquired from the environment, here the type of education favoured by the religious atmosphefe^Tlhe^ome community and the_girehtal home, have determined the choice of occupation, and through i^he protessional career.
The smaller participation of Catholics in the modern business life of Germany is all the more striking because it runs counter to a tendency which has been observed at all times ^^ including the present. National or religious minorities which are in a position of sub- ordination to a group of rulers are likely, through their voluntary or involuntary exclusion from positions of political influence, to be driven with peculiar force into economic activity. Their ablest members seek to satisfy the desire for recognition of their abilities in this field, since there is no opportunity in the service of the 'State. This has undoubtedly been true of the Poles in Russia and Eastern Prussia, who have without question been undergoing a more rapid economic advance than in Galicia, where they have been in the ascendant. It has in earlier times been true of the Huguenots in France under Louis XIV, the Nonconformists and Quakers in England, and, last but not least, the Jew for two thousand years. But the Catholics in Germany have shown no striking evidence of such a result of their position. In the past they have, unlike the Protestants, undergone no particularly prominent economic devel- opment in the times when they were persecuted or only tolerated, either in Holland or in England. On the other hand, it is a fact that the Protestants (especi- 39 The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism ally certain branches of the movement to be fully discussed later) both as ruling classes and sis ruled, both as majority and as minority, have shown a spc^idi <.^^tendency to develop economic rationalism v^hich cannot be observed to the same extent among Catholics either in the one situation or in the other.^^ Thus the principal explanation of this difference must be sought in the permanent intrinsic character of their religious beliefs, and not only in their temporary external It will be our task to investigate these religions with a view to finding out what peculiarities they have or have had which might have resulted in the behaviour we have described. On superficial analysis, and on the basis of certain current impressions, one might be tempted to express the diflference by saying that the greater other- worldliness of Catholicism, the ascetic character of its highest ideals, must have brought up its adherents to a greater indifference toward the good things of this world. Such an explanation fits the popular tendency in the judgment of both religions. On the Protestant side it is used as a basis of criticism of those (real or imagined) ascetic ideals of the Catholic way of life, while the Catholics answer with the accusation that materialism results from the seculariza- tion of all ideals through Protestantism. One recent writer has attempted to formulate the difference of their attitudes toward economic life in the following manner: "The Catholic is quieter, having less of the acquisitive impulse; he prefers a life of the greatest possible security, even with a smaller income, to a life of risk and excitement, even though it may bring the 40 Religions Affiliation and Social Stratification chance of gaining honour and riches. The proverb says jokingly, ^either eat well or sleep wellLJn the present case the Protestant prefers to eat well, the Catholic to sleep undisturbed.**^^ — ► In fact, this desire to eat,^^! may_J]>e-^ correct though incomplete characterization of the motives of many nominal Protestants in Germany at the present time.. But things were very different in the past: the English, Dutch, and American Puritans were charac- terized by the exact opposite of the joy of living, a fact which is indeed, as we shall see, most im- portant for our present study. Moreover, the French Protestants, among others, long retained, and retain to a certain extent up to the present, the characteristics which were impressed upon the Calvinistic Churches everywhere, especially under the cros« in the time of the religious struggles. Nevertheless (or was it, perhaps, as we shall ask later, precisely on that account?) it is well known th^t these characteristics were one of the most important factors in the industrial and capital- istic development of France, and on the small scale permitted them by their persecution remained so. If we may call this seriousness and the strong predomi- nance of religious interests in the whole conduct of life otherworldliness, then the French Calvinists were and still are at least as otherworldly as, for instance, the North German Catholics, to whom their Catholicism is undoubtedly as vital a matter as religion is to any other people in the world. Both differ from the predominant religious trends in their respective countries in much the same way. The Catholics of France are, in their lower ranks, greatly interested in the enjoyment of life, 41 The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism in the upper directly hostile to religion. Similarly, the | Protestants of Germany are to-day absorbed in worldly economic lif^, and their upper ranks are most indifferent to religion. ^^j)Hardly anything shows so clearly as this parallel that, with such vague ideas as that of the alleged other\vorldliness of Catholicism, and the alleged materialistic joy of living of Protestantism, and others like them, nothing can be accomplished for our pur- pose. In such general terms the distinction does not even adequately fit the facts of to-day, and certainly not of the past. If, however, one wishes to make use of it at all, several other observations present themselves at once which, combined with the above remarks, suggest that the supposed conflict between other- worldliness, asceticism, and ecclesiastical piety on the one side, and participation in capitalistic acquisition on the other, might actually turn out to be an intimate relationship.
As a matter of fact it is surely remarkable, to begin with quite a superficial observation, how large is the number of representatives ojfjhejnost^jpiritual forms pf Christian _pifiJty-whQ Jiaye s^rung^rom comme^jal jcircles^. In particular, very many of the most zealous adherents of Pietism are of this origin. It might be explained as a sort of reaction against mammonism on the part of sensitive natures not adapted to commercial life, and, as in the case of Francis of Assisi. many Pietists have themselves interpreted the process of their conversion in these terms. Similarly, the remark- able circumstance that so many of the greatest capital- istic entrepreneurs — down to Cecil Rhodes — have come from clergymen's families might be explained as a reaction against their ascetic upbringing. But this 42 Religious Affiliation and Social Stratification form of explanation fails where an extraordinary capitalistic business sense is combined in the same persons and groups with the most intensive forms of a piety which penetrates and dominates their whole lives. Such cases are not isolated, but these traits are charac- teristic of many of the most important Churches and sects in the history of Protestantism. Especially Calvinism, wherever it has appeared,^® has shown ;:his combination. However little, in the time of the expansion of the Reformation, it (or any other Protest- ant belief) was bound up with any particular social class, it is characteristic and in a certain sense typical that in French Huguenot Churches monks and business men (merchants, craftsmen) were particularly numer- ous among the proselytes, especially at the time of the persecution.^'^ Even the Spaniards knew that heresy (i.e. the Calvinism of the Dutch) promoted trade, and this coincides with the opinions which Sir William Petty expressed in his discussion of the reasons for the capitalistic development of the Netherlands. Gothein ^^ rightly calls the Calvinistic diaspora the seed-bed of capitalistic economy.^^ Even in this case one might'' consider the decisive factor to be the superiority of the French and Dutch economic cultures from which these