communities sprang, or perhaps the immense influence of exile in the breakdown of traditional relationships.^^^ But in France the situation was, as we know from Colbert's struggles, the same even in the seventeenth century. Even Austria, not to speak of other countries, directly imported Protestant craftsmen. I But not all the Protestant denominations seem to have had an equally strong influence in this direction. / 43 The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism That of Calvinism, even in Germany, was among the strongest, it seems, and the reformed faith ^^ more than the others seems to have promoted the develop- ment of the spirit of capitalism, in the Wupperthal as well as elsewhere. Much more so than Lutheranism, as comparison both in general and in particular instances, especially in the Wupperthal, seems to prove.22 por Scotland, Buckle, and among English poets, Keats, have emphasized these same relation- ships.^^ Even more striking, as it is only necessary to mention, is the connection of a religious way of life with the most intensive development of business acumen among those sects whose otherworldliness is as proverbial as their wealth, especially the Quakers and the Mennonites. The part which the former have played in England and North America fell to the latter in Germany and the Netherlands. That in East Prussia Frederick William I tolerated the Mennonites as in- dispensable to industry, in spite of their absolute refusal to perform military service, is only one of the numerous well-known cases which illustrates the fact, though, considering the character of that monarch, it is one of the most striking. Finally, that this com- bination of intense piety with just as strong a development of business acumen, was also characteristic of the Pietists, is common knowledge.^^ It is only necessary to think of the Rhine country and of Calw. In this purely introductory discussion it is unnecessary to pile up more examples. For these few already all show one thing:, 'that the spirit of hard work, of progress, or whatever else it may be called, the awakening of which one is inclined to ascribe to 44 Religious Affiliation and Social Stratification Protestantism, must not be understood, as there is a tendency to do, as joy of living nor in any other sense < as connected with the EnHghtenment. The_old_Protest-! antismof^Luther, Calvin, Knox, Voet, had _Brecious ligipjn^ with what fo-day is called progress. To whole agpprfgnf nnndern life which the most extreme re- ligionist^ would not wish to suppress to-day^ it was directly hostile. If any innerrelationship between certain expressions of the old Protestant spirit and modern capitalistic culture is to be found, we must attempt to find it, for better or worse, not in its alleged more or less materialistic or at least anti-ascetic joy of living. but in its purely religious characteristics. Montesquieu says {Esprit des Lois, Book XX, chap. 7) of the English that they "had progressed the farthest of all peoples of the world in three important things: in piety, in commerce, and in freedom". Is it not possible »that their commercial superiority and their adaptation to free political institutions are connected in someway with that record of piety which Montesquieu ascribes to them?
A large number of possible relationships, vaguely perceived, occur to us when we put the question in this way. It will now be our task to formulate what •occurs to us confusedly as clearly as is possible, con- •sidering the inexhaustible diversity to be found in all historical material. But in order to do this it is necessary' to leave behind the vague and general concepts with which we have dealt up to this point, and attempt to penetrate into the peculiar characteristics of and the differences between those great worlds of religious thought which have existed historically in the various branches of Christianity.
45 The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism Before we can proceed to that, however, a few remarks are necessary, first on the pecuHarities of the phenomenon of which we are seeking an historical explanation, then concerning the sense in which such an explanation is possible at all within 'the limits of these investigations.
46 CHAPTER II THE SPIRIT OF CAPITALISM / In the title of this study is used the somewhat pre- tentious phrase, the spirit of capitaHsm. ^vVhat is to be understood by it? The attempt to give, anything Hke a definition of it brings out certain difficulties which are in the very nature of this type of investigation.
If any object can be found to which this term can be applied with any understandable meaning, it can only be an historical individual, i.e. a complex of elements associated in historical reality which we unite into a conceptual whole from the standpoint of their cultural significance.
Such an historical concept, however, since it refers in its content to a phenomenon significant for its unique individuality, cannot be defined according to the formula genus proximum, differentia specifica, but it must be gradually put together out of the individual parts which are taken from historical reality to make it up. Thus the final and defimitive concept cannot stand at the beginning of the investigation, but must come at the end. We must, in other words, work out in the course of the discussion, as its most important result, the best conceptual formulation of what we here under- stand by the spirit of capitalism, that is the best from the point of view which interests us here. This point of view (the one of which we shall speak later) is, further, by no means the only possible one from which the historical phenomena we are investigating can be analysed. Other standpoints would, for this as for every 47 The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism historical phenomenon, yield other characteristics as the essential ones. The result is that it is by no means , necessary to understand by the spirit of capitalism only what it will come to mean to us for the purposes of our analysis. This is a necessary result of the nature of historical com'::epts which attempt for their methodo- logical purposves not to grasp historical reality in abstract general formulae, but in concrete genetic sets of relations whicli are inevitably of a specifically unique and individual character.^ Thus, if we try to determine the object, the analysis and historical explanation of which we are attempting, it cannot be in the form of a conceptual definition, but at least in the beginning only^ provisional description of what is here meant by the spirit of capitalism. Such a description is, however, indispensable in order clearly to understand the object of the investigation. For this purpose we turn to a d'ocument of that s^irit^which contains__what we are looking for in almost classical purity, and at the^ämeTir/n^^Käs" theliH^^tag of being free from all direct relationship to religion, being thus, for our purposesyfree of pf^cönceptions7~^ I "Remember, that time is money. He that can earn ' ten shillings a day by his labour, and goes abroad, or / sits idle, one half of that day, though he spends but I sixpence during his diversion or idleness, ought not to \ reckon that the only expense; he has really spent, or \ rather thrown away, five shillings besides.
"Remember, that credit is money. If a man lets his money lie in my hands after it is due, he gives me the interest, or so much as I can n:\ake of it during that 48 The Spirit of Capitalism time. This amounts to a considerable sum where a man has good and large credit, and makes good use of it. "Remember, that money is of the prolific, generating nature. Money can beget rrioney, and its offspring can beget more, and so on. Five shillings turned is six, turned again it is seven and threepence, and so on, till it becomes a hundred pounds. The more there is of it, the more it produces every turning, so that the profits rise quicker and quicker. He that kills a breeding-sow, destroys all her offspring to the thousandth generation. He that murders a crown, destroys all that it might/ have produced, even scores of pounds."
"Remember this saying. The good paymaster is lord^JL\ ^lanother mail's purse. He that is known to pay punctu- ally and exactly to the time he promises, may at any time, and on any occasion, raise all the money his friends can spare. This is sometimes of great use. After industry and frugality, nothing contributes more to the raising of a young man in the world than punctu- ality and justice in all his dealings; therefore never keep borrowed money an hour beyond the time you promised, lest a_disappointment shut up youtiriend!s^ | purse for ever.
"The most trifling actions that affect a man's credit are to be regarded. The sound of your hammer at five in the morning, or eight at night, heard by a creditor, makes him easy six months longer; but if he sees you at a billiard-table, or hears your voice at a tavern, when you should be at work, he sends for his money the next day; demands it, before he can receive it, in a lump.
"It shows, besides, that you are mindful of what you | 49 ~ The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism owe; it makes you appear a careful as well as an honest man, and that still increases your credit.
"Beware of thinking all your own that you possess, and of living accordingly. It is a mistake that many people who have credit fall into. To prevent this, keep an exact account for some time both of your expenses and your income. If you take the pains at first to mention particulars, it will have this good effect: you will discover how wonderfully small, trifling expenses mount up to large sums, and will discern what might have been, and may for the future be saved, without occasioning any great inconvenience."
"For six pounds a year you may have the use of one hundred pounds, provided you are a man of known prudence and honesty.
"He that spends a groat a day idly, spends idly above S six pounds a year, which is the price for the use of one J hundred pounds.
4 "He that wastes idly a groat's worth of his time ?r per day, one day with another, wastes the privilege of ^ using one hundred pounds each day.
"^ "He that idly loses five shillings' worth of time, ^ loses five shillings, and might as prudently throw five J shillings into the sea. "He that loses five shillings, not only loses that sum, but all the advantage that might be made by turning it in dealing, which by the time that a young man becomes old, will amount to a considerable sum of money." ^ It is Benjamin Ferdinand who preaches to us in these sentences, the same which Ferdinand Kiirnberger SO The Spirit of Capitalism satirizes in his clever and malicious Picture of American Culture^ as the supposed confession of faith of the Yankee. That it is the spirit of capitaHsm which here speaks in characteristic fashion, no one will doubt, however little we may wish to claim that everything which could be understood as pertaining to that spirit is contained in it. Let us pause a moment to consider this passage, the philosophy of which Kürn- berger sums up in the words, "They make tallow out of cattle and money out of men". The peculiarity of this philosophy of.^l^variCe appears to be the ideal of the honest man of recognized credit, and above all the idea of a duty of the individual toward the increase of _his capital, which is assumed as an end in itself. Truly what is here preached is not simply a means of making one*s way in the world, but a peculiar ethic. The infraction of its rules is treated not äs foolishness but as forgetfulness of duty. That is the essence of the matter. It is not mere business astuteness, that sort of thing is common enough, it is an ethos. This is the quality which interests us.
When Jacob Fugger, in speaking to a business associate who had retired and who wanted to persuade him to do the same, since he had made enough money and should let others have a chance, rejected that as pusillanimity and answered that "he (Fugger) thought otherwise, he wanted to make money as long as he could ",^ the spirit of his statement is evidently quite different from that of Franklin. What in the former case was an expression of commercial daring and a personal inclination morally neutral,^ in the latter takes on the character of anr ethically coloured maxim 51 The 'Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism for the conduct of life. The concept spirit of capitaHsm is here used in this specific sense,^ it is the spirit of modern capitaHsm. For that we are here deahng only with Western European and American capitalism is obvious from the way in which the problem was stated. Capitalism existed in China, India, Babylon, in the classic world, and in the Middle Ages. But in all these cases, as we shall see, this particular ethos was lacking. Now, all Franklin's moral attitudes are coloured with utilitarianism. Honesty is useful, because it assures credit; so are punctuality, industry, frugality, and that is the reason they are virtues. A logical deduction from this would be that where, for instance, the appearance of honesty serves the same purpose, that would suffice, and an unnecessary surplus of this virtue would evidently appear to Franklin's eyes as unproductive waste. And as a matter of fact, the story in his autobiography of his conversion to those virtues,' or the discussion of the value of a strict maintenance of the appearance of modesty, the assidu- ous belittlement of one's own deserts in order to gain general recognition later,^ confirms this impression. According to Franklin, those virtues, like all others, are only in so far virtues as they are actuallv useful to the individual, and the surrogate of mere appearance is always gnfpjfiVnf when it accomplishes ^e end in view. It ij, a rnnrlnrinn tt liii 1i ij. iiiHl'ilnhlH far «Irirt Utilitarianism. The impression of many Oemaans that the virtues professed by Americanism are pureJ^ypo- crisy seems to have been confirmed by this striking case. But in fact the matter is not by any means so simple. Benjamin Franklin's own character, as it appears in 52 The Spirit of Capitalism the really unusual candidness of his autobiography, belies that suspicion. The circumstance that he ascribes his recognition of the utility of virtue to a divine revelation which was intended to lead him in the path of righteousness, shows that something more than mere garnishing for purely egocentric motives is involved.
vjn fact, the summum bonum of this ethic, the earning of more and more money, combined with the strict avoidance of all spontaneous enjoyment of life, is above all completely devoid of any eudasmonistic, not to say hedonistic, admixture. It is thought of so purely ^^>t^ as an end in itself, that from the point of view of the happiness of, or utility to, the single individual, it appears entirely transcendental and absolutely irra- tional.^Man is dominated by the making of money, by acquisition as the ultimate purpose of his life. "T)conomic acquisition is no longer subordinated to^:^,;^ man as the means for the satisfaction of his material f;i needs. This reversal of what we should call the natural relationship, so irrational from a naive point of view, is evidently as definitely a leading principle of capitalism as it is foreign to all peoples not under capitalistic influence. At the same time it expresses a type of feeling which is closely connected with certain religious ideas. If we thus ask, why should ''money be made out of men", Benjamin Franklin himself, although he was a colourless deist, answers in his autobiography with a quotation from the Bible, which his strict Calvinistic father drummed into him again and again in his youth: '*Seest thou a man diligent in his busjiiess.'* He shall stand before kings" (Prov. xxii. 29). |The earning of money within the modern economic order is, so long 53 r.
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism ;,as it is done legally, the result and the expression of ( virtu^andproficiencYJn a calling J and this virtue and proficiency are, as it is now not difficult to see, the real Alpha and Omega of Franklin's ethic, as expressed in the passages we have quoted, as well as in all his works without exception.^^ And in truth this peculiar idea, so familiar to us to-day, but in reality so little a matter of course, of one's duty in a calling, is what is most characteristic of the[ßocial ethic of capitalistic culture/ and is in a sense the fundamental basis of it. It is an obligation which the individual is supposed to feel and does feel towards the content of his professional^^ activity, no matter in what it consists, in particular no matter whether it appears on the surface as a utilization of his personal powers, or only of his material possessions (as capital).
Of course, this conception has not appeared only under capitalistic conditions. On the contrary, we shall later trace its origins back to a time previous to the ad- vent of capitalism. Still less, naturally, do we maintain that a conscious acceptance of these ethical maxims on the part of the individuals, entrepreneurs oj labourers, in modern capitalistic enterprises, is a condition of the further existence of present-day capitalisnaJwThe ^ I capitalistic economy of the present day is an immense \ cosmos into which the individual is born, and which presents itself to him, at least as an individual, as an unalterable order of things in which he must live. It forces the individual, in so far as he is involved in the system of market relationships, to conform to capital- istic rules of action. The manufacturer who in the long 54 The Spirit of Capitalism run acts counter to these norms, will just as inevit be eliminated from the economic scene as the woi who cannot or will not adapt himself to them will be thrown into the streets without a job. — ^ Thus the capitalism of to-day, which has come to dominate economic life, educates and selects the economic subjects which it needs through a process of economic survival of the fittest. But here one can easily^ see the limits of the concept of selection as a means of historical explanation^Aln order that a manner of life so well adapted to the peculiarities of capitalism could be selected at all, i.e. should come to dominate others, it had to originate somewhere, and not in isolated indi- viduals alone, but as a way of life common to whole groups of men.lThisorigin is what really needs explana- tion. Concerning the doctrine of the more naive his- torical materialism, that such ideas originate as a \ reflection or superstructure of economic situations, we \ shall speak more in detail below. At this point it will suffice for our purpose to call attention to the fact that without doubt, in the country of Benjamin Franklin's birth (Massachusetts), the spirit of capitalism (in the sense we have attached to it) was present before the capitalistic order. There were complaints of a peculiarly calculating sort of profit-seeking in New England, as distinguished from other parts of America, as early as 1632. It is further undoubted that capitalism remained far less developed in some of the neighbouring colonies, the later Southern States of the United States of America, in spite of the fact that_,these latter were ' ^^ founded by large capitalists for business motives, while '^ ^ the New England colonies^ereTounded by preachers/ _ SS ^( The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and seminary graduates with the help of small bour- geois, craftsmen and yoemen, for religious reasons. In this case the causal relation is certainly the reverse of t^at suggested by the materialistic standpointj ^!5ut the origin and history of such ideas is. «lucli more complex than the theorists of the supeßflWfcture suppose. The spirit of capitalism, in the sense in which we are using the term, had to fight its way to supremacy against a whole world of hostile forces. A state of mind such as that expressed in the passages we have quoted from Franklin, and which called forth the applause of a whole people, would both in ancient times and in the Middle Ages ^^ have been proscribed as the lowest sort of avarice and as an attitude entirely lacking in self- respect. It is, in fact, still regularly thus looked upon by all those social groups which are least involved in or adapted to modern capitalistic conditions. This is not wholly because the instinct of acquisition was in those times unknown or undeveloped, as has often been said. Nor because the auri sacra fames, the greed for gold, was then, or now, less powerful outside of bourgeois capitalism than within its peculiar sphere, as the illusions of modern romanticists are wont to believe.
The difference between the capitalistic and pre- capitalistic spirits is not to be found at this point. The greed of the Chinese Mandarin, the old Roman aristo- crat, or the modern peasant, can stand up to any comparison. And the auri sacra fames of a Neapolitan cab-driver or barcaiuolo, and certainly of Asiatic representatives of similar trades, as well as of the craftsmen of southern European or Asiatic countries, is, as anyone can find out for himself, very much more 56 The Spirit of Capitalism intense, and especially more unscrupulous than that of^ay, an Englishman in similar circumstances.^^ tChe universal reign of absolute unscrupulousness in ■ the pursuit of selfish interests by the making of money f , has been a specific characteristic of precisely those countries whose bourgeois-capitalistic development, measured according to Occidental standards, has re- mained backward^ As every employer knows, the lack of coscienziosita 6i the labourers ^^ of such countries, '; for instance Italy as compared with Germany, has been, and to a certain extent still is, one of the principal \. _Qbstai::les,to their capitalistic development. [Capitalism /\ cannot make use of the labour of those who practise the doctrine of undisciplined liberum arbitrium, any more than it can make use of the business man who seems absolutely unscrupulous in his dealings with others, as we can learn from Franklin. Hence the difference does not lie in the degree of development of any impulse to make money QPhe atiri sacra fames is as old as the history of man. Out we shall see that those who submitted to it without reserve as an uncontrolled impulse, such as the Dutch sea-captain who "would go through hell for gain, even though he scorched his