When the imagination of a whole people has once been turned toward purely quantitative bigness, as in the United States, this romanticism of numbers exercises an irresistible appeal to the poets among business men. Otherwise it is in general not the real leaders, ^nd especially not the permanently successful entrepreneurs, who are taken in by it. In particular, the resort to en- tailed estates and the nobility, with sons whose conduct at the university and in the officers' corps tries to cover up their social origin, as has been the typical history of German capitalistic parvenu families, is a product of later decadence. The ideal type ^® of the capitalistic entrepreneur, as. it has been represented even in Germany by occasional outstanding examples, has no relation to such more or less refined climbers. He avoids ostentation and unnecessary expenditure^ as weir~ äs conscious enjoyment of hTs power, and is emEarrassed^y the outward signs of the^cial recogni- HoiTwHich he receives. His manner oFlife is, in other words, often, and we shall have to investigate the historical significance of just this important fact, distinguished by a certain ascetic tendency, as appears clearly enough in the sermon of Franklin which we have quoted. It is, namely, by no means exceptional, but rather the rule, for him to have a_s^t_üfjQaodesty which is essentially more honest than the reserve which Franklin so shrewdly recommends. He gets nothing out of his wealth for himself, except the irrational sense^ ofjiaving done his job well.
But it is just that which seems to the pre-capitalistic man so incomprehensible and mysterious, so unworthy and contemptible. That anyone should be able to make 71 The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism it the sole purpose of his Hfe-work, to sink into the grave weigiied down with a great material load of money a.*id goods, seems to him explicable only as the prod'-^ct of a pf fvprsf^ instinrt, the auri sacra fames.
.^.c present under our individualistic political, legal, and economic institutions, with the forms of organiza- tion and general structure which are peculiar to our economic order, this spirit of capitalism might be understandable, as has been said, purely as a result of adaptation. The capitalistic system so needs this devotion to the calling of making money, it is an attitude toward material goods which is so well suited to that system, so intimately bound up with the condi- tions of survival in the economic struggle for existence, that there can to-day no longer be any question of a necessary connection of that acquisitive manner of life with any single Weltanschauung. In fact, it no longer needs the support of any religious forces, and feels the si attempts of religion to influence economic life, in so far as they can still be felt at all, to be as much an unjustified interference as its regulation by the State. In such circumstances men's commercial and social interests do tend to determine their opinions and attitudes. Whoever does not adapt his manner of life to the conditions of capitalistic success must go under, ■iz^ br at least cannot rise. But these are phenomena of a time in which modern capitalism has become dominant and has become emancipated from its old supports. But as it could at one time destroy the old forms of mediaeval regulation of economic life only in alliance with the growing power of the modern State, the same, we may say provisionally, may have been the case in 72 II The Spirit of Capitalism its relations with religious forces. Whether and in what sense that was the case, it is our task to investisrate. ror that the conception or money-making as an end in itself to which people were bound, as a calling, was contrary to the ethical feelings of whole epochs, it is hardly necessary to prove. The dogma Deo placer e vix potest which was incorporated into the canon law and applied to the activities of the merchant, and which at that time (like the passage in the gospel about interest) ^^ was considered genuine, as well as St. Thomas's characterization of the desire for gain as turpitudo (which term even included unavoidable and hence ethically justified profit-making), already con- tained a high degree of concession on the part of the ^ Catholic doctrine to the financial powers with which ^ the Church had such intimate political relations in 1^9 the Italian cities, ^^ as compared with the much more radically anti-chrematistic views of comparatively wide circles. But even where the doctrine was still better accommodated to the facts, as for instance with Anthony of Florence, jhe feeling was never quite overcome, that activity directed to acquisition for its own sake was at bottom a pudendum which was to be tolerated only because of the unalterable necessities of life in this worldj Some moralists of that time, especially of the nominalistic school, accepted developed capitalistic business forms as inevitable, and attempted to justify them, especially commerce, as necessary. The iudustria developed in it they were able to regard, though not without contradictions, as a legitimate source of profit, and hence ethically unobjectionable. But the dominant ^ 73 The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism doctrine rejected the spirit of capitalistic acquisition as turpitudo, or at least could not give it a positive ethical sanction. An ethical attitude like that of Ben- jamin Franklin would have been simply unthinkable. This was, above all, the attitude of capitalistic circles themselves. Their life-work was, so long as they clung to the tradition of the Church, at best something morally indifferent. It was tolerated, but was still, even if only on account of the continual danger of collision with the Church's doctrine on usury, somewhat dangerous to salvation. Quite considerable sums, as the sources show, went at the death of rich people to religious institutions as conscience money, at times even back to former debtors as usiira which had been unjustly taken from them. It was otherwise, along with heretical and other tendencies looked upon with dis- approval, only in those parts of the commercial aris- tocracy which were already emancipated from the tradition. But even sceptics and people indifferent to the Church often reconciled themselves with it by gifts, because it was a sort of insurance against the uncertainties of what might come after death, or because (at least according to the very widely held latter view) an external obedience to the commands of the Church was sufficient to insure salvation. ^^ Here the either non-moral or immoral character of their action in the opinion of the participants themselves comes clearly to light.
Now, how could activity, which was at best ethically tolerated, turn into a calling in the sense of Benjamin Franklin.'' The fact to be explained historically is that in the most highly capitalistic centre of that time, in 74 The Spirit of Capitalism Florence of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the money;md capital market of all the great political Powers,, this attitude was considered ethically un- justifiable, or at best to be tolerated. But in the back- woods small bourgeois circumstances of Pennsylvania in the eighteenth century, where business threatened for simple lack of money to fall back into barter, where there was hardly a sign of large enterprise, where only the earliest beginnings of banking were to be found, the same thing was considered the essence of moral conduct, even commanded in the name of duty. To speak here of aj;eflection of material conditions in the ideal^ superstructure would be patent nonsense. WhaP was the background of ideas which couFd account for the sort of activity apparently directed toward profit alone as a calling toward which the individual feels himself to have an ethical obligation? For it was this idea which gave the way of life of the new entrepreneur its ethical foundation and justification. ^ The attempt has been made, particularly by Sombart, in what are often judicious and eflfective observations, to depict economic rationalism as the salient feature of modern economic life as a whole. Undoubtedly with justification, if by that is meant the extensipn of the productivity of labour which has, through the " sub- ordination of the process of production to scientific points of view, relieved it from its dependence upon the natural organic limitations of the hun>an individual. Now this process of rationalization i^ the field of technique and economic organization undoubtedly determines an important part of the ideals of life of modern bourgeois society. Labour in the service of a 75 S^ The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capialism rational organization for the provision of humanity with material goods has without doubt always appeared to representatives of the capitalistic spirit as one of the most important purposes of their life-work. It is only necessary, for instance, to read Franklin's account of his efforts in the service of civic improvements in Philadelphia clearly to apprehend this obvious trutl. And the joy and pride of having given employment to numerous people, of having had a part in the economic progress of his home town in the sense referring to figures of population and volume of trade which capitalism associated with the word, all these things obviously are part.of the specific and undoubtedly idealistic satisfactions in life to modern men of busi- ness. Similarly it is one of the fundamental character- istics of an individualistic capitalistic economy that it is rationalized on the basis of rigorous calculation, directed with foresight and caution toward the economic success which is sought in sharp contrast to the hand- to-mouth existence of the peasant, and to the privileged traditionalism of the guild craftsman and of the adventurers' capitalism, oriented to the exploitation of political opportunities and irrational speculation.
It might thus seem that the development of the spirit of capitalism is best understood as part of the development of rationalism as a whole, and could be deduced from the fundamental position of rationalism on the basic problems of life. In the process Protestant- ism would only have to be considered in so far as it had formed a stage prior to the development of a purely rationalistic philosophy. But any serious attempt to carry this thesis through makes it evident that such a 76 / The Spirit of Capitalism simple way of putting the question will not work, simply becaus'e of the fact that the history of rationalism shows 3 development which by no means follows parallel lines in the various departments of life. The rationalization of private law, for instance, if it is thought of as a logical simplification and rearrange- ment of the content of the law, was achieved in the highest hitherto known degree in the Roman law of late antiquity. But it remained most backward in some of the countries with the highest degree of economic rationalization, notably in England, where the Renais- sance of Roman Law was overcome by the power of' the great legal corporations, while it has always retained its supremacy in the Catholic countries of Southern Europe. The worldly rational philosophy of the eighteenth century did not find favour alone or even principally in the countries of highest capitalistic development. The doctrines of Voltaire are even to-day the common property of broad upper, and what is practically more important, middle-class groups in the Romance Catholic countries. Finally, if under practical rationalism is understood the type of attitude which sees and judges the world consciously in terms of the worldly interests of the individual ego, then this view of life was and is the special peculiarity of the peoples of the libenim arbitrium, such as the Italians and the French are in very flesh and blood. But we have already convinced ourselves that this is by no means the soil in which that relationship of a man to his calling as a task, which is necessary' to capitalism, has pre-eminently grown. In fact, one may — this simple proposition, which is often forgotten, should be placed 77 The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capuutism at the beginning of every study which essays to deal with rationalism — rationalize life from fundamentally different basic points of view and in very different directions. Rationalism is an historical concept which covers a j^JKile-WQrici of different Üiings. It will be our task to find out whose intellectual child The particular concrete form of rational thought ~was, from which theidea of a calling and the devotion to labour in_the calling lias grown, which is, as we haye seen^ so irra- tional from the standpoint of purely eudaemoni^tic_ self-interest, but which has been and still is one of the most characteristic elements of our capitalistic culture.. We are here particularly interested in the origin of precisely the irrational element which lies in this, as in every conception of a calling.
78 CHAPTER III LUTHER'S CONCEPTION OF THE CALLING Task of the Investigation Now it is unmistakable that even in the German word Bert^, and perhaps still more clearly in the English calling, a religious conception, that of a task set by God7^~at~least suggested. The more emphasis is pur upon the word in a concrete case, the more evident is the connotation. And if we trace the history of the word through the civilized languages, it appears that neither the predominantly Catholic peoples nor those of classical antiquity^ have possessed any expression of similar connotation for what we know as a calling (in the sense of a life-task, a definite field in which to work), while pne has existed for all predominantly Protestantpeo^les^ It may be further shown that this IS not due to any ethnical peculiarity of the languages concerned. It is not, for instance, the product of a Germanic spirit, but in its modern meaning the word comes from the Bible translations, through the spirit of the translator, not that of the original.- In Luther's translation of the Bible it appears to have first been used at a point in Jesus Sirach(xi. 20 and 21) precisely in our modern sense. ^ After that it speedily took on its present meaning in the everyday speech of all Pro- testant peoples, while earlier not even a suggestion of such a meaning could be found in the secular literature of any of them, and even, in religious writings, so far as I can ascertain, it is only found in one of the German 79 The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism mystics whose influence on Luther is well known.
Like the meaning of the word, the idea is new, a product of the Reformation. This may be assumed as generally known. It is true that certain suggestions of the positive valuation of routine activity in the world, which is contained in this conception of the calling, had already existed in the Middle Ages, and even in late Hellenistic antiquity. We shall speak of that later.
But at least one thing was unquestionably new: the valuation of the fulfilment of duty in worldly affairs as the highest form which the moral activity of the individual could assiime. This it was which inevitably gave every-day worldly activity a religious significance, and which first created the conception of a calling in this sense. The conception of the calling thus brings out that central dogma of all Protestant denominations which the Catholic division of ethical precepts into prcecepta and consilia discards. The only way of living acceptably to God was not to surpass worldly morality in monastic asceticism, but solely through the fulfilment of the obligations imposed upon the individual by his ^ position in the worjd. That was his calling.
Luther* developed the concept ion~m'The course of the first decade of his activity as a reformer. At first, quite in harmony with the prevailing tradition of the Middle Ages, as represented, for example, by Thomas Aquinas,^ he thought of activity in the world as a thing of the flesh, even though willed by God. I,t is the indispensable natural condition of a life of faith, but in itself, like eating and drinkjng, morally ijieutral.^ But with the development of the conception of sola fide in all its consequences, and its logical result, the increas- 80 Luther's Conception of the Calling ingly sharp emphasis against the Catholic cons.;^^ evangelica of the monks as dictates of the devil, tL, ' calling grew in importance. [The monastic life is not .only quite devoid of value as a means of justification before God, but he also looks upon its renunciation of y the. duties of this world as the product of selfishness, yN- withdrawing from temporal obligations. In contrast, labour in a calling appears to him as the outward expression of brotherly love This he proves by the observation that the division of labour forces every individual to work for others, but his view-point is highly naive, forming an almost grotesque contrast to J Adam Smith's well-known statements on the same subject.' However, this justification, which is evidently essentially scholastic, soon disappears again, and there remains, more and more strongly emphasized, the state- ment that the fulfilment of worldly duties is under all circumstances the only way to live acceptably to God. It and it alone is the will of God, and hence every legitimate /C calling has exactly the same worth in the sight of God.® [That this moral justification of worldly activity was "^ — one of the most important results of the Reformation, especially of Luther's part in it, is beyond doubt, and may even be considered a platitude.^ This attitude is worlds removed from the deep hatred of Pascal, in his contemplative moods, for all worldly activity, which he was deeply convinced could only be understood in terms of vanity or low cunning.^^ And it differs even more from the Hberal utilitarian compromise with the world at which the Jesuits arrived] But just what the prac- tical significance of this achievement of Protestantism was in detail is dimly felt rather than clearly perceived.
8i jy^g r'rotestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism j^^.n the first place it is hardly necessary to point out lat Luther cannot be claimed for the spirit of capital- ism in the sense in which we have used that term above, or for that matter in any sense whatever. The religious circles which to-day most enthusiastically celebrate that great achievement of the Reformation are by no means friendly to capitalism in any sense. And Luther himself would, without doubt, have sharply repudiated any connection with a point of view like that of Franklin. Of course, one cannot con- sider his complaints against the great merchants of his time, such as the Fuggers,^^ as evidence in this case. For the struggle against the privileged position, legal or actual, of single great trading companies in the six- teenth and seventeenth centuries may best be compared with the modern campaign against the trusts, and can no more justly be considered in itself an expression of a traditionalistic point of view. Against these people, against the Lombards, the monopolists, speculators, and bankers patronized by the Anglican Church and the kings and parliaments of England and France, both the Puritans and the Huguenots carried on a bitter struggle. ^2 Cromwell, after the battle of Dunbar (September 1650), wrote to the Long Parliament: "Be pleased to reform the abuses of all professions: and if there be any one that makes many poor to make a few rich, that suits not a Commonwealth." But, nevertheless, we will find Cromwell following a quite specifically capitalistic line of thought. ^^ On the other hand, Luther's numerous statements against usury or interest in any form reveal a conception of the nature of capitalistic acquisition which, compared with that of 82 Luther's Conception of the Calling late Scholasticism, is, from a capitalistic view-point, definitely backward.^^ Especially, of course, the doctrine of the sterility of money which Anthony of Florence had already refuted.
But it is unnecessary to go into detail. For, above all, the consequences of the conception of the calling in the religious sense for worldly conduct were susceptible to quite different interpretations. The effect of the Reformation as such was only that, as compared with tKe~~Cäthölic attitude, the moral emphasis on and the ' religious sanction of, organized worldly labour in a calling was mightily increased. The way in which the concept of the calling, which expressed this change, should develop further depended upon the religious evolution which now took place in the different Pro- testant Churches. The authority of the Bible, from which Luther thought he had derived his idea of the calling, on the whole favoured a traditionalistic inter- pretation. The old Testament, in particular, though in the genuine prophets it showed no sign of a tendency to excel worldly morality, and elsewhere only in quite isolated rudiments and suggestions, contained a similar religious idea entirely in this traditionalistic sense. Everyone should abide by his living and let the godless mn after gain. That is the sense of all the statements which bear directly on worldly activities. Not until the Talmud is a partially, but not even then fundamentally, different attitude to be found. The personal attitude of Jesus is characterized in classical purity by the typical antique-Oriental plea: "Give us this day our daily bread." The element of radical repudiation of the world, as expressed in the fiafiajvas rrjs dBiKlas, 83 ^ The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism excluded the possibility that the modern idea of a calling should be based on his personal authority.^^ In the apostolic era as expressed in the New Testament, especially in St. Paul, the Christian looked upon worldly activity either with indifference, or at least essentially traditionalistically; for those first generations were filled with eschato logical hopes. Since everyone was simply waiting for the coming of the Lord, there was nothing to do but remain in the station and in the worldly occupation in which the call of the Lord had found him, and labour as before. Thus he would not burden his brothers as an object of charity, and it would only be for a little while. Luther read the Bible through the spectacles of his whole attitude; at the time and in the course of his development from- about 1518 to 1530 this not only remained traditionalistic but became ever more so.^^ In the first years of his activity as a reformer he was, since he thought of the calling as primarily of the flesh, dominated by an attitude closely related, in so far as the form of world ^^ activity was concerned, to the Pauline eschatological indifference as expressed in i Cor. vii.^' One may attain salvation in any walk of life; on the short pilgrimage of life there is no use in laying weight on the form of occupation. The pursuit of material gain beyond personal needs must thus appear as a symptom of lack of grace, and since it can apparently only be attained at the expense of others, directly reprehen- sible.^® As he became increasingly involved in the affairs / of the world, he came to value work in the world more (highly. But in the concrete calling an individual pursued he saw more and more a special command of God to 84 Luther's Conception of the Calling fulfil these particular duties which the Divine Will had imposed upon him. And after the conflict with the Fanatics and the peasant disturbances, the objective historical order of things in which the individual has (v been placed by God becomes for Luther more and \\\ more a direct manifestation of divine will.^^ The stronger and stronger emphasis on the providential element, even in particular events of life, led more and more to a traditionalistic interpretation based on the idea of Providence. The individual should remain once -) and for all in the station and calling in which God had placed him, and should restrain his worldly activity within the limits imposed by his established station in life. While his economic traditionalism was originally the result of Pauline indifference, it later became that of a more and more intense belief in divine provi- dence,^^ which identified absolute obedience to God's will, 2^ with absolute acceptance of things as they were. Starting from this background, it was impossible for Luther to establish a new or in any way fundamental connection between worldly activity and religious principles.22 His acceptance of purity of doctrine as the one infallible criterion of the Church, which became