Weber—The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

by Max Weber Translated by Talcott Parsons With an introduction by Anthony Giddens

[Weber, Max. [1930] 2001. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism: And Other Writings. Translated by Talcott Parsons. 2nd ed. London and New York: Routledge.]

Points

Broken down by Giddens [then broken down further by me]—

1. “In seeking to specify the distinctive characteristics of modern capitalism in The Protestant Ethic, Weber first of all separates off capitalistic enterprise from the pursuit of gain as such […]
2. “only in the West, and in relatively recent times, has capitalistic activity become associated with the rational organisation of formally free labour. By ‘rational organisation’ of labour here Weber means its routinised, calculated administration within continuously functioning enterprises. [para]
3.  “A rationalised capitalistic enterprise implies two things: a disciplined labour force, and the regularised investment of capital […]
4. “The regular reproduction of capital, involving its continual investment and reinvestment for the end of economic efficiency, is foreign to traditional types of enterprise. It is associated with an outlook of a very specific kind: the continual accumulation of wealth for its own sake, rather than for the material rewards that it can serve to bring. ‘Man is dominated by the making of money, by acquisition as the ultimate purpose of his life. Economic acquisition is no longer subordinated to man as the means for the satisfaction of his material needs’ (p. 18). This, according to Weber, is the essence of the spirit of modern capitalism. [para]
5. “What explains this historically peculiar circumstance of a drive to the accumulation of wealth conjoined to an absence of interest in the worldly pleasures which it can purchase? […]
6. “Weber finds the answer in the ‘this-worldly asceticism’ of Puritanism, as focused through the concept of the ‘calling’. The notion of the calling, according to Weber, did not exist either in Antiquity or in Catholic theology; it was introduced by the Reformation. It refers basically to the idea that the highest form of moral obligation of the individual is to fulfil his duty in worldly affairs […]
7. “Although the idea of the calling was already present in Luther’s doctrines, Weber argues, it became more rigorously developed in the various Puritan sects: Calvinism, Methodism, Pietism and Baptism […]
8. “Of the elements in Calvinism that Weber singles out for special attention, perhaps the most important, for his thesis, is the doctrine of predestination: that only some human beings are chosen to be saved from damnation, the choice being predetermined by God […]
9. “From this torment, Weber holds, the capitalist spirit was born. On the pastoral level, two developments occurred: it became obligatory to regard one- self as chosen, lack of certainty being indicative of insufficient faith; and the performance of ‘good works’ in worldly activity became accepted as the medium whereby such surety could be demonstrated. Hence success in a calling eventually came to be regarded as a ‘sign’ – never a means – of being one of the elect. The accumulation of wealth was morally sanctioned in so far as it was combined with a sober, industrious career; wealth was condemned only if employed to support a life of idle luxury or self-indulgence. [para]
10. “Calvinism, according to Weber’s argument, moral energy and drive of the capitalist entrepreneur; Weber speaks of its doctrines as having an ‘iron consistency’ in the bleak discipline which it demands of its adherents” (x – xiii).

Weber’s Intro

• The occident has the most rational systematic, and specialized way of doing pretty much everything.
  • This includes capitalism—”the Occident has developed capitalism both to a quantitative extent, and (carrying this quantitative development) in types, forms, and directions which have never existed elsewhere” (xxxiii – iv).
  • “But in modern times the Occident has developed, in addition to this, a very different form of capitalism which has appeared nowhere else: the rational capitalistic organization of (formally)free labour” (xxxiv).
  • “The modern rational organization of the capitalistic enterprise would not have been possible without two other important factors in its development:
    1. the separation of business from the household, which completely dominates modern economic life, and closely connected with it,
    2. rational book-keeping” (xxxxv, numbers added)

Part 1

Religious Affiliation and Social Stratification

• Historical question—”why were the districts of highest economic development at the same time particularly favourable to a revolution in the Church?” (4).
  • “the Reformation meant not the elimination of the Church’s control over everyday life, but rather the substitution of a new form of control for the previous one” (4).
  • But, “The rule of Calvinism, would be for us the most absolutely unbearable form of ecclesiastical control of the individual which could possibly exist” (5).
  • “not all the Protestant denominations seem to have had an equally strong influence in this direction. 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 development of the spirit of capitalism” (10).
• Main task—”If any inner relationship 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” (11).

The Spirit of Capitalism

• Ben Franklin is a good example of the spirit of capitalism personified: “Time is money … credit is money … the good paymaster is lord of another man’s purse … He that idly loses five shillings worth of time; loses five shillings, and might as well prudently throw five shillings in the sea” (14-16).
• 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 eudaemonistic, not to say hedonistic, admixture. It is thought of so purely 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 irrational. Man is dominated by the making of money, by acquisition as the ultimate purpose of his life. Economic acquisition is no longer sub-ordinated to man as the means for the satisfaction of his material needs” (18).
  • This goes against traditionalism, because, “A man does not “by nature” wish to earn more and more money, but simply to live as he is accustomed to live and to earn as much as is necessary for that purpose” (24).
  • So for capitalism of this form to be achieved, “not only is a developed sense of responsibility absolutely indispensable, but in general also an attitude which, at least during working hours, is freed from continual calculations of how the customary wage may be earned with a maximum of comfort and a minimum of exertion. Labour must, on the contrary, be performed as if it were an absolute end in itself, a calling. But such an attitude is by no means a product of nature. It cannot be evoked by low wages or high ones alone, but can only be the product of a long and arduous process of education” (25).
• How can this be rational?
  • “one may—this simple proposition, which is often forgotten should be placed 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 …
  • “We are here particularly interested in the origin of precisely the irrational element which lies in this, as in every conception of a calling” (38).

Luther’s Concept of the Calling

• Luther’s “calling” can be understood as “a religious conception, that a task is set by God” (39).
• The idea 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 assume. 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” (40).
• “The effect of the Reformation as such was only that, as compared with the Catholic attitude, the moral emphasis on and the religious sanction of, organized worldly labour in a calling was mightily increased” (42).
• “for Luther the concept of the calling remained traditionalistic. His calling is something which man has to accept as a divine ordinance, to which he must adapt himself. This aspect outweighed the other idea which was also present, that work in the calling was a, or rather the, task set by God […]
  • “Thus, for the time being, the only ethical result was negative; worldly duties were no longer subordinated to ascetic ones; obedience to authority and the acceptance of things as they were, were preached” (44-45).
• “Although the Reformation is unthinkable withoutLuther’s own personal religious development, and was spiritually long influenced by his personality, without Calvinism his work could not have had permanent concrete success” (46).
  • “We thus take as our starting-point in the investigation of the relationship between the old Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism the works of Calvin, of Calvinism, and the other Puritan sects” (47-48).

Part 2

The Religious Foundations of Worldly Asceticism

• Four principle forms of ascetic Protestantism:
  1. Calvinism
  2. Pietism
  3. Methodism
  4. Baptist sects
• Calvinism
  • most characteristic dogma is predestination, that “only a small proportion of men are chosen for eternal grace […]
    • “To apply earthly standards of justice to His sovereign decrees is meaningless and an insult to His Majesty […]
    • “Everything else, including the meaning of our individual destiny, is hidden in dark mystery which it would be both impossible to pierce and presumptuous to question. [para]
    • “For the damned to complain of their lot would be much the same as for animals to bemoan the fact they were not born as men” (60).
  • So “We know only that a part of humanity is saved, the rest damned. To assume that human merit or guilt play a part in determining this destiny would be to think of God’s absolutely free decrees, which have been settled from eternity, as subject to change by human influence, an impossible contradiction […]
    • “In its extreme inhumanity this doctrine must above all have had one consequence for the life of a generation which surrendered to its magnificent consistency. That was a feeling of unprecedented inner loneliness of the single individual. In what was for the man of the age of the Reformation the most important thing in life, his eternal salvation, he was forced to follow his path alone to meet a destiny which had been decreed for him from eternity. No one could help him” (60-61).
  • “For us the decisive problem is: How was this doctrine borne in an age to which the after-life was not only more important, but in many ways also more certain, than all the interests of life in this world? The question, Am I one of the elect? must sooner or later have arisen for every believer and have forced all other interests into the background” (65).
  • “two principal, mutually connected, types of pastoral advice appear.
    1. On the one hand it is held to be an absolute duty to consider oneself chosen, and to combat all doubts as temptations of the devil, since lack of self-confidence is the result of insufficient faith, hence of imperfect”
    2. On the other hand, in order to attain that self-confidence intense worldly activity is recommended as the most suitable means. It and it alone disperses religious doubts and gives the certainty of grace” 66-67).
  •  “Only one of the elect really has the fides efficax, only he is able by virtue of his rebirth (regeneratio) and the resulting sanctification (sanctificatio) of his whole life, to augment the glory of God by real, and not merely apparent, good works […]
    • “Thus, however useless good works might be as a means of attaining salvation … they are the technical means, not of purchasing salvation, but of getting rid of the fear of damnation” (69)
  • “the significance of the Reformation in the fact that now every Christian had to be a monk all his life. The drain of asceticism from everyday worldly life had been stopped by a dam, and those passionately spiritual natures which had formerly supplied the highest type of monk were now forced to pursue their ascetic ideals within mundane occupations. [para]
  • “But in the course of its development Calvinism added some-thing positive to this, the idea of the necessity of proving one’s faith in worldly activity. Therein it gave the broader groups of religiously inclined people a positive incentive to asceticism” (74).
• Pietism
  • “in so far as the rational and ascetic element of Pietism outweighed the emotional, the ideas essential to our thesis maintained their place. These were: (1) that the methodical development of one’s own state of grace to a higher and higher degree of certainty and perfection in terms of the law was a sign of grace; and (2) that “God’s Providence works through those in such a state of perfection”, i.e. in that He gives them His signs if they wait patiently and deliberate methodically” (84).
  • Even so, “when we consider German Pietism from the point of view important for us, we must admit a vacillation and uncertainty in the religious basis of its asceticism which makes it definitely weaker than the iron consistency of Calvinism” (87).
• Methodism
  • unlike Calvinism, which held everything emotional to be illusory, the only sure basis for the certitudo salutis was in principle held to be a pure feeling of absolute certainty of forgiveness, derived immediately from the testimony of the spirit” (89-90).
  • “the Methodist ethic appears to rest on a foundation of uncertainty similar to Pietism. But the aspiration to the higher life, the second blessedness, served it as a sort of makeshift for the doctrine of predestination (91).
    • “The emotional act of conversion was methodically induced … [and] the emotion, once awakened, was directed into a rational struggle for perfection” (92).
• The Baptist Sects
  • “since predestination was rejected, the peculiarly rational character of Baptist morality rested psychologically above all on the idea of expectant waiting for the Spirit to descend […]
  • “The purpose of this silent waiting is to overcome everything impulsive and irrational, the passions and subjective interests of the natural man. He must be stilled in order to create that deep repose of the soul in which alone the word of God can be heard.” (96).
• “It is our next task to follow out the results of the Puritan idea of the calling in the business world, now that the above sketch has attempted to show its religious foundations […]
  • the decisive point was, to recapitulate, the conception of the state of religious grace, common to all the denominations, as a status which marks off its possessor from the degradation of the flesh, from the world. It is our next task to follow out the results of the Puritan idea of the calling in the business world, now that the above sketch has attempted to show its religious foundations […]
  • “The religious life of the saints, as distinguished from the natural life, was—the most important point—no longer lived outside the world in monastic communities, but within the world and its institutions. This rationalization of conduct within this world, but for the sake of the world beyond, was the con- sequence of the concept of calling of ascetic Protestantism” (100).
    • “it strode into the market-place of life, slammed the door of the monastery behind it, and undertook to penetrate just that daily routine of life with its methodicalness, to fashion it into a life in the world, but neither of nor for this world” (101).

Asceticism and the Spirit of Capitalism

• “In order to understand the connection between the fundamental religious ideas of ascetic Protestantism and its maxims for everyday economic conduct, it is necessary to examine with especial care such writings as have evidently been derived from ministerial practice” (102).
  • “Richard Baxter stands out above many other writers on Puritan ethics, both because of his eminently practical and realistic attitude, and, at the same time, because of the universal recognition accorded to his works” (103).
  • “Waste of time is …  the first and in principle the deadliest of sins. The span of human life is infinitely short and precious tomake sure of one’s own election. Loss of time through sociability, idle talk, luxury, even more sleep than is necessary for health, six to at most eight hours, is worthy of absolute moral condemnation” (104).
  • “Accordingly, Baxter’s principal work is dominated by the continually repeated, often almost passionate preaching of hard, continuous bodily or mental labour” (105).
  • “If God show you a way in which you may lawfully get more than in another way (without wrong to your soul or to any other), if you refuse this, and choose the less gainful way, you cross one of the ends of your calling, and you refuse to be God’s steward, and to accept His gifts and use them for Him when He requireth it: you may labour to be rich for God, though not for the flesh and sin. [para]
  • “Wealth is thus bad ethically only in so far as it is a temptation to idleness and sinful enjoyment of life, and its acquisition is bad only when it is with the purpose of later living merrily and without care. But as a performance of duty in a calling it is not only morally permissible, but actually enjoined” (108).
• “Let us now try to clarify the points in which the Puritan idea of the calling and the premium it placed upon ascetic conduct was bound directly to influence the development of a capitalistic way of life. As we have seen, this asceticism turned with all its force against one thing: the spontaneous enjoyment of life and all it had to offer” (111).
  • “When the limitation of consumption is combined with this release of acquisitive activity, the inevitable practical result is obvious: accumulation of capital through ascetic compulsion to save” (116).
  • “As far as the influence of the Puritan outlook extended, under all circumstances ..   it favoured the development of a rational bourgeois economic life; … It stood at the cradle of the modern economic man” (117).
  • “the intensity of the search for the Kingdom of God commenced gradually to pass over into sober economic virtue; the religious roots died out slowly, giving way to utilitarian worldliness” (119).
• “The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so […]
  • This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which to-day determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force […]
  •  “In Baxter’s view the care for external goods should only lie on the shoulders of the “saint like a light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment.” But fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage” (123).
• “To-day the spirit of religious asceticism—whether finally, who knows?—has escaped from the cage. But victorious capitalism, since it rests on mechanical foundations, needs its support no longer […]
  • “No one knows who will live in this cage in the future, or whether at the end of this tremendous development entirely new prophets will arise, or there will be a great rebirth of old ideas and ideals, or, if neither, mechanized petrification, embellished with a sort of convulsive self-importance. For of the last stage of this cultural development, it might well be truly said: “Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved” (124).

Annotation Summary for: Weber – The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

Page 4, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “Max Weber The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

Page 9, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “An appreciation of what Weber sought to achieve in the book demands at least an elementary grasp of two aspects of the cir- cumstances in which it was produced: the intellectual climate within which he wrote, and the connections between the work itself and the massive programme of study that he set himself in the second phase of his career.”

Page 9, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “1. THE BACKGROUND”

Page 9, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “German philosophy, political theory and economics in the nine- teenth century were very different from their counterparts in Britain. The dominant position of utilitarianism and classical political economy in the latter country was not reproduced in Germany, where these were held at arm’s length by the influ- ence of Idealism and, in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, by the growing impact of Marxism.”

Page 9, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “In Britain, J. S. Mill’s System of Logic (1843) unified the natural and social sciences in a framework that fitted comfortably within existing traditions in that country.”

Page 9, Underline (Red): Content: “Mill’s System of Logic (1843)”

Page 10, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “The tradition of the Geisteswissenschaften, or the ‘hermeneutic’ tradition, from the middle of the eighteenth century onwards wasintertwined with, but also partly set off from, the broader streamof Idealistic philosophy. Those associated with the hermeneuticviewpoint insisted upon the differentiation of the sciences ofnature from the study of man. While we can ‘explain’ naturaloccurrences in terms of the application of causal laws, humanconduct is intrinsically meaningful, and has to be ‘interpreted’or ‘understood’ in a way which has no counterpart in nature”

Page 10, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “Weber was critical of the notions of ‘intu-ition’, ‘empathy’, etc. that were regarded by many others asnecessarily tied to the interpretative understanding of conduct.Most important, he rejected the view that recognition of the‘meaningful’ character of human conduct entails that causalexplanation cannot be undertaken in the social sciences”

Page 11, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “It was from such an intellectual background that Weber approached Marxism, both as a set of doctrines and a political force promoting practical ends.”

Page 11, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “He was a member of the so-called ‘younger generation’ associated with the Verein, the first group to acquire a sophisticated knowledge of Marxist theory and to attempt to creatively employ elements drawn from Marxism – without ever accepting it as an overall system of thought, and recoiling from its revolutionary politics.”

Page 11, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “While acknowledging the contribu- tions of Marx, Weber held a more reserved attitude towards Marxism (often being bitterly critical of the works and political involvements of some of Marx’s professed followers)”

Page 11, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “2. THE THEMES OF THE PROTESTANT ETHIC In seeking to specify the distinctive characteristics of modern capitalism in The Protestant Ethic, Weber first of all separates off capitalistic enterprise from the pursuit of gain as such.”

Page 11, Stamp (Star (Frame, Red))

Page 11, Stamp (Star (Frame, Red))

Page 12, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “only in the West, and in rela- tively recent times, has capitalistic activity become associated with the rational organisation of formally free labour.4 By ‘rational organ- isation’ of labour here Weber means its routinised, calculated administration within continuously functioning enterprises.”

Page 12, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “A rationalised capitalistic enterprise implies two things: a dis- ciplined labour force, and the regularised investment of capital.”

Page 12, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “The regular reproduction of capital, involving its con- tinual investment and reinvestment for the end of economic efficiency, is foreign to traditional types of enterprise. It is associated with an outlook of a very specific kind: the continual accumulation of wealth for its own sake, rather than for the material rewards that it can serve to bring.”

Page 12, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “‘Man is dominated by the making of money, by acquisition as the ultimate purpose of his life. Economic acquisition is no longer subordinated to man as the means for the satisfaction of his material needs’ (p. 18). This, according to Weber, is the essence of the spirit of modern capitalism.”

Page 12, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “What explains this historically peculiar circumstance of a”

Page 13, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “drive to the accumulation of wealth conjoined to an absence of interest in the worldly pleasures which it can purchase?”

Page 13, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “Weber finds the answer in the ‘this-worldly asceticism’ of Puritanism, as focused through the con-cept of the ‘calling’. The notion of the calling, according toWeber, did not exist either in Antiquity or in Catholic theology;it was introduced by the Reformation. It refers basically to theidea that the highest form of moral obligation of the individualis to fulfil his duty in worldly affairs.”

Page 13, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “Although the idea of the calling was already present in Luther’s doctrines, Weber argues, it became more rigorously developed in the various Puritan sects: Calvinism, Methodism, Pietism and Baptism.”

Page 13, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “Of the elements in Calvinismthat Weber singles out for special attention, perhaps the mostimportant, for his thesis, is the doctrine of predestination: thatonly some human beings are chosen to be saved from damna-tion, the choice being predetermined by God.”

Page 14, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “From this torment, Weber holds, the capitalist spirit was born. On the pastoral level, two developments occurred: it became obligatory to regard one- self as chosen, lack of certainty being indicative of insufficient faith; and the performance of ‘good works’ in worldly activity became accepted as the medium whereby such surety could be demonstrated.”

Page 14, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “demonstrated. Hence success in a calling eventually came to be regarded as a ‘sign’ – never a means – of being one of the elect. The accumulation of wealth was morally sanctioned in so far as it was combined with a sober, industrious career; wealth was condemned only if employed to support a life of idle luxury or self-indulgence.”

Page 14, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “Calvinism, according to Weber’s argument, moral energy and drive of the capitalist entrepreneur; Weber speaks of its doctrines as having an ‘iron consistency’ in the bleak discipline which it demands of its adherents.”

Page 14, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “3. THE PROTESTANT ETHIC IN THE CONTEXT OF WEBER’S OTHER WRITINGS”

Page 17, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “he specifies a number of fundamental socio-economic factors which distinguish the European experience from that of India and of China, and which were of crucial importance to the emergence of modern capitalism. These include the following:”

Page 17, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “1. The separation of the productive enterprise from the house- hold which, prior to the development of industrial capitalism, was much more advanced in the West than it ever became else- where.”

Page 17, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “2. The development of the Western city. In post-mediaeval Europe, urban communities reached a high level ofpolitical autonomy, thus setting off ‘bourgeois’ society fromagrarian feudalism.”

Page 18, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “3. The existence, in Europe, of an inherited tradition of Roman law, providing a more integrated and developed rationalisation of juridical practice than came into being elsewhere.”

Page 18, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “4. This in turn was one factor makingpossible the development of the nation-state, administered byfull-time bureaucratic officials, beyond anything achieved in theEastern civilisations. ”

Page 18, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “5. The development of double-entry bookkeeping in Europe.”

Page 18, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “6. That series of changeswhich, as Marx emphasised, prepared the way for the forma-tion of a ‘free’ mass of wage-labourers, whose livelihooddepends upon the sale of labour-power in the market. ”

Page 18, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “Taken together, these represent a mixture of necessary and precipitating conditions which, in conjunction with the moral energy of the Puritans, brought about the rise of modern West- ern capitalism.”

Page 19, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “Puritanism has played a part in creating the ‘iron cage’ in which modern man has to exist – an increasingly bureaucratic order from which the ‘spontaneous enjoyment of life’ is ruthlessly expunged. ‘The Puritan’, Weber concludes, ‘wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so’ (p. 123).”

Page 19, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “4. THE CONTROVERSY”

Page 19, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “the work expresses his conviction that there are no ‘laws of history’: the emergence of modern capitalism in the West was an outcome of an historically specific conjunction of events.”

Page 20, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “The intellectual power of Weber’s arguments derives in no small part from his”

Page 21, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “disregard of traditional subject-boundaries, made possible bythe extraordinary compass of his own scholarship. Con-sequently, his work can be approached on several levels: as aspecific historical thesis, claiming a correlation between Calvin-ism and entrepreneurial attitudes; as a causal analysis of theinfluence of Puritanism upon capitalistic activity; as an interpret-ation of the origins of key components of modern Western soci-ety as a whole; and, set in the context of Weber’s comparativestudies, as part of an attempt to identify divergent courses in therationalisation of culture in the major civilisations of West andEast.”

Page 24, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “The elements of Weber’s analysisthat are most definitely called into question, I would say, are: thedistinctiveness of the notion of the ‘calling’ in Lutheranism;22the supposed lack of ‘affinity’ between Catholicism and”

Page 25, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “regularised entrepreneurial activity; and, the very centre-point of the thesis, the degree to which Calvinist ethics actually served to dignify the accumulation of wealth in the manner suggested by Weber.”

Page 29, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “AUTHOR’S INTRODUCTION A product of modern European civilization, studying any prob- lem of universal history, is bound to ask himself to what com- bination of circumstances the fact should be attributed that in Western civilization, and in Western civilization only, cultural phenomena have appeared which (as we like to think) lie in a line of development having universal significance and value.”

Page 32, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “the State itself, in the sense of a political associ- ation with a rational, written constitution, rationally ordained law, and an administration bound to rational rules or laws, admin- istered by trained officials, is known, in this combination of characteristics, only in the Occident, despite all other approaches to it.”

Page 32, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “And the same is true of the most fateful force in our modernlife, capitalism. The impulse to acquisition, pursuit of gain, ofmoney, of the greatest possible amount of money, has in itselfnothing to do with capitalism. This impulse exists and hasexisted among waiters, physicians, coachmen, artists, prosti-tutes, dishonest officials, soldiers, nobles, crusaders, gamblers,and beggars. ”

Page 32, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “Capitalism may even be iden- tical with the restraint, or at least a rational tempering, of this irrational impulse. But capitalism is identical with the pursuit of”

Page 33, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “profit, and forever renewed profit, by means of continuous, rational, capitalistic enterprise.”

Page 33, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “For it must be so: in a wholly capitalistic order of society, an individual capitalistic enterprise which did not take advantage of its opportunities for profit- making would be doomed to extinction.”

Page 33, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “We will define a capitalistic economic action asone which rests on the expectation of profit by the utilization ofopportunities for exchange, that is on (formally) peacefulchances of profit. ”

Page 33, Highlight (Yellow): Content: “capitalistic economic action ”

Page 33, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “Where capitalistic acquisition is rationally pursued, the corresponding action is adjusted to calculations in terms of capital.”

Page 33, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “Theimportant fact is always that a calculation of capital in terms ofmoney is made, whether by modern book-keeping methods orin any other way, however primitive and crude. Everything isdone in terms of balances: at the beginning of the enterprise aninitial balance, before every individual decision a calculation toascertain its probable profitableness, and at the end a final bal-”

Page 34, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “ance to ascertain how much profit has been made.”

Page 34, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “the Occident has developed capitalism both to a quantitative extent, and (carrying this quantitative develop- ment) in types, forms, and directions which have never existed”

Page 35, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “elsewhere.”

Page 35, Stamp (Star (Frame, Red))

Page 35, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “But in modern times the Occident has developed, in additionto this, a very different form of capitalism which has appearednowhere else: the rational capitalistic organization of (formally)free labour.”

Page 36, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “Rational industrial organization, attuned to a regular market,and neither to political nor irrationally speculative opportunitiesfor profit, is not, however, the only peculiarity of Western capit-alism. The modern rational organization of the capitalisticenterprise would not have been possible without two otherimportant factors in its development: the separation of businessfrom the household, which completely dominates modern eco-nomic life, and closely connected with it, rational book-keeping.”

Page 36, Underline (Blue): Content: “The modern rational organization of the capitalisticenterprise would not have been possible without two otherimportant factors in its development: the separation of businessfrom the household, which completely dominates modern eco-nomic life, and closely connected with it, rational book-keeping”

Page 37, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “Exact calculation—the basis of everything else—is only possible on a basis of free labour.7”

Page 37, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “Hence in a universal history of culture the central problem for”

Page 38, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “us is the origin of this sober bourgeois capitalism with its rational organization of free labour.”

Page 38, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “Or in terms of cultural his- tory, the problem is that of the origin of the Western bourgeois class and of its peculiarities,”

Page 40, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “Two older essays have been placed at the beginning which 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 an economic spirit, or the ethos of an economic system.”

Page 40, Stamp (Star (Frame, Red))

Page 40, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “In this case we aredealing with the connection of the spirit of modern economiclife with the rational ethics of ascetic Protestantism. Thus wetreat here only one side of the causal chain.”

Page 41, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “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.”

Page 41, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “In another respect the uninitiated at least must be warned against exaggerating the importance of these investigations.”

Page 43, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “we may make a reference to the anthropological side of the problem. it would be natural to suspect that the most importantreason lay in differences of heredity. The author admits that he isinclined to think the importance of biological heredity verygreat. But in spite of the notable achievements of anthropo-logical research, I see up to the present no way of exactly or evenapproximately measuring either the extent or, above all, the formof its influence on the development investigated here”

Page 46, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “1 RELIGIOUS AFFILIATION AND SOCIAL STRATIFICATION1”

Page 46, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “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 modern enterprises, are overwhelmingly Protestant.4”

Page 46, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “It is true that the greater relative participation of Protestants in the”

Page 47, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “ownership of capital,5 in management, and the upper ranks of labour in great modern industrial and commercial enterprises,6 may in part be explained in terms of historical circumstances7 which extend far back into the past, and in which religious affiliation is not a cause of the economic conditions, but to a certain extent appears to be a result of them.”

Page 47, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “There arises thus the historical question: why were the districts of highest eco- nomic development at the same time particularly favourable to a revolution in the Church?”

Page 47, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “the Reformation meant not the elimination of the Church’s control over everyday life, but rather the substi- tution of a new form of control for the previous one.”

Page 48, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “The rule of Calvinism, would be for us the most absolutely unbearable form of ecclesi- astical control of the individual which could possibly exist.”

Page 49, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “It is well known that the factory has taken its skilledlabour to a large extent from young men in the handicrafts; butthis is much more true of Protestant than of Catholic journey-men. Among journeymen, in other words, the Catholics show astronger propensity to remain in their crafts, that is they moreoften become master craftsmen, whereas the Protestants areattracted to a larger extent into the factories in order to fill theupper ranks of skilled labour and administrative positions.10”

Page 50, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “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 historico-political situations.13”

Page 53, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “not all the Protestant denominations seem to have had anequally strong influence in this direction. That of Calvinism,even in Germany, was among the strongest, it seems, and thereformed faith21 more than the others seems to have promotedthe development of the spirit of capitalism”

Page 54, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “If any inner relationship between certain expressions ofthe old Protestant spirit and modern capitalistic culture is to befound, we must attempt to find it, for better or worse not in itsalleged more or less materialistic or at least anti-ascetic joy ofliving, but in its purely religious characteristics.”

Page 54, Stamp (Star (Frame, Red))

Page 56, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “2 THE SPIRIT OF CAPITALISM”

Page 56, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “the spirit of capitalism. What is to be understood by it? ”

Page 57, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “if we try to determine the object, the analysis and his- torical explanation of which we are attempting, it cannot be in the form of a conceptual definition, but at least in the beginning only a 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.”

Page 57, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “time is money. credit is money.”

Page 58, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “The good paymaster is lord of another man’s purse.”

Page 59, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “He that idly loses five shillings’ worth of time; loses five shil- lings, and might as prudently throw five shillings into the sea.”

Page 59, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “It is Benjamin Franklin who preaches to us in these sentences,”

Page 59, Underline (Red): Content: “Benjamin Franklin”

Page 59, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “the philosophy ofwhich Kürnberger sums up in the words, “They make tallow outof cattle and money out of men”. ”

Page 59, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “The peculiarity of this”

Page 60, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “philosophy of avarice 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.”

Page 60, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “Truly what is here preached is not simply ameans of making one’s way in the world, but a peculiar ethic.The infraction of its rules is treated not as foolishness but asforgetfulness of duty.”

Page 60, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “It is not mere business astuteness, that sort of thing is common enough, it is an ethos. This is the quality which interests us.”

Page 61, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “The circumstance that he ascribes his rec- ognition 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.”

Page 61, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “In fact, the summum bonum of this ethic, the earning of moreand more money, combined with the strict avoidance of allspontaneous enjoyment of life, is above all completely devoid ofany eudaemonistic, not to say hedonistic, admixture. It isthought of so purely as an end in itself, that from the point ofview of the happiness of, or utility to, the single individual, itappears entirely transcendental and absolutely irrational.9 Man isdominated by the making of money, by acquisition as the ultim-ate purpose of his life. Economic acquisition is no longer sub-ordinated to man as the means for the satisfaction of his materialneeds.”

Page 61, Stamp (Star (Frame, Red))

Page 62, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “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 business? He shall stand before kings” (Prov. xxii. 29).”

Page 63, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “the capitalism of to-day, which has come to dominateeconomic life, educates and selects the economic subjects whichit needs through a process of economic survival of the fittest. Buthere one can easily see the limits of the concept of selection as ameans of historical explanation. In order that a manner of life sowell adapted to the peculiarities of capitalism could be selectedat all, i.e. should come to dominate others, it had to originatesomewhere, and not in isolated individuals alone, but as a way oflife common to whole groups of men. This origin is what reallyneeds explanation”

Page 63, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “in the country of Ben- jamin 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 calculat- ing sort of profit-seeking in New England, as distinguished from other parts of America, as early as 1632.”

Page 64, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “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 Ages12 have been proscribed as the lowest sort of avarice and as an attitude entirely lacking in self-respect.”

Page 66, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “The most important opponent with which the spirit of capit- alism, in the sense of a definite standard of life claiming ethical sanction, has had to struggle, was that type of attitude and reac- tion to new situations which we may designate as traditionalism.”

Page 66, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “One of the technical means which the modern employer uses in order to secure the greatest possible amount of work from his men is the device of piece-rates.”

Page 66, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “raising thepiece-rates has often had the result that not more but less hasbeen accomplished in the same time, because the worker reactedto the increase not by increasing but by decreasing the amountof his work.”

Page 66, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “A man, for instance, who at the rate of 1 mark per acre mowed 2½ acres per day and earned 2½ marks, when the rate was raised to 1.25 marks per acre mowed, not 3 acres, as he”

Page 67, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “might easily have done, thus earning 3.75 marks, but only 2acres, so that he could still earn the 2½ marks to which he wasaccustomed. The opportunity of earning more was less attractivethan that of working less.”

Page 67, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “He did not ask: how much can I earn in a day if I do as much work as possible? but: how much must I work in order to earn the wage, 2½ marks, which I earned before and which takes care of my traditional needs?”

Page 67, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “A man does not “by nature” wish to earn more and more money, but simply to live as he is accustomed to live and to earn as much as is necessary for that purpose.”

Page 68, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “not only is a developed sense of responsibilityabsolutely indispensable, but in general also an attitude which, atleast during working hours, is freed from continual calculationsof how the customary wage may be earned with a maximum ofcomfort and a minimum of exertion. Labour must, on the con-trary, be performed as if it were an absolute end in itself, acalling.”

Page 68, Stamp (Star (Frame, Red))

Page 68, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “But such an attitude is by no means a product of nature. It cannot be evoked by low wages or high ones alone, but can only be the product of a long and arduous process of education.”

Page 75, Highlight (Cyan): Content: ” Thepeople filled with the spirit of capitalism to-day tend to be indif-ferent, if not hostile, to the Church. The thought of the piousboredom of paradise has little attraction for their active natures;religion appears to them as a means of drawing people awayfrom labour in this world. If you ask them what is the meaningof their restless activity, why they are never satisfied with whatthey have, thus appearing so senseless to any purely worldly viewof life, they would perhaps give the answer, if they know any atall: “to provide for my children and grandchildren”. But moreoften and, since that motive is not peculiar to them, but was justas effective for the traditionalist, more correctly, simply: thatbusiness with its continuous work has become a necessary partof their lives. That is in fact the only possible motivation, but it atthe same time expresses what is, seen from the view-point ofpersonal happiness, so irrational about this sort of life, where aman exists for the sake of his business, instead of the reverse.”

Page 78, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “Now, how could activity, which was at best ethically tolerated, turn into a calling in the sense of Benjamin Franklin? The fact to”

Page 79, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “be explained historically is that in the most highly capitalisticcentre of that time, in Florence of the fourteenth and fifteenthcenturies, the money and capital market of all the great politicalPowers, this attitude was considered ethically unjustifiable, or atbest to be tolerated. ”

Page 79, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “But in the backwoods small bourgeois cir- cumstances of Pennsylvania in the eighteenth century, the same thing was considered the essence of moral conduct, even commanded in the name of duty.”

Page 81, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “one may—this simple proposition, which is often forgotten should be placed at the beginning of every study which essays to deal with rationalism—rationalize life from fundamentally different basic points of view and in very differ- ent directions.”

Page 81, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “We are here particularly interested in the origin of precisely the irrational element which lies in this, as in every conception of a calling.”

Page 82, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “3 LUTHER’S CONCEPTION OF THE CALLING”

Page 82, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “Now it is unmistakable that even in the German word Beruf, and perhaps still more clearly in the English calling, a religious con- ception, that of a task set by God, is at least suggested.”

Page 83, Underline (Red): Content: “Luther”

Page 83, Stamp (Star (Frame, Red))

Page 83, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “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 assume. This it was which inevit- ably gave every-day worldly activity a religious significance, and which first created the conception of a calling in this sense.”

Page 85, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “Luther himself would, without doubt, have sharply repudiated any connection with a point of view like that of Franklin.”

Page 85, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “The effect of the Reformation as such was only that,as compared with the Catholic attitude, the moral emphasis onand the religious sanction of, organized worldly labour in a call-ing was mightily increased.”

Page 87, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “for Luther the concept of the calling remained trad- itionalistic.23 His calling is something which man has to accept as a divine ordinance, to which he must adapt himself. This”

Page 88, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “aspect outweighed the other idea which was also present, that work in the calling was a, or rather the, task set by God.24”

Page 88, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “Thus, for the time being, the only ethical resultwas negative; worldly duties were no longer subordinated toascetic ones; obedience to authority and the acceptance of thingsas they were, were preached.25 ”

Page 88, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “significance evidently cannot be derived directly from the attitude of Luther and his Church to worldly activity, and is perhaps not altogether so easily grasped as the connection with other branches of Protestantism. It is thus well for us next to look into those forms in which a relation between”

Page 89, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “practical life and a religious motivation can be more easily per- ceived than in Lutheranism.”

Page 89, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “Although the Reformation is unthinkable withoutLuther’s own personal religious development, and was spiritu-ally long influenced by his personality, without Calvinism hiswork could not have had permanent concrete success.”

Page 89, Underline (Red): Content: “Milton”

Page 90, Stamp (Star (Frame, Red))

Page 90, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “We thus take as our starting-point in the investigation of the relationship between the old Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism the works of Calvin, of Calvinism, and the other”

Page 91, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “Puritan sects.”

Page 92, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “we have no intention whateverof maintaining such a foolish and doctrinaire thesis32 as that thespirit of capitalism (in the provisional sense of the termexplained above) could only have arisen as the result of certaineffects of the Reformation, or even that capitalism as an eco-nomic system is a creation of the Reformation. ”

Page 92, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “On the contrary, we only wish to ascertain whether and to what extent religious forces have taken part in the qualitative formation and the quantitative expansion of that spirit over the world.”

Page 96, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “4 THE RELIGIOUS FOUNDATIONS OF WORLDLY ASCETICISM”

Page 96, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “In history there have been four principal forms of ascetic Protes-tantism (in the sense of word here used): (1) Calvinism in theform which it assumed in the main area of its influence inWestern Europe, especially in the seventeenth century; (2) Piet-ism; (3) Methodism; (4) the sects growing out of the Baptistmovement.1 ”

Page 99, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “A. CALVINISM”

Page 99, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “Now Calvinism5 was the faith6 over which the great political and cultural struggles of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were fought in the most highly developed countries, At that time, and in general even to-day, the doctrine of predestination was considered its most characteristic dogma.”

Page 102, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “All creation, including of course the fact, as it undoubtedly was for Calvin, that only a small proportion of men are chosen for eternal”

Page 103, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “grace, can have any meaning only as means to the glory andmajesty of God. To apply earthly standards of justice to His sove-reign decrees is meaningless and an insult to His Majesty,14 Everything else, including the meaning of our individual destiny, is hidden in dark mystery which it would be both impossible to pierce and presumptuous to question. For the damned to complain of their lot would be much”

Page 103, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “For the damned to complain of their lot would be much the same as for animals to bemoan the fact they were not born as men.”

Page 103, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “We know only that a part of humanity is saved, the restdamned. To assume that human merit or guilt play a part indetermining this destiny would be to think of God’s absolutelyfree decrees, which have been settled from eternity, as subject tochange by human influence, an impossible contradiction.”

Page 103, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “In its extreme inhumanity this doctrine must above all have had one consequence for the life of a generation which sur- rendered to its magnificent consistency. That was a feeling of unprecedented inner loneliness of the single individual.16”

Page 103, Stamp (Star (Frame, Red))

Page 103, Underline (Blue): Content: “a feeling of unprecedented inner loneliness of the single individual.16”

Page 103, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “In what was for the man of the age of the Reformation the most”

Page 104, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “important thing in life, his eternal salvation, he was forced tofollow his path alone to meet a destiny which had been decreedfor him from eternity. No one could help him. ”

Page 108, Underline (Red): Content: “Kierkegaard’s”

Page 108, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “For us the decisive problem is: How was this doctrine borne36in an age to which the after-life was not only more important,but in many ways also more certain, than all the interests of lifein this world?37 The question, Am I one of the elect? must sooneror later have arisen for every believer and have forced all otherinterests into the background.”

Page 108, Stamp (Star (Frame, Red))

Page 108, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “For Calvin himself this was not a problem. He felt himself to be a chosen agent of the Lord, and was certain of his own salvation. He rejects in principle theassumption that one can learn from the conduct of otherswhether they are chosen or damned. It is an unjustifiable attemptto force God’s secrets.”

Page 109, Underline (Blue): Content: “two types of pastoral advice appear. On the one hand it is held to be an absolute duty to consider oneself chosen, and to combat all doubts as temptations of the devil,45”

Page 109, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “two principal, mutuallyconnected, types of pastoral advice appear. On the one hand it isheld to be an absolute duty to consider oneself chosen, and tocombat all doubts as temptations of the devil,45 since lack of self-confidence is the result of insufficient faith, hence of imperfect”

Page 109, Stamp (Star (Frame, Red))

Page 110, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “grace.”

Page 110, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “On the other hand, in order to attain that self-confidence intense worldly activity is recom- mended as the most suitable means.47 It and it alone disperses religious doubts and gives the certainty of grace.”

Page 110, Underline (Blue): Content: “On the other hand, in order to attain that self-confidence intense worldly activity is recom- mended as the most suitable means.47”

Page 112, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “If we now ask further, by what fruits the Calvinist thought himself able to identify true faith? the answer is: by a type of Christian conduct which served to increase the glory of God.”

Page 112, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “Only one of the elect really has the fides efficax,55 only he is able by virtue of his rebirth (regeneratio) and the resulting sanctification (sanctificatio) of his whole life, to augment the glory of God by real, and not merely apparent, good works.”

Page 112, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “Thus, how- ever useless good works might be as a means of attaining salva- tion, for even the elect remain beings of the flesh, and everything they do falls infinitely short of divine standards, nevertheless, they are indispensable as a sign of election.60 They are the tech- nical means, not of purchasing salvation, but of getting rid of the fear of damnation.”

Page 112, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “In practice this means that God helps those who help them- selves.63”

Page 117, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “the significance of the Reformation in the fact that now every Chris- tian had to be a monk all his life. The drain of asceticism from everyday worldly life had been stopped by a dam, and those passionately spiritual natures which had formerly supplied the highest type of monk were now forced to pursue their ascetic ideals within mundane occupations.”

Page 117, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “But in the course of its development Calvinism added some-thing positive to this, the idea of the necessity of proving one’sfaith in worldly activity.88 Therein it gave the broader groups ofreligiously inclined people a positive incentive to asceticism.”

Page 123, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “B. PIETISM”

Page 123, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “In so far as the movement remained within the Reformed Church, it is almost impossible to draw the line between Pietistic and non- Pietistic Calvinists.108”

Page 124, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “election could not be proved by theological learning atall.111 Hence Pietism, with a deep distrust of the Church of thetheologians,112 to which—this is characteristic of it—it stillbelonged officially, began to gather the adherents of the praxispietatis in conventicles removed from the world.113 It wished tomake the invisible Church of the elect visible on this earth.”

Page 126, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “the development of German Pietism led away from the doctrine of pre- destination.”

Page 127, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “in so far as the rational and ascetic elem-ent of Pietism outweighed the emotional, the ideas essential toour thesis maintained their place. These were: (1) that themethodical development of one’s own state of grace to a higherand higher degree of certainty and perfection in terms of the lawwas a sign of grace;124 and (2) that “God’s Providence worksthrough those in such a state of perfection”, i.e. in that He givesthem His signs if they wait patiently and deliberate methodic-ally.125”

Page 130, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “All in all, when we consider German Pietism from the point ofview important for us, we must admit a vacillation anduncertainty in the religious basis of its asceticism which makes itdefinitely weaker than the iron consistency of Calvinism, a”

Page 132, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “C. METHODISM”

Page 132, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “The combination of an emotional but still ascetic type of religionwith increasing indifference to or repudiation of the dogmaticbasis of Calvinistic asceticism is characteristic also of the Anglo-American movement corresponding to Continental Pietism,namely Methodism.154”

Page 132, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “The name in itself shows what impressedcontemporaries as characteristic of its adherents: the methodical,systematic nature of conduct for the purpose of attaining thecertitudo salutis. ”

Page 132, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “unlike Calvinism, which held”

Page 133, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “everything emotional to be illusory, the only sure basis for the certitudo salutis was in principle held to be a pure feeling of abso- lute certainty of forgiveness, derived immediately from the tes- timony of the spirit, the coming of which could be definitely placed to the hour.”

Page 134, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “from our view-point the Methodist ethic appears to reston a foundation of uncertainty similar to Pietism. But the aspir-ation to the higher life, the second blessedness, served it as a sortof makeshift for the doctrine of predestination.”

Page 135, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “The emotional act of conversion was methodically induced. the emotion, once awakened, was directed into a rational struggle for perfection.”

Page 135, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “D. THE BAPTIST SECTS”

Page 136, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “the believer’s Church.171 the religious community, was no longer looked upon as a sort of trust foundation for supernatural ends, an institution, neces- sarily including both the just and the unjust, whether for increasing the glory of God (Calvinistic) or as a medium for bringing the means of salvation to men (Catholic and Lutheran), but solely as a community of personal believers of the reborn, and only these. In other words, not as a Church but as a sect.173”

Page 136, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “This is all that the principle, in itself purely external, that only adults who have personally gained their own faith should be baptized, is meant to symbolize.174”

Page 139, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “since predestination was rejected, the peculiarly rationalcharacter of Baptist morality rested psychologically above all onthe idea of expectant waiting for the Spirit to descend The purpose of this silent waiting is to over- come everything impulsive and irrational, the passions and sub- jective interests of the natural man.”

Page 139, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “He must be stilled in order to create that deep repose of the soul in which alone the word of God can be heard.”

Page 143, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “It is our next task to follow out the results of the Puritan idea of the calling in the business world, now that the above sketch has attempted to show its religious foundations.”

Page 143, Underline (Blue): Content: “the decisive point was, torecapitulate, the conception of the state of religious grace,common to all the denominations, as a status which marks offits possessor from the degradation of the flesh, from theworld.193 It is our next task to follow out the results of the Puritan idea of the calling in the business world, now that the above sketch has attempted to show its religious foundations.”

Page 143, Stamp (Star (Frame, Red))

Page 143, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “the decisive point was, torecapitulate, the conception of the state of religious grace,common to all the denominations, as a status which marks offits possessor from the degradation of the flesh, from theworld.193 ”

Page 143, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “The religious life of the saints, as distinguished from the natural life, was—the most important point—no longer lived outside the world in monastic communities, but within the world and its institutions. This rationalization of conduct within this world, but for the sake of the world beyond, was the con- sequence of the concept of calling of ascetic Protestantism.”

Page 144, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “it strode into the market-place of life, slammedthe door of the monastery behind it, and undertook to penetratejust that daily routine of life with its methodicalness, to fashionit into a life in the world, but neither of nor for this world”

Page 145, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “5 ASCETICISM AND THE SPIRIT OF CAPITALISM”

Page 145, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “In order to understand the connection between the fundamental religious ideas of ascetic Protestantism and its maxims for every- day economic conduct, it is necessary to examine with especial care such writings as have evidently been derived from minis- terial practice.”

Page 146, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “Richard Baxter stands out above many other writers on Puritan ethics, both because of his eminently practical and realistic atti- tude, and, at the same time, because of the universal recognition accorded to his works,”

Page 146, Underline (Red): Content: “Richard Baxter”

Page 147, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “Waste of time is thus the first and in principle the deadliest ofsins. The span of human life is infinitely short and precious tomake sure of one’s own election. Loss of time through sociabil-ity, idle talk,10 luxury,11 even more sleep than is necessary forhealth,12 six to at most eight hours, is worthy of absolute moralcondemnation.13”

Page 148, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “Accordingly, Baxter’s principal work is dominated by the con- tinually repeated, often almost passionate preaching of hard, continuous bodily or mental labour.18”

Page 148, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “Labour is, on the one hand, anapproved ascetic technique, as it always has been20 in the West-ern Church, in sharp contrast not only to the Orient but toalmost all monastic rules the world over.21 ”

Page 149, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “Even the wealthy shall not eat without working, for even though they do not need to labour to support their own needs, there is God’s commandment which they, like the poor, must obey.29”

Page 150, Underline (Red): Content: “Adam Smith’s”

Page 151, Highlight (Cyan): Content: ““If God show you a way in which you may lawfully get more than in another way (with- out wrong to your soul or to any other), if you refuse this, and choose the less gainful way, you cross one of the ends of your calling, and you refuse to be God’s steward, and to accept His gifts and use them for Him when He requireth it: you may labour to be rich for God, though not for the flesh and sin.”41”

Page 151, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “Wealth is thus bad ethically only in so far as it is a temptationto idleness and sinful enjoyment of life, and its acquisition is badonly when it is with the purpose of later living merrily andwithout care. But as a performance of duty in a calling it is notonly morally permissible, but actually enjoined.42 ”

Page 154, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “Let us now try to clarify the points in which the Puritan ideaof the calling and the premium it placed upon ascetic conductwas bound directly to influence the development of a capitalisticway of life. As we have seen, this asceticism turned with all itsforce against one thing: the spontaneous enjoyment of life andall it had to offer. ”

Page 158, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “This worldly Protestant asceticism, as we may recapitulate upto this point, acted powerfully against the spontaneous enjoy-ment of possessions; it restricted consumption, especially ofluxuries. On the other hand, it had the psychological effect offreeing the acquisition of goods from the inhibitions of trad-itionalistic ethics. It broke the bonds of the impulse of acquisi-tion in that it not only legalized it, but (in the sense discussed)looked upon it as directly willed by God.”

Page 159, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “When the limitation of consumption is combined with this release of acquisitive activity, the inevitable practical result is obvious: accumulation of capital through ascetic compulsion to save.85”

Page 160, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “As far as the influence of the Puritan outlook extended, underall circumstances itfavoured the development of a rational bourgeois economic life; It stood at the cradle of the modern economic man.”

Page 162, Stamp (Star (Frame, Red))

Page 162, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “the intensity of the search for the Kingdom ofGod commenced gradually to pass over into sober economicvirtue; the religious roots died out slowly, giving way to utilitar-ian worldliness. ”

Page 166, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so. This order is now bound to the technical andeconomic conditions of machine production which to-daydetermine the lives of all the individuals who are born into thismechanism, not only those directly concerned with economicacquisition, with irresistible force.”

Page 166, Underline (Blue): Content: “The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so.”

Page 166, Stamp (Star (Frame, Red))

Page 166, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “In Baxter’s view the care for external goods should only lie on the shoulders of the “saint like a light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment”.114 But fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage.”

Page 166, Underline (Blue): Content: “the care for external goods should only lie on the shoulders of the “saint like a light cloak, But fate decreed that the cloak should become aniron cage.”

Page 167, Stamp (Star (Frame, Red))

Page 167, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “To-day the spirit of religious asceticism—whether finally, who knows?—has escaped from the cage.”

Page 167, Underline (Blue): Content: “To-day the spirit of religiousasceticism”

Page 167, Underline (Blue): Content: “has escaped fromthe cage. ”

Page 167, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “But victorious capitalism, since it rests on mechanical foundations, needs its support no longer.”

Page 167, Underline (Blue): Content: “But victorious capitalism, needs its support no longer.”

Page 167, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “The rosy blush of itslaughing heir, the Enlightenment, seems also to be irretrievablyfading, and the idea of duty in one’s calling prowls about in ourlives like the ghost of dead religious beliefs. Where the fulfil-ment of the calling cannot directly be related to the highestspiritual and cultural values, or when, on the other hand, it neednot be felt simply as economic compulsion, the individual gen-erally abandons the attempt to justify it at all.”

Page 167, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “No one knows who will live in this cage in the future, orwhether at the end of this tremendous development entirely newprophets will arise, or there will be a great rebirth of old ideasand ideals, or, if neither, mechanized petrification, embellishedwith a sort of convulsive self-importance. For of the last stage ofthis cultural development, it might well be truly said: “Special-ists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullityimagines that it has attained a level of civilization never beforeachieved.” ”

Page 167, Underline (Magenta): Content: “For of the last stage ofthis cultural development, it might well be truly said: “Special-ists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullityimagines that it has attained a level of civilization never beforeachieved.” ”

Page 168, Highlight (Cyan): Content: “The modern man is in general, even with the best will, unable to give religious ideas a signifi- cance for culture and national character which they deserve. But it is, of course, not my aim to substitute for a one-sided material- istic an equally one-sided spiritualistic causal interpretation of culture and of history.”

Page 169, Underline (Red): Content: ” Talcott Parsons: ‘ “Capitalism” in recent German literature:Sombart and Weber’, Parts 1 and 2, The Journal of Political Econ-omy, Vols. 36 and 37, 1928 and 1929″

Page 169, Underline (Red): Content: “Anthony Giddens: Politics and Sociology in the Thought of Max Weber. London, 1972.”

Page 169, Underline (Red): Content: “R. K. Merton: ‘Science, technology and society in seventeenth century England’, Osiris, Vol. 4, 1938 (reprinted as a single vol- ume, New York, 1970).”

Page 183, Underline (Red): Content: “Autobiography (ed. F. W. Pine, Henry Holt, New York, 1916), p. 112.”