The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
traders in offices, tax-farmers, large merchants, and financial magnates. See the Introduction.
23. The assumption is thus by no means justified a priori, that is all I wish to bring out here, that on the one hand the technique of the capitalistic enterprise, and on the other the spirit of professional work which gives to capitalism its expansive energy, must have had their original roots in the same social classes. Similarly with the social relationships of religious beliefs. Calvinism was historically one of the agents of education in the spirit of capitalism. But in the Netherlands, the large moneyed interests were, for reasons which will be discussed later, not predominately adherents of strict Calvinism, but Arminians. The rising middle and small bourgeoisie, from which entrepreneurs were principally recruited, were for the most part here and elsewhere typical representatives both of capitalistic ethics and of Calvinistic religion. But that fits in very well with our present thesis: there were at all times large bankers and merchants. But a rational capitalistic organization of industrial labour was never known until the transition from the Middle Ages to modern times took place.
24. On this point see the good Zurich dissertation of J. Maliniak (1913).
25. The following picture has been put together as an ideal type from conditions found in different industrial branches and at different places. For the purposes of illustration which it here serves, it is of course of no consequence that the process has not in any one of the examples we have in mind taken place in precisely the manner we have described.
26. For this reason, among others, it is not by chance that this first period of incipient (economic) rationalism in German industry was accompanied by certain other phenomena, for instance the catastrophic degradation of taste in the style of articles of everyday use.
27. This is not to be understood as a claim that changes in the supply of the precious metals are of no economic importance.
28. This is only meant to refer to the type of entrepreneur (business man) whom we are making the object of our study, not any empirical average type. On the concept of the ideal type see my discussion in the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, XIX, No. 1. (Republished since Weber's death in the Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre. The concept was first thoroughly developed by Weber himself in these essays, and is likely to be unfamiliar to non-German readers. It is one of the most important aspects of Weber's methodological work, referred to in a note above.—Translator's Note.
29. This is perhaps the most appropriate place to make a few remarks concerning the essay of F. Keller, already referred to (volume 12 of the publications of the Görres-Gesellschaft), and Sombart's observations (Der Bourgeois) in following it up, so far as they are relevant in the present context. That an author should
