The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
"Ce que MM. Weber et Troeltsch," writes Professor Pirenne,[1] "prennent pour l'esprit Calviniste, c'est précisément l'esprit des hommes nouveaux que la révolution économique du temps introduit dans la vie des affaires, et qui s'y opposent aux traditionalistes auxquels ils se substituent." Why insist that causation can work in only one direction? Is it not a little artificial to suggest that capitalist enterprise had to wait, as Weber appears to imply, till religious changes had produced a capitalist spirit? Would it not be equally plausible, and equally one-sided, to argue that the religious changes were themselves merely the result of economic movements?
If Weber, as was natural in view of his approach to the problem, seems to lay in the present essay somewhat too exclusive an emphasis upon intellectual and ethical forces, his analysis of those forces themselves requires, perhaps, to be supplemented. Brentano's criticism, that the political thought of the Renaissance was as powerful a solvent of conventional restraints as the teaching of Calvin, is not without weight. In England, at any rate, the speculations of business men and economists as to money, prices, and the foreign exchanges, which were occasioned by the recurrent financial crises of the sixteenth century and by the change in the price level, were equally effective in undermining the attitude which Weber called traditionalism. Recent studies of the development of economic thought suggest that the change of opinion on economic ethics ascribed to Calvinism was by no
- ↑ H. Pirenne, Les Périodes de l'Histoire Sociale du Capitalisme (1914).
