Mad Max (Weber) in New England

Max Weber’s hypothesis that a Protestant ethic of laboring diligently for salvation midwifed the capitalist spirit of rationalized, accumulative enterprise is one of the most famous theories in twentieth-century social science, generating nearly a century’s research into the mutual embrace of religious sentiment and economic progress. Scholars have frequently extended Weber’s insights to societies far removed in time and place from post-Reformation northwest Europe, which makes their slight attention to seventeenth-century New England so startling. Colonized by English Puritans, the archetypical “innerworldly ascetics,” and harboring an entrepreneurial class that quickly established durable commercial ties around the Atlantic rim, early New England would seem an obvious venue for testing Weber’s theories, yet not only have few writers tried, most have sequestered its religious ideals from socioeconomic structures. The voluminous literature on Puritanism issuing from Perry Miller’s great ur-texts have treated theology, ecclesiology, liturgy and devotion as primarily spiritual phenomena having little truck with trade. Miller himself folded Weber into a chapter of the New England Mind (1953) entitled “The Protestant Ethic,” although less to divine a countinghouse mentality germinating in the meetinghouse than to elucidate jeremiads lamenting the alleged decline of the founding generation’s ideals. For Miller’s heirs, though, capitalism merely provided the floorboards on which the Puritans staged their intellectual dramas. Economic historians, for their part, have focused on how New Englanders created their markets without pondering why they strived so assiduously. Perhaps they suppose that Massachusetts’s corporate origins and rapid commercialization render the Protestant ethic’s appearance nonproblematic: it was present at the creation.

Yet two of the profoundest studies of colonial New England’s religious and economic values have divorced Puritanism from capitalism. Bernard Bailyn’s The New England Merchants in the Seventeenth Century (1955) described a continual antagonism between the Puritan gentry and an emergent merchant class whose entrepreneurship and cosmopolitanism set them against the Elect elite. According to Richard Bushman, ¹ New Englanders became “yankees”—independent, acquisitive, and shrewdly mercenary—only after shedding Puritan habits. The Great Awakening reconciled net worth and new birth, divesting possessive individualism of its sinful connotations while liberating converts from clerical authoritarianism. Scholars have lately cried up the eighteenth-century “consumer revolution” that turned the English Atlantic into an “empire of goods” and collated probate records to produce finely detailed pictures of colonial living standards, but have presumed rather than analyzed the high levels of personal productivity necessary to have kept Americans in teacups and Turkey rugs. Almost by default, Puritanism has appeared either irrelevant or obstructive to economic growth.

Studies of New England communities reinforced this impression, often treating villages as self-contained systems unaffected by far-flung commercial networks. Meanwhile, historians ranging south and west of the Hudson identified profit-maximizing behavior among people as theologically and socially diverse as Dutch Reformed Yorkers, Pennsylvania Quakers, and Chesapeake Anglicans. By 1988 Jack Greene could argue that the middle and southern colonies better anticipated the materialistic, atomistic, and multicultural society the United States became than did New England. ² But the image of overheated southerners pawing over capitalism while overscrupulous New Englanders gingerly sidled up to it looks odd over against two well-established observations: the difference between the developmental trajectories of the northern and southern economies, and the prominence of Puritan activity in England’s most commercializing precincts. What sea change could account for Saints taking care of business in London but shunning it in New London? A few historians denied the conundrum. Christine Heyrman proposed that, in Gloucester and Marblehead at least, Puritanism, community identity, and mercantile profits grew coactively, and Stephen Innes found entrepreneurial tendencies in Springfield similar to those unearthed in Germantown or Philadelphia. ³ Now, he offers a more general argument making Puritanism integral to New England’s capitalistic infrastructure and fundamental to its economic success.

Innes derives New England’s productivity from its distinctive “civil ecology,” a system of families, churches, and governments that, deployed to...