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TWO The Protestant Ethic Thesis Virtually all the modern world has been read into Calvinism; liberal politics and voluntary association; capitalism and the social discipline upon which it rests; bureaucracy with its systematic procedures and its putatively diligent and devoted officials; and finally all the routine forms of repression, joylessness, and unrelaxed aspiration. By one or another writer, the faith of the brethren, and especially of the Puritan brethren, has been made the source or cause or first embodiment of the most crucial elements of modernity. Michael Walzer (1965, 300) With their shared emphasis on the key causal role of social and political values, analyses couched in terms of political culture have a common origin in Weber’s book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism ([1905] 1958a). Sometimes, the link to Weber is explicit and direct. Harrison (1992) and Fukuyama (1995, chap. 5), for example, specifically ground their analyses in Weber. On other occasions, the linkage is indirect. Thus, while Putnam (1993) does not reference Weber, he does draw heavily on Banfield’s (1958) analysis of amoral familism in southern Italy. Still other scholars link the argument to Weber directly and indirectly. Accordingly, Granato, Inglehart, and Leblang (1996) emphasize both Weber and the subsequent exegesis associated with McClelland’s study of need for achievement (1961). But Banfield and McClelland themselves drew heavily on Weber, and their arguments are direct extensions of his. Indeed, as Hirschman put it, “in the 1950s, . . . Weber’s Protestant Ethic [was] modernized into David McClelland’s ‘achievement motivation’ as a precondition of progress and into Edward C. Banfield’s ‘amoral familism’ 33 34 before norms as an obstacle” (1984, 99). The longevity of the Weber thesis is thus remarkable. While our use of the term Weber thesis is routine, it is important to understand that he did not initiate the idea that confessional differences are associated with progress. Far from being original, the core of Weber’s argument had been common in the Protestant German intellectual circles of which he was a part since the late eighteenth century, with their confessional stereotypes of Protestants as active and productive and of Catholics as passive and unproductive (Münch 1993). By the time of The Protestant Ethic, the linkage between religion and economics was commonplace (Nipperdy 1993). And the argument was hardly confined to Germany. Consider the views of the eminent English Whig historian Thomas Macaulay. The loveliest and most fertile provinces of Europe have, under her [the Church of Rome’s] rule, been sunk in poverty, in political servitude, and in intellectual torpor, while Protestant countries, once proverbial for sterility and barbarism, have been turned by skill and industry into gardens, and can boast of a long list of heroes and statesmen, philosophers and poets. (1849, 1:30–31) Nor were these simply national differences. Whoever passes in Germany from a Roman Catholic to a Protestant principality, in Switzerland from a Roman Catholic to a Protestant canton, in Ireland from a Roman Catholic to a Protestant county, finds that he has passed from a lower to a higher grade of civilisation. On the other side of the Atlantic, the same law prevails. The Protestants of the United States have left far behind them the Roman Catholics of Mexico , Peru, and Brazil. The Roman Catholics of Lower Canada remain inert, while the whole continent round them is in a ferment with Protestant activity and enterprise. (Macaulay 1849, 1:31) Similarly, in the United States, John Draper (1874) had already advanced the influential thesis that the Reformation gave rise to modern rational science (and thus to technological advances and economic growth) in the face of strong resistance from Catholic Europe. Acknowledging that the general argument has a long pedigree, our purpose in this chapter is to evaluate Weber’s thesis linking Protestantism with capitalism in light of ongoing historical scholarship. Such an evalua- The Protestant Ethic Thesis 35 tion is crucial given the current revival of cultural explanations of political life that stem from Weber’s thesis and that thereby view his thesis as a fundamentally accurate account of the phenomenon he sought to explain. The evaluation is also critical because Weber’s thesis has thoroughly permeated contemporary social science. The term Protestant work ethic has long since become part of common usage, a label used even for psychological measures whose meaning is thereby taken to be self-evident (see, e.g., Furnham 1990). Some have reported a significant Protestant ethic in such unlikely quarters as contemporary...

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