Crucial Episodes in the History of Faith and Finance

Proposing a dialogue between Herbert Lüthy’s La Banque Protestante en France (1959–1961) and Marieke de Goede’s Virtue, Fortune, and Faith (2005), this essay highlights some of the main points of convergence between the two works. Both authors understand the emergence and historical consolidation of financial capitalism as resulting from recurrent, historically grounded confrontations of contending financial practices, intertwined with questions of faith. Considering these two texts together helps historians to see a long arc of links between capitalism and systems of belief in both the past and present, primarily put forth in the Weber thesis.