Toryism and Trade Can Never Agree, 1713, p. 12. The tract is wrongly ascribed to Davenant by H. Levy, Economic Liberalism, 1913, p. 12. ↩
See, e.g., G. Martin, La Grande Industrie sous le règne de Louis XIV, 1899, chap. XVII, where the reports of several intendants are quoted; and Levasseur, Histoire du commerce de la France, 1911, vol. I, p. 421. ↩
A Letter from a Gentleman in the City to a Gentleman in the Country About the Odiousness of Persecution, 1677, p. 29. ↩
Sir Wm. Temple, Observations Upon the United Provinces of the Netherlands, chap. V, VI. ↩
The True Interest and Political Maxims of the Republick of Holland and West-Friesland, 1702, pt. I, chap. XIV. ↩
Petty, Political Arithmetic, 1690, pp. 25–6. ↩
The Present Interest of England Stated, by a Lover of His King and Country, 1671. I am indebted to Mr. A. P. Wadsworth for calling my attention to the passage quoted in the text. The same point is put more specifically by Lawrence Braddon: “The superstition of their religion obligeth France to keep (at least) fifty Holy days more than we are obliged to keep; and every such day wherein no work is done is one hundred and twenty thousand pounds loss to the deluded people” (“Abstract of the Draft of a Bill for relieving, reforming and employing the Poor,” 1717). See also Defoe, in his Enquiry Into Occasional Conformity, 1702, pp. 18–19: “We wonder, gentlemen, you will accept our money on your deficient funds, our stocks to help carry on your wars, our loans and credits to your victualling office and navy office. If you would go on to distinguish us, get a law made we shall buy no lands, that we may not be freeholders; and see if you could find money to buy us out. Transplant us into towns and bodies, and let us trade by our selves; let us card, spin, knit, weave and work with and for one another, and see how you’ll maintain your own poor without us. Let us fraight our ships apart, keep our money out of your Bank, accept none of our bills, and separate your selves as absolutely from us in civil matters, as we do from you in religious, and see how you can go on without us.” ↩
Swift, Examiner. ↩
Bolingbroke, Letter to Sir Wm. Windham, 1753, p. 21. ↩
Reliquiæ Baxterianæ (see note 2), p. 94. He goes on: “The generality of the Master Workmen [i.e., employers] lived but a little better than their journeymen (from hand to mouth), but only that they laboured not altogether so hard.” ↩
Voltaire, Lettres Philosophiques, no. X, and Montesquieu, Esprit des Lois, XIX, 27, and XX, 22. See also the remarks to the same effect in D’Argenson, Considérations sur le Gouvernement de la France, 1765. ↩
Brief Survey of the Growth of Usury in England, 1673. ↩
Marston, Eastward Ho!, act I, sc. I. ↩
Clarendon, History of the Rebellion, bk. I, par. 163. ↩
Petty, Political Arithmetic, 1690, p. 23. ↩
Max Weber, Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus, first published in the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik Statistik, vols. XX, XXI, and since reprinted in vol. I of his Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie, 1920; Troeltsch, Die Soziallehren der Christlichen Kirchen and Protestantism and Progress, 1912; Schulze-Gaevernitz, Britischer Imperialismus und Englischer Freihandel, 1906; Cunningham, Christianity and Economic Science, 1914, chap. V.
Weber’s essay gave rise to much discussion in Germany. Its main thesis—that Calvinism, and in particular English Puritanism, from which nearly all his illustrations are drawn, played a part of preponderant importance in creating moral and political conditions favorable to the growth of capitalist enterprise—appears to be accepted by Troeltsch, Die Soziallehren der Christlichen Kirchen, pp. 704 seqq. It is submitted to a critical analysis by Brentano (Die Anfänge des modernen Kapitalismus, 1916, pp. 117–57), who dissents from many of Weber’s conclusions. Weber’s essay is certainly one of the most fruitful examinations of the relations between religion and social theory which has appeared, and I desire to acknowledge my indebtedness to it, in particular with reference to its discussion of the economic application given by some Puritan writers to the idea expressed by the word “calling.” At the same time, there are several points on which Weber’s arguments appear to me to be one-sided and overstrained, and on which Brentano’s criticisms of it seem to me to be sound.
Thus (i), as was perhaps inevitable in an essay dealing with economic and social thought, as distinct from changes in economic and social organization, Weber seems to me to explain by reference to moral and intellectual influences developments which have their principal explanation in another region altogether. There
