Petty, Political Arithmetick, Works, edited by Hull, I, p. 262. ↩
On these conflicts and developments see H. Levy in the book cited above. The very powerful hostility of public opinion to monopolies, which is characteristic of England, originated historically in a combination of the political struggle for power against the Crown—the Long Parliament excluded monopolists from its membership—with the ethical motives of Puritanism; and the economic interests of the small bourgeois and moderate-scale capitalists against the financial magnates in the seventeenth century. The Declaration of the Army of August 2, 1652, as well as the Petition of the Levellers of January 28, 1653, demand, besides the abolition of excises, tariffs, and indirect taxes, and the introduction of a single tax on estates, above all free trade, i.e. the abolition of the monopolistic barriers to trade at home and abroad, as a violation of the natural rights of man. ↩
Compare H. Levy, Die Grundlagen des ökonomischen Liberalismus in der Geschichte der englischen Volkswirtschaft, pp. 51 f. ↩
That those other elements, which have here not yet been traced to their religious roots, especially the idea that honesty is the best policy (Franklin’s discussion of credit), are also of Puritan origin, must be proved in a somewhat different connection (see the following essay [not translated here]). Here I shall limit myself to repeating the following remark of J. A. Rowntree (Quakerism, Past and Present, pp. 95–6), to which E. Bernstein has called my attention: “Is it merely a coincidence, or is it a consequence, that the lofty profession of spirituality made by the Friends has gone hand in hand with shrewdness and tact in the transaction of mundane affairs? Real piety favours the success of a trader by insuring his integrity and fostering habits of prudence and forethought, important items in obtaining that standing and credit in the commercial world, which are requisites for the steady accumulation of wealth” (see the following essay). “Honest as a Huguenot” was as proverbial in the seventeenth century as the respect for law of the Dutch which Sir W. Temple admired, and, a century later, that of the English as compared with those Continental peoples that had not been through this ethical schooling. ↩
Well analysed in Bielschowsky’s Goethe, II, chap. XVIII. For the development of the scientific cosmos Windelband, at the end of his “Blütezeit der deutschen Philosophie” (Vol. II of the Geschichte der Neueren Philosophie), has expressed a similar idea. ↩
Saints’ Everlasting Rest, chap. XII. ↩
“Couldn’t the old man be satisfied with his $75,000 a year and rest? No! The frontage of the store must be widened to 400 feet. Why? That beats everything, he says. In the evening when his wife and daughter read together, he wants to go to bed. Sundays he looks at the clock every five minutes to see when the day will be over—what a futile life!” In these terms the son-in-law (who had emigrated from Germany) of the leading dry-goods man of an Ohio city expressed his judgment of the latter, a judgment which would undoubtedly have seemed simply incomprehensible to the old man. A symptom of German lack of energy. ↩
This remark alone (unchanged since his criticism) might have shown Brentano (Die Anfänge des modernen Kapitalismus) that I have never doubted its independent significance. That humanism was also not pure rationalism has lately again been strongly emphasized by Borinski in the Abhandlungen der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1919. ↩
The academic oration of von Below, Die Ursachen der Reformation (Freiburg, 1916), is not concerned with this problem, but with that of the Reformation in general, especially Luther. For the question dealt with here, especially the controversies which have grown out of this study, I may refer finally to the work of Hermelink, Reformation und Gegenreformation, which, however, is also primarily concerned with other problems. ↩
For the above sketch has deliberately taken up only the relations in which an influence of religious ideas on the material culture is really beyond doubt. It would have been easy to proceed beyond that to a regular construction which logically deduced everything characteristic of modern culture from Protestant rationalism. But that sort of thing may be left to the type of dilettante who believes in the unity of the group mind and its reducibility to a single formula. Let it be remarked only that the period of capitalistic development lying before that which we have studied was everywhere in part determined by religious influences, both hindering and helping. Of what sort these were belongs in another chapter. Furthermore, whether, of the broader problems sketched above, one or another can be dealt with in the limits of this Journal [the essay first appeared in the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik —Translator’s Note] is not certain in view of the problems to which it is devoted. On the other hand, to write heavy tomes, as thick as they would have to be in this case, and dependent on the work of others (theologians and historians), I have no great inclination (I have left these sentences unchanged).
For the tension between ideals and reality in early capitalistic times before the Reformation, see now Strieder, Studien zur Geschichte der kapitalistischer Organizationsformen, 1914, Book II. (Also as against the work of Keller, cited above, which was utilized by Sombart.) ↩
I should have thought that this sentence and the remarks and notes immediately preceding it would have sufficed to prevent any misunderstanding of what this study was meant to accomplish, and I find no occasion for adding anything. Instead of following up with an immediate continuation in terms
