The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

be in principle of equal value. The difference from the Thomistic view is common to the German mystics and Luther. It may be said that Thomas, principally to retain the moral value of contemplation, but also from the viewpoint of the mendicant friar, is forced to interpret Paul’s doctrine that “if a man will not work he shall not eat” in the sense that labour, which is of course necessary lege naturae, is imposed upon the human race as a whole, but not on all individuals. The gradation in the value of forms of labour, from the opera servilia of the peasants upwards, is connected with the specific character of the mendicant friars, who were for material reasons bound to the town as a place of domicile. It was equally foreign to the German mystics and to Luther, the peasant’s son; both of them, while valuing all occupations equally, looked upon their order of rank as willed by God. For the relevant passages in Thomas see Maurenbrecher, Thomas von Aquino’s Stellung zum Wirtschaftsleben seiner Zeit, 1888, pp. 65 ff. ↩

It is astonishing that some investigators can maintain that such a change could have been without effect upon the actions of men. I confess my inability to understand such a view. ↩

“Vanity is so firmly imbedded in the human heart that a camp-follower, a kitchen-helper, or a porter, boast and seek admirers.⁠ ⁠…”(Faugeres edition, I, p. 208. Compare Koester, Die Ethik Pascals (1907), pp. 17, 136 ff.). On the attitude of Port Royal and the Jansenists to the calling, to which we shall return, see now the excellent study of Dr. Paul Honigsheim, Die Staats- und Soziallehren der französischen Jansenisten im 17ten Jahrhundert (Heidelberg Historical Dissertation, 1914. It is a separately printed part of a more comprehensive work on the Vorgeschichte der französischen Aufklärung. Compare especially pp. 138 ff.). ↩

Apropos of the Fuggers, he thinks that it “cannot be right and godly for such a great and regal fortune to be piled up in the lifetime of one man.” That is evidently the peasant’s mistrust of capital. Similarly (Grosser Sermon vom Wucher, Erlangen edition, XX, p. 109) investment in securities he considers ethically undesirable, because it is “ein neues behendes erfunden Ding”⁠—i.e. because it is to him economically incomprehensible; somewhat like margin trading to the modern clergyman. ↩

The difference is well worked out by H. Levy (in his study, Die Grundlagen des ökonomischen Liberalismus in der Geschichte der englischen Volkswirtschaft, Jena, 1912). Compare also, for instance, the petition of the Levellers in Cromwell’s army of 1653 against monopolies and companies, given in Gardiner, Commonwealth, II, p. 179. Laud’s regime, on the other hand, worked for a Christian, social, economic organization under the joint leadership of Crown and Church, from which the King hoped for political and fiscal-monopolistic advantages. It was against just this that the Puritans were struggling. ↩

What I understand by this may be shown by the example of the proclamation addressed by Cromwell to the Irish in 1650, with which he opened his war against them and which formed his reply to the manifestos of the Irish (Catholic) clergy of Clonmacnoise of December 4 and 13, 1649. The most important sentences follow: “Englishmen had good inheritances (namely in Ireland) which many of them purchased with their money⁠ ⁠… they had good leases from Irishmen for long time to come, great stocks thereupon, houses and plantations erected at their cost and charge.⁠ ⁠… You broke the union⁠ ⁠… at a time when Ireland was in perfect peace and when, through the example of English industry, through commerce and traffic, that which was in the nation’s hands was better to them than if all Ireland had been in their possession.⁠ ⁠… Is God, will God be with you? I am confident He will not.”

This proclamation, which is suggestive of articles in the English Press at the time of the Boer War, is not characteristic, because the capitalistic interests of Englishmen are held to be the justification of the war. That argument could, of course, have just as well been made use of, for instance, in a quarrel between Venice and Genoa over their respective spheres of influence in the Orient (which, in spite of my pointing it out here, Brentano, Die Anfänge des modernen Kapitalismus, p. 142, strangely enough holds against me). On the contrary, what is interesting in the document is that Cromwell, with the deepest personal conviction, as everyone who knows his character will agree, bases the moral justification of the subjection of the Irish, in calling God to witness, on the fact that English capital has taught the Irish to work. (The proclamation is in Carlyle, and is also reprinted and analysed in Gardiner, History of the Commonwealth, I, pp. 163 f.) ↩

This is not the place to follow the subject farther. Compare the authors cited in note 89 below. ↩

Compare the remarks in Jülicher’s fine book, Die Gleichnisreden Jesu, II, pp. 108, 636 f. ↩

With what follows, compare above all the discussion in Eger, Die Anschauung Luthers vom Beruf (Giessen, 1900). Also Schneckenburger’s fine work, which is even today not yet out of date (Vergleichende Darstellung der lutherischen und reformierten Lehrbegriffe, Grüder, Stuttgart, 1855). Luthardt’s Ethik Luthers, p. 84 of the first edition, the only one to which I have had access, gives no real picture of the development. Further compare Seeberg, Dogmengeschichte, II, pp. 262 ff. The article on Beruf in the Realenzyklopädie für protestantische Theologie und Kirche is valueless. Instead of a scientific analysis of the conception and its origin, it contains all sorts