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Like Marx's Manifesto (which, my students are routinely shocked to discover, features a celebratory account of capitalism), Protestant Ethic can be easily misread. Weber himself anticipated facile readers, clearly rejecting the "foolish and doctrinaire thesis" of a causal link between Protestantism and capitalism. The connection, for Weber, inhered both in the "elective affinity" between Protestant theology and capitalist enterprise and in the "psychological sanctions" for accumulation afforded by religious doctrine. The "affinity" originated in the Protestant repudiation of Catholic sacramentalism and ecclesiology. In Weber's view, the marrow of Protestant (and especially Calvinist) divinity was its mistrust of "magical and sacramental forces," its "complete elimination of salvation through the Church and the sacraments," and its affirmation of predestination. Lacking the assurance provided by material and communal mediation, the Calvinist believer allayed the resulting anxiety through "intense worldly activity" in the form of a "calling." In the process, Calvinist capitalists achieved a "sanctification of worldly activity" once reserved for monastic contemplation, and cultivated a "worldly asceticism" which, once loosened from its theological moorings, became the classic trinity of bourgeois virtues: diligence, thrift, and self-restraint.
Two key points emerge from Weber's epic tale. First, the "spirit of capitalism" is not just another term for greed; it is the rationalized accumulation of wealth, undertaken, at least at first, for the sake of God's glory. Second, the nexus of Protestantism and capitalism lay in a "disenchantment of the world" which, by evacuating the material world of any sacramental significance, unleashed upon it (and human beings) the capitalist's energies of mastery and acquisition.
As scholars from Lujo Brentano and R. H. Tawney onward have pointed out, problems abound in Protestant Ethic. It caricatures both Protestant and Catholic theology, reducing the former to voluntarism and the latter to magic. (This is true but, as I'll argue shortly, misleading.) It erases craft guilds, accounts of which have emphasized the "sanctification of worldly activity" conferred by medieval economic culture. And it misrepresents Puritan capitalism itself, Weber's depiction of which relies on evidence from 17th-century England, not 16th-century Geneva. (Tawney's Religion and the Rise of Capitalism is more reliable and astute on all these counts.)
Still, Protestant Ethic remains valuable as a critical document charged by its author's own contradictions. Take, for instance, Weber's subtle but perceptible disparagement of bourgeois rectitude, leavened, in part, by Oedipal and professional stresses. His unforgettable portrait of the Puritan divine Richard Baxter is a warning against any philistine inclination to read the parable of the talents as a lesson in venture capitalism. Weber writes with a fine contempt for the "pharisaically good conscience" of capitalists who, then and now, preach the virtues of thrift while cutting wages. And his consignment to the notes of a paragraph on industrial labor's "joyless lack of meaning"—whether enforced, he adds, "for conscience sake" or "without transcendental sanctions"—hides a pearl of wisdom we need in the age of the air-conditioned sweatshop.
Yet for all its humanist magnanimity, Weber's book is virtually hopeless. Once pursued as a calling, the production of worldly goods becomes an "iron cage" of merely terrestrial duties and compulsions. Is there no escape? Perhaps, Weber mused, "new prophets" will arise to herald a "great rebirth of old ideas and ideals." But Weber thought more likely a drearier prospect of "mechanized petrification, embellished with a sort of convulsive self-importance"—the world, that is, of his soulless, technically proficient barbarians, convinced that they lived at the end of history. As intellectual history, that's Nietzsche in sociological drag; as prophecy, it's not a bad premonition of our command economy of pleasure. Disguised as "consumerism" or "hedonism," the work ethic rears its joyless head in the office and at the mall. Perpetually unsatisfied by our purchases, we transform the primrose path of destruction into the treadmill of delight.
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