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Puritanism and the Spirit of Capitalism*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

Winthrop S. Hudson
Winthrop S. Hudson
Affiliation:
Colgate-Rochester Divinity School, Rochester, N. Y.
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Extract

Calvinism as an historical movement was exceedingly complex. It was a phenomenon in which theology, economic theory, political philosophy, and a general cultural orientation were inextricably mixed and applied in an intense effort to refashion society into a Holy Commonwealth. In attempting to interpret this movement, as Sidney E. Mead has pointed out, “one is always in danger either of trying to do complete justice to the complexity and landing in a confusing incoherence and lack of clarity, or of seizing upon one interpretative theme in the interest of clarity and landing in over-simplification.” Most of the discussions of Calvinism, in any or all of its various manifestations, have avoided the first alternative—falling into the morass of confusion and incoherence—but many have succumbed to the second—an over-simplification that is definitely misleading.

Type
Research Article
Information
Church History , Volume 18 , Issue 1 , March 1949 , pp. 3 - 17
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 1949

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References

1 Review of Wertenbaker, Thomas Jefferson, The Puritan Oligarchy (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1947)Google Scholar, to be published in The Journal of Religion.

2 The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Parsons, Talcott (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1930Google Scholar. This essay was first printed in the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, Vols. XX and XXI, for 1904 and 1905).Google Scholar

3 New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1926.

4 Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, 6.Google Scholar

5 Ibid., 60.

6 Ibid., 2.

7 Ibid., 3, 160–63, 172.

8 Ibid., 316.

9 The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 7.Google Scholar

10 Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, 316Google Scholar. Tawney refers to “large economic movements, in particular the Discoveries and the results which flowed from them.”

11 The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 7, 8.Google Scholar

12 Ibid., 11.

13 Ibid., 9.

14 Ibid., 155.

15 Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, 317.Google Scholar

16 Ibid., 226. The italics are mine.

17 Ibid., 227.

18 Ibid., 240. “The first person to emphasize the way in which the idea of a ‘callling’ was used as an argument for the economic virtues was Weber, to whose conclusions I am largely indebted” (Ibid., 321).

19 Ibid., 230.

20 Ibid., 246.

21 The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 110.Google Scholar

22 Ibid., 110–11, 114–15, 163, 172.

23 The problem posed by the doctrine of predestination with reference to any endeavor to “get right with God” was more apparent than real. Calvin suggests that men are obliged to use the cautions, means, and remedies which God has provided (Institutes, I, xvii, 4)Google Scholar, and by the seventeenth century various theoretical solutions had been worked out by the theologians.

25 The most illuminating discussion of the Puritan spirit is to be found in Perry, Ralph Barton, Puritanism and Democracy (New York: Vanguard Press, 1944)Google Scholar. Especially discerning are his chapters, “The Importance of Salvation,” and “The Moral Athlete,” in which he describes the depth and intensity of the Puritan's religious concern, and the rigor and dogged determination with which he subordinated all lesser goods to the supreme good of salvation. In the light of his preceding analysis, it is rather surprising that he accepted uncritically the conclusions of Tawney.

26 The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 155–56.Google Scholar

27 Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, 219.Google Scholar

28 Christian Directory, reprinted in The Practical Works of Richard Baxter (London: Arthur Hall and Co., 1847), I, 222.Google Scholar

29 Ibid., 181.

30 Ibid., 151.

31 Ibid., 219.

32 Ibid., 514. Greatness, riches, dominion, applause, honor are but “a dream that maketh thee really neither better nor safer than other men” (Ibid., 211). “No men prosper so much as the most ungodly,” while it is “reproach and suffering which usually falls upon the godly” (Ibid 31).

33 Ibid., 31.

34 Ibid., 94.

35 Ibid., 468.

36 Ibid., 216.

37 Ibid., 770–71.

38 Ibid., 771–72.

39 Ibid., 827.

40 The Protestant, Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 162Google Scholar; Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, 243.Google Scholar

41 Foreword to The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 3.Google Scholar

42 Works, I, 61Google Scholar. Some persons, Baxter says, “are thought covetous because they are laborious in their callings and thrifty and saving, not willing that anything be lost. But all this is their duty: if they were lords or princes, idleness and wastefulness would be their sin. God would have all men labor in their several callings that are able. … The question is, How they use that which they labor so hard for and save so sparingly. If they use it for God and charitable uses, there is no man taketh a righter course. He is the best servant for God that will be laborious and sparing that he may be able to do good” (Ibid., 217). “The question is not whether you give now and then as alms to deceive your consciences, and part with so much as the flesh can spare, as a swine will do when he can eat no more, but whether all that you have be devoted to the will of God and made to stoop to his service and the saving of your souls” (Ibid., 216).

43 Ibid., 377–78.

44 “The callings most useful to the public good are the magistrates, the pastors, and teachers of the church, schoolmasters, physicians, lawyers, etc., husbandmen (ploughmen, graziers, and shepherds); and next to them are mariners, clothiers, booksellers, tailors, and such other that are employed about things most necessary to mankind; and some callings are employed about matters of so little use (as tobaceo-sellers, lace-sellers, feather-makers, periwig-makers, and many more such) that he that may choose better should be loth to take up with one of these, though possibly in itself it may be lawful. It is a great satisfaction to any honest mind to spend his life in doing the greatest good he can; and a prison and constant calamity to be tied to spend one's life in doing little good at all to others, though he should grow rich by it himself.”

45 Ibid., 211.

46 Ibid., 219.

47 Ibid., 221.

48 Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, 224.Google Scholar

49 Ibid., 239.

50 Ibid., 226.

51 Ibid., 217 f.

52 The most illuminating discussion of sixteenth-century Puritanism and its social and economic outlook is to be found in Knappen, M. M., Tudor Puritanism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1939), 339–53, 401–23Google Scholar. See also his Two Elizabethan Puritan Diaries (Chicago: American Society of Church History, 1933), 6, 8–9, 13–16.Google Scholar

53 A profitable calling is one that ministers to the common good. “As the bees labor to replenish their hive so man, being a sociable creature, must labor for the good of the society which he belongs to, in which his own is contained as a part” (Baxter, , Works, I, 376)Google Scholar. In an economy of scarcity, to be idle or to engage in an “unprofitable calling” is quite obviously a violation of the duty of brotherly love, and therefore “these drones” which “consume that which others labor for but are no gatherers themselves” are vigorously condemned (Ibid., 854).

54 Tudor Puritanism, 353.Google Scholar

55 Ibid., 422–23. These words were written of Tudor Puritanism, but they apply with equal force to the period of the Commonwealth. Also interesting is Knappen's evaluation of the contention that Puritanism was predominantly a middle class movement. “There is little … to indicate that Puritanism, with its restrictions on the profit motive and its highly technical theology, was predominantly a middle class movement. Rather, if it must be stated in class terms, it was a Protestant clericalism, a system in which the organized intelligentsia, whoever their allies might be, played the role of the senior partner” (Ibid., 353).

56 Pp. 7–8, 10. Quoted by Tawney, , Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, 239.Google Scholar