Max Weber published two essays in 1904 and 1905 in the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik that became one of the most famous books in 20th-century social science: Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismusor The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (hereafter referenced as PE). Since the publication of its second part 120 years ago, PE has generated fierce controversies. Lynn White once described the heated debates over Weber’s thesis in the decades after 1905 as an “academic Thirty Years War.” In 2001, David Chalcraft wrote that, in fact, the debates were tantamount to an “academic ‘Hundred Years War.’”
Debates about the validity of the argument in PE, which continue today, concern the precise nature of the theological and historical relationship between Protestantism and economic development. There is undeniably a robust correlation between them. But is that correlation spurious—that is, are there other underlying commonalities across Protestant lands besides Protestantism that can account for their economic development? Or is the relationship between Protestantism and high levels of economic development a causal one? If the relationship is indeed causal, what are the characteristics unique to Protestantism that make it so? Are these characteristics foregrounded in Reformed theology (“Calvinism”), and if so, does the foregrounding have anything to do with doctrines of predestination?
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