The story that German sociologist Max Weber tells in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism is that the rise of Homo economicus, that utility-maximizing creature whose sense of the common good has withered, can be traced back to Calvinists deficient in Gemütlichkeit—or, a kind of friendly public-spiritedness. They retained the austerity and urgency of their religion but abandoned its spiritual content and, doing so, helped turn the modern world into an iron cage.
Perhaps it does not matter that Weber’s bad little tract, written first as essays in 1904–05, is really indefensible. It has stuck in the brain of American academia as if it were truth itself. The explanation of what has gone wrong is obviously a polemical construct, reflecting, no doubt, that Calvinists were a minority in Germany, many of them of French Huguenot origin dating from the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. I understand that Weber’s mother was Calvinist, which might suggest a reason for his eagerness to establish his distance from that side of his heritage. A friend of his, Werner Sombart, wrote a reply, The Jews and Modern Capitalism (1911), which demonstrated that Weber’s description of the “Protestant” actually described the Jew.
Nothing surprising there. Weber had simply borrowed a stereotype from a slightly different context. He should have recognized that minorities often thrive because they know they have to develop skills. Calvinists were by far the most literate group in Europe when Weber wrote. This is the kind of thing that produces prosperity. Two religious groups of vastly greater influence (Catholicism and Lutheranism) were active in Germany when the country became something worse than an iron cage, but they don’t get a glance. Why German thought of his period has retained such status and influence, I can’t imagine. People who know the title of the book feel they have read it, and they have, since it is all assertion—of a familiar kind—and no argument. Furthermore, the supposed conflation of virtue and godliness with individual prosperity and material flourishing is not what one of the central figures of the Reformation intended.
All this is an unfortunate turn of intellectual history. The religious tradition propelled by the Calvinist reformation, which lies in the deep background of our cultural moment, provides a powerful account of the human person and the meaning of human life that stands in contrast to the anemic anthropology on offer today.