Protestant Denominational Belief Systems Chart

CHAPTER THREE
THE PROTESTANT ETHIC THESIS AS
AMERICAN SOCIOLOGY OF RELIGION
William H. Swatos, Jr., and Peter Kivisto
No essay in the sociology of religion has generated a greater output of
research and debate than The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
that Talcott Parsons’s translation brought to Anglo-America in 1930,
something Parsons himself recognized when toward the end of his life
he described his contribution to the discipline as that of acting “as an
importer” (in Reinhold 1973: 80)—a few hundred pages yielding tens of
thousands, perhaps even more, as it is virtually impossible to catalogue
the entire range of “Protestant ethic” scholarship. A dominant chord
in sociology today would interpret Weber in the context of European
sociology and social movements. We would argue otherwise. Although
himself only a visitor in the body, with the help of Parsons and others
Weber and the American “way of life” became one in spirit—the dao
of capitalism. Critics from Weber’s day until the present notwithstanding, Protestant Ethic scholarship continues only to grow, and despite
Andrew Greeley’s unheeded call for a “moratorium” over forty years
ago, neither detractors nor proponents seem wearied. How has this
come to be so?
Perhaps this is because there is no other account that offers a more
convincing explanation of the origins of the modern life-world, even if
the “truth” of Weber’s account cannot be de nitively established: Do
we at some point want so badly to nd a “cause” that can account for
the fundamental changes in the social relationships and cultural developments we associate simultaneously with capitalism and modernity
that we “will to believe” the Weber thesis? Is it that Weber offers us
something more than a shoulder shrug, something essentially “spiritual” in a world of “mechanized petri cation”—that is, a supremely
ironic account of the way in which a religious ethic could be shaped
by forces of “fate” to create “the tremendous cosmos of the modern
economic order,” a “nullity” that “imagines that it has attained a level
of civilization never before achieved”? (1930: 181–82) The dialectic
Blasi, Anthony. American Sociology of Religion : Histories, BRILL, 2007. ProQuest Ebook Central, BLASI_F5_87-119.indd 87 5/29/2007 7:41:39 PM
http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/gcu/detail.action?docID=467939.
Created from gcu on 2021-12-12 18:13:04. Copyright © 2007. BRILL. All rights reserved.
88 william h. swatos, jr., and peter kivisto
between technical-economic progress and personal meaninglessness
is mediated by a religious dynamic that is alternatively self-perpetuating and self-destructive as material success becomes the ultimate test
of self-abnegation in a secular restatement of “not my will, but thine
be done.” The pursuit of work for its own sake at once replaces and
becomes the pursuit of the divine for its own sake.
As it stands today, the PESC is a preeminently American sociological
text—a book that was largely ignored in Germany except by a few
critics—“American” in the sense that underlying it was a fascination
by Weber with an alternative way of doing and seeing social life from
that of n-de-siècle Europe, an American way by which Weber was
simultaneously enthralled and repelled, but which ultimately won
the day in light of subsequent developments in Europe. Speci cally,
Weber gives a religious account of American capitalism that resonated
with Americans’ own sense of themselves as a chosen nation. His nal
champion of the Protestant ethic is neither Luther nor Calvin nor
Bunyan nor Milton nor Baxter but Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard.1
With Parsons as his medium, Weber provided American sociology
with a spiritual account of the origins of American capitalism and a
prophetic warning against the dangers that accompany a loss of that
higher moral vision. Sam Whimster may well be right in his recent
assertion that the PESC essays are not in themselves sociology but
instead represent at one level “descriptive psychology being applied
to national-economy,” while they are at another level “a work of art”
(2007: 11, 50), but their effect on American sociology—and not only
sociology of religion, though especially sociology of religion—simply
cannot be stressed strongly enough.
Retrospective
“Finally a monograph has been written by Dr. Max Weber . . . which
has astounded all readers with its wealth of thought and profundity of
insight. This work more than anything else has given me the feeling
that our expertise is at an end, that we have to start learning afresh”
1
We wish to emphasize that it is Poor Richard, not the historical person of Franklin
himself, with whom Weber is concerned. Richard is a religious gure for Weber, symbolizing the coincident dynamics from ethic to spirit and back again. (Similarly with
respect to Bunyan, it is Pilgrim to whom Weber refers.)
Blasi, Anthony. American Sociology of Religion : Histories, BRILL, 2007. ProQuest Ebook Central, BLASI_F5_87-119.indd 88 5/29/2007 7:41:40 PM
http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/gcu/detail.action?docID=467939.
Created from gcu on 2021-12-12 18:13:04. Copyright © 2007. BRILL. All rights reserved.
the protestant ethic thesis as AMERICAN sociology of religion 89
(Weber 1975: 128). These words of the German political economist
G.F. Knapp were spoken not about The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of
Capitalism, but a decade before the rst publication of the essay, when
Weber presented his East Elbian studies, now almost entirely ignored
by the sociological community, yet so signi cant in their day that they,
more than anything else, provided the basis for the invitation that
Weber accepted to come to the United States and speak at the St.
Louis exposition of 1904, shortly before the rst segment of the PESC
essay appeared in the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaften und Sozialpolitik later
that fall. We introduce the East Elbian studies, peripheral as they may
seem to the “momentous” Protestant Ethic debate, because we want
to take the position that throughout his work Weber was interested in
the interplay of economy and society and the interplay of value positions with material outcomes. The PESC was simply one piece among
many in a life project.2
Weber’s rst dissertation, now brilliantly translated by Lutz Kaelber,
makes absolutely clear that he was excavating the socioeconomic structures of capitalist origins in his earliest academic forays (Weber 2003).
Hence, by the time the PESC appeared, there can be no question that
Weber was steeped in the history of the developments in accounting,
labor relations, money and banking, political economics, and so on that
had taken place as a part of the historical foreground of capitalist expansion. Yet these elements could not explain adequately, for Weber, what
it was that, so to speak, caused modern rational capitalism to achieve
“liftoff.” What was it that gave it “thrust”? What was it that served, as
Randall Collins (1986: 93) has phrased it, as the “last intensi cation”
of capitalism as a life-form of sociocultural relationships? Why was
it, Weber puzzled, that capitalism became this cultural life-form in
Anglo-America rather than “in the great centres of the Middle Ages
like Florence where, God knows, capitalism was incomparably more
‘developed’ ” from a technical point of view? (2001: 112) This question
became for him, more and more, “the demon who holds the bers of
his very life” (1946: 156)