Max Weber (1864-1920)

Max Weber was a sociologist and communist.  His essay, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, is, according to Wikipedia, the 4^th most influential Sociology paper in the 20^th century.  Because it touches on Christianity and it shows poor thinking, I am reviewing it.

Wikipedia further states that no one has discovered a ‘Protestant work ethic’, which is unsurprising. I never noticed that Catholics were lazy compared to Protestants.  Furthermore, Weber lays great stress on a belief in predestination as the cause of the spirit of capitalism.  In other words, Lutherans and Reformed church members should start more businesses than Methodists and Episcopalians, because they believe in predestination.  I don’t get it either, but remember this is the 4^th most influential Sociology paper in the 20^th century (if you wish, you may insert snark here).

Communists are atheists, so Weber obviously hasn’t met many Christians or hung around churches very much.  Near the start of the book, Weber quotes some aphorisms from Poor Richard’s Almanac by Benjamin Franklin.  They do show a spirit of capitalism, since Franklin is handing out advice on how to get ahead.  Of course, Franklin was not a theologian, but rather a wealthy businessman and printer, so you would expect that from him.  Some businessmen make a religion out of making money, but that has little to do with which church they belonged to.  For the record, Franklin was a raised a Puritan, and as a child met Cotton Mather.

That is the best part of the book.  Weber appears to have read a large amount of the Theology of various churches.  He zeroed in on predestination, but he included the Methodists, who do not believe in predestination.

Along the way, he makes an interesting observation about predestination, which has been made by a number of others, including Martin Luther.  He observes that in predestination, there is an elect which is going to heaven and the damned who are not. If some of the believers in predestination decide that they are members of the elect, then they wish to prove it.  One way of proving it is to be successful in business and make a lot of money.  Weber conflates the self-denying asceticism of the believer, such as going into the desert of contemplate God, with the self-denial required to save money and invest.  This is intensified in the Calvinist tradition of predestination.  According to Weber, this is the spirit of capitalism.

The desire to believe that you are saved and others are damned is not confined believers in predestination.  It is an offshoot of the desire to play the game, we’re better than you. Luther got around the problem by claiming that no one could know for sure that they were saved. All too often, that part of Luther’s teaching on this point is ignored.

While Weber makes that point about predestination, the idea of proving the we’re better than you is not confined to making money.  It is the stock-in-trade of every killjoy on the planet.  The Puritans, who were masters of the game, declared Christmas to be a pagan holiday. They called themselves ‘the godly’, as opposed to all of those other ungodly people. Whether they actually were more godly is open to debate.  What is not open to debate is that they felt very good about themselves. Puritanism freed them from self-esteem issues.

Since the sociologists have not found an effect from the Protestant ethic, it seems safe to say that it does not exist.  The final question is why Weber thought it existed.

The Protestant Ethic was published in 1904. While it does not explicitly say what its motivations are, the industrialization of the United States, Great Britain and Germany was the dominant theme in 19^th century geopolitics.  By 1900, Germany was more powerful than Austria, which was traditionally the strongest German state. Moreover in continental Europe, Germany was the dominant country, eclipsing both France and Austria.  By contrast, in 1800 France under Napoleon conquered most of Europe.

The three dominant industrial countries – Great Britain, United States and Germany, were all Protestant countries.  They surpassed France and Austria, who were the biggest Catholic countries, and far surpassed Italy and Spain, who were becoming impoverished. World War II was, to a large extent, a struggle pitting Germany against Great Britain and the United States for world-wide supremacy.

Aside from the United States, the most prosperous colonies were all British – Canada, Australia, South Africa.  South Africa was far more industrialized than any other colony in Africa. It forms a pattern, but that doesn’t prove that Protestantism caused rapid industrialization. It just means that Protestantism might be the cause. Correlation is not causation. Protestantism correlated with rapid industrialization, but that did not necessarily cause rapid industrialization.

So what is the truth?

The industrialization of the 19^th century took place after James Watt’s invention of the steam engine in 1769. This seminal invention sparked an industrial explosion. For the first time, a fossil fuel driven engine could be used to supply power anywhere. The only requirement was a large supply of coal.

Coal

Coal is not distributed evenly across the globe, so there are coal haves and coal have-nots.  Compounding this problem is a second problem: coal is expensive to ship.  The steam engine plus coal distribution separated the world into haves and have-nots.  The following table was compiled from the 1913 World Coal Resources, while the production figures from Mineral Industry, 1917.  It consists of the states who mined more than 1% of the world’s coal in 1913.

¹Canada, Australia, South Africa, India and New Zealand

These countries represented 98.8% of the world’s production in 1911, as well as 98.9% of the world’s known coal resources.  Since the petroleum industry was only getting started then, this represented most of the world’s fossil fuel supply.  We can see that 84.4% of the world’s production was controlled by just 3 countries – United States, Germany and Great Britain.  These countries also controlled 81 % of the world’s coal resources.  The British had a knack for settling colonies that had large coal resources, so the British Commonwealth had a lot of coal, and that is reflected in the fact that former British colonies India, Australia and South Africa were the 3^rd , 4^th and 7^th largest producers of coal in 2015.

The paltry production figures for France and Austria are caused by their scant coal resources.  Either the coal is low grade, difficult to mine, or both. The coal was expensive in those countries, so they did not industrialize. Neither Italy nor Spain appear on this list because their coal resources are so meager. Around the world, Latin America is almost devoid of coal, as is Africa outside of South Africa, which has 90% of Africa’s coal. Of the 7 largest producers of coal, only Indonesia does not appear on this list. The island of Borneo was not well explored in 1913, and it supplies most of Indonesia’s coal.

It should be obvious that you cannot industrialize without fuel.  It happened that the countries with a Protestant heritage also possessed large coal deposits. It was an accident of geography, not culture.  W. Stanley Jevons proposed that coal was the cause of Britain’s lead in industrialization, but was not believed. It was nicer to believe that the British possessed a sterling, hard-working character.

Summary

Correlation is not causation.  Max Weber found a correlation but it was not the cause. He was a Sociologist, and sought a sociological or cultural cause. Like the drunk searching for his keys under the streetlight because the light is better, he stuck to his area of expertise rather than search for an alternative cause. The production figures on coal were scarcely a mystery, but they were outside his area of expertise and so he did not consider them. Until the advent of oil, all countries were dependent on coal, and coal was too expensive to ship. You could not open a steel mill in Argentina because Argentina had no coal and shipping it in was too expensive. You couldn’t open a steel mill in France for the same reason. By default, industrialization fell to the three countries who had ample coal and had a European heritage. China would industrialize later.

From a religious standpoint, this was a popular explanation for the industrialization of the United States, Great Britain and Germany, and it involved pride. People could be proud of their hard work. They could have felt lucky and humble that their nation was blessed with coal resources, but the 19^th century was not a humble century. The tragedies of the 20^th century followed 19^th century pride.

Sources:

Weber, Max, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, translated by Talcott Parsons.

Lessnoff, Michael H., The Spirit of Capitalism and the Protestant Ethic, 1994, Edward Elger Publishing Company, Brookfield, VT.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protestant_Ethic_and_the_Spirit_of_Capitalism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Weber

Coal

Jevons, W. Stanley, The Coal Question, 3^rd edition, 1906, Sentry Press, New York, NY.

Hoar, Hannah, The Coal Industry of the World, 1930, US Government Printing Office, Washington, DC.

Moore, Elwood, Coal, 1922, John Wiley and Sons, New York, NY.