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Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Highlights)
Page 4
Notes
109. Petty, Political Arithmetick, Works, edited by Hull, I, p. 262.
110. On these conflicts and developments see H. Levy in the book cited above. The very powerful hostility of public opinion to monopolies, which is characteristic of England, originated historically in a combination of the political struggle for power against the Crown--the Long Parliament excluded monopolists from its membership--with the ethical motives of Puritanism; and the economic interests of the small citizen and moderate-scale capitalists against the financial magnates in the seventeenth century. The Declaration of the Army of August 2, 1652, as well as the Petition of the Levellers of January 28, 1653, demand, besides the abolition of excises, tariffs, and indirect taxes, and the introduction of a single tax on estates, above all free trade, i.e. the abolition of the monopolistic barriers to trade at home and abroad, as a violation of the natural rights of man.
111. Compare H. Levy, Die Grundlagen des okonomischen Liberalismus in der Geschichte der englischen Volkswirtschaft, pp. 51f.
112. That those other elements, which have here not yet been traced to their religious roots, especially the idea that honesty is the best policy (Franklin's discussion of credit), are also of Puritan origin, must be proved in a somewhat different connection (see the following essay [not translated here]). Here I shall limit myself to repeating the following remark of J. A. Rowntree (Quakerism, Past and Present, pp. 95-6), to which E. Bernstein has called my attention: "Is it merely a coincidence, or is it a consequence, that the lofty profession of spirituality made by the Friends has gone hand in hand with shrewdness and tact in the transaction of mundane affairs? Real piety favours the success of a trader by insuring his integrity and fostering habits of prudence and forethought, important items in obtaining that standing and credit in the commercial world, which are requisites for the steady accumulation of wealth" (see the following essay). "Honest as a Huguenot" was as proverbial in the seventeenth century as the respect for law of the Dutch which Sir W. Temple admired, and, a century later, that of the English as compared with those Continental peoples that had not been through this ethical schooling.
113. Well analysed in Bielschowsky's Goethe, II, chap. xviii. For the development of the scientific cosmos Windelband, at the end of his Blutezeit der deutschen Philosophie (Vol. II of the Gesch. d Neueren Philosophie), has expressed a similar idea.
114. The Saints' Everlasting Rest, chap. xii.
115. "Couldn't the old man be satisfied with his $75,000 a year and rest? No! The frontage of the store must be widened to 400 feet. Why? That beats everything, he says. In the evening when his wife and daughter read together, he wants to go to bed. Sundays he looks at the clock every five minutes to see when the day will be over--what a futile life!" In these terms the son-in-law (who had emigrated from Germany) of the leading dry-goods man of an Ohio city expressed his judgment of the latter, a judgment which would undoubtedly have seemed simply incomprehensible to the old man. A symptom of German lack of energy.
Cf. J. O. y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses and Ernst Troeltsch, The Divine Seed * Morgenthau, The German Character * David Turner, Byzantium : The 'alternative' history of Europe
