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THE "PROTESTANT ETHIC" REVISITED: A TWENTIETH-CENTURY LOOK
JAMES BRADFORD DE LONG
Harvard University and NBER March 1989

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Two important additional points deserve mention here. First, in Weber's schema the key to the growth of industrial capitalism is not the presence of a Protestant ethic but the presence of a work ethic. Any other ethic of hard work and accumulation would have served as well as the Protestant ethic from an economic point of view. 

Second, Weber's attitude toward the Protestant ethic is at best ambivalent, for Weber believes that those who hold to the Protestant ethic are not sane. It made sense for a believing Calvinist to perform his duties of diligence and sobriety, for only those who were diligent and sober could be counted among the blessed who would enter Heaven after the Last Judgment. Hard work and the avoidance of excessive consumption thus fulfilled the important spiritual need of keeping one's hope of Heaven alive.

But it makes no sense for someone who does not believe in Calvinist theology to work hard and refrain from enjoyment. In Weber's view, divorced from the broader religious context that gave it meaning, the Protestant ethic and the economic world it supports are "an iron cage" which may end in "mechanized petrifaction, embellished with a sort of convulsive selfimportance." A culture of "specialists without soul and sensualists without passion, this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved." Although Weber claims that he does not want to burden his discussion with "judgments of value and of faith," in his estimation the damage resulting from the triumph of the Protestant ethic outweighs the additional material prosperity generated. And Weber's assessment was not an uncommon one in the first half of this century: John Maynard Keynes, for example, looked forward to the collapse of the Protestant ethic in an age in which mankind had "solved the economic problem" and could "value ends above means and prefer the good to the useful. We shall honour those who can teach us how to pluck the hour and the day virtuously and well..."

Which of these two schools is more correct as an explanation of the failure of convergence has implications for long-run development policy. If the "security of property" school has put its finger on the only important reason for the absence of convergence, then clear conclusions follow: a good development program would help create the educational and material infrastructure for absorbing modern technology and then try to reduce the activist state as much as possible so that growth will not be stalled by government interference.

If the "work ethic" has also played a significant role, then the problems of development are much more difficult to tackle and the implications much more cloudy. Future generations would benefit from the implantation of an accumulative, acquisitive ethic in the present, and the present generation would benefit materially. But Weber and Keynes, at least, do not believe that converting someone to the ethic of accumulation is doing him a favor. Keynes especially had little but scorn for those who accumulated without ever reflecting on why they did so, living always for the future and never for the present:

Of course [after the `Economic Problem' is solved] there will still be many people with intense, unsatisfied purposiveness who will blindly pursue wealth--unless they can find some plausible substitute. But the rest of us will no longer be under any obligation to applaud and encourage them. For we shall inquire more curiously than is safe to-day into the true character of this `purposiveness'.... For purposiveness means that we are more concerned with the remote future results of our actions than with their own quality or their immediate effects on our own environment. The `purposive' man is always trying to secure a spurious and delusive immortality for his acts by pushing his interest in them forward into time. He does not love the cat, but the cat's kittens; nor, in truth, the kittens, but only the kittens' kittens, and so forward for ever to the end of cat-dom. For him jam is not jam unless it is a case of jam to-morrow and never jam to-day. Thus by pushing his jam always forward into the future, he strives to secure for his act of boiling it an immortality.

By contrast, Benjamin Franklin--at least in his literary persona that gives advice to young tradesmen--would see no problem: people have a duty to make something of themselves. But unless one believes that the accumulative ethic is good as an end in itself, whether it should be inculcated is tangled up with the question of what the present generation owes to the future. And the terms of the "partnership[s]... between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who have yet to be born" that are the nations of the world are not written down in black letters.

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