The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

In the opening chapter of Weber’s book, he introduces the key concepts and ideas that he will explore throughout The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. The core hypothesis of his book is that the development of the Protestant religion in the 17th and 18th centuries helped to spur the rise of industrial capitalism in Western European countries. To develop his argument, Weber begins by presenting some central facts that support his hypothesis. He notes that in capitalistic countries whose populations belong to multiple religions, the “people who own capital, employers, more highly educated skilled workers, and more highly trained technical or business personnel in modern companies tend to be, with striking frequency, overwhelmingly Protestant” (3). As these different groups of individuals make up those who most profit from the capitalistic economy, Weber believes it is sensible to investigate to what extent the development of capitalism might be connected to certain ideas central to Protestant teachings.

Weber moves on to discuss the differences between Protestants and Catholics and to explore some initial arguments people might make to describe why Protestants are more amenable to capitalism than Catholics. The different Protestant branches of Christianity grew out of the 16th-century Reformation, a religious movement originally led by the theologian