Lacking the assurance of salvation provided by Catholic sacramental rituals, the Calvinist allayed the inevitable anxiety through “tireless labor in a calling.” So the “spirit of capitalism” was not, Weber argued, just another term for greed; it was the rationalized accumulation of wealth, undertaken, Calvinists convinced themselves, for the sake of God’s glory and majesty. In the process, Calvinist capitalists achieved a “sanctification of worldly activity” and cultivated an “innerworldly asceticism,” which, once loosened from its theological moorings, became the classic trinity of bourgeois
...more
