Weber proposed that early Protestants believed they must work to accumulate wealth as proof that they were in God’s favor. This was a departure from the Catholic notion of good works—service done for others to earn salvation. Capitalism couldn’t really take hold, Weber noted, until people became convinced, one way or another, to make more money than they needed. That would seem an easy sell today, but it wasn’t in seventeenth-century England, when many commoners still earned money only occasionally, lived mostly by subsistence, and felt that they had enough, much to the frustration of the
...more
