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 landowners who wanted them to do steady work for wages. “A man does not ‘by nature’ wish to earn more and more money,” Weber argues, “but simply to live as he is accustomed to live and to earn as much as is necessary for that
...more
