Proverbs 22:29 · Subject · Diligence
The Protestant Work Ethic
Max Weber published his essay on the Protestant ethic in two articles of 1904 and 1905, and historians and economists have tested it ever since.
Benjamin Franklin, whose sayings Weber chose to show the spirit of capitalism, learned a proverb about diligence from his Calvinist father.
Do you see a man skilled in his work? He will be stationed in the presence of kings; he will not stand before obscure men.
- Book
- Proverbs
- Hold in memory
- Romans 12:11
Summary
The phrase comes from the title of Max Weber's essay, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Weber found in the Puritans a habit of steady, disciplined work in a lawful calling, with gain sought for God and pleasure restrained. He argued that this habit, born of religious conviction, helped build the modern economic order and then outlived its faith. He set limits on his own claim, and his critics have questioned its reach, its evidence and its cause. Scripture's call to diligence is older than the thesis and stands on its own ground.
- Weber argued that the Puritans carried the discipline of the cloister into daily work.
- Weber limited his claim to one cause among several.
- Baxter's directions join steady work to a strict limit on gain and on overwork.
- R. H. Tawney accepted part of the thesis and judged that Weber overstated it.
- Sascha Becker and Ludger Woessmann traced the prosperity of Protestant regions of Prussia to the literacy that Bible reading required.
A Thesis About Diligence and Money
Weber asked why steady work and saving came to be prized as duties in parts of Protestant Europe.
Diligence is the value of steady, careful work that Scripture asks of every believer. In the twentieth century a German scholar made it the centre of a famous argument about the rise of modern business. Readers still meet his claim as the Protestant work ethic, often in a broader form than he gave it.
The question here is what Weber argued, what he declined to argue, and how his critics have weighed it. Weber's essay in Talcott Parsons's translation, the Puritan Richard Baxter whom he cites, R. H. Tawney and a study of 2009 give the answer.
Weber quotes Proverbs 22:29 in the King James wording, and the American Standard Version keeps that wording: "Seest thou a man diligent in his business? he shall stand before kings".
The Berean text reads "skilled in his work" where the King James Version reads "diligent in his business".
The Thesis and Its Critics in Their Dates
The seven dates span a little over a century.
Weber's articles drew a German critic within a dozen years, an English historian's book by 1926 and an economic test in 2009.
To scale: 7 of 7 stops dated.
- Weber's two articles in the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik1904 and 1905 ADTawney's preface of 1937 and his note giving volumes 20 and 21
- Lujo Brentano's critique in Die Anfänge des modernen Kapitalismus1916 ADTawney's note, pages 117 to 157
- The essay reprinted in volume 1 of Weber's collected essays on the sociology of religion1920 ADTawney's note in Religion and the Rise of Capitalism
- Tawney's Religion and the Rise of Capitalism1926 ADThe copyright line, 1926, in Tawney's book
- Talcott Parsons's English translation1930 ADThe front matter of the translation, first published in Great Britain
- Tawney's preface to the new edition1937 ADThe title of Tawney's preface
- Becker and Woessmann, Was Weber Wrong?2009 ADThe Quarterly Journal of Economics, volume 124, issue 2
A timeline of seven dated events, each row naming the record that fixes its date.
What Weber Argued
Weber argued that a religious discipline of work became a habit of business.
In Parsons's translation, asceticism "was carried out of monastic cells into everyday life, and began to dominate worldly morality". Weber adds that "it did its part in building the tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order".
He summed up the Puritan view of idleness in the words "Unwillingness to work is symptomatic of the lack of grace". Tawney notes that English Puritanism is the source "from which nearly all his illustrations are drawn".
Weber also quoted John Wesley, who saw the same habit producing wealth in his own movement. Wesley wrote that "religion must necessarily produce both industry and frugality, and these cannot but produce riches", and he feared that pride and love of the world would follow.
The Limits Weber Set on His Claim
Weber's chapter on Luther's idea of the calling sets the bounds of his claim.
In that chapter Weber disclaimed "such a foolish and doctrinaire thesis as that the spirit of capitalism" could have arisen only from the Reformation. He also disclaimed the thesis "that capitalism as an economic system is a creation of the Reformation".
The popular phrase is used of hard work in general, of long hours, or of a national character. Weber wrote of one religious habit in particular churches and centuries, beside economic and political causes he also granted.
Richard Baxter on Time, Idleness and Riches
The Puritan writer Weber cites in his chapter on asceticism gave rules on the use of time, on idleness and on riches.
Richard Baxter's A Christian Directory gives a chapter of directions about labour, and its first concern is the waste of time.
Baxter warns that unsteady work wastes a life. When a man's labours are "occasional, or unconstant", he writes, "more time is spent in idleness than in labour".
On riches Baxter allows the more profitable lawful work, for "you may labour to be rich for God, though not for the flesh and sin". He adds that "your end must be, that you may be the better provided to do God service, and may do the more good with what you have".
Do not wear yourself out to get rich; be wise enough to restrain yourself.Baxter cites this proverb as the check on gain, so his rule for profit stands under it.
The same chapter warns against work that consumes a life. A calling that takes up the whole of "body and mind" and leaves no room for "greater things" is, Baxter writes, "a constant snare and prison to the soul".
Three Judgments of the Thesis
Historians and economists have accepted Weber's main claim, qualified it, or traced the effect to another cause.
The Puritan ethic helped create the conditions for capitalismMax Weber; Ernst Troeltsch, as Tawney reports him
Tawney states the main thesis as the claim that "Calvinism, and in particular English Puritanism" played "a part of preponderant importance in creating moral and political conditions favorable to the growth of capitalist enterprise". He writes that it "appears to be accepted by Troeltsch" in The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches.
The objection: Becker and Woessmann find that the Protestant regions of Prussia also had better schooling, so a cause other than the ethic may explain their prosperity.
True in part and overstatedR. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, preface to the 1937 edition; Lujo Brentano, 1916
Tawney wrote of the Puritan teaching that "Weber tended to treat it as more unique than it was" and that "he exaggerated its stability and consistency". He adds that Weber took his evidence "from a somewhat late phase in the history of the movement". Tawney's note adds that Brentano submitted the essay to critical analysis and "dissents from many of Weber's conclusions".
The objection: Tawney himself calls Weber's essay "one of the most fruitful examinations" of its subject, so the criticism narrows the thesis without overturning it.
The effect came through literacySascha O. Becker and Ludger Woessmann, Was Weber Wrong?, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2009
Becker and Woessmann argue that "Protestant economies prospered because instruction in reading the Bible generated the human capital crucial to economic prosperity". They test the claim on "county-level data from late-nineteenth-century Prussia", using "distance to Wittenberg as an instrument".
The objection: a study of one state in one century measures schooling and income, and it leaves the habits of work Weber described unmeasured.
Diligence Older Than the Thesis
Whatever the verdict on Weber, the Puritans he studied argued their diligence from Scripture, and the command they read is older than any of them.
Do not let your zeal subside; keep your spiritual fervor, serving the Lord.The verse stands at the close because Baxter set the service of God first in his own rules for work.
Sources
Scripture is the Berean Standard Bible.
- The Holy Bible, American Standard Version (1901)
- Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, translated by Talcott Parsons (London: George Allen and Unwin; New York: Scribner, 1930), chapters 2, 3 and 5; quoted at fifty words or fewer.
- R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (copyright 1926), the preface to the 1937 edition and its notes, Mentor printing; quoted at fifty words or fewer.
- Richard Baxter, A Christian Directory, part 1, Christian Ethics, chapter 10, part 1, Directions about our Labour and Callings, title 1, directions 1, 2, 8 and 9 (London: George Virtue, 1846, as reprinted)
- Sascha O. Becker and Ludger Woessmann, "Was Weber Wrong? A Human Capital Theory of Protestant Economic History", Quarterly Journal of Economics 124, no. 2 (2009): 531 to 596, doi 10.1162/qjec.2009.124.2.531; quoted at fifty words or fewer.