Our present social sciences, with their concepts of “culture” and “personality,” have made us vividly aware of the interrelatedness of the particular aspects of human behaviour in societies. It comes no longer as a surprise that religion and economic expansiveness are interconnected.
In his famous study, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber developed the idea that ascetic Protestantism in some way prepared the way for the calculating spirit of modern, rational capitalism. Here an ideal factor was regarded as an independent variable in history. Although the main thesis has found fairly general acceptance, important criticisms have been levelled at particular points of Weber's essay. While Weber demonstrated the affinity between such ideas as the religiously coloured “calling” and “innerworldly asceticism,” and the more utilitarian and secular economic ideas of later times (Franklin), he did not carefully analyse the precise nature of the influence of the earlier ideas. For that purpose, a detailed study of the economic structure of early modern Europe would have been necessary, and, at least within The Protestant Ethic, Weber abstained from such a study.