Liberty and Property. Ellen Wood
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that Protestantism had something to do with the ‘rise of capitalism’? It is certainly true that Lutheranism became a powerful force when it established itself in great commercial centres. It is also true that, in some commercial cities, where urban patriciates had become rentiers instead of active merchants and where they restricted access to the political domain, burghers and new merchants without political privileges might use Protestant doctrine to challenge patrician dominance. It may even be true that Protestantism, and Calvinism in particular, removed ecclesiastical constraints on commercial activities, or that Protestant doctrine, and especially Calvin’s doctrine of the calling, called into question old verities about the unworthiness of commercial pursuits and the acquisition of wealth, or about work as a curse and simply a punishment for original sin. But, even if we accept that Protestantism promoted a ‘work ethic’ or that it had certain benefits for merchants, and even if we set aside its equal usefulness to nobles, princes and kings, its bearing on the ‘spirit of capitalism’ is another matter altogether.
Let us first be clear about what is meant by capitalism and the conditions of its ‘rise’. Conventional wisdom – and, indeed, a great deal of scholarly work – treats the rise of capitalism as little more than the quantitative growth of commerce or exchange for profit. Capitalism, in other words, is ‘commercial society’ as understood by classical political economy, a society in which commercial practices that have existed since time immemorial have, with the expansion of cities, markets and trade, become the economic norm. Human beings have, time out of mind, engaged in profitable exchange, and capitalism is just more of the same. This means that, if the birth of capitalism requires any explanation, all that needs to be explained is the growth of market opportunities and the removal of obstacles to the expansion of commerce.
Yet this understanding of capitalism takes no account of the very specific economic principles that came into being in early modern Europe, principles very different from anything that had existed before even in the most commercialized societies: not simply the growth of market opportunities with the expansion of vast trading networks, but the emergence of wholly new compulsions, the inescapable imperatives of competition, profit-maximization, constant accumulation and the endless need to reduce the costs of labour by improving labour productivity. These imperatives did not operate in the age-old practices of commercial exchange even in its most elaborate forms. Traders made their fortunes not by means of cost-effective production in integrated competitive markets but rather by negotiating separate markets, the ‘buying cheap and selling dear’ that was the essence of pre-capitalist commerce. A revolutionary transformation of relations between producing and appropriating classes, as well as changes in the nature of property, would be required to set in train the imperatives of the capitalist market – as happened in English agrarian capitalism
Once we identify capitalism with market imperatives, the search for its origins must take a different form. The question then becomes not how commercial opportunities expanded and economies were freed to take advantage of them, or even how the cultural and moral climate changed to justify pursuit of profit, but rather how social arrangements and the production of basic human needs were so fundamentally transformed as to impose compulsions and necessities unlike any that had governed human social life before.
This is not a question addressed by the most influential advocates of the view that Protestantism in one way or another promoted the development of capitalism – Max Weber and R.H. Tawney – nor, indeed, by their later supporters and critics. Both traced the evolution of Protestantism, especially in its Calvinist form, into a particular variety of Puritanism, especially in England, that encouraged ‘capitalist’ values and practices; but neither of them actually argued that Protestantism caused the emergence of capitalism. It would be fair to say that in both arguments the development of Protestantism into a doctrine favouring capitalism (in the sense they understood it) presupposes the existence of certain forms of property and economic practices that, if not already fully ‘capitalist’ (in their terms), are ‘capitalist’ in embryo and mark a significant break from feudal forms and principles.
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