Quakers & Capitalism — The Double-culture Period: The Protestant (Quaker) Ethic & the Capitalist Spirit
January 22, 2011 § 7 Comments
The Protestant (Quaker) Ethic and the Capitalist Spirit
The early, groundbreaking sociologist Max Weber, in his most famous book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904), offers a useful framework for approaching the relationship between the religious culture of early Friends and the social culture necessary (or at least optimal) for the rise of capitalism. Weber himself mentions Quakers frequently, not just as a community, but also George Fox and Robert Barclay. He devotes a lengthy section of his book to “The Baptist Sects,” in which he includes Quakers. To my mind, he seems to understand Quakerism rather well.
Apropos to our current exploration of Quaker character and how it served their extraordinary financial success, Weber discussed at length in his book how two qualities of the “Protestant ethic” converged to produce just the double culture we are discussing: material engagement in a world from which you are spiritually withdrawing. The two forces he describes are worldly asceticism and rational asceticism.
Worldly Asceticism
Friends defined the ultimate spiritual value as the inward experience of Christ and then sought to ground all their actions in the world in the promptings of the Holy Spirit. This led to a rejection of the world as source of spiritual fulfillment and recast the world as the sphere of spiritual expression. The combination generates an impulse to be perfect in the world. When you see leadings and moral direction as revelations of God, it sanctifies all action as calling. At the same time, hearing the call requires silence, that is, removal from the world.
Rational Asceticism
When you cannot achieve grace through sacraments, good works or confession, the only proof of grace is a way of life that is unmistakably different from that of others. This requires a certain withdrawal from the world. It requires the individual to supervise her own state of grace in her conduct—that is, it permeates the life with asceticism, forcing the “rationalization of conduct within the world for the sake of the world beyond,” as Weber put it. The requisite “rational” planning of one’s life in accord with God’s will forces you to reengage the world with a plan—or, more accurately, with a discipline (discipleship); that is, a self-conscious deliberateness that includes robust structures and processes for drafting the plan (discerning God’s will) and correcting mistakes through negative feedback (gospel order).
These are highly adaptive qualities for sustainability in the high-risk, intensively entrepreneurial and opportunistic environment of rapidly-evolving capitalism in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. First, though, you must get into the world of commerce in the first place. These ascetic spiritual qualities might have actually impeded Quaker involvement in the world of money and business, if Friends had been left to themselves. But they weren’t left to themselves; in fact, they were left no choice. Fate—in the form of the persecutions—threw them into the counting houses and fledgling factories of England. Of course, early Friends didn’t believe in ‘fate’; they believed in God’s ever-guiding hand. Once into the deep water, they determined to swim as though God had thrown them in.
The next post in the Quakers & Capitalism series discusses specific character traits emphasized in early Quaker culture and how they fostered Quaker success in business.
Through the Flaming Sword 
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Nicely done.
Being excluded from the professions was another influence pushing Quakers toward various kinds of commerce.
I also think that achieving grace and expressing that grace has been achieved (or is ongoing) do go together. Although Quakers have always said that performing sacraments, doing good works and confession are not the means of attaining grace each of these (in peculiar form) have been recognized among us as signs that grace (the direct guidance of God in ones life) is at work.
i appreciate your using quotation marks around the word “rational” (beyond when quoting Weber) but would not have used the word, myself. Rationalizing conduct seems to imply that there is an ideology that is guiding–and among Friends (at least those who do not conflate the faith and practice of Friends and that of Protestantism) there is no such ideology. Friends, at least originally, were children of the Light–not of the Enlightenment.
Thanks, again. I’ll look forward to seeing more.
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Interesting read. Found this via Martin Kelley and have reposted you on our new Right Sharing of World Resources blog. Hope that’s all right!
http://blog.rswr.org/post/2928173857/steven-davison-the-protestant-quaker-ethic-the
Thank you!
~Betsy Blake
RSWR Communications Coordinator
Betsy, thanks for reposting on RSWR’s site.
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