Quakerism & Capitalism — Transition: War and the Social Order

May 30, 2011 § 3 Comments

The second period of major transition in Quaker culture and economics began (as I have not-too-arbitrarily pegged it) in 1895 with the Manchester Conference and it ended with the first Friends World Conference in London in 1920. A number of significant events, both within the Quaker communities and in the world around them during this period, deserve fuller treatment than I have so far given them in my introduction. Here I want to focus on British Quakers’ awakening to the systemic evils of capitalism as it was brought to a climax by the Great War.

I do not say ‘evils’ lightly, for, as we shall see, that is the conclusion many British Friends came to. This story starts in 1915, when London Yearly Meeting convened a committee on War and the Social Order charged with examining the causes of the war and proposing actions the Yearly Meeting could take to try to prevent such a war from happening again.

The very act of convening such a committee was a mark of how Quakerism was modernizing and liberalizing in this period. Committees had been organized around a concern before this but, for two hundred fifty years, Friends had used the traditional faith and practice of Quaker ministry to pursue “concerns”: A Friend felt led, brought the “concern” to their meeting, traveled or served under the auspices of a minute, then laid down the work when they felt released from their call. In the early twentieth century, if I have my history right (it’s hard to research this kind of thing without combing through quarterly and yearly meeting minutes in detail, which I have not yet done), Quaker meetings increasingly turned to committees to act on behalf of the body in the way that the War and Social Order committee did, until we now take this mode of organizing corporate testimonial life for granted, and have almost totally lost the original mode of traditional Quaker ministry.

In 1916, the Yearly Meeting convened a Conference on War and the Social Order at Devonshire House that produced a remarkable document titled “Seven Points of the Message to all Friends”, asking all Friends to affirm its principles. The Seven Points were all positive in tone and offered no direct condemnation of capitalism per se. But it was strongly worded and, most importantly, it did directly address the economic system as a system. Notably, point number six read:

That our membership one of another involves the use of all our gifts, powers, and resources for the good of all. No system which uses these for mere money-making or private gain, alienating them from their true end, can satisfy.”

The Seven Points also focused special attention on workers and labor relations.

At its 1917 sessions, the Yearly Meeting sent the draft to the quarterly meetings and the General Meeting of Scotland for review and a new draft was presented to the Yearly Meeting in 1918. This final version consolidated the original seven principles into six and added two more. The new document, titled Foundations of a True Social Order, was more concise and, in some ways though not all, it was more forceful than the Seven Points had been.

From several different angles, the Foundations defined the purpose of an economic system: that it should express the Brotherhood revealed by Jesus Christ that “knows no restriction of race, sex or social class”, that it should further the growth of full personhood beyond material ends, that it should be organized around mutual service, not private gain.

The Foundations also defined how an economic system (the “social order”) should operate: it should apply “the spiritual force of righteousness, loving-kindness and trust” to industrial relations, not the methods of outward domination and physical force. The document was strongly anti-materialist and called for regulation of land and capital on behalf of “the need and development of man (sic)”. And it clearly recognized that serious problems plagued the current social order, that these problems were ultimately spiritual in nature, and that they demanded action.

The adoption of the Foundations of a True Social Order and the actions that followed its adoption signalled a fundamental and decisive shift in Quaker culture. At the end of the first transition period in the 1690s, with the Toleration Acts, Friends had agreed to give up their claim on the social order in return for religious toleration. Now, in reaction to the persecutions of Friends for conscientious objection to the first world war—a breach of that tacit ‘agreement’ by the state—and in reaction to the war’s manifest horrors, the deal was off. The double-culture period was over. Friends came out of this second transition period once again determined to change the world, ready to fully engage with the social order, led to a large degree by young Friends who had already paid a heavy price for their religious convictions—an been strengthened by the experience.

London Yearly Meeting approved the Foundations, but debate was very vigorous. Many Friends on the committee blamed capitalism directly for the war. Some pressed for a clear socialist recommendation and a few Friends actually formed communes when the meeting pulled back from so radical a move. On the other hand, many were anxious that it went too far and they succeeded in tempering the stronger language presented by some quarterly meetings.

Friends dealt with this internal conflict characteristically by convening another committee, the Committee on Industry and the Social Order. This extraordinary group produced a series of very searching pamphlets on the topics of economic and social policy and labor relations throughout the middle of the century. I’ve not been able to fully research this body of work and I’m not sure when the committee was finally laid down, if it was at all. The last clear reference I have found is from 1955.

Besides the new committee, the other major outcome of London Yearly Meeting’s exercise in 1918 was the first Friends World Conference in London in 1920, for which the eight “Foundations of a True Social Order” became a central theme.

On a parenthetical personal note, I would add that it was while reading the proceedings of the 1920 Friends World Conference and its discussion of the Foundations that I first felt led to study Quaker economic history further. I believe I was researching Right Sharing of World Resources for a project I had proposed for the Albert Cope Scholarship at Pendle Hill; Right Sharing was first brought to Friends by Young Adult Friends at the Friends World Conference at Guilford College in 1967. The 1920 Conference document was right next to the ones for 1967 on the shelf and I just picked picked it up out of curiosity. The debate about the limited liability corporation caught my eye first: Quakers trying to discern whether it was morally correct to use a technology whose very purpose was to divest owners and managers of culpability for a corporation’s actions. Then there was the presentation and debate about the Foundations and references to the 1918 sessions of London Yearly Meeting. I kept following this thread and eventually, the leading grew until I started writing Quakers and Capitalism in earnest.

Quakers & Capitalism — Transition into Modern Liberalism

May 12, 2011 § Leave a comment

In this series on Quakers & Capitalism, I have divided Quaker economic history into three major periods separated by times of transition that lasted roughly a generation, during which external forces have combined with internal trends within Quakerism to completely transform the community’s culture and its economic life. During the first transition, from roughly 1661 to 1695, the persecutions combined with the establishment of gospel order to turn the movement away from its radical apocalyptic engagement with the social, political and religious institutions of the day into a culture that was paradoxically dualistic: quietist and peculiar, insular and withdrawn from virtually every area of social converse—but one: Quakers were intensely engaged in the worlds of industry, commerce and the practical arts and sciences. They entered this transition as mostly independent farmers and small trades people. They emerged as a people almost wholly engaged in commerce, poised to literally change the world, after all, by ushering in an all-new system for creating wealth—industrial capitalism. Not quite single-handedly, but not far from it, either.

The double-culture period lasted two hundred years, though 19^th century evangelicalism weakened the intense dualism that had marked the 18^th century, drawing Friends out of their isolation to a degree and helping to inspire paternalistic philanthropic attempts to ameliorate the suffering of the poor.

The first transition period had rather clearly defined boundaries, marked by the passage of new legislation designed to crush the dissenting sects, beginning in 1661, and by their repeal, concluding fairly decisively in 1695, and by George Fox’s efforts to establish gospel order among Friends upon his release from prison in 1661 and by his death in 1691. The second transition period is a little less clearly defined. I have chosen 1895 as the starting point and 1920 as the end.

Externally, 1895 saw the passage in Great Britain of the final legislation legalizing the limited liability corporation. This new technology would completely transform, not just capitalism, but Quakerism, as well.

Other forces emerged about the same time that created a fertile environment for dramatic change within the Society:

the origins of the what would soon become the Labour Party in Great Britain;
the rise in America of Progressivism as an alternative response to industrialization besides the conservatism and socialism and anarchism of the day;
the rise in America of Pentecostalism, often dated to 1901, and of the Social Gospel movement, which had a relationship with the Progressive Party much like today’s Christian right does with the Republican party; and
the articulation for the first time of Catholic social teaching, beginning with Pope Leo III’s encyclical, Rerum Novarum, in 1891.

All of these movements were to a degree responses to the downside of industrial capitalism, whose awesome wealth-generating capacity had outgrown society’s ability to control its excesses and its ability to protect its victims.

Then came the Great War, a cataclysm that, in Europe, anyway, would reroute virtually all social energies, decimate an entire generation of men, and transform the zeitgeist of the West.

The war also brought to a climax a new zeitgeist in Quakerism that had begun in 1895 in Britain, with the Manchester Conference, and in 1887 in America, with the Richmond Conference. The conferences marked a turning point in the course of evangelicalism among Friends and, for many Friends, a decisive move toward liberalism. Friends General Conference formed in 1900, Three Years Meeting (later Friends United Meeting) formed in 1902. In 1893, Rufus Jones became the editor of Friends’ Review (later, The American Friend), and began a lifelong effort to reunite divided Friends and modernize Quakerism. In 1897, Jones met John Wilhelm Rowntree, a kindred spirit who had played a major role in the Manchester Conference and the summer school movement that came out of it. A generation of young very gifted Friends began leading Quakers into the modern era and toward a level engagement with the world around them that had not existed since the 1650s.

Then, again for the first time in 250 years, Friends faced persecution for their faith, for conscientious objection to the war. After more than a decade of liberalization and increasing involvement with social problems and institutions, this experience finally closed the door on Quaker withdrawal from the world. The American Friends Service Committee was born in 1917. In 1918, London Yearly Meeting heard and discussed the report of its Committee on War and the Social Order, charged with analyzing the causes of the war and proposing responses. The resulting Eight Principles of a Just Social Order became a major theme of the first Friends World Conference, held in London in 1920.

In the meantime, Quaker economics also entered a new era. In a future post, we’ll start examining this major transition in our economic history with a look at Benjamin Seebohm Rowntree and his landmark book, Poverty: A Study in Town Life.

Quakers & Capitalism — The Decline of Evangelical Political Economy

March 30, 2011 § 1 Comment

In 1832 and 1834, the debate in Britain over how to deal with industrial urban poverty took a decisive turn in the New Poor Law, whose policies and ethos more or less dominated Victorian poor relief for the rest of the century. The New Poor Law denied any able-bodied person money or help unless they lived in a workhouse and worked. It mandated that workhouses be built in every parish and living conditions were deliberately designed to be worse than conditions outside the workhouse in order to discourage people from seeking aid. Eligibility requirements were set very high.

The laws were a decisive triumph for evangelical political economy, codifying the mostly predetermined conclusions of the Royal Commission into the Operation of the Poor Laws 1832, two of whose four members were staunchly evangelical (Bishop John Bird Sumner and its economist, Nassau William Senior). They reflected a weird convergence of Thomas Malthus’s population theory and evangelical moral philosophy, David Ricardo’s classical economic theory of wages, and Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarianism. Sumner saw Malthus’s theory of geometric population growth and its threat to national security as part of the Divine Plan and agreed that, by removing some of the poor’s suffering, the old assessment system tended to remove the incentive for moral improvement. The law therefore embraced suffering as a deterrent to the moral vices believed to cause poverty and as an incentive to repentance. It also embraced Benthan’s utilitarian faith in the free market system to provide the “greatest good for the greatest number,” in terms of wages, and also his assumption that people choose pleasant options over unpleasant ones, and would therefore choose to work rather than to live in the workhouse, if conditions in workhouses were bad enough.

Around mid-century, however, evangelical thinking began to lose its hold on the discipline of political economy and on the distinctive middle class piety that it had fostered in British society, though it remained a dominant force in Quakerism (both British and American), especially among the Society’s leadership, until almost the end of the century. The causes of this decline of evangelical influence on economics were its failures on several fronts:

As economic theory, it failed to keep up with the more effective economic tools of classical economics, as represented especially by the genius of John Stuart Mill, who mastered the entire field by the age of 13, in 1819, but only wrote his masterpiece, Principles of Political Economy, in 1848.
As public policy, it failed to deal effectively with the intensifying problems of industrial capitalism and eventually gave way to organized philanthropy in the private sector and more liberal policies in British government.
As moral philosophy, it collapsed in the face of a terrible social and moral calamity—the Irish famine of 1845-1852..

Political economy matures.

Political economy cut its teeth on a series of economic crises in Great Britain. The first major collapse, in 1825-26, was comparable in its severity to the crash of 1929. This was the depression that so exercised J.J. Gurney, which we mentioned in an earlier post.

Evangelical political economists seized on this devastating and totally unexpected event as an example of divine retribution. One radical journalist (William Cobbett) remarked: “Will the Quakers and Unitarians now venture to deny that there is a God?” meaning a retributive, evangelical God. Cobbett’s remark leads us to believe that most Quakers were not prepared to see the crash as divine retribution; even Gurney seems to have thought it more a test than a judgment.

More shocks followed the crash of ‘25, however, with severe recessions occurring in 1837, 1847-8, 1857 and 1866. The sheer regularity of these events called for a more rational explanation than divine wrath in response to greedy speculation and over-investment leading to bubble formation and collapse. The evangelical Malthus had first defined—and predicted—economic collapses, but he ascribed it to middle-class avarice outpacing the natural limits of consumer demand, over-extending itself in debt, and collapsing in bankruptcy. However, as the understanding of business cycles advanced with real experience, the moral argument for recessions began to lose its weight. Morality still figured, of course—there was no denying the role of greed—but the mechanism was revealed as a mechanism, increasingly understood as independent of causal moral factors that could be cured with moral condemnation.

The return of organized giving.

As the industrial revolution became an industrial regime, neither personalized individual, voluntary giving nor the state’s New Poor Laws were up to the job of taking care of the poor, whose ranks were swelling and whose plight was worsening, and not just in the cities but also in the countryside, where the ‘new economy’ was shaking down the old land-based, agrarian rentier economy. Organized giving came back with a moral vengeance in mid-century in Great Britain, becoming a badge of moral probity for the middle and upper classes (think A Christmas Carol, published in 1843) and a requirement for social esteem in the mid-Victorian period. Friends provided tremendous leadership by example in the rise of philanthropy, becoming the signature examples of how and why it should be done.

Moral philosophy.

The great Irish famine proved something of a turning point in the fortunes of evangelical political economics. As a set of ideas, evangelical political economy dominated public intellectual discourse and the minds of key government actors and policy makers through much of the first half of the 19^th century and society as a whole in England adopted its moral tone. This consciousness and the policy of strictly limiting governmental intervention on behalf of the poor shaped the early British response to the Irish famine in the beginning. As the crisis intensified, so did the rhetoric of divine visitation. Sir Charles Trevelyan, the British administrator of relief to the Irish, limited his government’s efforts because “the judgment of God sent the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson. . . a direct stroke of an all-wise and all-merciful Providence [designed to reveal] the deep and inveterate root of social evil.” The public works that had been organized were deliberately structured so as to produce no profit, leaving starving men to pay their own expenses while doing pure make work. Then, for a time, all relief was suspended. Meanwhile, the costs of the Poor Law fell on local landlords, who simply evicted their tenants in response, and the Law denied anyone with at least a quarter of an acre of land any relief; it also forced tenants to forfeit their land to their landlord if they couldn’t produce enough to pay rent and taxes. Nearly 200,000 people were driven off the land in 1849-50.

Eventually, however, the suffering became so visibly overwhelming (perhaps a million people died and another million migrated) that it prompted a backlash of moral revulsion against the moralizers. As both human and national sympathies were awakened in England, so was a sense of outrage at the cold-hearted blamers, who were all pointing in different directions at a bewildering multitude of sins that seemed hardly up to the job of justifying such violent wrath from the Almighty. And it became clear that the government had to act much more forcefully.

More importantly, the laissez-faire policies that the British government applied to the problem, from an explicitly evangelical worldview, made things worse. Even Chalmers, who died not long after, admitted that this crisis was an exception and called for intervention. In the face of this moral failure compounded by policy failure, and lacking Chalmers, its guiding light, evangelical political economics fell swiftly from favor.

Quakers, to their credit, were famously heroic in their response to the Irish crisis. They were present in Ireland already in numbers large enough to form a yearly meeting and had already been ministering to the poor of Ireland for generations. They laid no blame, gave abundantly from their hearts and their purses, made no conditions, abided no corruption in the administration of their relief, and they were fair.

One more factor turned the tide against evangelical political economy in mid-19^th century—in a word, optimism. Evangelical political economy was, in its essence, pessimistic because the human battle against sin was a losing battle. One looked to the cross for victory, not to markets, the government or social programs. Eventually, those whose hopes rose on the new economy chose the optimism of the classical economists over the ineffectual moralizations of the evangelicals.

Science was taking off, and so was its brother, technology—solving problems, improving living conditions, promising and delivering on a new idea: progress. The Origin of the Species gave progressives the theory of social evolution, a framework for understanding progress. Quantum mechanics seemed to deepen the old Newtonian laws of physical determination with a new language of energy. Dr. John Snow proved that the horrible cholera epidemic of 1854 in London had scientifically definable causes, where the terrible cholera epidemic of 1830 had prompted the same kind of evangelical moralizing that had labeled the crash of ’25 a divine visitation.

In the late 1850s, two other events helped to redirect economics and Quaker culture during the second half of the century. In the economic sphere, the Limited Liability Act of 1855 allowed limited liability to companies of more than 25 members. This made large amounts of personal financial capital available to build large-scale industrial companies without needing charters from Parliament. The United States had always been more friendly to the idea of limited liability and it gained momentum from Jacksonian populism in 1830s, which saw it as a mark of economic democracy. However, since corporate charters were regulated by the states, laws clarifying limited liability moved forward in a more haphazard fashion than in the UK, but by mid-century, the practice of limiting liability for shareholders was widespread.

Meanwhile, in 1859, John Stephenson Rowntree, then just 24, submitted Quakerism Past and Present as an essay for a prize offered to the Friend who could most effectively address the problem of Quaker decline. Within a year, London Yearly Meeting began revising its discipline along the lines he had suggested, ending, among other things, the practice of disowning members for marrying out of meeting and a host of other infractions. British Quakers were finally emerging from their quietist shell.

The New Poor Law stayed on the books for decades, however, and the basic assumption that the poor were responsible for their own plight remained unshaken until the Quaker Benjamin Seebohm Rowntree published his landmark book, Poverty: A Study of Town Life, in 1901.

Evangelicalism in America.

Things were somewhat different in America. Here, the evangelical movement lagged behind that of Great Britain in terms of when it really took hold. Moreover, Friends in America had never become the huge economic force that they had in England and had always been much more diverse in their economic pursuits and status. Many American Friends were still farmers through the 19th century and many were small business tradespeople. Philadelphia had its very rich Quakers and many of them turned evangelical, but the main current of evangelicalism flowed west among Friends of much more modest means. Also, because social welfare was the responsibility of the states, national public policy toward poor relief did not really take shape until the New Deal.

This diversity has made it much more difficult for me to follow all these trails to outline the history of Quakers and capitalism in the U.S. This is one of the areas in which I would hope other Quaker historians might fill in the gaps.

The next transition

In the next post, we will look at the second major period of transition in Quaker economic history, which began with the great conferences in Richmond, Indiana, and Manchester, England, in the early 1890s, and ended with World War I and the Conference of All Friends in 1920. In economics, Seebohm Rowntree’s book ushered in a new understanding of the causes of poverty and the structure of capitalism, and the last and decisive step was taken in legalizing the limited liability corporation, a technology that was destined to deconstruct the great Quaker fortunes of the past two hundred years.

Quakers & Capitalism — Evangelical Political Economy

March 9, 2011 § 2 Comments

How evangelicalism shaped 19th century Quaker economics – Part 1

In 1825, Great Britain entered an economic depression comparable in severity to the crash of 1929 in America. Hundreds of firms went bankrupt and the Bank of England itself came close. The collapse came out of the blue. Thomas Robert Malthus, of ‘Malthusian theory’ fame, an evangelical cleric and pioneer economist, had predicted cyclical collapses, but no one had seen this one coming. Theories about its causes and ideas for its cure buzzed in the parlors of the business and intellectual elites and occupied the journalists and pamphleteers.

In his journal, Joseph John Gurney recorded “feeling the Lord to be near to us” during that time. (Descended from Hugh de Gournay, one of the Norman nobleman who came to England with William the Conqueror, his family had started with huge land grants from William in Norwich and Suffolk. They founded the Bank of Norwich in 1770, which was for a time the second largest bank in England after the Bank of England. Around 1809, the family bought a large billbrokering business, a firm that either lends money or finds lenders for borrowers; for forty years, Overend, Gurney and Company was the largest broker of loans in the world. In 1896, Gurney’s Bank merged with Backhouse’s Bank and Barclays Bank of London and several other Quaker provincial banks to form what is now Barclays Bank.)

The two schools of political economy current at the time—classical and evangelical—approached these cyclical downturns differently, in terms of how they analyzed their causes, how they would manage the system in times of crisis, and how they treated those who suffered from their fallout. In 1825, evangelical thinkers dominated this economic discourse.

Gurney himself believed, along with his evangelical peers, in a providential God who watched human events and sometimes intervened according to a divine plan. Like them, mindful of judgment, he watched out for temptation and hoped for atonement. The financial crisis of 1825-26 was surely a moral test; but mostly it was seen as a judgment against those who had already surrendered to avarice and ambition. Gurney no doubt experienced God’s nearness as, first, the searing heat of financial losses, which naturally turned him inward to reflect on his own moral character; and then, when his fortune ultimately survived, as the cool refreshing draught of escape from ruin and at least partial reassurance of his moral uprightness. His fortune was saved; he was saved. Many of his fellow capitalists were not.

For moderate evangelicals like Gurney, God’s providence was systemic: both nature and markets ran according to God’s plan for the world’s government and for human judgment, but not every little event was an act of specific divine intervention. Adam Smith’s famous “invisible hand”—the natural tendency of markets to efficiently set prices on their own, without government interference—this was actually the invisible hand of God at work. The fact that the actions of individuals powered the mechanisms of the market and gave it direction made the system an inherently moral one. Market policy therefore required a moral philosophy and this evangelical philosophy required not only that you leave God’s mechanisms alone but also that you leave individuals to choose their actions and suffer their judgment.

Such a moral philosophy naturally encouraged moral speculation, especially when bad things happened: cholera epidemics and market downturns pointed toward sins as causes, so the evangelical economists would search for the culprit sins behind these events. As the system tended to be general in its chastising effects, hurting lots of people and society in general, so the more moderate evangelical political economists tended to be somewhat general in their attributions of moral cause and they tended to differ when they got down to specifics.

More radical evangelicals believed, however, that God micro-managed the system, intervening directly and with specific purpose in virtually all events. Thus, they saw every outbreak of cholera or market downturn as a deliberate visitation for some specific sin(s) and this emboldened them to get serious and specific with their condemnations and exhortations.

All evangelical political economists agreed, though, that, squirming under God’s plan, and always defying its purposes, lurked human sin. Every human problem had its ultimate root in sin. Social ills, like poverty and economic recessions, personal problems, like poverty and bankruptcy—you could trace them all back to sin, not just sinfulness in general, but often a particular act, trait or policy. Sin and its consequences for the immortal soul gave evangelical political economists a sense of emotional urgency that heated the discourse up far more than the rational theories of the classical economists.

The sins behind economic downturns were clear: greed, primarily, ambition, and pride. Bull markets encouraged borrowing and speculation. Encouraged by their winnings, investors got overextended. Then, when everyone realizes that they are sitting on a bubble, panic ensues, people start calling in their notes, and the system collapses. Chastised for a time, businessmen (sic) recommit themselves to prudence. But then they forget the pain, greed plants its seeds again, and the cycle starts over.

The sins behind poverty were also clear: improvidence and licentious habits—laziness, gambling, drinking, wantonness of all kinds—and, of course, sex. Sex led to overpopulation among the working classes, which led to poverty.

The cure for both poverty and what we now call the business cycle was moral tuition. The cure for economic depressions was collective repentance and a nation that hewed more closely to God’s law. The cure for poverty was personal repentance and strengthened moral character. The evangelical worldview rejected most practical approaches to poverty relief and turned instead to moral paternalism. Poor relief was actually cruel in its consequences because it encouraged idleness, and suffering was actually salutary, because it led to repentance. Far better to suppress vice and encourage industry, economy and discipline. Their material charity thus tended toward things like good clothing that could support self-respect, rather than grants of money. And, of course, Bibles, plus enough education to enable the poor to read their Bibles. One thinks immediately of Elizabeth Fry, Gurney’s sister, ministering to the inmates of Newgate Prison.

In the next post, we’ll return to Gurney and his friendship with the greatest evangelical political economist of the age, Thomas Chalmers, as a window into the distinctive evangelical mutation in the Quaker double culture of religious withdrawal and economic engagement—how it drew Friends back into the world of social and political action in crucial ways without seriously threatening the distinctives of Quaker culture.

Quakers & Capitalism — The Evangelical Transition

March 3, 2011 § 7 Comments

In this series of posts and in my book on Quakers and Capitalism, I have divided Quaker economic history into three major periods defined by the ways that Friends engaged with the world around them. These major historical periods were separated by major periods of transition, in which external forces and internal forces collided to produce a new Quaker alignment. In the first transition period, brought on by the persecutions in England in the last decades of the 17^th century, the external pressures of persecution and the internal imposition of gospel order closed a period of intense apocalyptic engagement with the world and opened a period of cultural dualism, in which Friends withdrew from the world socially, politically and religiously, but channeled incredible energy outward into the world of business, commerce and finance.

Over the course of the 18^th century, Friends played key roles in creating modern capitalism and the industrial revolution in England and they continued to build the new economy throughout the 19^th century. The turn of the 20^th century brought a second major transition, in which the rise of corporate capitalism, liberal thought and new persecutions during the First World War collided with a liberalizing movement within Quakerism. The result was a decisive turn outward, away from quietist withdrawal and into much more vigorous and creative engagement with the world and its problems, including the social fallout and political responses to capitalism’s darkside.

Right in the middle of the double-culture period, however, around 1800, Friends went through a minor period of transition brought on by the rise into cultural prominence of evangelicalism. Evangelicalism opened a door in the wall that Friends had built around themselves and allowed them to reengage with the world in certain ways without giving up their distinctive and even insular culture. More importantly with respect to a study of Quakers and capitalism, the new evangelicalism emerged and co-evolved with the new ‘science’ of economics, though the term ‘economics’ only came into use a hundred years later. Then it was called ‘political economy,’ and focused on the ways that production and consumption were organized in nation states. The first political economists, including its putative ‘father,’ Adam Smith, held chairs in moral philosophy. The first professor of political economy in England was Thomas Malthus (1805).

Malthus was an evangelical minister. Like other evangelical political economists of the time, Malthus’s moral theology shaped his economic theory and this combination gave rise to a second major school of economic thinking that stood in some opposition to the ‘classical’ school first defined by Adam Smith in his Wealth of Nations (published in 1776). Together, these two schools shaped the issues and discourse that defined early modern economic thinking and this dynamic dialog found embodiment in two extraordinary men: Thomas Malthus and David Ricardo. Malthus and Ricardo were friends but friendly rivals intellectually, and their publishing duel helped define the field of political economy as it matured.

Ricardo was the second great classical economist, after Adam Smith. He was born Jewish and had emigrated to England with his family from Holland. But then he eloped with a Quaker, Priscilla Anne Wilkinson, and his family disowned him. He made a fortune in the stock market and ‘retired’ to write at the age of 43. He converted to Unitarianism.

(One of these days, I plan to research Ricardo more thoroughly, hoping to clarify his relationship with his wife’s family and her meeting and with Quakerism in general. Was she herself disowned for marrying out of meeting? Why did he become a Uniterian instead of a Quaker? What affect, if any, did his new religious identity and his exposure to Quakerism have on his economic thinking? If political economy was, in that time, essentially moral philosophy, and if theology was shaping the work of his primary intellectual correspondent, and he himself had undergone some kind of religious transformation, how could these factors not have helped to inform his own ideas?)

No Friends, evangelical or otherwise, contributed significantly to this new discipline of political economy until the second major transition around 1900, and evangelicalism did not alter substantially the momentum or direction of Quaker wealth-building. But it did help to shape the way that Friends approached poverty and other negative consequences of capitalist expansion during the 19^th century. And Joseph John Gurney, the great evangelical Friend of his time, was a close associate and a deep admirer of one of the preeminent evangelical political economists of the age, Thomas Chalmers (1740-1847).

Evangelical political economy dominated economic policy and politics in Great Britain throughout the first half of the 19th century and its moral philosophical approach to social problems has returned to favor periodically ever since. In subsequent posts, I want to

talk about Chalmers and explore his relationship with Gurney as a window into how evangelical thought helped to shape social and political responses to the structural violence of capitalism;
look at how evangelical Quakerism adopted and adapted this moral philosophy;
examine the rise and fall and periodic resurgence of evangelical political economy and the role of some Friends in that history; and
look briefly at the different course that these issues took in America, where Friends had always been more diverse, not just theologically, but also in terms of social class, social and political geography, economic development, and relative influence over social policy.

Renewing Friends’ Testimony on Economics

February 7, 2011 § 2 Comments

One of the reasons I’ve been writing on Quakers and capitalism is that I hope to invite Friends to consider more deeply our testimony on economics (and I don’t mean our testimony on money, but on the structure and institutions and worldview of our economic system) with a fuller appreciation of our economic history as context. I believe we stand in some ways in the same relationship with capitalism as we do with penitentiaries: our ancestors played key roles in the emergence of capitalism (industrial capitalism, anyway) and its early evolution, just as we did with the penitentiary. And just as the penitentiary was, in its inception, an advance in human welfare, a positive solution to a problem, and now has become part of the problem, just so industrial capitalism brought tremendous improvements to humankind, only to become in some ways a new source of suffering and oppression. In both cases, our historical role lays upon us some kind of obligation to reform the system and minister to the victims of our legacy.

Where to start? We have four paths to walk, I think. They are somewhat independent of each other and each deserves careful consideration. In my initial thinking, anyway, these four paths to a renewed testimony on economics are:

Starting with divine inspiration. The first impulse, of course, is to turn to our Teacher, from whom we have learned to expect continuing revelation. Spiritual renewal comes from G*d (using G*d as a placeholder for the Mystery Reality behind/within our personal and corporate religious experience, whatever that experience is). So, in addition to study, thought and discussion, we need to pray and worship and support those who are called to ministries of witness in this area.
Starting with secular progressive thinking on political economics. The vitality of our economic testimony depends on being Spirit-led. Its effectiveness depends, to a great degree, on knowing the science of economics and the work of its progressive thinkers and critics. There’s lots of material here, and therefore lots to learn and lots of work to do.
Starting from our present testimonies. We can work our way ‘laterally’ across our testimonial life from the other testimonies. This is a common and natural tack. I’ve done this myself, turning the light of the testimonies on peace, integrity, simplicity and equality on economics. This yields great fruit and I will return to this approach in some future posts.
Starting from our foundational traditions, including, especially, the Bible. I think a lot of ‘liberal,’ ‘post-Christian,’ ‘post-traditional’ Friends overlook the Bible, partly because they just don’t know it and partly because, in some folks’ hands, they have experienced the Bible as a weapon of regressive thinking. This extends to the sphere of economics no less than other areas social and political life. In fact, I devote a lengthy section of Quakers and Capitalism to the often, though not exclusively, negative influence of evangelical thinking on progressive political economics. Nevertheless, our Christian Friends are in a position to lead the way here, because the gospel of Jesus is, at its core, a powerful progressive economic message.

I’ve been writing another book on the gospel of Jesus whose sections on his teachings on ‘economics’ have grown so much that it now looks like it needs to be its own book. The new book’s tentative title is Good News for the Poor: The Economics of Redemption in the Common-wealth of God. I’ve explored some of this material in my other blog, www.biblemonster.com, including a series on the Beatitudes, which, when you know enough about the ‘economic legislation’ in Torah, turn out to be midrashim on inheritance law and, specifically, on bankruptcy.

In fact, Christian scripture—the synoptic gospels, anyway (Matthew, Mark and Luke)—are totally saturated with economic testimony. Jesus was preoccupied with the poor and the people and social, political and religious institutions that oppressed the poor. (It’s worth noting that in Hebrew and Aramaic (Jesus’ native tongue), the word is the same for “the poor” and for “the oppressed”—ani, as in Bethany (beth ani, house of the poor/oppressed), the little town not far from Qumran where Martha, Mary, Lazarus and Simon the Leper lived.)

Jesus healed the poor and I believe that several of these healings included a social welfare dimension in the healing itself—that we too narrowly define these ‘miracles’ as medical cures of disease, and miss the innovations and reforms in community life that serve as context for his healings. Several of his other miracles also have an economic dimension. Several parables deal directly with poverty. Many of our favorite sayings of Jesus are essentially teachings about economics or have economic elements, including not just the Beatitudes, but also much of the rest of the Sermon on the Mount, and the two love commandments. The Lord’s Prayer has economics at its core. But more importantly, Jesus defined his ministry, his role as the Christ, the Messiah, in economic terms. Economic justice was the very foundation of Jesus’ ministry.

These are far-reaching claims, I know, and to some, all the more startling because these teachings often are virtually invisible to the ‘untrained eye.’ We know so many of these passages so well that it’s hard to believe such a different and radical meaning could be hiding in there. So it takes a while to make the case. I hope you’ll bear with me.

Nevertheless, I believe that Jesus’ teachings on ‘economics’ are comprehensive, far-reaching, radically progressive and totally relevant to our situation today, notwithstanding their original context in an agrarian economy very different from our own. The gospel is a great place to start when reconsidering out testimony on economics. I think I’m going to pursue this mostly in BibleMonster because that blog is dedicated to the Bible, but it will take time. For one thing, I have another theme I want to take up there, as well—what I call “spiritual ecology”: a look at how Jesus used the landscape of Palestine in his own spiritual practice (where he went in Palestine to do what and why); and also a look at the role that ecology and technology have played in the emergence and evolution of the Western religious tradition more broadly.

In the meantime, I want to lay out in BibleMonster the “economics of redemption” as I see them and bring these principles into Through the Flaming Sword as planks in a platform for a more fully developed Quaker testimony on economics. More to come . . .

Quakers & Capitalism — Quaker Contributions to the Emergence and Growth of Industrial Capitalism

January 28, 2011 § 2 Comments

Now we come to the material that never fails to blow Friends’ minds when I do presentations on the history of Quaker economics. When Friends hear the scale of these contributions, when they recognize the significance of some of these contributions, not only for capitalism but for modern civilization itself, they inevitably ask, why have we never heard this before? For the sheer length and scope of this list is astounding, and the impact of these developments could hardly be exaggerated.

Friends were, to a greater or lesser degree, directly responsible for the five developments that made a broad-scale economy based on industrial production possible:

Industrial tooling materials. Quakers developed new, improved techniques for casting iron and, more importantly, invented a method for casting steel. These technologies made durable, mass-producible machine parts possible. Without them, the industrial revolution would have been more of a series of occasional local uprisings. Machines made it possible to mass produce goods for the first time in history, and cast iron made machinery possible. Cast steel made it possible to mass produce durable machines. This development exponentially accelerated the industrialization of the economy. It’s impossible to overstate the importance of these breakthroughs.
Industrial strength transport. Friends built the first railroad in England and developed the technologies essential for its expansion: iron bridges, iron rails, steam locomotion. Horse-drawn locomotion on normal roadbeds, especially those outside of major cities, constrained the transport of everything: raw materials, prepared materials, supplies, parts, fuel, products, people, money—all moved in small quantities at a snail’s pace, when it moved at all. The problem was especially acute in the case of industrial metals like iron and steel, zinc and lead. (Quakers invented the passenger train, as well.)
Finance. Friends formed many of the first private banks in England. Several of these banks soon became some of the largest private financial institutions in the world. The Bank of Norwich (the Gurneys) was for a long time second only to the Bank of England in its holdings. Lloyds was the first bank to diversify its holdings and invest in more than one industry. The other name in banking that everyone knows is Barclay’s, but there were other major Quaker banks, as well.
Energy. It was shortage of fuel (wood) that had stalled the British iron industry in the seventeenth century. British Quaker iron magnates invented rotated crop coppice farming to solve this problem of dwindling virgin timber supplies for fuel. But their real breakthrough was coke, a refinement of coal, a fuel that burned hot enough to make quality steel possible. They also invented the match—for the first time in history, you could afford to let your fire go out because you could restart it easily any time you wanted. This significantly released the tremendous burden on fuel supplies.
The industrial business model. New materials, especially cast steel, made a new kind of production possible. Friends were among the very first to develop a production model that capitalized on this material potential. The interchangeable parts plow developed by Robert Ransome in the 1720s represents the very beginning of mass industrialization. Also, Quakers created the first conglomerate, breaking out of the single family–single site business to create larger associations of many small business units in a variety of industries. Friends also played a key role in developing business associations. Finally, John Joseph Rowntree is the first person known to have engaged in industrial espionage, stealing trade secrets from his (mostly Quaker) competitors in chocolate production while interviewing them for potential jobs; he hired some of these people but he picked the brains of all.

So Friends came up with key technological innovations in such key areas as industrial materials, industrial processes, transport, energy and organization. They also built key industries and, of course, businesses in those industries. They created industries that had never existed before or introduced them to England for the first time. Here’s a partial list of the industries in whose development Friends played a significant, if not essential, role:

banking
iron
coke smelting
iron casting
steel casting
brass and zinc production
lead mining
silver mining and refining
railroads
canals
porcelain
safety matches
chocolate
coffee houses
English cutlery

In the next post we’ll look at Quaker contributions in venture capital and the role of Quakers in creating the consumer economy itself, including the famous invention of the price tag.

Meanwhile, clicking here: Quaker Contributions to Industrial Capitalism—will open a document that concisely summaries some of these contributions. It’s also available on the Quakers & Capitalism—The Book page.

Quakers & Capitalism — The Double-culture Period: Factors in Quaker Success

January 26, 2011 § 3 Comments

Here’s the next installment in Quakers and Capitalism, outlining aspects of Quaker character and community practice that helped make Friends so phenomenally successful in business during the ‘double-culture period” between roughly 1700 ad 1900. I realized while working on this section of the book that the last post in the series, on the Protestant ethic as discussed by Max Weber in his book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, really belongs with the material I had planned to publish in this post, so I’ve deleted the earlier post and combined the contents of both in a longer section.

This section would have been too long to post in its entirety here, anyway, so I invite readers to download Factors in Quaker Business Success; it’s also available on the Quakers & Capitalism page, whose link is to the left. So here’s a brief precis:

Quakers & Capitalism—The Double-culture Period: Factors in Quaker Success

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.

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 a 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 17^th 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.

Quaker Culture and Quaker Character

Quaker culture cultivated other personal character qualities that also served the phenomenal financial success of this period. Some, like their famous frugality, moderation and financial prudence and their Puritan rejection of entertainment, drink and gambling, protected their wealth from dissipation. Some traits, like their integrity and discretion, built up a reputation that engendered trust and attracted customers, suppliers, and business associates. Some, like their meticulousness and their sense of business as service, directly affected the quality of their products and services.

Here, I offer a simple bullet list of these character traits. For the fuller treatment of each trait, see the pdf file.

Business as service
Spiritual standards for daily life
Meticulouslness
Silence and discretion
Simplicity, frugality and moderation
Prudence and debt

Quaker Practice and Quaker Wealth

Corporate community practice also guided, supported and constrained Quaker business practice, and in many ways, these were more important even than Quaker character in helping them build their fortunes:

the emergence of testimonies on the conduct of business that were enforced under the disciplines of gospel order, including
the testimony against civil suit;
apprenticeships;
more or less enforced intermarriage; and, most importantly,
traveling ministry, intervisitation and correspondence.

The written and visitation ministry networks soon became so active and fully developed that often only one or two degrees of separation stood between one Quaker business person and another. Students of the Internet have been developing network-oriented business theories that would offer very interesting opportunities here for more fully understanding this aspect of Quaker success. I suspect that this ‘network effect’ is the most important factor in the rapid expansion and extraordinary success of early Quaker capitalists.

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

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

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.

Quakers & Capitalism – The Double-culture Period (1695–1895)

January 13, 2011 § Leave a comment

Quakers & Capitalism – The Double-culture Period (1695–1895)

Introduction

The Restoration of Charles II and the persecutions ended a period of radical Quaker engagement with virtually all the institutions of English society. But the Lamb’s War focused particularly on religious institutions and not so much on those governing commerce. Capitalism had yet to emerge in any meaningful way. The primary engine for wealth creation was still the land. As trades people and yeoman farmers (that is, agricultural producers who owned their own land), early Quakers were not at the bottom of this food chain, but they started out more or less frozen in their places, without much visible prospect for change. But change was all around them and Friends adapted with remarkable resilience.

By the end of what I am calling the first transition period in the economic history of Friends, they had not only survived an economic harrowing, but had actually thrived, and not just in spite of it but, in some ways, paradoxically, because of it. They were thrust into uniquely challenging economic circumstances and they turned their tribulations into opportunities. But they responded to these challenges with an oddly bipolar cultural alignment.

On the one hand, they built walls around themselves. Take plain speech and plain dress, as only one front on which Friends retreated from the Lamb’s War. Originally these cultural forms embodied early Friends’ testimony to equality in the spirit before the Lord, which they found in scripture and which they confirmed in their hearts. In what I am calling the “double culture” period, these practices became cultural identifiers that told the rest of the world, “We stand apart.” This happened quite quickly, before even the first generation of leaders had passed away. Margaret Fell expressed her concerns about the shift in one of her later epistles. Similarly, in one area after another, Friends withdrew from the world around them.

All but one. They left one wide gate in their wall against the world. This gate opened into a new country, one that was sparsely peopled, nearly devoid of institutions, of infrastructure, of rules and conventions, a virgin landscape waiting to be developed—an economy based not on land and its produce but on technology and industrial production, an economy in which wealth was created by private (or corporate) ownership of capital goods, by investment determined by private decision rather than by state control, and by prices, production and distribution of goods determined mainly in a free market, that is, in a market relatively free from government regulation. In a word—capitalism.

As I have rather arbitrarily defined it, the first transition period stretched between the Restoration in 1661 to 1695, when Parliament passed the Quakers Act of 1695, which allowed Quakers to substitute an affirmation where the law required an oath, except when giving evidence in a criminal case, serving on a jury, or holding an office of profit from the Crown.* (The new affirmation read: “I, A. B., do declare in the presence of Almighty God, the Witness of the truth of what I say.”). One might close the period of persecutions with the passage of the Toleration Act in 1689, which granted freedom of worship to Nonconformists of the Church of England, Protestant dissenters like Quakers, Presbyterians, and Baptists (it deliberately excluded Roman Catholics and Unitarians, however). The Toleration Act did significantly ease the state’s assault on Friends, especially the financial burden, though local compliance was somewhat erratic for a long time and Friends continued to pay fines for failure to pay tithes into the 19th century. So the Toleration Act closed the door, more or less, on the persecutions. But the Quakers Act opened the door to more or less unhindered economic life, because of the importance of law in the conduct of business. Without the Quakers Act, Quaker business might have remained a much smaller, more self-contained endeavor. With the right of affirmation, however, Friends were free to fully participate in the new contractarian social order that was a necessary precondition for the rise of capitalism. They used this freedom to build an all-new economy.

This was an extraordinary achievement: despite huge financial losses during the period of the persecutions, Friends ended up rich. Really rich. By the beginning of the second period of Quaker economic history, fourteen Quaker families enjoyed revenues over £100,000. And this was only the start of something big—there followed two hundred years of thriving economic life characterized by incredible wealth-building and by a perennial stream of significant contributions to emerging capitalism, industrialization, technological innovation, social reform and philanthropic work.

Quakers became a people with a double culture. Their economic culture could not have been more engaged with the world. Their social-religious culture could hardly have been less engaged. Even as late as the 1860s, a woman might be raised to adulthood in a well-to-do Quaker family in Baltimore without ever coming into contact with nonQuakers. When Quakers call the 18^th and 19^th centuries the “quietist period,” we mean the religious culture and we forget the economic culture.

Yet, these two cultures were intimately related. This was one people, after all. Individual Quakers, their families and meetings, lived these two cultures as one life. They fused the two cultures without apparent contradiction and with phenomenal success.

How did they do this? What sociological factors fed their material success and economic engagement with the world and denied them social and religious engagement? These are complex social dynamics and I’m not a sociologist. But I think I see three general areas in which Quaker culture encouraged creative, successful economic engagement in the world—with phenomenal financial results—out of the spiritual values that drew them inward toward each other and toward their Inner Teacher and away from the wider world.

Quaker character. The first area is the fortuitous ways Quaker culture helped shape Quaker character so as to make Friends successful business people. One aspect of this Quaker character was an ethos Friends shared with their radical Puritan forbears and contemporaries, which they exemplified with extraordinary energy. We’ve already touched on how the Protestant ethic gave birth to the capitalist spirit, a la Max Weber, and here I want to elaborate on two of Weber’s key ideas as they apply to Friends: “worldly asceticism” and “rational asceticism.” Furthermore, Quakers expressed this ethos in distinctive ways and even encoded some aspects of the Quaker character in their testimonial life. Quakers became famous for a set of character traits that served to guide their behavior in business and to build a reputation that nurtured their success.
Quaker practice. Quakers also adopted corporate practices that fostered economic and financial success. It’s hard to exaggerate the importance of corporate Quaker practice in building their personal fortunes. Quakers did not—could not—build their fortunes by themselves.
Sublimation. All the energy (and money) that Quaker character and culture repressed had to go somewhere. Thus, when Quaker character, with the indispensable support of Quaker culture, tackled a worldly problem, it tended to generate amazing creativity and innovation, a freedom of modes of thinking that was paradoxically opposite to the gradually solidifying (and ultimately ossifying) modes of religious thinking that took hold in Quaker culture. It would barely stretch the truth of the matter to say that Quakers were the wellspring from which gushed many of the main streams of industrial capitalist development, even as their own well of spiritual vitality gradually went dry.

Download a pdf file of this post.

* The Act also allowed legal proceedings to be taken against Quakers before a Justice of the Peace for refusing to pay tithes if it did not exceed £10. The Act would have expired in seven years but, in 1702, Parliament extended it for another eleven years by the Affirmation by Quakers Act 1701 and then made it permanent in 1715.

Political economy matures.

The return of organized giving.

Moral philosophy.

The next transition

How evangelicalism shaped 19th century Quaker economics – Part 1

Quakers & Capitalism—The Double-culture Period: Factors in Quaker Success

The Protestant (Quaker) Ethic and the Capitalist Spirit

Worldly Asceticism

Rational Asceticism

Quaker Culture and Quaker Character

Quaker Practice and Quaker Wealth

The Protestant (Quaker) Ethic and the Capitalist Spirit

Worldly Asceticism

Rational Asceticism

Introduction

Where Am I?