False Economy - Alan Beattie [67]
As amateur psychology goes, it is at least ingenious. It is, of course, next to impossible to prove what seventeenth-century Puritans were actually thinking. As the historian E. P. Thompson used to say, we cannot interview tombstones. But a review of the circumstantial evidence of Puritan attitudes at the time—what people were writing and saying—is not especially favorable to Weber.
A wider reading of the radical Protestant schools of thought of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—whose writing Weber himself cites—reveals a large number of sentiments that would struggle to make it into the curriculum of Harvard Business School. While they did not glorify poverty in the way that Catholic social teaching often had, there were frequent echoes of the biblical warning that rich men rarely enter the kingdom of heaven. John Downame, a popular Puritan writer and preacher, argued: "Doth not common experience teach us that worldly prosperity is a step-mother to virtue, those being most destitute of it, who most abound in worldly things, and they most rich in spiritual grace who are most wanting therein?" Richard Baxter, one of the seventeenth-century writers Weber himself often cited as an example of the Protestant ethic, inveighed against the "false rule of them that think their commodity is worth as much as anyone will give."
This attitude traveled to North America with the Puritans. Whatever subsequently caused the United States to become one of the most successful capitalist economies in the world, it was not the theology of its Calvinist colonists. The fathers of the Plymouth Colony railed against the "notorious evil ... whereby most men walked in all their commerce—to buy as cheap and sell as dear as they can." The colony set maximum prices, wages, and interest rates; and the price of a cow was to be set by what the seller was deemed to need for a reasonable return, not what the buyer was prepared to pay.
William Bradford, one of the colony's early governors, said that an increase in material prosperity "will be the ruin of New England, at least of the churches of God there." That it was neither, and that Protestantism continued to flourish in North America alongside a highly successful economy, shows the malleability of theological doctrine when it meets the harsh reality of economic self-interest. Weber tells us that there were complaints about the "greed for profit" of New Englanders as early as 1632, a mere twelve years after the Mayflower landed; if so, that was flatly contradictory to what their leaders were saying.
In practice, any association between radical Protestantism and gung-ho capitalism in England seems more likely to have involved the latter driving the former. We saw above, in the chapter on cities, that the holder of licenses and monopolies from the crown under the monarchy were often Catholic, or at least the association was firmly embedded in the eyes of many of those excluded from the privileged elite. So it is not surprising that the smaller merchants and manufacturers would be more comfortable with the religion that also challenged the primacy of Rome.
English Puritanism was strong among small manufacturers of clothing and other goods and in the more economically advanced parts of the country, in and around London and in East Anglia. Indeed, East Anglia was the home of Oliver Cromwell, who became Lord Protector of England during its brief experiment with republicanism. But (as Weber himself accepted) Puritanism changed over time. The more worldly doctrine of the seventeenth-century writers, with their emphasis on hard work and wealth, was much more in line with