False Economy - Alan Beattie [68]
Protestant England and some districts of the Netherlands did indeed flourish from the sixteenth century onward. But there were no large-scale banking, commercial, or industrial activities in seventeenth-century England or the Netherlands that had not already been achieved in the medieval Catholic cities of Lyons and Augsburg, or in such northern Italian states as Venice and Florence. As we saw in the chapter on cities, those Italian city-states during the Renaissance developed sophisticated prototypes of the toolbox of modern capitalism.
Weber's analysis has not aged well in the century since it appeared. He claimed that at the time of writing (1905) Germans of the Lutheran rather than the Calvinist tradition of Protestantism exhibited an "easygoing congeniality" not to be found in Brits and Americans. "Upon meeting Americans and English, Germans are normally inclined to perceive ... a certain internal constraint, a narrowness of manifest emotional range, and a general inhibitedness," he opined. Today's Germans might be forgiven for finding those characteristics somewhat elusive in contemporary American tourists or visiting English soccer fans.
For fans of the Protestant ethic, the last few decades of the twentieth century must have come as something of a disappointment. Sociologists writing in the Weberian tradition in the 1960s regularly pointed to the underdevelopment of Catholic European countries. They were subsequently undermined by the rapid economic advance of Italy, Spain, and the Republic of Ireland. With the exception of the relative failure of largely Catholic South America (compared with the success of the largely Protestant North American countries), Protestant economic superiority over its Catholic counterpart is an increasingly hard thesis to stand by.
So often are such analyses proved wrong that they struggle to rise above the status of ad hoc rationalizations of current events. Other familiar targets in the past were the religious and cultural traditions of Asia, chiefly Hinduism and Confucianism. An Australian expert invited by the Japanese government in 1915 to assess the country's economic prospects concluded: "Japan commercially, I regret to say, does not bear the best reputation for executing business. ... My impression as to your cheap labour was soon disillusioned when I saw your people at work. No doubt they are lowly paid, but the return is equally so; to see your men at work made me feel that you are a very satisfied easy-going race who reckon time is no object. When I spoke to some managers they informed me that it was impossible to change the habits of national heritage."
Once again, psychology of dubious merit has been deployed to explain why a particular tradition is incompatible with economic growth. In the case of Asian religions, critics often draw on a distinction made by anthropologists. In "guilt societies," governed by religions like Christianity, the norms governing social interaction are internalized within the individual. In "shame societies," inspired by Eastern religions and philosophies like Confucianism, the disapproval of the wider community enforces good behavior. By providing a monitoring mechanism embedded within the self, so the theory goes, guilt societies are better at giving their members the sense of drive and endeavor needed for a flourishing capitalist society.
It sounds vaguely plausible, but, like the Protestant-Catholic distinction, it has recently rather foundered on the rocky coast of fact. Along with those