The Protestant Ethic in Protestant Thought
| DOI | 10.1177/1474885106067283 |
| Date | 01 October 2006 |
| Author | Gangolf Hübinger |
| Published date | 01 October 2006 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
The Protestant Ethic in Protestant
EJPT
Thought
European Journal
Max Weber in Protestant Memory
of Political Theory
© SAGE Publications Ltd,
London, Thousand Oaks
and New Delhi
Gangolf Hübinger
issn 1474-8851, 5(4) 455–468
[DOI: 10.1177/1474885106067283]
Europa-Universität Viadrina, Frankfurt
Translation: Gordon C. Wells
Editor’s Note
It is now one hundred years since the publication of Max Weber’s essays that were to
become known collectively as ‘The Protestant Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism’.
This article marks this event. Recent scholarship has made it impossible to ignore the
complexity of Weber’s original text, the history of its reception, and the political and
religious context within which it was written. The Protestant Ethic is, in an important
sense, a political text that seems to possess ‘eternal youth’. (Peter Lassman)
With his great ‘essay in cultural history’, Max Weber pioneered new ways of
thinking about Protestantism. But did the publication of the Protestant ethic
thesis also shape the view of history held by Protestants? If so, in what way has
Protestant thinking been affected by the thesis? The particular question that
needs to be asked is: what political aim has Protestantism pursued in its dealings
with the Protestant ethic thesis in the course of the 20th century? In what follows,
I shall be discussing this hitherto neglected aspect of Weber’s most frequently
quoted work. For reasons of space I shall concentrate on developments in
Germany.
We know that Max Weber regarded his study of the significance of Puritanism
for the origin of the spirit of capitalism as an exemplary demonstration of ‘how
ideas become effective in history’.1 Accordingly, in a letter to Heinrich Rickert,
Weber declared that his Protestant Ethic would be an ‘essay in cultural history’.2
This amounted to an interesting offer to German cultural Protestantism in par-
ticular, and it was one that went beyond the confines of scholarly discourse. Since
the era of Max Weber, the term ‘cultural Protestantism’ has been used to describe
Contact address: Gangolf Hübinger, Europa-Universität Viadrina, Frankfurt (Oder),
Postfach 1786, D-1786, D-15207 Frankfurt (Oder), Germany.
Email: huebinger@euv-ffo-o.de
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European Journal of Political Theory 5(4)
the Protestant mode of thought that seeks to be ‘in tune with the entire cultural
development of our time’.3 It is a mode of thought that seeks to be a part of
modern social sciences and aims to transform theology into a historical science of
culture (Martin Rade). The claim to explain the origin and structure of the
modern world through a constructive connection between theology and sociology
has helped to give Max Weber and the ‘Protestant ethic’ ‘eternal youth’ in
Protestant historical discourse, for in the course of the 20th century it is not only
the theological and sociological ways of explaining modernity that have changed.
The relationship between theological and social science explanations of the world
has also been changing.
In a significant way, then, with his essays on the sociology of religion, Max
Weber stands between ‘history and memory’. The new history of science empha-
sizes this. History as empirical research sees itself hypothetically, and is subject to
the rules of verification through a critical study of the sources; history as memory
sees itself in absolute terms and serves individual or collective self-assurance and
identity formation. Of course, these two objects are not strictly speaking oppo-
sites, but are in a relationship of tension with each other. On the one hand, Max
Weber is one of the modern classics of scientific modelling for the analysis of the
constellation of social structures, political orders and cultural orientation. At the
same time he is also one of the prominent ‘lieux de mémoire’ (Pierre Nora) in the
Protestant culture of memory. I propose to examine this situation and the ques-
tion of how the Protestant Ethic has brought it about. I shall do so by means of
three exemplary observations from three periods of time. The first is concerned
with the stimulus that Weber gave to the cultural Protestantism of his time, the
‘classical modern’ era (I). Then Weber takes on a new role in the debates regard-
ing the position of the Federal Republic of Germany in the process of western
modernization in the 1960s (II). Finally, in the last twenty years the ‘light of the
great cultural problems’ has moved on.4 Weber and the ‘Protestantism theses’
have been placed in the new situation of globalization and cultural plurality,
European expansion and the structural changes of industrial society (III).
I
Max Weber’s cultural history of the Puritan ethic in its relationship to the capital-
ist economic ethos was not a success story for the Protestant culture of memory as
a whole; and this should come as no surprise. When it appeared in complete form
in June 1905, it did, however, fascinate an academic elite that was interested in
enhancing the status of the comparative history of religion and critical dogmatics.
Weber himself remained active in this narrowly defined cultural Protestant milieu
right up to the time of his death. He was influential in the leading Protestant
political circles, notably the Evangelical Social Congress (Evangelisch-sozialer
Kongress), and especially the Association for Social Policy (Verein für Sozial-
456
politik). The (mainly Protestant) Progressive People’s Party (Fortschrittliche
Hübinger: The Protestant Ethic
Volkspartei) looked upon him as an authoritative figure and after the end of the
war he was an election campaigner for the German Democratic Party (DDP), the
party of left-of-centre middle-class Protestantism.
Less well known is the fact that before the war Weber was involved in the
project for an encyclopedia on the classification of cultural Protestant knowledge.
Since 1900, the leading cultural Protestant university publisher, J.C.B. Mohr in
Tübingen, had been planning a large-scale encyclopedia. In 1905 the project
came closer to fruition; the work was to be entitled ‘Religion in History and the
Present Day’ (Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart, or RGG). Max Weber offered
to take on the editorship of the ‘social science’ section. Then, however, in the
summer of 1905, he delegated this task to Gottfried Traub, the Protestant pastor
and Liberal politician. Traub is one of three colleagues who helped to give special
prominence to Weber’s theses within the Protestant press. The other two were
Friedrich Naumann and Ernst Troeltsch. It was the role of Gottfried Traub to
enhance the semantic significance of the term ‘capitalism’. Developing the theme
of his book which bore the title Ethics and Capitalism,5 Traub authored the article
on ‘Capitalism’ for the RGG. In it, demonstrating a mastery of current issues in
social science, he wrote:
It was precisely the increase in the population that gave new momentum to the mechanism
of economic development, and what had recently been brought about by the economic
boom and its technological advances became, in the next moment, the cause of a new
increase. To understand the economic expansion that occurred in the progress toward
capitalism, many interconnected factors: machines, technology, scientific knowledge,
freedom of trade, private ownership and population increase, have to be taken into
account. Of course, we must not underestimate the importance of political factors (e.g. the
various revolutionary periods), religious movements (e.g. Calvinism), philosophical ideas
(e.g. Hegel, Feuerbach, Marx). When considering the historical development of capitalism,
it seems to us a futile over-simplification to try to single out one phenomenon as the cause
of all the others.6
There is a cross-reference to the key concept of ‘Calvinism’ and Max Weber:
It is no co-incidence that the countries where Calvinism first flourished have today become
the countries with the most highly developed capitalist economic systems. Calvinism
proved to have a profound effect on the development of economic life, as we see from the
way, through its ethic, based on the idea of predestination, it helped to create the
foundations of capitalism in the Netherlands, England and North America. We have Max
Weber to thank for having discovered these links.7
It was one of the most important contributions of the former pastor Friedrich
Naumann during the Kaiserreich to have brought together religious Liberalism
and political Liberalism into a dialogue that was revitalizing for both sides.
Like Max Weber, Naumann too argued from a central position. Wolfgang J.
Mommsen has even claimed that Naumann’s political influence derived from the
fact that he always adopted Max Weber’s position five years after Weber himself.8
I should just like to quote one passage as evidence that this observation is prob-
ably largely correct. In 1911 Naumann wrote in the Neue Rundschau, published by
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European Journal of Political Theory 5(4)
S. Fischer, the most important journal of the ‘classical modern’ era in Germany,
an article entitled ‘Cultural History and Capitalism’. It is not without significance
that the title is Weberian. Naumann assigns to cultural history the task of exam-
ining ‘the nature and origin of capitalism’:
Something amazing is sweeping over the earth, a supra-national life community, a new way
of being human....
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