Did Religion Invent Capitalism? Weber’s Most Controversial Thesis | Philosophy Podcast

Описание: 🎧 This episode (24:06) dives into one of the most influential—and endlessly contested—arguments in modern social theory: Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. It’s not a story about greed or technology. It’s a story about how a moral universe can generate an economic one.

Weber’s claim is sharp: modern capitalism didn’t emerge only from markets and machines, but from a specific religious discipline of life—especially within Puritan (above all Calvinist) forms of Protestantism. Here, work is not merely a means to live. It becomes a moral duty, a calling, a test of seriousness before God. Economic success can appear as a possible sign of grace—yet only under a strict condition: no hedonism, no luxury, no soft self-indulgence. The result is a distinctive character type: methodical, restrained, future-oriented—capable of rational organization, systematic reinvestment, and an ethic of self-control.

But the episode also tracks the fault-lines: Weber’s thesis has been criticized, revised, attacked, and defended for over a century. Was Protestantism truly a condition for capitalism—or merely one factor among many (law, politics, cities, colonial trade, accounting, state power)? The deeper question is more unsettling: even if religion fades, does its discipline remain—reappearing as a secular norm inside modern work culture?

🚩 In this episode:
– what Weber actually argues about Protestantism and capitalism
– the “spirit of capitalism” as a moral attitude, not an economic system
– work as a vocation and religious obligation
– inner-worldly asceticism: discipline, restraint, anti-luxury
– traditional earning vs modern rationalized labor
– major critiques of Weber and the Calvinism controversy
– religious roots of modern economic mentality

✦ Core Idea:
For Weber, capitalism is not a purely economic fact—it’s a historical outcome of a particular ethos. Rational labor organization, discipline, systematic accumulation, and restrained consumption grow out of religious tension between duty and salvation. And even when religion recedes, its ethos can survive—no longer as faith, but as a secular law of the workplace.

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💬 Question for you:
Does contemporary capitalism still run on a religious ethos—transformed into secular discipline—or has it become a fully detached, self-accelerating machine?

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