The Protestant Work Ethic: Why Catholics are Lazy and Protestants Hardworking

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The Key Message

Actually, Weber's idea is quite simple: He saw at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries that the countries with a Protestant tradition were much more successful than the nations with a Catholic tradition. 

England was booming, while Spain slid from economic crisis to economic crisis. The USA was preparing to become a world power, while at the same time, much of Latin America did not even have a functioning infrastructure. Prussia had a flourishing industry, and factory owners traveled to rural Bavaria for their summer retreats. What did England, the USA and Prussia all have in common? Correct, they were predominantly Protestant! While on the other hand, Spain, Latin America and Bavaria were Catholic. And from this, Weber concluded that religion must play a role in economic life.

Of course, there was no such thing as God's grace behind his thesis! Max Weber was perhaps no atheist, but he was certainly agnostic and in other words, the afterlife to him could not be proven. But perhaps, it was not any God who influenced the success of his believers but a view of life, a kind of ethics connected to religion. And indeed, he found something in Calvin's doctrinal edifice.

Calvin, in fact, taught that those who are justified before God will already have success in this life. This is called the doctrine of predestination. This word is derived from the Latin praedestinare (= to determine in advance). In this, Calvin related two generally recognized attributes of God: God is both omniscient and just. Since God is omniscient, he knows which believers will prove themselves, and since he is just, he will provide them with a good life while on earth. 

Such an assertion had to have an effect on every believer! For instance, if my salvation is measured by how well I am doing, then I must do everything to achieve this good life! 

Weber associated this philosophy of life with the Huguenots, Calvinists, Methodists, Quakers, Baptists and Pietists. Calvin reasoned – that they all dealt with the new possibilities of early capitalism quite differently than Catholics. According to Weber, this is supported by the fact that in many countries influenced by the Protestant faith use words for work such as "vocation" which is used to reference both a profession and a calling. In other words, earning a living through a profession was equated with worship by members of these faiths.

On top of all this, Protestants seemed to have little or no use for Catholic pomp and ceremony. Thus, instead of spending their money on useless objects and pleasures, they accumulated wealth and put it back into the market as capital. As a result, resources were available in abundance for large enterprises of every kind and those small fortunes invested over time became large fortunes. The Protestant-influenced nations simply climbed to the top of the economic world.

Of course, Weber's theses have long been refuted today and in every conceivable way. Nevertheless, Weber is still one of the most cited sociologists when it comes to explaining why a small number of the world’s population has become rich while the world’s overall majority has remained poor.  

Just Who was this Max Weber?

Max Weber was born in 1864 into a family descended from Huguenots on both his father's and mother's side. In other words, when Max Weber describes the Protestant work ethic, he has in mind ideals he himself grew up with. His father was a lawyer and since 1872 a Reichstag deputy in the National Liberal Party. As such, the eight-year-old listened attentively to discussions about the politics of the day around his family‘s dinner table.  

Above all, he heard what the wealthy bourgeoisie had expected from the state. His uncle Carl David was one of the largest and most successful manufacturers of fine linen in Germany. He produced tablecloths, napkins and bed covers which were exported all over the world and in a market with relatively few competitors.  

For the Weber family, the economy was the center of the state as Adam Smith had claimed. Care of the poor was part of this model, but should not be regulated by the state. Carl David Weber, for example, financed a hospital and supported the construction of a synagogue. This offers us a perfect example of just how wealthy the family was which Max Weber came from.

Coming from such a prosperous family, Weber could have leaned back and lived off his father's fortune in peace, but his upbringing stood in the way and he didn’t know the meaning of idleness. Weber studied law, national economics, philosophy, theology and history in Heidelberg, Strasbourg, Göttingen and Berlin and at the age of 25, he earned his doctorate. At 28 he habilitated and was immediately appointed as a lecturer at University and at 29, he received an extraordinary professorship at the Friedrich-Wilhelms University in Bonn. That same year he was elected to the committee of the Verein für Sozialpolitik, (Association for Social Policy) an important society of economists in the German-speaking area, he joined the Altdeutscher Verband (Old German Society) and also married. So, in addition to his family and university duties, Weber was also involved in politics, where his day must have been more than full with activity. At 30, he was appointed to Freiburg and at 32 to Heidelberg. By 1898 and at the age of 34, the Heidelberg psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin diagnosed him with what today might be called burnout and referenced "neurasthenia from years of overwork". As part of his cure or remedy, Weber took some time off and finally in 1903 gave up his teaching activities for almost two decades.

Of course, that didn't mean he stopped all of his interests and activities. He traveled to the United States for three months, not for recreation but for education. He was still very interested in what Protestant entrepreneurs were getting up to, and this curiosity took him to the slaughterhouses of Chicago for instance. He also met a former student who showed him a very different America.  

W. E. B. Du Bois was a black man paternally descended from a French Huguenot and a Haitian slave. Du Bois was brilliant, to such an extent that Max Weber kicked his hitherto vehemently held theory of the superiority of the Aryan race right into the dustbin. He attended American-Indian schools and Tuskegee University, the oldest African American educational institution in the United States. There he experienced that it was not the colour of a person's skin that determined education and success so, it had to be something else!

A big shot doesn’t just come out of nowhere!

As the 20th century arrived, it was not just Max Weber who sought to reason why it was the West's duty to be the leader of the world. Unlike today, during his lifetime colonization was not perceived as the rape of foreign peoples, but more as a historical undertaking. History so to speak, obliged the superior to rule all the other peoples and help them to acquire the same standards. Quite similar to Darwin's theory Weber’s contemporaries thought that superior races cannot choose whether they displace another race or not. 

Max Weber was a convinced supporter of a Greater Germany and its colonies. He condemned Bismarck's restraint in world politics and would have liked to see the German fleet sailing in all the world's oceans.

As such, Weber was not the first to establish a connection between Protestant religious communities and the rise of the West as Werner Sombart and Ernst Troeltsch did this before him. 

The impetus for Weber's epochal work however, came not just from his trip to the United States, but also from a study published by one of his students. In 1900, Martin Offenbacher published a study on the economic situation of Catholics and Protestants in Baden. He proved that in this Grand Duchy, Protestants had more income and education than Catholics. He showed this statistically and thus simingly irrefutably that Protestants more often occupied leading positions in large-scale industry, more often held commercially-oriented jobs and were represented in greater numbers in the civil service. Catholics on the other hand, were more likely to be found in skilled trades. A question of personal work ethic? Yes, said Max Weber completely ignoring the fact that the Baden Kulturkampf – a conflict between civil government and religious authorities – occurred only a generation ago. The conflict saw Catholics rebel for the first time against their systemic discrimination by Baden's state institutions.

However, Max Weber's ideas did not develop from nowhere. He summarized thoughts floating around clearly and convincingly in two highly regarded treatises. Both totalled only about 160 pages - and, as is well known, the brevity of a work increases the likelihood that it will be read. 

Published in 1904 - Protestant ethics and the "spirit" of capitalism. Part I: The Problem in volume 20 of the journal. Archives of Social Science and Social Policy. Followed in 1905 D Protestant Ethics and the "Spirit" of Capitalism. Part II: The Professional Ethics of Ascetic Protestantism in the same magazine series.

Questionable ideals

Now, at first Weber's work was not perceived with much excitement outside of academia. Of course, professors debated his thesis, but the general public perceived the Heidelberg professor more as a passionate commentator on the politics of the day. Weber vehemently advocated imperialist ideals and colonial policy. He advocated them in lead articles for widely read daily newspapers, at Protestant church congresses, and in his lectures. Indeed, and in 1918 Weber returned once again to teaching, first in Vienna and then in Munich from 1919.

However, some of the things he said then have to be considered questionable today. For example, he defended the murder of Bavarian Prime Minister Kurt Eisner as a brave act but, he also thought that his murderer should have been executed. Not as a punishment or as a deterrent, but to make him a martyr and not the Jewish Social Democrat Eisner.

Max Weber, who of course had not himself seen the misery of the trenches, dreamed of the greatness and nobility of the German nation to the very end as he was a passionate revisionist and rejected the Versailles Peace Treaty. He died in 1920, and one may well ask how scholars would evaluate his work today had he lived until the seizure of power in 1933. He most likely would have shared at least some of the ideals of National Socialism.

Marianne Weber

When the scientist died of pneumonia at the age of 56, he left behind his 50-year-old widow, Marianne Weber, née Schnitger. She was a very special woman for her time, highly intelligent and someone who possessed a similar work ethic as her husband. Weber encouraged her to do something that the social order of the day did not actually approve. She studied philosophy and national economics at the University of Freiburg from 1896; of course, only as a guest student and without the possibility of sitting for any exams.

Instead, she became a published writer and also involved herself in the women's rights movement. She worked on the board of the Federation of German Women's Associations and set up a legal aid office for women. With the end of the First World war came political equality and Marianne Weber actually stood as a candidate to the state parliament of Baden, and was elected. Her inaugural speech in 1919 was the first speech ever delivered by a woman before the Baden state parliament.

But of course she was first and foremost a wife, after all that's what women were back then. This is why she immediately gave up her parliamentary seat when her husband received the call to return to Munich where he died, and Marianne Weber, with her usual efficiency, made his posthumous fame her primary concern.

To this end, she collected his work and published it in such a way that it would readily be available to all. For this specific act, and not for her own achievements(!) - she was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Heidelberg in 1922. In 1926, she published an influential and idealist biography of Max Weber, the veracity of which has been criticized only in the last decade.

The Afterlife of Weber's Theses

After World War II, the USA emerged as the leading nation and in God's Own Country, there were some sociologists who were only too happy to adopt Weber's theses. Talcott Parsons, who had studied national economics at the University of Heidelberg between 1925 and 1927, translated Weber's Protestant Work Ethic into English after World War II. Today, he is considered the most influential theorist of sociology of this era.

Weber's theses seemed to fit too well into the postwar era. The American Dream of being a humble dishwasher and becoming a millionaire through one's own efforts was thus given historical roots. Surely the American way of life had to be connected to the Protestant work ethic! Talcott Parson brought his Weber worship back to Germany, where in 1964 the Heidelberg Sociologists' Day was dedicated to Weber's work.

Today, Weber's thesis is part of general knowledge though, the fact that it has long since been disproved hardly matters. Wikipedia even postulates that Weber's work is probably the most discussed single scientific achievement in the field of sociology, history and cultural studies. Scholars have also criticized Weber's methods, refuted him with historical facts, and questioned his views in his biography and contemporary background.

Nevertheless, Weber's considerations still sound seductively conclusive. But, that's the way it is with populist claims, they sound all the more logical, as long as one spends the least amount of time measuring them against ALL available facts.