Is the Protestant Work Ethic mostly a Calvinist thing?

A cultural departure from this original thread.

Note that Protestant Work Ethic isn't something that there's a hard and fast definition for, more like a cultural stereotype that Max Weber came up with and analyzed. I just ask this because I read an article that talks about how modern Germany isn't so keen to help out the rest of Europe because of its Lutheran roots. However, I wonder if what we associate with Protestant Work Ethic is more of a Calvinist- specifically, English Puritan- thing, and that North Germans were always frugal and hard-working, even before the Reformation. Certainly, Luther did help popularize the idea of occupation as vocation, but I'd think Jean Calvin and the Calvinists emphasized it more than Luther and the Lutherans did.
 

fi11222

Banned
A cultural departure from this original thread.

Note that Protestant Work Ethic isn't something that there's a hard and fast definition for, more like a cultural stereotype that Max Weber came up with and analyzed. I just ask this because I read an article that talks about how modern Germany isn't so keen to help out the rest of Europe because of its Lutheran roots. However, I wonder if what we associate with Protestant Work Ethic is more of a Calvinist- specifically, English Puritan- thing, and that North Germans were always frugal and hard-working, even before the Reformation. Certainly, Luther did help popularize the idea of occupation as vocation, but I'd think Jean Calvin and the Calvinists emphasized it more than Luther and the Lutherans did.
The idea of a work ethic tied to religion is much older than protestantism. In the Middle Ages, it was part of the monastic creed to say: "Orare est Laborare, Laborare est Orare", which means: "prayer is work and work is prayer".

In many ways, protestantism is the generalization of the monastic ideal to the whole of society.
 
I'm not entirely sure I buy wholely into that 'Protestant Work Ethic' thing. In the sense that it's unique to Protestants. I think most subsistence farmers and labourers, pretty much everyone in agriculture, works damned hard. Perhaps its time we re-evaluated Weber.
 
I'm not entirely sure I buy wholely into that 'Protestant Work Ethic' thing. In the sense that it's unique to Protestants. I think most subsistence farmers and labourers, pretty much everyone in agriculture, works damned hard. Perhaps its time we re-evaluated Weber.

Those positions work hard (especially sustenance farmers) in developing and underdeveloped parts of the world and in the past because they have to; the idea of the Protestant Work Ethic was more based not on the backbreaking, fundamentally required labor, but on other less labor intensive jobs or forms of agriculture where you don't actually have to exhaust yourself and do it all the time to survive; in short the basic idea of the 'Protestant Work Ethic' was working more than you have to and/or doing what it takes to get the job done in a good quality, efficient and timely manner.
 
I don't think there's such a thing as "protestant work ethic", either.

It's more the fact that the European countries where the bourgeois (who "worked") first achieved political prominence in their struggle with the nobility (who didn't work, and prized themselves on that) were protestant. Hence, the public perception of "what one should aspire to" shifted from a noble's life of leisure/warfare/administration to a bourgeois’s life of "work".
 

Deimos

Banned
Protestant work ethic is more of a coincidental thing than a true part of protestatism.
What Max Weber was describing was the syllogismus practicus - the idea that (sometimes) wealth and success could be seen as divine blessing and would affirm that the one receiving it is among the elect and not the reprobates. That came about because Calvin and his followers wanted to encourage good works and self-improvement while also keeping the doctrine of sola fide and no justification through works. Weber argued that such an outward sign of being saved meant that it was highly sought after and as a result the Calvinists outclassed their peers.

The problem with this is that the data Max Weber was using was highly skewed to support that idea. The Dutch were good traders and seafarers before Calvinism and surely could have achieved their wealth even without that specific denomination.
The Puritans in England were never a accurate representation of society. Puritans were disproportionally middle and upper class and furthermore for a certain time they were banned from holding public offices and were consequently forced to direct their interests toward being merchants, manufacturers and scholars.

The Industrial Revolution might have started in a country with a lot of Calvinists but the Catholics in Wallonia and in West Germany proved to be similarly adept at it.
 
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The Protestant work ethic is mainly a thing that could be said to be lacking in Catholics and various non-Christians, to help explain/justify the success of predominately Protestant states.
 

fi11222

Banned
Why are so many people so uneasy about the protestant work ethic ?

Have we become lazy ? Or ist it a rejection of something on a deeper level ?

By the way, the fact that protestants had a specific work ethic is obvious to anyone not biased for some reason. I am using the word "had" purposefully here ...
 
We have regions in Europe where Catholics and Protestants lived side-by-side does anyone have date Protestant Swiss worked hard than Catholic ones, that hungarian protestants in Transylvania worked harder than Catholics ones etc.
 
Those positions work hard (especially sustenance farmers) in developing and underdeveloped parts of the world and in the past because they have to; the idea of the Protestant Work Ethic was more based not on the backbreaking, fundamentally required labor, but on other less labor intensive jobs or forms of agriculture where you don't actually have to exhaust yourself and do it all the time to survive; in short the basic idea of the 'Protestant Work Ethic' was working more than you have to and/or doing what it takes to get the job done in a good quality, efficient and timely manner.

Again, I'm skeptical. This sounds like 'work smarter not harder' truisms. I think Weber overlooked the existence of capital for investment, technology, better tools, plants etc. I am inclined to suspect that Weber overstated his thesis to impute a sort of 'moral superiority' into virtuous hardworking protestants over lazy Catholics by ignoring a lot of underlying factors.
 

Cueg

Banned
I can't get into specifics at the moment, but how do proponents of this theory explain sub-Saharan Africa? You know, that war-torn region that, by all metrics, is one of the poorest on this Earth. Why didn't the 300 million Protestants that live there turn it into an indistral paradise?
 
It's been a while, but my memory is that Weber's original formulation did indeed view it as mostly a Calvinist thing.
 
My theory is that it isn't protestantism that created a Protestant work ethic, but the people who were attracted protestantism had a work ethic.

Or more exactly, the people who were attracted to protestantism were the rising citizen class*, basicly the people who weren't part of the (higher) nobility or clergy. Basicly the urban population who was making money, but were often still a second class of citizen next to the higher nobility. Protestantism was a way to freedom, to think for themselves and not listen to the clergy or the nobility. So it was often these people who became protestants and already had the work ethic.
 

Cueg

Banned
My theory is that it isn't protestantism that created a Protestant work ethic, but the people who were attracted protestantism had a work ethic.

Or more exactly, the people who were attracted to protestantism were the rising citizen class*, basicly the people who weren't part of the (higher) nobility or clergy. Basicly the urban population who was making money, but were often still a second class of citizen next to the higher nobility. Protestantism was a way to freedom, to think for themselves and not listen to the clergy or the nobility. So it was often these people who became protestants and already had the work ethic.

I was under the impression that Protestasim was the mechanism by which the nobility acquired[
power. They broke away from the Catholic church and claimed authority from God There were plenty of heretical Catholic movements through history. The movement of Luther differed in that it had the backing of the nobility everywhere it thrived. Everywhere it didn't, it was quickly snuffed out like all the heresies before it.
 
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Deimos

Banned
My theory is that it isn't protestantism that created a Protestant work ethic, but the people who were attracted protestantism had a work ethic.

Or more exactly, the people who were attracted to protestantism were the rising citizen class*, basicly the people who weren't part of the (higher) nobility or clergy. Basicly the urban population who was making money, but were often still a second class of citizen next to the higher nobility. Protestantism was a way to freedom, to think for themselves and not listen to the clergy or the nobility. So it was often these people who became protestants and already had the work ethic.
That is another good observation. it is ofte forgotten that Protestantism was a movement that usually began in towns and cities and only gradually spread to the countryside.
The French protestants who fled France because of persecutions, for example, were usually better skilled workers and more educated than the average population of the countries they emigrated to. Their success can be explained by an advantage in skills they accumulated not because they believed in a certain way but because the surrounding culture forced them to become prosperous enough to become indispensable to the Catholic majority. However, that did ultimately not work in France.
 
I was under the impression that Protestasim was the mechanism by which the nobility acquired[
power. They broke away from the Catholic church and claimed authority from God There were plenty of heretical Catholic movements through history. The movement of Luther differed in that it had the backing of the nobility everywhere it thrived. Everywhere it didn't, it was quickly snuffed out like all the heresies before it.


I know I generalize a bit, but my guess is that you're thinking about Lutheranism and Pompejus is thinking about Calvinism.
 
My theory is that it isn't protestantism that created a Protestant work ethic, but the people who were attracted protestantism had a work ethic.

Or more exactly, the people who were attracted to protestantism were the rising citizen class*, basicly the people who weren't part of the (higher) nobility or clergy. Basicly the urban population who was making money, but were often still a second class of citizen next to the higher nobility. Protestantism was a way to freedom, to think for themselves and not listen to the clergy or the nobility. So it was often these people who became protestants and already had the work ethic.

IDK, most Protestant states had laws penalising the wrong sorts of Christian just as much as the Catholics did. It's not really clear that someone in Protestant England or Calvinist Geneva would have had any more freedom of thought than someone in Catholic France or Italy.
 
Why are so many people so uneasy about the protestant work ethic ?

Have we become lazy ? Or ist it a rejection of something on a deeper level ?

By the way, the fact that protestants had a specific work ethic is obvious to anyone not biased for some reason. I am using the word "had" purposefully here ...

Wow. Ha.

One would think, since it's so obvious, that it would also be easy to prove by providing evidence. I invite you to do so.
 
Again, I'm skeptical. This sounds like 'work smarter not harder' truisms. I think Weber overlooked the existence of capital for investment, technology, better tools, plants etc. I am inclined to suspect that Weber overstated his thesis to impute a sort of 'moral superiority' into virtuous hardworking protestants over lazy Catholics by ignoring a lot of underlying factors.

And the big one: literacy, which actually does slightly correlate to Protestantism (and Judaism) (note that I wrote about correlation and not causation). But yes, modern-day “protestant work ethic” is basically “white man's burden”: an ex-post justification for racism.

(Some of the reasons for Germany's tightly closed purse are probably due to demographics or memories of hyperinflation or reunification).
 
Wow. Ha.

One would think, since it's so obvious, that it would also be easy to prove by providing evidence. I invite you to do so.

The protestant work ethic is nothing more than socially accepted bigotry, in the very fringes of outright racism. Northern european media loved mentioning it during the worst times of the financial crisis.

If you said "Of course those africans are poor, they lack my white man working ethic", you would be a racist. But you can totally say "Of course those southern european catholics are poort, they lack my protestant work ethic" and not only get away with it, it will be accepted as the truth.
 
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