Five-minute digest
Religion and the Rise of Capitalism
Summary
Religion and the Rise of Capitalism is a historical study, first given as the Henry Scott Holland Memorial Lectures in 1922, of how Christian thought about economic life changed between the late Middle Ages and the early eighteenth century. Tawney's question is how a society that once judged trade, lending and prices by moral and religious standards came to treat economic activity as a self-governing realm ruled by impersonal laws. Chapter I, The Medieval Background, describes society as the medieval writers saw it: a body of unequal members with different functions, all serving a common end. Avarice was a deadly sin; the just price, the ban on usury and the condemnation of speculators and middlemen applied that view to the market. Tawney admires the coherence of this teaching while recording the gap between it and actual practice, and remarks that the true heir of Aquinas's doctrine of value is the labour theory of value. Chapter II, The Continental Reformers, sets the Reformation against the commercial revolution of the sixteenth century, centred on Antwerp, with new banking, rising prices and international finance. Luther, in Tawney's account, met these forces with a peasant's suspicion of commerce and the old denunciations of usury, while his separation of inner faith from outward works left him without a practical social program. Calvin, by contrast, accepted commerce and moderate interest, and built in Geneva a discipline that sought to bring every department of life under the rule of religion. Chapter III, The Church of England, follows the Tudor and Stuart Church through enclosures, the sale of monastic lands and the preaching of Latimer and others against greedy landlords, to the paternal social policy of Laud, and then the retreat of the Church from economic questions after the Civil War. Chapter IV, The Puritan Movement, is the heart of the book and its engagement with Max Weber. Tawney grants that Puritan teaching on the calling, diligence and thrift fostered the economic virtues, but insists that Puritanism contained both a collective discipline and an individualism, and that economic change shaped religion as much as religion shaped economics. By the late seventeenth century, he argues, writers such as Richard Baxter and later commercial moralists honoured industry as a religious duty, while poverty came to be seen as a sign of idleness rather than a claim on charity. The Conclusion sums up: the medieval Church's attempt to subordinate economic appetites to moral ends was often corrupt in practice but noble in aim, and Tawney closes with his own judgment that a society treating wealth as the supreme end cannot be called Christian. The library text is the 1926 American edition (Harcourt, Brace), dedicated to Bishop Charles Gore, with Tawney's notes and index.
Top Lessons
Economics was once a branch of ethics
Tawney shows that medieval and early Reformation writers judged prices, loans and wages by moral law and the common good, and that the idea of an autonomous economy governed by its own laws is comparatively recent. Readers learn to see that the boundaries between religion and economics have a history.
The calling and the economic virtues
Puritan preachers taught that every Christian must labour diligently in a lawful calling chosen before God, and Tawney credits this teaching with forming habits of industry, thrift and sobriety. He also argues that over time the same teaching could make success a mark of virtue and poverty a mark of fault.
History is more tangled than any single thesis
Against a simple reading of Weber, Tawney insists that Puritanism contained both a collectivist discipline and an individualism, and that economic change shaped religious thought as much as the reverse. He models careful historical judgment about causes.
Judging the past by its aims
Tawney grants that medieval discipline was often corrupt in practice, but asks that people be judged by their reach as well as their grasp. He treats the old moralists with respect while recording their failures.
Verified Quotes
Frequently cited
“The true descendant of the doctrines of Aquinas is the labor theory of value. The last of the Schoolmen was Karl Marx.”
“So merciless is the tyranny of economic appetites, so prone to self-aggrandizement the empire of economic interests, that a doctrine which confines them to their proper sphere, as the servant, not the master, of civilization, may reasonably be regarded as among the pregnant truisms which are a permanent element in any sane philosophy.”
Frequently cited
“It was a creed which sought, not merely to purify the individual, but to reconstruct Church and State, and to renew society by penetrating every department of life, public as well as private, with the influence of religion.”
“In every human soul there is a socialist and an individualist, an authoritarian and a fanatic for liberty, as in each there is a Catholic and a Protestant.”
“The calling is not a condition in which the individual is born, but a strenuous and exacting enterprise, to be undertaken, indeed, under the guidance of Providence, but to be chosen by each man for himself, with a deep sense of his solemn responsibilities.”
“The garrison had discovered that the invading host of economic appetites was, not an enemy, but an ally.”
“men are to be judged by their reach as well as by their grasp--by the ends at which they aim as well as by the success with which they attain them.”
Frequently cited
“Compromise is as impossible between the Church of Christ and the idolatry of wealth, which is the practical religion of capitalist societies, as it was between the Church and the State idolatry of the Roman Empire.”
Medical Lens
The book has no medical content; the chapter title The New Medicine for Poverty is a metaphor for changing attitudes to poor relief.