The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

In Escape from Freedom, Erich Fromm argues that people do not know what to do with their freedom. Man fought for freedom from nature, the church and the state. When man won that fight, he found himself isolated, powerless and alone in the world. The safety, security and belonging that older systems provided were gone. Man was now responsible for his own life. It was too much to handle. So man sought escape through submission to an authoritarian figure, through destructiveness, or through automaton conformity.

The compulsion to work is a common escape. Fromm ties this to Protestantism, drawing on Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. He makes his psychological case with an abridged version of Weber's observations. I read Weber to understand socioeconomic change.

Weber says the Reformation changed society. The change started with Martin Luther. The German priest argued that everyone has a calling in life, and that God assigns it. A calling took the form of work. You were to do that work as well as you could, while staying in the station God gave you. That second half kept Luther close to the traditionalist view. Fulfilling the calling was your obligation to God. That mindset gave work a holiness once reserved for the monastery. Your work was God's work. Doing it made you righteous.

John Calvin also believed that everyone has a calling. He went further, and grounded it in predestination. Calvin asserted that your fate is written before you are born. The elect will be saved, the rest will not. You can never know for sure where you fall. But your work offers a clue.

For Calvin, the calling becomes a command to labour for God's glory. If another job is more useful, more productive or more profitable, changing is legitimate. If Providence puts a lawful chance at greater profit in front of you, refusing it means refusing God. Profit-seeking became a form of worship.

Calvin also held that you are not supposed to enjoy the money. The Puritans treated art, sport, culture and leisure as sinful indulgence. Pious people worked hard and rested on Sunday. Weber calls this combination of hard work and self-denial "worldly asceticism."

Worldly asceticism fed capitalism. Work hard, profit, save instead of consume, reinvest, produce more, profit more, repeat. A traditionalist would have called the profit motive avarice. Calvinists and other Puritans called it a duty to God. Success in your work was a sign that God had written success into your life, and that you stood among the elect.

Then religion dropped away. The shift Weber describes began in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. He published The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism at the start of the 20th. By then, he argues, the cycle of work, profit, save, reinvest, produce more, profit more had become a way of living that owed nothing to predestination.

People did not set out to invent capitalism. They set out to lead lives devoted to God. Luther and Calvin turned work into the primary form of devotion. In Calvinism it spurred a compulsive activity that laid the foundations of capitalism. The religious element faded. The economic element stayed.

Back in Escape from Freedom, Fromm treats predestination as a source of uncertainty and anxiety that people could not bear. They worked the anxiety away. Like Weber, he watched something religious harden into a default way of living. Fromm asks whether the compulsion to work reflects what people want, or whether they have swallowed social pressure and economic motive whole.

Instead of consciously submitting to someone, you internalize society's expectations until they feel like your own desires. You want the promotion. You want to be productive. You feel guilty doing nothing. You measure yourself by achievement. Nobody has to force you to work. You have adopted the character the economic system requires. This is Fromm's third mechanism of escape: automaton conformity.

Modern people have escaped many external authorities without gaining positive freedom. The person who cannot stop working looks independent and self-directed while taking orders from a command he has swallowed. The boss no longer needs to stand over him; the boss is now inside him.