We investigate the thesis widely credited to Max Weber that Protestantism contributed to the rise of industrial capitalism by estimating the associations between the percentage of Protestants and the development of industrial capitalism in European countries in the mid- to late nineteenth century. Development is measured using five sets of variables, including measures of wealth and savings, the founding date of the principal stock exchange, extension of the railroads network, distribution of the male labor force in agriculture and in industry, and infant mortality. On the basis of this evidence, there is little empirical support for what we call the "Common Interpretation" of Weber's The Protestant Ethic, namely the idea that the strength of Protestantism in a country was associated with the early development of industrial capitalism. The origin of the Common Interpretation and its popular success are probably derived largely from selected anecdotal evidence fortified, through retrospective imputation, by the perceived well-being of contemporary Protestant countries.

The Beloved Myth: Protestantism and the Rise of Industrial Capitalism in Nineteenth-Century Europe

Nations can vary greatly in their wealth, democratic rights and the wellbeing of their citizens. These gaps are often obvious, and by studying the flow of immigration one can easily predict people's wants and needs. But why are there also large differences in the level of education indicating disparities in cognitive ability? How are they related to a country's economic, political and cultural development? Researchers in the paradigms of economics, psychology, sociology, evolution and cultural studies have tried to find answers for these hotly debated issues. In this book, Heiner Rindermann establishes a new model: the emergence of a burgher-civic world, supported by long-term background factors, furthered education and thinking. The burgher-civic world initiated a reciprocal development changing society and culture, resulting in past and present cognitive capital and wealth differences. This is an important text for graduate students and researchers in a wide range of fields, including economics, psychology, sociology and political science, and those working on economic growth, human capital formation and cognitive development.

Cognitive Capitalism: Human Capital and the Wellbeing of Nations

Capitalists in Spite of Themselves Elite Conflict and Economic Transitions in Early Modern Europe

The Spirit of SpeculationJohn Law and Economic Theology in the Age of Lights

It has been perhaps half a century since an historian could make a reputation by solemnly affirming, against the established nineteenth-century belief, the congeniality of history to eighteenth-century thinking. Hence the familiar, unrevised approach to eighteenth-century historiography is not the archaic notion of its essentially anti-historical character but rather the subsequent scheme, popularized by Carl Becker in the early 1930s, which acknowledged the importance of “the new history” in the philosophes ' “heavenly city.” According to this scheme, “the new history” was an integral production of the philosophes ' intellectual enterprise because it was “philosophy teaching by example”—because, that is, it was associated with the philosophes ' own religiosity, which was negatively related to the traditional doctrine of a Christian dispensation.

Benjamin Nelson

Papers

The bourgeois: Catholicism vs. capitalism in eighteenth-century France