Religion and the Rise of Capitalism

I

The Medieval Background

“La miséricorde de Dieu est infinie: elle sauvera même un riche.”

“Que pourrions-nous gagner,” once wrote a celebrated economist, “à recueillir des opinions absurdes, des doctrines décriées, et qui méritent de l’être? Il serait à la fois inutile et fastidieux de les exhumer.”1 One who studies the development of social theory can hardly hope to avoid the criticism which is brought against those who disturb the dust in forgotten lumber-rooms. If he seeks an excuse beyond his own curiosity, he may find it, perhaps, in the reflection that the past reveals to the present what the present is capable of seeing, and that the face which to one age is a blank may to another be pregnant with meaning. Writing when economic science was in the first flush of its dogmatic youth, it was natural that Say should dismiss as an unprofitable dilettantism an interest in the speculations of ages unillumined by the radiance of the new Gospel. But to determine the significance of opinion is, perhaps, not altogether so simple a matter as he supposed. Since the brave days when Torrens could say of Political Economy, “Twenty years hence there will scarcely exist a doubt respecting any of its fundamental principles,”2 how many confident certainties have been undermined! How many doctrines once dismissed as the emptiest of superstitions have revealed an unsuspected vitality!

The attempt to judge economic activity and social organization by ethical criteria raises problems which are eternal, and it is possible that a study of the thought of an age when that attempt was made, if with little success, at least with conviction and persistence, may prove, even today, not wholly without instruction. In the present century, the old issues seem, indeed, to have acquired a new actuality. The philosophy which would keep economic interests and ethical idealism safely locked up in their separate compartments finds that each of the prisoners is increasingly restive. On the one hand, it is evident that the whole body of regulations, by which modern societies set limits to the free play of economic self-interest, implies the acceptance, whether deliberate or unconscious, of moral standards, by reference to which certain kinds of economic conduct are pronounced illegitimate. On the other hand, there are indications that religious thought is no longer content to dismiss the transactions of business and the institutions of society as matters irrelevant to the life of the spirit.