The Protestant work ethic — also known as the "Puritan work ethic" — is a biblically based teaching on the necessity of hard work, perfection and the goodness of labor. Protestant preachers preached on the goodness and the necessity of labor and its efficacious effect for humans personally and on Christian society as a whole. Protestant preachers saw this as a salve or a correction for original sin.

The term was first coined by Max Weber who was the “youngest” of the German Historical School. It is part of old American culture of the 1800s and is seen by some Americans as one of the cornerstones of national prosperity.

Max Weber

In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904-1905, Eng. trans. 1930) Max Weber argued for an intimate, causal connection between a Calvinist ascetic ideal

One of the fundamental elements of the spirit of modern capitalism, and not only of that but of all modern culture: rational conduct on the basis of the idea of the calling, was born — that is what this discussion has sought to demonstrate — from the spirit of Christian asceticism. . . .

The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so. For when asceticism was carried out of monastic cells into everyday life, and began to dominate worldly morality, it did its part in building the tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order. This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which today determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only



those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force. Perhaps it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt. In Baxter's view the care for external goods should only lie on the shoulders of the 'saint like a cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment.' But fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage.

Since asceticism undertook to remodel the world and to work out its ideals in the world, material goods have gained an increasing and finally an inexorable power over the lives of men as at no previous period in history. Today the spirit of religious asceticism — whether finally, who knows? — has escaped from the cage. But victorious capitalism, since it rests on mechanical foundations, needs its support no longer. The rosy blush of its laughing heir, the Enlightenment, seems also to be irretrievably fading, and the idea of duty in one's calling prowls about in our lives like the ghost of dead religious beliefs. Where the fulfilment of the calling cannot directly be related to the highest spiritual and cultural values, or when, on the other hand, it need not be felt simply as economic compulsion, the individual generally abandons the attempt to justify it at all. In the field of its highest development, in the United States, the pursuit of wealth, stripped of its religious and ethical meaning, tends to become associated with purely mundane passions, which often actually give it the character of sport. (Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons , pp. 180-82).

Weber himself was not a great admirer of this ethic. He wrote:

Of the last stage of this cultural development, it might truly be said: 'Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved.' (Ibid., p. 182).

External link

• by economist Donald Frey

See also

• WASP Protestantse werkethiek