Religion and the Rise of Capitalism

2022 Reprint of the 1926 edition. Exact facsimile of the original edition and reproduced with Optical Recognition. Also includes the 1937 updated introduction by Tawney. In one of the truly great classics of twentieth-century political economy, R. H. Tawney addresses the question of how religion has affected social and economic practices. He does this by a relentless tracking of the influence of religious thought on capitalist economy and ideology since the Middle Ages. In so doing he sheds light on why Christianity continues to exert a unique role in the marketplace. In tough, muscular, richly varied prose, he tells an absorbing and meaningful story. Tawney's work is a direct response to Weber's famous treatise on the Protestant Ethic. In Tawney accepts Weber's main premise but argues that political and social pressures and the spirit of individualism with its ethic of self-help and frugality were more significant factors in the development of capitalism than was Calvinist theology. Contents: The medieval background. The continental reformers. The Church of England. The Puritan movement.