Mad Max (Weber) in New England

Abstract

Max Weber's hypothesis that a Protestant ethic of laboring diligently for salvation midwifed the capitalist spirit of rationalized, accumulative enterprise is one of the most famous theories in twentieth-century social science, generating nearly a century's research into the mutual embrace of religious sentiment and economic progress. Scholars have frequently extended Weber's insights to societies far removed in time and place from post-Reformation northwest Europe, which makes their slight attention to seventeenth-century New England so startling. Colonized by English Puritans, the archetypical innerworldly ascetics, and harboring an entrepreneurial class that quickly established durable commercial ties around the Atlantic rim, early New England would seem an obvious venue for testing Weber's theories, yet not only have few writers tried, most have sequestered its religious ideals from socioeconomic structures. voluminous literature on Puritanism issuing from Perry Miller's great ur-texts have treated theology, ecclesiology, liturgy and devotion as primarily spiritual phenomena having little truck with trade. Miller himself folded Weber into a chapter of the New England Mind (1953) entitled The Protestant Ethic, although less to divine a countinghouse mentality germinating in the meetinghouse than to elucidate jeremiads lamenting the alleged decline of the founding generation's ideals. For Miller's heirs, though, capitalism merely provided the floorboards on which the Puritans staged their intellectual dramas. Economic historians, for their part, have focused on how New Englanders created their markets without pondering why they strived so assiduously. Perhaps they suppose that Massachusetts's corporate origins and rapid commercialization render the Protestant ethic's appearance nonproblematic: it was present at the creation. Yet two of the profoundest studies of colonial New England's religious and economic values have divorced Puritanism from capitalism. Bernard Bailyn's New England Merchants in the Seventeenth Century (1955) described a continual antagonism between the Puritan gentry and an emergent merchant class whose entrepreneurship and cosmopolitanism set them against the Elect