The Protestant Ethic — Revisited

Abstract

In his article on “Respect for Work and Cleanliness,” Nikolai A. Mel'gunov touches on themes which are largely associated in our minds with the work of Max Weber. The aristocratic contempt for manual work and more broadly for any kind of specialization, the association of industriousness with religious dissent and with Protestant dissent particularly, the general view that labor is a burden which in Russian culture as in Catholicism is related to the frequency of holidays, the observable differences between Protestants and Catholics in the Rhineland — these and other themes can be found in Weber's work. Yet Weber himself considered these notions a commonplace in the literature. He believed that his own study offered a more probing analysis of the relation between the Protestant Ethic and that complex of attitudes towards economic activities which he designated as “innerworldly asceticism”.