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The Anti-Puritan Work Ethic

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 January 2014

C. John Sommerville
C. John Sommerville*
Affiliation:
University of Florida
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Extract

For years those who have looked for the contribution of religion to the “spirit of capitalism” have concentrated on the English Puritans and their Calvinist counterparts elsewhere. Those scholars have relied on literary evidence to make their points, and to establish the relationship between Calvinist doctrines or assumptions and an ascetic and compulsive devotion to work. It came as a surprise, therefore, when a rigorously quantitative content analysis of the most popular religious books of Restoration England showed just the opposite—that the most self-consciously “Anglican” authors were those who placed the most emphasis upon work and worldly enterprise as a religious duty. They were also able to integrate this duty with the rest of their theology in a more straightforward, logical manner than the Puritans, for whom the connection is thought to have been psychological, mediated by religious anxiety. Work was, for the most popular Anglican authors, part of a moralistic religion of works. We can even say that such an emphasis was adopted at just the time when Anglicans were facing up to a change in the status of their church and adopting attitudes more characteristic of members of a movement or denomination, which helps to explain why work and effort were coming to seem more important to them.

There have been numerous lines of criticism of Max Weber's thesis connecting the doctrine of evangelical conversion and the spirit of economic enterprise. But since the following approach and alternative suggestions do not build on them, we must go back again to Weber's own classic formulation.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 20 , Issue 2 , Spring 1981 , pp. 70 - 81
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 1981

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References

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2 On the popularity of secular works and the relative popularity of best-sellers then and now, see Sommerville, C. John, “On the Distribution of Religious and Occult Literature in Seventeenth-Century England,” The Library, 29 (1974), pp. 221–225CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Klotz, Edith L., “A Subject Analysis of English Imprints for Every Tenth Year from 1480 to 1640,” Huntington Library Quarterly, 1 (1938), pp. 417–419CrossRefGoogle Scholar, shows that by 1640 there were already 200 religious titles being printed each year in England. Wing's Short-Title Catalogue and the Stationers' Register list about a thousand religious titles which required reprinting at least once from 1660 to 1711. The general study was published as Popular Religion in Restoration England (Gainesville, Fla., 1977)Google Scholar.

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