From the title a reader might anticipate a work that returned to Richard Tawney’s 1926 book of the same name, or perhaps a reflection on the history of the “Weber thesis” that relates Protestant religion to the rise of capitalism. Tawney sought to account for the transformation of a medieval moral order in which “not only political but social theory is saturated with doctrines drawn from the sphere of ethics and religion, and economic phenomena are expressed in terms of personal conduct, as natural and inevitably as the nineteenth century expressed them in terms of mechanism” (Tawney [1926] Reference Tawney1938, p. 24). While Tawney here reverses Émile Durkheim’s terms—as a transformation from mechanical to organic solidarity—there are clear similarities in his account of a process of dissolution and renewal in which religion played such a leading role. In the 1937 preface to his Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, Tawney himself made the link to Max Weber’s essays of 1904/1905 on the “Protestant Ethic,” and Werner Sombart’s two-volume Der moderne Kapitalismus of 1902. He also demonstrated an understanding of the importance of Ernst Troeltsch, “the best introduction to the historical study of religious thought on social issues” ([1926] Reference Tawney1938, p. vii) and in fact a major source for Weber’s own work.

Troeltsch is not mentioned at all in Benjamin Friedman’s book; Weber, only in passing three times (pp. 125, 168, 403); Tawney, not in the main text at all (p. xix). “Capitalism” first occurs in the main text on p. 370, in a quotation from Carl Henry’s The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism (1947). Weber’s essays were translated into English by Talcott Parsons and published in 1930 with an introduction by Tawney, and it was this book that did more than any other to cement the conception that “capitalism” was an all-encompassing force whose origins lay in the Reformation of the sixteenth century (the “Weber thesis”). But while there is a great deal about religion in Friedman’s book, this is mostly about American theology of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; and “capitalism” is not meaningfully addressed at all.

Instead, the opening chapters present a discussion of Adam Smith as a product of the Scottish Enlightenment and natural theology, the foundation of a modern economics organized around “the competitive market mechanism” (ch. 4).

But curiously, this sweeping claim remains unsubstantiated by Friedman. Having asserted that this “idea of the invisible hand of competition in a market setting” went on to found “Western thinking,” once into the nineteenth century we hear little more of Smith. Adam Smith’s account of “competition conducted within markets as the principal organising mechanism of economic activity carried out under commerce” is described as his principal innovation, although “Smith did not work out mathematically the joint interaction of supply and demand” (p. 96). The work of Bernard Mandeville is introduced to expose self-interest and the market mechanism, although Smith used the term “self-interest” only once in Wealth of Nations, disassociated his thinking from that of Mandeville in Theory of Moral Sentiments, and made a critical distinction between “self-love” and “vanity” that passes Friedman by completely. In relation to the positive function of human vanity in rendering nations wealthy but vain persons no happier, there is also no mention in the extensive notes and bibliography of François Fénelon’s Telemachus, the most-read literary work in eighteenth-century France and whose translations peaked in step with the many wars of that century.

With chapters 5 and 6 we move back to Reformation theology—with Martin Luther nailing his ninety-five theses to the door of a church (p. 112), and Johannes Gutenberg getting the credit for the invention of moveable-type printing (p. 111), neither story today being supported even by Wikipedia—and the account of the European Reformation segues into a potted history of the politics and culture of seventeenth-century England. This is then followed by Chapter 7 on “The Calvinist Controversy in America” and for the remainder of the fifteen chapters we remain firmly located in North America.

As far as political economy goes, the story also shifts to American political economy; but here again, while the book reviews the works of Daniel Raymond, John McVickar, and Francis Wayland, there is one footnote recording the fact that Jean-Baptiste Say was used in teaching, not Smith (p. 454n25); and there is no mention at all of Jane Marcet’s Conversations in Political Economy (1816), which opens with a remark on Fenelon’s Telemachus. Martin O’Connor’s standard survey of the teaching of political economy in American colleges and universities (not cited here) notes that Marcet and Say were the texts most frequently encountered in the early teaching of political economy in the United States (Reference O’Connor1944, pp. 111–115). Mathew Carey and his son Henry Carey are mentioned in passing in footnotes only, as Roman Catholics (p.453n1).

As the narrative moves onwards we get more American economic history, Harriet Beecher Stowe (p. 293), Andrew Carnegie (p. 297); then some comments on the important role of American universities in postbellum USA, that the development of the American social sciences was entwined with Christian theology. We move through John Maynard Keynes (p. 354), Friedrich Hayek’s Road to Serfdom (p. 366), to William F. Buckley (p. 373) and Billy Graham (p. 379), concluding with the demise of the USSR (p. 387) and ruminations on recent American cultural and political life.

Clearly this is a book prompted by the unusual prominence of religiosity in contemporary American civic life; but this is surely an American problem, not a problem of “capitalism.” Look north to Canada.