Protestant Ethic

The Protestant ethic is a fundamental cultural form crucial to the study of consumer culture. At its most basic, it is a moral injunction that endorses the individual's duty to create wealth and achieve success by hard work, thrift, saving, and investment. To perform this function, it was necessary for a revised system of values and norms to promote competitive individualism, entrepreneurialism, and productivity as it also discouraged the ostentatious and perhaps socially toxic display of wealth and worldly pleasures. An investigation into the balance of the tension between these positive drives and negative restraints can inform the crucial debate on whether consumer culture is propelling us along the road to progress and happiness or catastrophic decay.

The Protestant ethic came into being as early Puritan groups in sixteenth-century Europe redirected and intensified the Christian tradition of asceticism, which valorizes self-control, the deferral of gratification, the denial of worldly pleasures, and the methodical planning of the individual's life. These virtues were regarded as antidotes to the moral incoherence, worldliness, and corruption that were threatening Christianity under the stewardship of the Catholic Church. Confined by Catholicism to the monasteries, these virtues did not permeate everyday life, where cycles of sin and repentance flourished under the confessional system. Protestants argued that using the monasteries in this way was equivalent to the church evading its responsibilities and failing to distribute the means of salvation; strict ascetic regulation should pervade the whole population.

In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber surveyed the Protestant Reformation's relationship with the early development of capitalism. Protestantism released the monastic virtues into everyday life, notes Anthony Giddens, energizing each individual with the rationalist principles that were to prove useful to the growth of capitalism. Wealth-creation and the improvement of environments by hard work, investment, enterprise, technical innovation, and productive efficiency were to be encouraged. Excessive leisure, personal consumption, and the conspicuous display of consumer symbolism were to be discouraged and sacrificed for the sake of constant economic growth. This metaproject required a fundamental change in [Page 1162]the character of individuals, many of whom were inclined to leisure and concerned about the potentially deleterious social effects of the single-minded pursuit of wealth. The Protestants cast aside these reservations and linked wealth-creation to salvation. Whereas the refusal to work hard, create wealth, and save money became sinful, performing these tasks diligently with a view to expanding the economy was a sign of God's blessing and ensured salvation. Under the Calvinist doctrine of fides efficax, faith could be proven only in the performance of these objective tasks. Calvinism also preached predestination; only the salvation of a minority was ensured, which tended to foster anxiety and social ambition alongside existential loneliness and the gradual “disenchantment” of the world in the mind of the individual.

Protestantism gave ethical justification to the functional requirements vital to the acceleration of capitalism's development. The subsequent division of labor into specialized occupations and the conversion of functional tasks into ethical duties all became signs that humans were glorifying God. The principal ideal was to create a population of ambitious yet ascetically regulated, law-abiding individuals devoted to business, work, saving, and the expansion of the economy, the great vocation that was to allow humanity to practice God's will on earth and transcend the brutal chaos of Thomas Hobbes's “state of nature.”

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