The Puritan Denial

Extract

The technical achievements and elaboration since the sixteenth century do not comprise the whole of modern capitalism. Capitalism has been much more than that; it has been an outlook on life with its own peculiar orientation and values. To endeavour to understand capitalism as a socio-economic form, therefore, it will be of help to look at the type of character which played a fundamental rôle in the capitalistic development. There is a vast literature on the relation between capitalism and Calvinism, especially in its Puritan form. The general question does not concern us here. What we shall consider is the Puritan character as it appeared in the middle seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In this way it will be possible for us to discern more clearly the temper from which the modern technical innovations sprung or by which they were exploited. The spirit that lies behind these new methods in many ways involves an asceticism as rigid and as austere as the older medieval one: but the goal is different, the ascesis is intramundane, while the reward is no longer invisible but very near and very tangible.

When one examines the Puritan mentality at this period, that character with its intense energies and limited horizon, it reveals those features that have made possible the organisation of industry and wealth which has caught millions of human beings in its meshes during the course of the modern era; meshes more unbreakable than steel because they were spun of the fibre of emotionless hearts and held together by the unyielding rigidity of relentless human wills; meshes cast by men conscious of a purpose to be achieved and self-righteous in the pursuit of that purpose.