The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

The concept spirit of capitalism is used in the specific sense, it is the spirit of modern capitalism. Capitalism existed in China, India, Babylon, in the classic world, and in the Middle Ages. Thus the capitalism of to-day, which has come to dominate economic life, educates and selects the economic subjects which it needs through a process of economic survival of the fittest. In order that a manner of life so well adapted to the peculiarities of capitalism could be selected at all, i.e. should come to dominate others, it had to originate somewhere, and not in isolated individuals alone, but as a way of life common to whole groups of men. The spirit of capitalism, in the sense in which we are using the term,…