The Beginnings of Capitalism and the New Mass Morality

Abstract

Grossman criticises Max Weber’s argument, recapitulated by Franz Borkenau, about Calvinism’s role in the emergence of capitalism. According to Grossman’s Marxist account, Calvinism emerged as a doctrine neither the masses nor the bourgeoisie but of the craft stratum. Capitalism arose two centuries earlier than Calvinism. A crucial aspect of ‘education in labour discipline’, that Borkenau and Weber neglected, was coercion. Religion in general serves as ‘an instrument of mass domestication’. Strands of Catholic thought were better suited to be mass capitalist moralities than Protestantism.