Liz DeLillo
Staff Writer
The concept of the Protestant work ethic developed in ways running counter to Max Weber’s recounting of Puritan thought in The Protestant Work Ethic and Spirit of Capitalism, argued Elizabeth Anderson.
Anderson spoke at 2 p.m. last Friday in the Hall of Philosophy, finishing off the Interfaith Lecture Series’ Week Five theme, “The Spirit of Capitalism: Prosperity and the Enduring Legacy of the Protestant Work Ethic.”
She is the Max Shaye Professor of Public Philosophy, John Dewey Distinguished University Professor and Arthur F. Thurnau Professor at the University of Michigan. Her research focuses on moral, social and political philosophy as well as the philosophy of social sciences and economics.
Weber argued that the Protestant work ethic was secularized, “the obsession with certainty of salvation fell away,” resulting in “… a division between the duties of workers and where the benefits would live,” Anderson said. “The duties were the same — industry, frugality and asceticism — but the capitalist would look at the reward, saying they are the ones who would be maximizing their wealth.”
Her argument, however, complicates Weber’s picture of the Protestant work ethic; she traced the idea’s history.
“My view is that Weber was only half right. He did capture the spirit of the work ethic as it existed in his day,” Anderson said. “But if we go back to the original Puritans, his reading of them, many think, is deeply flawed, and we can trace the influence of the forgotten parts of the work ethic in a very different direction from what Weber said.”
She read the Puritan theologians Weber quoted and said they were “remarkable moralists.” Anderson found the original Puritan work ethic was egalitarian, treating all as morally equal.
In the original Puritan work ethic, theologians believed workers should get rewards in their lifetime and shouldn’t be at the whim of businesses whose sole goal was to maximize profits, Anderson said.
She described how the Puritan preacher Robert Sanderson theorized the structure of society as a clock: “As in the artificial body of a clock, one wheel moves another and each part gives and receives help to and from the other.”
“… In other words, ‘We should be like the wheels of the clock’ — each wheel helps another move along, and it also receives help from all of the other gears — ‘and that is how we should be in the great community of society,’ ” said Anderson.
The clock’s mechanism represents both the cohesive and structural integrity of callings, or professional occupations, as each calling held equal worth.
Emphasizing all callings as equal was common in Puritanism, Anderson added.
“An interesting feature and implication of this, which was quite radical at the time and quite liberating, is that (Sanderson) is quite clear this is something that you had to discover for yourself, and it is your duty to occupy a calling that sustains your enthusiasm for your whole working life,” Anderson said. “Only you can decide what that is.”
“Hence, the Puritans derived from this a right to freedom of occupational choice — it is this beautiful move in moral philosophy where you take a duty and convert it to an individual right to act according to your own judgment — and Sanderson was convinced that you can trust workers to autonomously find their calling and fulfill its duties,” said Anderson.
Anderson also highlighted English theologian Richard Baxter’s treatment of workers’ rights. He, like Sanderson, held that all workers were entitled to dignity, meaningful work and honest labor to advance the good of society. Employers had strict duties to provide safe working conditions and pay fair wages to workers, and everyone had the right to charity if unable to work.
The provisions in Baxter’s work ethic held all to the same duties, regardless of class status. Anderson elaborated on how Baxter believed the wealthy were also required to work, and he “condemned business models that amount to pure wealth extraction,” viewing it as a spiritual loss, Anderson said.
In Baxter’s “On Oppression,” which critiques such business models, he defines oppression as “taking advantage of people who are vulnerable — they may be poor or disabled — you are not allowed to do that,” Anderson said.
“What we get then is, in the original Puritan work ethic, a different picture than what Weber characterized it as,” Anderson said. “Everybody, rich or poor, property owner or pure labor, they all have the same duties — industry, frugality, aestheticism, giving to charity to the extent that you are able, and yes, you should be making money, as much as you can.”
In tracing how the work ethic was distorted between Sanderson and Baxter’s time and Weber’s, Anderson emphasized the economic impact the Industrial Revolution had on workers.
“It was not a sharp division between manual laborers and people getting income from some kind of proprietary interest, and hence, in the original Puritan model, the benefits and burdens of the work ethic are always combined in one person — that was the standard,” Anderson said.
In the Industrial Revolution, however, “factories get enormous, only capitalists can afford to build these things, and workers become dispossessed. The peasants get evicted from the land and become manual laborers who are working seasonally — very marginal — or they become factory workers, and they don’t own their own tools anymore,” she said.
The social and economic shifts this industrialization ushered in influenced how the work ethic was understood. After the class split, two interpretations of the work ethic developed: the capitalist version and the workers’ version. Workers believed in the duties and benefits of hard work while also believing not every minute should be spent working.
Identifying Weber’s discussion with the capitalist version, Anderson then researched what became of the workers’ version — and she found Karl Marx.
She read Marx’s first work, which is a 1835 high school graduation examination essay titled, “Reflections of a Young Man on the Choice of a Profession.”
“Lo and behold, what does he say? He says, ‘Well, it has to be something that advances the good of other people, and it has to fit the person’s talents and education, and it has to fulfill in exercising the talents and sustain that person’s interests and commitment.’ Right there, he is just reproducing Sanderson’s sermon — isn’t that astonishing?” Anderson said. “He only adds one extra thing, although I think it is already implicit in Sanderson and Baxter, namely that the profession has to be capable of commanding the respect of other people so that it can be conducted with dignity.”
The workers’ version became a theory of social democracy notably implemented in Scandinavian nations through “free and universal high-level education” and “comprehensive social insurance and health insurance.”
More than simply continuing the philosophical thread, Marxism relied integrally on these ideas.
“The Puritan ideal of work became the foundation of Marx’s ideal of unalienated labor, where he would write later in his famous manuscript spelling out and criticizing capitalism for failing to deliver jobs that would enable people to engage and work in an unalienated way,” Anderson said.
Having traced the work ethic’s origins and parsed its interpretations, Anderson’s conclusions took a different shape than Weber’s.
“We should reconsider the Puritan division of labor in a more positive light. That clock metaphor is a very powerful metaphor — everybody has got to be helping everybody else. We both give and receive help from everybody — that is what the division of labor amounts to,” Anderson said. “Also, you get a kind of implicit critique in the clock metaphor of this idea that the billionaires are entitled to every penny; what makes one wheel go is the contributions of all the other gears.”
Beyond divergent interpretations and historical splits, Anderson emphasized the philosophy’s contemporary relevance.
“What we owe to the Puritans is an ideal of what work ought to be for people. So much work in society today does not fulfill what the Puritans wanted it to: people get ruled tyrannically, and many of them are slaving away at sub-living wages, unhealthy working conditions — (and) already in the 17th century, you have these preachers saying that is wrong,” Anderson said.
She ended her lecture with a quote by another famous Puritan, John Milton, from Paradise Lost. When God expels Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, they must find a new way of life.
“Adam and Eve cannot just live by the fruit off the trees anymore,” Anderson said. “They have to work, and this is the thought that Milton puts in Adam’s head. He says, ‘With labor I must earn / My bread; what harm? Idleness had been worse.’ ”
