Holding the Centre

Joyful Puritans

There has been much made and unmade about the Protestant work ethic.  However, what is sometimes overlooked is that this social work ethic, together with its economic and industrial impacts, was essentially a Puritan affect.  Historian Christopher Dawson makes this claim in his book about religion and progress.

Historians like Troeltsch and Max Weber have shown how much the industrial movement owes to the moral and social ideals of Puritanism.  The Protestant asceticism of the 17th and 18th centuries did not lead men to fly from the world and to give up all the goods to the poor and the Church, as in the Middle Ages.  It inculcated the duty of unremitting industry and thrift, while at the same time it discouraged rigorously every kind of self-indulgence and extravagance in the expenditure of what had been gained.

The result was extensive capital formation--capital that was not subsequently applied to consumption and gross displays of wealth and flippant expenditure, but to further commerce and industrial and trade activities.

Thus there grew up a new social type, the hard-working, conscientious, abstemious man of business, whose only interests were in his counting-house and in the meeting house of his sect; men who spared themselves no more than their employees, and who looked on their work as a kind of religious vocation.

We believe Dawson overstates the case here.
  There is much evidence that the Puritans and their descendants were, contrary to the accepted stereotypes, people of much vivacity, laughter, joy, and celebration.  Clearly they looked on their work as a religious vocation, a calling from God.  But equally they regarded joy and celebration in a similar light.  (See, for example, an article written in 2009 on Oliver Cromwell and the Puritans.)

Dawson continues:

It was men of this stamp who supplied the driving power of the Industrial Revolution, and were the founders of the economic power of Britain and the United States.  It is, indeed, difficult to realize the importance of this element in English culture owing to the comparatively small part that it took in the literary and political life of the age. . . . Nevertheless, it had a far greater influence than [the dominant aristocratic culture] on the rise of the new economic order.  Nor was its influence limited to the economic field, for many of the philosophers and scientists themselves belonged to this nonconformist culture.  The leaders of scientific thought were found not at the great universities, nor, as in France, in the centre of fashionable society; they were the sons of north country weavers and blacksmiths who combined an intense sectarian religiosity with the devotion to the new knowledge.  

This assertion directly contradicts the modern prevailing view--that  Puritan religious devotion was tantamount to slavery to superstitious ignorance, whilst intellectual and rational endeavour was the natural preserve of the secularists and the irreligious--like men such as Voltaire.  This may have been true in some respects in France, it was not the case in England.

. . . . the narrow and intense spirit of Puritanism permeated the whole movement and gave English middle-class society the moral force to carry out the vast material labour of the Industrial Revolution.  Consequently, the real spirit of the age is to be found not in the somewhat arid eudaemonism of utilitarian ethics, but in the sombre asceticism which sacrificed all the pleasures and graces of life to the ideals of moral duty and economic power.  [Christopher Dawson, Progress and Religion: An Historical Enquiry (London: Sheed and Ward, 1945),  p. 204f.]

Again, characterising Puritanism as "sombre", and suggesting that is "sacrificed all the pleasures and graces of life" is a canard.  The evidence does not bear it out, as Percy Scholes has shown.  But seeing work, industry, and thrift--along with works of charity and mercy--as divine and holy callings were intrinsic parts of the Puritan world-and-life view.  On these foundations the modern industrial world has been built.

But the Puritanism that produced the industrial revolution has long since been tossed aside.  It is extremely doubtful that what it built can be maintained.  When the foundations are removed, the superstructure crumbles.