Abstract

Although Weber does not call attention to the fact (and as far as I have been able to tell, no one else has observed it), The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism argues that not one but two quite different “spirits” of capitalism were generated by the Protestant ethic. It is the normative complementarity between these two spirits, inculcated into different classes of social actors, that Weber claims as a key contributor to Western capitalism as a system of unequal exchange between such classes. Thus, for entrepreneurs, “Everything is done in terms of balances: at the beginning of the enterprise an initial balance, before every individual decision a calculation to ascertain its probable profitableness, and at the end a final balance to ascertain how much profit has been made.”