I am grateful to my two co-editors for agreeing to reprint the preceding comments. For however misleading a critical review might be – as I believe the present one is – it always highlights places where misunderstandings are liable to arise which the author has not done enough to prevent, whether or not they are actually his fault.

Indeed, with regard to almost all the objections raised by my critic, I must deny any fault on my part, and for some of these I must even reject all possibility of misunderstanding for the attentive reader. Despite my affirming the contrast in ‘spirit’ between the sayings of Jakob Fugger and Benjamin Franklin (XX:15/PE:51), my critic has me finding that spirit equally in both. I take Franklin as one of various illustrations for what in an ad hoc way I christened the ‘spirit of capitalism’ and for this spirit's not being simply linked to forms of economic enterprise (XX:26/PE:64f.). Yet my critic thinks I treat Franklin's mental outlook in one place as identical to this capitalist ‘spirit’ and in another as different from it. I took considerable pains to demonstrate that the ethically coloured concept of the ‘calling’ (and the corresponding verbal meaning), common to all Protestant peoples since the Bible translations but lacking among all others, was, in the respect crucial to my investigation, an invention of the Reformation (XX:36/PE:79). Yet my critic thinks Luther must have taken up an ‘expression familiar to the people’ already – though of course he fails to substantiate this ‘familiarity’ with a single fact. Philological findings may obviously correct my conclusions at any time. However, as the evidence stands, this certainly cannot be done merely by asserting the opposite.

Furthermore, despite my trying to establish at length how and why the idea of the ‘calling’ in its Lutheran form differed in kind from its shape in ‘ascetic’ Protestantism, where it formed an integral constituent [integrierender Bestandteil] of the capitalist ‘spirit’, my critic presents this difference as an objection to me, when it was my own conclusion and a fundamental argument of my essay. He even accuses me of an ‘idealist interpretation of history’, deriving capitalism from Luther.