Summary

Felix Rachfahl's review is considerably longer than Karl Fischer's, containing some 90 pages, serialised in five parts in the Internationale Wochenschrift, 1909, nos. 39–43. It also includes frequent references to Troeltsch's essay on ‘Protestant Christianity and the Modern Church’ (Troeltsch 1906a) and ‘Protestantism and Progress’ (Troeltsch 1906b), which Rachfahl sees as broadly co-extensive with Weber's thesis.

Rachfahl sees three areas of difficulty in Weber: (1) problems with the concept of ‘capitalist spirit’; (2) Calvinism and the vocational ethic; and (3) the economic influence of Calvinism.

Rachfahl sees Weber's concept of the capitalist spirit as both too wide and too narrow: too wide because it includes all people who break with what Sombart called traditionalistic attitudes and seek more than their immediate needs but who do not actually accumulate capital, typically people of the lower middling strata whose only concern is to improve their social–economic standing; and too narrow because it excludes motives that go beyond acquisition of wealth for its own sake such as honour and respect, well-being for one's family and kin, and power and service to the nation. Rachfahl sees Weber's notion of acquisitiveness underpinned by frugality and abstinence as in practice hard to distinguish from miserliness. Any concept of the capitalist spirit ought also to include an element of calculative expenditure and speculation. Rachfahl contends that Weber's unnecessary restrictions stem from his use of ideal-types which invidiously rule out alternative causal scenarios and from his abstract opposition of the capitalist spirit to traditionalist need-based economies. This opposition wrongly includes actors who demonstrate no major break with traditionalism in terms of income and wrongly excludes actors who, while no Puritans, accumulate large amounts of capital.

With regard to Calvinism, Rachfahl stresses that while Calvin's attitudes to economic life and usury in particular were more liberal than Luther's, Calvin emphatically placed charity above private gain. Although usury was not wrong in itself for Calvin, no business was to be made of it. Interest had to be accompanied by restrictions wherever the welfare of the community was at stake. And whatever relaxation of the ban on interest occurred in this period was not due to Calvin's teaching but had begun already.