Statistical origins of the “Protestant ethic”

Abstract

Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism has raised numerous questions, but one that has not been raised often is the question of its origins: What and who prompted Weber to write his work? My answer is that its origins are found in a series of statistics generated by Weber’s former student Martin Offenbacher. Offenbacher’s thesis that was the economic and social superiority of Protestants could be traced to better education and better jobs. Weber and Offenbacher have been attacked for ignoring an “alternative thesis”; I argue that on the contrary, they examined its possibilities and decided correctly that the Protestant “character” was crucial in explaining the economic differences between Protestants and Catholics. The statistical origins of the Protestant Ethic answer the question of what prompted Weber to write this work and also indicates that he realized that the subject of ascetic Protestantism was more complicated than he originally thought.