Why do we think hard work is virtuous?

By Chris Fleming

Why is work treated, strangely enough, as if it were next to godliness?

One of the sharper answers came from German sociologist Max Weber. His book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905) has become a classic – though we need to be careful about what ‘classic’ means here. Like the Bible or Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, The Protestant Ethic is widely bought, regularly invoked, and rarely read.

Weber’s book is not quite a history of economics, nor is it what we would label ‘religious history’. It borrows from both, but is stranger than either. The Protestant Ethic is a study of how religious ideas, especially Calvinism, helped shape the mindset upon which modern capitalism thrives.

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