Anti-Entrepreneurial Attitudes in Elizabethan Sermons and Popular Literature

• Published in: The Journal of British studies 1976-01, Vol.15 (2), p.1-20
• Main Author: O'Connell, Laura Stevenson
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Bourgeois; British studies; Capitalism; Entrepreneurs; Heroes; Mayors; Merchants; Preachers; Vocation; Wealth
• ISSN: 0021-9371; 1545-6986
• DOI: 10.1086/385683

It has been nearly half a century since R. H. Tawney published Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, and in spite of many efforts to refine and to dispute Tawney's thesis, the work has retained great influence over sixteenth and seventeenth-century English historical studies. There is considerable debate over the nature of the connection between Calvinism and capitalism, but amidst this disagreement there is a basic acceptance of the idea that the Puritan “work ethic” and the development of an entrepreneurial spirit were related to each other. Tawney suggested that the Puritans' doctrine of the calling engendered a new appreciation of diligent labor and a gradually developing certainty that the wealth which resulted from diligence should be considered a measure of godly activity. Thus, Puritanism discarded the suspicion of economic motives which had been a characteristic of earlier religious reform movements: in its later phases [it] added a halo of ethical sanctification to the appeal of economic expediency, and offered a moral creed, in which the duties of religion and the calls of business ended their long estrangement in an unanticipated reconciliation …. It insisted, in short, that money-making, if not free from spiritual dangers, was not a danger and nothing else, but that it could be, and ought to be, carried on for the greater glory of God. Tawney was speaking of the “later stages” of Puritanism; he took his examples entirely from post-restoration works.