Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, by Benjamin M. Friedman

In his 1904 The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber famously questioned the relationship between religionparticularly Protestant Christianity -and the development of capitalism as a mode of production and social organization.Weber argued that the Calvinist belief in predestination led to the kind of work ethic and behaviour that made the emergence of capitalism possible.In his 2022 Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, Benjamin M. Friedman contributes to this Weberian account through the perspective and scholarship of an economist.Though, rather than focusing on the relationship between behaviour and belief, Friedman traces how ideas that were once rooted in Christian theology informed, and continue to inform, economic theory.His thesis, against Weber, is that it was an explicit turning away from a Calvinist belief in predestination at the end of the eighteenth century in Scotland and England, and later in the United States, that shaped the emergence and development of capitalist economic theory (xiii, 165-68).The prime example of this thesis is Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations (1776).Friedman's book is divided into fifteen chapters.The first chapter presents his understanding of a "worldview": the ideas and concepts that people carry as a consequence of their social, cultural, and historical context, and which influence them regardless of their conscious awareness (6)(7)(8)(9)(10)(11) 28).Chapters two to four focus on Adam Smith, whose Wealth of Nations became foundational for the academic discipline of economics.Focusing his analysis on the context of the Scottish Enlightenment, Friedman situates Smith as a thinker who was active in the theological and ethical debates that occurred within the intellectual associations he belonged to.Chapters 5 and 6 provide the wider context of these debates and better insight