Abstract

Weber's treatment of the Protestant Ethic in American colonial economic history is indefensible in terms of historical evidence; his ideal-typology of the causal importance of Calvinism in the development of Western capitalism generally is at best a useful fiction. Weber neither understood the economic demands of Puritan doctrine nor appreciated the disparity between ideology and economic reality. Weber's prerequisites for rational capitalism were not satisfied in the colonies, and his contrast between economic development in the North and non-Calvinist South is erroneous. Economic success in the colonies was determined far more by political and social connections than by special religious motivations