What does an esoteric concept like Calvinist soteriology have to do with the rise of modern economics? Does laissez-faire have its roots in the arcane Quinquarticular Controversy? Can one find the origins of the welfare state in postmillennialist eschatology? Questions like these, according to the Harvard economist Benjamin M. Friedman, are essential to understanding his discipline today ... once theological questions are rendered into secular language, their relevance, and thus the importance of Friedman’s Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, becomes clear ... if someone had told me that a former chairman of the Harvard economics department would write a major work on Calvinism and its influence, you would have had to consider me a skeptic. Nonetheless Benjamin M. Friedman has, and the result is an awakening all its own.
Friedman has made an important contribution to the literature on the intertwining of Western economic thought with religious beliefs. His detailed tracing of the philosophical and theological roots of free market economics is well researched, well written, and well worth reading.
The book’s title is misleading—Mr. Friedman’s narrative is about the evolution of economic thought, not capitalism. He alternates between theological debates and developments in economic thought. On economics he is compelling, on theology disappointingly tendentious. Mr. Friedman unselfconsciously presents as fact a host of skeptical—and highly debatable—claims about Christianity and biblical texts. More important, he relies on a caricatured version of Calvinism, especially the New Testament-based doctrine that God predestines some to be saved, to set up his central claim: The weakening of traditional Calvinism, he contends, spurred a more optimistic conception of human potential, which helped to inspire key innovations in economic thought ... contains genuine contributions—the historical context of Adam Smith’s work and the Social Gospel origins of the American Economic Association are two. But the continuing and unconvincing emphasis on predestination gives the appearance of a unifying theme to a book that, alas, doesn’t have one.
Friedman exposes the profound influence of the religious thinking pervading the eighteenth-century Scottish intellectual environment in which Smith and Hume worked. More specifically, Friedman illuminates the effects on both thinkers of the displacement of dour Calvinism by a newly optimistic Protestantism affirming the benefits of individuals freely making choices while pursuing their own self-interests ... A bracing challenge to narrowly secular assessments of economic theory.
Friedman is an engaging narrator, but his book may try the patience of many readers. His weaving together of so many strands of human history is a remarkable achievement, but his non-linear and frequently repetitive prose make for an overly long book. Most crucially, the argument he is trying to make is often obscured by the plethora of detail. A little streamlining might, in fact, have left room for a sorely needed last chapter: how a global pandemic has shone a merciless light on the economic precarity of our society and discredited the policies long supported by religious and economic conservatives.
Following in the footsteps of Max Weber and R.H. Tawney (from whom he takes his title), Friedman, a professor of political economy at Harvard, deepens the case that throughout modern history in the West, religious thought and economic policy have been reciprocally enmeshed ... Few readers will fail to come away convinced of Friedman’s strong central thesis, but there are omissions. Friedman, a noted economist, strangely devotes more ink to religious thought than to economic principles ... this is a history of the rise of Protestant religion in relation to capitalism. We learn nothing of Jewish or Catholic thinkers or economists, especially curious given the author’s attention to the U.S. If this is really a Protestant story, what does it tell us? Friedman doesn’t say, but he does provide solid points of departure for further scholarly investigation. Not without flaws but still an important work on the origins of capitalism.
Harvard political economist Friedman (Day of Reckoning) delivers an ambitious intellectual history of Christian influence on the development of economic thought, from the Enlightenment to the present day ... Unfortunately, Friedman skims the surface of such topics as slavery and the New Deal in the book’s final third, and fails to paint a clear picture of how U.S. economic policies have been shaped by Protestant beliefs. This dense work will be of most interest to scholars of political economy.
