Capitalism's rise was due to religion? | January 10, 2006

1-08-06

William Grimes
The New York Times

As I read the review, I wonder if Stark is revisiting the classical "Protestant work ethic" theme, or if there are observations of his that are genuinely innovative. I am not sure that religionists would necessarily want to be identified as cause for the rise of capitalism. The themes are provocative nevertheless.

The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism and Western Success. Rodney Stark. Random House. $25.95. 281 pp.

Rodney Stark comes out swinging right from the bell in The Victory of Reason, his fiercely polemical account of the rise of capitalism. Stark, the author of The Rise of Christianity and One True God: Historical Consequences of Monotheism, is sick and tired of reading that religion impeded scientific progress and stunted human freedom. To those who say that capitalism and democracy developed only after secular-minded thinkers turned the light of reason on the obscurantism of the Dark Ages, he has a one-word answer: nonsense.

"The success of the West, including the rise of science, rested entirely on religious foundations, and the people who brought it about were devout Christians," he argues in this provocative, exasperating and occasionally baffling exercise in revisionism. Capitalism, and the scientific revolution that powered it, did not emerge in spite of religion but because of it.

If this sounds paradoxical, it shouldn't, Stark argues. Despite the prejudiced arguments of anticlerical Enlightenment thinkers, free inquiry and faith in human reason were intrinsic to Christian thought. Christianity, alone among the world's religions, conceived of God as a supremely rational being who created a coherent world whose inner workings could be discovered through the application of reason and logic. Consequently, it was only in the West, rather than in Asia or the Middle East, that alchemy evolved into chemistry, astrology into astronomy.

Stark gets down to cases quickly. He rapidly administers a few bracing slaps to Max Weber's theory that the Protestant ethic of self-denial and reinvestment propelled capitalism, pointing out that capitalism was in full flower in Italy centuries before the Reformation. As Stark himself concedes, historians have long since dismantled Weber's elegant and highly influential thesis, but he beats this dead horse one more time.

The most persuasive chapters in The Victory of Reason describe the early stirrings of free-market enterprise and scientific experimentation on the monastic estates that spread throughout Western Europe after the ninth century. It was during the so-called Dark Ages that Christian monks, throwing off "the stultifying grip of Roman repression and mistaken Greek idealism," developed innovations like the water wheel, horseshoes, fish farming, the three-field system of agriculture, eyeglasses and clocks.

Christian theology, which Stark praises as constantly evolving, kept pace with economic developments. Thinkers like Augustine and Thomas Aquinas gave their sanction to private property, profit and interest.

Stark sneaks in one of his most intriguing theories late in the book. He notes that soon after the Roman emperor Constantine converted to Christianity in 312, he began showering the church with money and privileges, making it an attractive career for the upper classes. The "church of piety," run by dedicated, poorly paid and ascetic clergy, gave way to the "church of power," which was far less likely to impede the growth of commerce. Had the church of piety prevailed, he writes, "Christianity probably would have continued to denounce usury and to oppose profit and materialism in general, just as Islam still does."

Stark has a vigorous prose style and a gift for clear explanation. The pace is swift, and the narrative thrilling, as he describes the evolution of northern Italian city-states and the great Italian banks that helped accelerate capitalism's rise in Flanders and England. The banks not only lent money; they also engaged in trade and manufacturing, often reorganizing and managing entire industries, like wool-making.

Stark's pugnacity often gets the better of him. He is contemptuously dismissive of Greece and Rome, which he describes as technologically incompetent, morally bankrupt (all those slaves) and too stupid to develop polyphony in music. To use one of Stark's favorite formulations, so much for Virgil, Horace and Euripides. When Greece and Rome are described as "great civilizations" in sneering quotation marks, you know that an argument has turned into a rant.

Posted by admin at January 10, 2006 04:18 PM