The document discusses how western civilization dominated globally due to its institutional structures, advancements in science, and economic models influenced by the Protestant work ethic. It argues that the Protestant Reformation played a crucial role in promoting industriousness and literacy, which contributed to capitalism and the industrial revolution. Ultimately, it suggests that Christian moral foundations facilitated the rise of democratic politics and economic systems in the West, with implications for other nations, particularly in the context of religion's role in societal development.

1. Part 6
The role of the work
ethic in the rise of
the west
L1 AES

2. 1. Western institutional structures like the corporation, the market the nation-state became the
global standards for competitive economics and politics – templates for other nations to copy.
2. Western science made huge advances; others either followed or were left behind.
3. Western systems of law and the political models derived from them, including democracy,
displaced or defeated the non-Western alternatives.
4. Western medicine marginalized the witch doctors and other faith-healers.
5. The Western model of industrial production and mass consumption left all alternative
models of economic organization behind.
• Late 1990s the West was still clearly the dominant civilization of the world.
• The five leading Western powers – the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom, France
and Canada – accounted for 44 per cent of total global manufacturing between them.
• The scientific world was dominated by Western universities, employees of which won most
Nobel prizes.

3. Rank Country Nobel Prizes
1 United States 368
2 United Kingdom 132
3 Germany 107
4 France 62
5 Sweden 30
6 Switzerland 26
7 Japan 26
8 Canada 23
9 Russia 23
10 Austria 21
11 Italy 20
12 Netherlands 20
13 Denmark 14
14 Norway 13
15 Israel 12
16 Australia 12
17 Poland 12
18 Belgium 10
19 South Africa 10
20 India 10
Nobel Prize Laureates by
Country
21 Hungary 9
22 China 9
23 Spain 8
24 Ireland 7
25 Czech Republic 5
26 Argentina 5
27 Finland 4
28 Romania 4
29 Egypt 4
30 New Zealand 3

4. Reformation
Europe

5. • The economic dynamism Western civilization - a consequence of the
Protestant Reformation.
• Other religions associated holiness with the renunciation of worldly things –
monks in cloisters, hermits in caves – the Protestant sects saw industry and
thrift as expressions of a new kind of hard-working godliness.
• Capitalism has a religious origin: “To attain … self-confidence, intense
worldly activity is recommended. Tireless labour - the surest sign that you
belonged to the Elect, that select band of people predestined by God for
salvation.”
• Protestantism has the effect of liberating the acquisition of wealth from the
inhibitions of traditionalist ethics – profit and wealth is directly willed by
God.
• The Protestant ethic - provided the capitalist with ‘sober, conscientious, and
unusually capable workers, who were devoted to work as the divinely
willed purpose of life’.
‘For most of history, men had worked to live. But the Protestants lived to work.’
• This work ethic gave birth to modern capitalism, which Weber defined as
‘sober, bourgeois capitalism with its rational organization of free labour’.
‘The Protestant Ethic and
the Spirit of Capitalism’.
Max Weber

6. A spirit of capitalism occurred before the
Reformation, in the towns of Lombardy and
Flanders.
Many leading reformers expressed distinctly anti-
capitalist views.
One major study of 276 German cities between
1300 and 1900 found ‘no effects of Protestantism
on economic growth’.

7. • Protestantism encouraged individual reading of the Bible, therefore literacy very important.
• This and printing were the two things that encouraged economic development (the accumulation of
‘human capital’) as well as scientific study.
• Scotland - spending on education, school enrolment and literacy rates were exceptionally high.
• Wherever Protestant missionaries went, they promoted literacy, with measurable long-term benefits to
the societies they sought to educate
• Protestant missionaries - responsible for the fact that school enrolments in British colonies were, on
average, four to five times higher than in other countries’ colonies.
• Protestant missionary activity - very good predictor of post-independence economic performance and
political stability in India .
• Recent surveys of attitudes show that Protestants have unusually high levels of mutual trust, an
important precondition for the development of efficient credit networks.
• Religious belief (as opposed to formal observance) - associated with economic growth, particularly
where concepts of heaven and hell provide incentives for good behaviour in this world. This tends to
mean not only hard work and mutual trust but also thrift, honesty, trust and openness to strangers, all
economically beneficial traits.

8. • Protestantism in the West - work, save and read.
• The Industrial Revolution
1. Product of technological innovation and consumption.
2. Depended on an increase in the intensity and duration of
work, combined with the accumulation of capital through
saving and investment.
3. Depended on the accumulation of human capital.
The literacy that Protestantism promoted was vital to all of this.

12. 0%-9%
10%-19% (Estonia, Sweden, Denmark)
20%-29% (Norway, Czech Republic, United Kingdom, Finland)
30%-39% (France, Netherlands, Belgium, Bulgaria, Russia, Belarus,
Luxembourg, Hungary, Albania, Latvia)
40%-49% (Germany, Switzerland, Lithuania, Kazakhstan, Ukraine,
Slovenia, Slovakia, Spain)
50%-59% (Azerbaijan, Serbia, Ireland, Austria)
60%-69%
70%-79% (Croatia, Montenegro, Greece, Portugal, Italy, Moldova,
Armenia, Poland, Cyprus, Macedonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina)
80%-89% (Georgia, Turkey, Romania, Malta)
90%-100% (Kosovo)
No data
Results of a 2008/2009 Gallup survey on whether respondents said that religion was "important in [their]
daily life."

13. “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed
creature, the heart of a heartless world,
and the soul of soulless conditions. It is
the opium of the people.”

14. ‘God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.
Yet his shadow still looms. How shall we comfort
ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was
holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned
has bled to death under our knives; who will wipe this
blood off us? What water is there for us to clean
ourselves?’Friedrich Nietzsche

15. Religion is an ‘illusion’, a ‘universal neurosis’ devised to
prevent people from giving way to their basic instincts –
in particular, their sexual desires and violent, destructive
impulses.
‘If one imagined its prohibitions removed, then could
choose any woman who took one’s fancy as one’s sexual
object, one could kill without hesitation one’s sexual
object, one could kill without hesitation one’s rival or
whoever interfered with one in any other way, and one
could seize what one wanted of another man’s goods
without asking his leave.’
Sigmund Freud 1856-1939
Father of Psychoanalysis

16. ‘For the West’s most compelling critics today the
Sixties opened the door to a post-Freudian anti-
civilization, characterized by a hedonistic celebration
of the pleasures of the self, a rejection of theology in
favour of pornography and a renunciation of the
Prince of Peace for grotesquely violent films and
video games that are best characterized as
‘warnography’.

17. Imagine there's no heaven,
It's easy if you try,
No hell below us,
Above us only sky,
Imagine all the people
living for today...
“Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I
needn’t argue about that; I’m right and I will be
proved right. We’re more popular than Jesus now; I
don’t know which will go first – rock ’n’ roll or
Christianity,
The universe that we observe has
precisely the properties we should
expect if there is, at bottom, no
design, no purpose, no evil, no
good, nothing but pitiless
indifference.”
― Richard Dawkins,
River Out of Eden: A Darwinian Vie

19. Springfield, Missouri has roughly one church for every
thousand citizens. There are 122 Baptist churches, thirty-
six Methodist chapels, twenty-five Churches of Christ
and fifteen Churches of God – in all, some 400 Christian
places of worship.

20. Wenzhou, China
1,339 officially
recognised churches

21. ‘Christianity offers China a new ‘common
moral foundation’capable of reducing
corruption, narrowing the gap between rich
and poor, promoting philanthropy and even
preventing pollution.’Professor Zhao Xiao

22. ‘We were asked to look into what accounted for the … pre-
eminence of the West all over the world … At first, we thought it
was because you had morepowerful guns than we had. Then we
thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we
focused on your economic system. In the past twenty years, we
have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion:
Christianity. That is why the West has been so powerful. The
Christian moral foundation of social and cultural life was what
made possible the emergence of capitalism and then the
successful transition to democratic politics. We don’t have any
doubt about this.’
Anonymous Fellow of the Chinese Academy of the Social
Sciences

23. In 2007 his successor Hu Jintao held an unprecedented
Politburo ‘study session’ on religion, at which he told
China’s twenty-five most powerful leaders that ‘the
knowledge and strength of religious people must be
mustered to build a prosperous society’.
The XIVth Central Committee of the Chinese Communist
Party was presented with a report specifying three
requirements for sustainable economic growth: property
rights as a foundation, the law as a safeguard and morality
as a support.

24. ‘So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he
created him; male and female he created them.’ Genesis 1:27
‘You are all sons of God through faith in Jesus Christ… There
is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for
you are all one in Jesus Christ.’ Galations 3:26-28
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created
equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain
unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the
pursuit of Happiness.”