Religion and the Rise of Capitalism: A Historical Study

The question that haunts modern capitalism has always been: can money have a conscience? R.H. Tawney's landmark 1926 study traces the answer through five centuries of religious and economic upheaval, showing how the medieval church's insistence that profit served God gave way to the Protestant doctrine that God approved of profit. This is intellectual archaeology at its most gripping. Tawney excavates the theological debates, the sermons, the pamphlets, and the political treatises that built the mental architecture of the modern market. He demonstrates that capitalism was never a purely economic phenomenon. It emerged from a religious revolution, carried forward by men who believed that worldly success evidenced divine favor. The book remains essential because the tension Tawney identified never resolved. We still argue about whether the market has moral limits, whether wealth signals virtue, whether economic behavior is a spiritual matter. Anyone trying to understand why we think about money the way we do will find the answer here, buried in the centuries before Adam Smith.