Conclusion

Abstract

It so happens that one individual who appears in this account, R. H. Tawney, made a major contribution to a debate, which has been of great importance to the social and historical sciences, about the relationship between religious beliefs and other kinds of value and behaviour. Max Weber and Tawney developed closely related explanations, which are all too easy to oversimplify, of the dynamics of crucial developments in Europe by proposing a determining relationship between Puritan doctrine and Capitalism.¹ The complex of beliefs in the Puritan doctrinal code, if their accounts are to be followed, on a straightforward reading provided bearings for conduct pointing in one direction which, however, proved vulnerable to a polar distortion in a particular psychological field of force, and led to contradictory and puzzling historical consequences. The classical debate they initiated raised issues that have a bearing even on investigations as limited as this. A fundamental methodological problem pointed out by their critics is the extraordinary difficulty of either specifying, or establishing any correlation between, such vague and broad concepts as Protestantism and Capitalism. There is another difficulty in the implicit and necessarily contentious claim on their part to a privileged access, through the insights of a theory, to the hidden and truly significant meaning of the values they were concerned with.