Quote:
Originally posted by taxwonk
Actually what I was saying is that the burghers wanted the people to work hard and be pious (read: don't get all drunk and break things or be too sick to work six days a week), so to get them to act accordingly, they couched it in religious terms.
The culture was manipulated to bring about an economic advantage without having to provide real-world incentives, like a living wage, etc.
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So it's a sixteenth-century conspiracy theory? There are all sorts of religious ideas floating around at any one time, and it's something of a mystery to say when Christianity took off instead of, e.g., Mithraic cults.* As I say, surely part of it is that the ideas resonate in light of the particular economic circumstances of the time, but it doesn't undermine the proposition that once the people believed that they should act like Elect, and not Damned, this had economic consequences. Which was kinda Weber's point.
* Like my periodic references to Capricorn One (which was on AMC last Sunday -- and what a good flick, too, with some solid acting by Orenthal James Simpson, who pretends to be an astronaut), I like to work in Mithraic cults now and then, if only to keep Atticus happy.
