This essay focuses on THE SPIRIT OF CAPITALISM In the title.. What is to be understood by it? The attempt to give anything like a definition of it brings out certain difficulties

THE SPIRIT OF CAPITALISM In the title

of this study is used the somewhat pretentious phrase, the spirit of capitalism. What is to be understood by it? The attempt to give anything like a definition of it brings out certain difficulties which are in the very nature of this type of investigation. If any object can be find to which this term can be apply with any understandable meaning, it can only be an historical individual, i.e. a complex of elements associate in historical reality which we unite into a conceptual whole from the standpoint of their cultural significance. Such an historical concept, however, since it refers in its content to a phenomenon.

significant

for its unique CAPITALISM individuality, cannot be defined according to the formula genus proximum, differentia specifica, but it must be gradually put together out of the individual parts which are taken from historical reality to make it up. Thus the final and definitive concept cannot stand at the beginning of the investigation, but must come at the end. We must, in other words, work out in the course of the discussion. As its most important result, the best conceptual formulation of what we here understand by the spirit of capitalism,

that is the best from the point of view which interests us here. This point of view (the one of which we shall speak later) is, further, by no means the only possible one from which the historical phenomena we are investigating can be analysed. Other standpoints would, for this as for every historical phenomenon, yield other characteristics as the essential ones. the spirit of capitalism. Such a description is, however, indispensable in order clearly to understand the object of the investigation. For this CAPITALISM purpose we turn to a document of that spirit which contains.

what we are looking for in almost

classical purity, and at the same time has the advantage of being free from all direct relationship to religion, being thus, for our purposes, free of preconceptions. Remember, that time is money. He that can earn ten shillings a day by his labour, and goes abroad, or sits idle, one half of that day, though he spends but sixpence during his diversion or idleness, ought not to reckon that the only expense; he has really spent, or rather thrown away, five shillings besides. Remember, that credit is money. If a man lets his money lie in my hands after it is due. He gives me the interest, or so much 14 in the words, .“They make tallow out of cattle and money out of men”. The peculiarity of this