ABSTRACT
The social and cultural processes surrounding consumption in western capitalism during
the twentieth century have been influ-enced by earlier cultural values, carried by various
social status groups into the modern capitalist period. Among these carriers of cultural
values, the early rational, peaceable, bourgeois capitalists of Britain and Holland, whose
world-view was analysed by the German sociologist Max Weber (1864-1920) in The
Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, have played a crucial role of world
historical significance. Their migration, sometimes forced upon them, across the Atlantic,
laid the basis of the modern United States of America-the social formation which has
come to epitomise the modern consumer’s dreamland, or heaven on earth. The analysis
Weber provided of this group, the early rational, Calvinist capitalists of the seventeenth
century, will be discussed briefly here, before looking at later changes to this cultural
patterning underpinning rational capitalism in the eighteenth century.
