ABSTRACT

When we speak of “laws,” we can be speaking of any number of different things: the laws of the state, or moral, religious, scientific or economic laws. Different, but not unrelated. Max Weber has revealed a strict correlation between Protestantism and economic development: in the sight of both God and the marketplace, initiative and personal sacrifice bear fruit. The United States has guided the economic development of the West not only because of its vast resources and the size of its internal market: when those resources still remained to be exploited, and the population of the American colonies was smaller than that of the mother country, Europe had already exported its most inflexible Protestant minds, preparing a secondary destiny for itself.