ABSTRACT
Weber views the West’s “world-oriented ethical individual” as rooted significantly in ancient monotheism, though also in developments in the Middle and High Middle Ages: the Western industrial city, Catholicism, and the dynamic autonomy of salvation religions. With Luther’s abolition of the Confessional, both Calvinism and Lutheranism inherited this “ethical individual”: ethical action now became directed, even for the laity, “toward the world.”
The Calvinists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, owing to revisions by the “Puritan Divines,” upheld powerfully this development, Weber stresses. As carried by the laities of these churches and sects, this individualism became widespread and assumed a “world-mastery” posture. Puritans in Colonial America, in light of their wide dispersion across innumerable sects as well as their strict “rejection” of the world, supported widely this posture. Their view of believers as appropriately “tools” of their Deity intensified their asceticism and their ethical action. With nineteenth-century secularization, successors to Puritanism came to practice their ethical individualism in American civic associations, Weber argues.
