Sublime

The place of the self-confidence which the elect sought to attain, and continually to renew in restless and successful work at his calling, was taken by an attitude of humility and abnegation.

The treatment of labour as a calling became as characteristic of the modern worker as the corresponding attitude toward acquisition of the business man.

The moral conduct of the average man was thus deprived of its planless and unsystematic character and subjected to a consistent method for conduct as a whole.

Thus just as in the case of the industrial order, in the general theoretical field, the important thing about Weber’s work was not how he judged the relative importance of ideas or of economic factors, but rather the way in which he analyzed the systems of social action within which ideas and values as well as “economic forces” operate to influence

But at least one thing was unquestionably new: the valuation of the fulfilment of duty in worldly affairs as the highest form which the moral activity of the individual could assume.

The God of Calvinism demanded of his believers not single good works, but a life of good works combined into a unified system.

One of the fundamental elements of the spirit of modern capitalism, and not only of that but of all modern culture: rational conduct on the basis of the idea of the calling, was born—that is what this discussion has sought to demonstrate—from the spirit of Christian asceticism.

The superior indulgence of the seigneur and the parvenu ostentation of the nouveau riche are equally detestable to asceticism. But, on the other hand, it has the highest ethical appreciation of the sober, middle-class, self-made man.

And on the other hand it legalized the exploitation of this specific willingness to work, in that it also interpreted the employer’s business activity as a calling.