Religion and the Rise of Capitalism

Abstract: Based on a presentation at the American Philosophical Society's Member Meeting in April 2023, the central question of this essay is where modern Western economics came from, and why it emerged when and where it did. The author argues that Adam Smith's thinking, indeed the entire Smithian revolution in thinking about what we now call economics, was enabled by what was then a new line of religious thinking in the English-speaking Protestant world – in particular, the turn away from Calvinist notions of depravity and predestination, which took the religious thinking of the English-speaking world beyond the original basis of the Protestant Reformation. This fundamental change in religious thinking enabled the secular thinking of that time and place to take on the more optimistic view of the human character, and the expanded concept of the possibilities for human agency, that underlie modern Western economics.