MAX WEBER WAS WRONG.

• Author: McCloskey, Deirdre Nansen
• Position: IDEAS

MAX WEBER, THE north German economist, proud reserve officer in the Kaiser's army, literal dueler with academic opponents, and co-founder of modern sociology, sits on every college reading list for his 1905 book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. If you didn't read it in college, it's time to turn off the TV, Google it, and do so. It's a stunning performance, one of my top 100 nonfiction books of the 20th century. The book is brilliant, readable, short. (By the way, henceforth you should exhibit your sophistication by pronouncing his name correctly. It's "VAY-ber," not like the "WEB-er" hamburger grill you've just put away for the year. You get extra points for saying "Max" in echt deutsch: "Maahx," not like "Mad Max.")

Others of the stunning 100 include Joseph Schumpeter's Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942), John Maynard Keynes' The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936), Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex (1949), and Edward Tufte's The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (1983). If you don't know such books, you don't know much, and you really need to get going.

But that a book is "great" does not mean it is correct, or is to be taken as good history or good economics or good theology. Marx's Das Kapital is indubitably a great book, one of the very greatest of the 19th century, as I say to annoyed friends of libertarian or conservative bent. But then I say to my left-wing friends, annoying them too, that Marx was wrong on almost every point of economics, history, and politics. Which is why I haven't got any friends.

So what's wrong with Weber's argument? First we need the argument. (Reading this summary is not an excuse for skipping the actual book.) Weber thinks that there is such a thing as, to use the Marxist word, modern "capitalism," originating in the 16th century. By capitalism he means, as the name implies, the focused accumulation of capital in masses. The focused accumulation, he says, depends on ample saving and hard work, characteristic of the Protestant north Germans as against the lazy, Catholic Bavarians.

How to get the ample saving and hard work? Spirit, Geist, runs things, he says (and I do too). He claims that the doctrine of salvation put forward by John Calvin emerged as the new spirit's engine. People saved and worked because they wanted to prove to themselves that they were in fact among the few "elect," predestined since the beginning by an omniscient God to be saved...