Over at Speculations and Such, Jonathan has an insightful comment on R.H. Tawney’s Religion and the Rise of Capitalism which includes the following, relevant to an historical understanding of the social implications of Calvinism:
Tawney… makes the important point that “[b]oth an intense individualism and a rigorous Christian socialism could be deduced from Calvin’s doctrine. Which one of them predominated depended on differences of political environment and of social class. It depended, above all, on the question whether Calvinists were, as at Geneva and in Scotland, a majority, who could stamp their ideals on the social order, or, as in England, a minority, living on the defensive beneath the suspicious eyes of a hostile government” (p. 113). It is Tawney’s contention, then, that it is because English Puritans were never able to extend their influence across the entirety of English society that economic individualism was primarily inculcated among them.
