The protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism game You are a 17th century Calvinist and you have salvation panic So it’s off to work I go! But I know that God has given me my vocation, my calling in life, if I do well at it then I know that I’m in God’s good books and I’m one of the saved Arrrgh! I’m frightened that I might not be one of God’s elect

Your work You believe that God has given you a calling in life And that calling is….balloon blowing. The harder you work at blowing up balloons and the more success you have the more you show yourself and others that you are predestined for heaven. We’ll ignore the fact that Calvinists would not have approved of balloons as they’re frivolous fun and that late hadn’t been invented yet

A week in your life 2 minutes will represent 1 working day you will start the day with two ballons and you need to try and blow these both up and tie them in the time. Each balloon is worth 3 jelly beans (this is our money) at the end of your day you can choose to reinvest your jelly beans & buy more balloons (they cost 2 jelly beans each) or eat some of them but remember that success eases your salvation panic, the fewer balloons you blow up the less sure you are that you are going to heaven. After your busy working day you can rest for one minute- you’re a Calvinist, you believe in an ascetic lifestyle and too much sleep is lazy and sinful, after all the devil will find work for idle hands to do! You will work for 6 days as this is what it tells us God did in Genesis

Temptation All this balloon blowing proving too difficult? You can choose to opt out and go to the party table where you can take a break and eat some chocolate BUT it will cost you 3 jelly beans and means that one of your balloons gets popped plus all that laziness and wasted money on fun will not ease your salvation panic Plus all the other Calvinists in your community have you marked down as a sinner.

Review of your week After your week of hard work how have you done? The more balloons you blew up the more likely it is that you’re heading for heaven. The more balloons you blew up the more jelly beans you now have, the person with the most can now invest in a balloon pump that’s industrialisation and the consequence of it will be lots of jelly beans- you’ve reassured yourself that you’re one of God’s elect, honoured God with your commitment to your calling and capitalism has developed as a by product. Also your attitude to hard work has rubbed off on others who have seen your success, they aren’t Calvinists but the protestant ethic has created the spirit of capitalism. Hard work and pursuit of profit but not greed your religion has created large scale social change.

Did it work for everyone though? Some of you will have found that no matter how hard you work you just didn’t have enough puff to blow up all the balloons this ties in the criticism of Weber’s theory that some countries that had large Calvinist populations, such as Scotland, Norway and Sweden just didn’t have the resources, technology and social structure to industrialise despite the hard working attitude of their population However in Weber’s defence he didn’t claim that Calvinsim was the only influence on the emergence of capitalism but that it was a significant factor in creating social change.

Where did the money (or the beans for the first balloons come from?) Marxist scholar Frank argued that slavery and colonialism (building an empire) was more significant that Calvinism in accelerating the development of capitalism as having an empire allowed Britain to obtain raw material really cheaply and gave them an advantage over the rest of Europe.

Transferring all of this into exam success The beliefs section of your paper two has two ten mark questions, one is a straight forward outline and evaluate two the other is a new analyse two arguments from the item. We are going to have a go at the first part of the this for the item question on page 19.