Hell and Christianity

[CountArach]

Another way to tell whether capitalism or Calvinism caused each other is to look at the states which are the exception to the rule. So take Scotland for example - a more backward country than Puritan England or the Netherlands, yet despite becoming fiercely Calvinist, it remained backward and feudal until the 18th century, by which time deism was in all likelihood as prominent amongst the enlightenment figures (Adam Smith, Hume etc) as Calvinism (though they couldn't say it out loud or they got executed). Anyway, if Calvinism really caused the development of capitalism, this should as a rule have happened in Scotland as well, but it didn't.

Weber believed that there were multiple paths to Capitalism, and that Calvinism was just one of them.

edit: before anyone gets confused, marxist means a logical development here not politics.

A marxist view means something different for historians, has nothing to do with economic theory, it's assuming a certain chain of events, a natural progression.

Nah, that's a Modernist historian. Marxist historians are still Marxists (Look at Hobsbawm, etc) in the economic sense and still look for that guiding hand of economic development, but they are by their very nature also Modernist. Modernist historians look for an overarching grand narrative to history and look at the inter-linking developments between two points (a diachronic analysis). This is as opposed to post-modern historians who would rather perform a synchronic analysis of a society, which is just a snapshot of a society at one given moment.