The Protestant Ethic Thesis before Weber: Forerunners in France and Brazil

It is well known that the “Protestant Ethic” thesis had existed for quite some time prior to Max Weber’s own formulation. Some specific cases of anticipation of the thesis are represented by Émile de Laveleye and Napoléon Roussel, in the French speaking world of the 19^th century, and, in the same century, by Brazilian writers Tavares Bastos, E. Carlos Pereira and a certain number of missionaries of English and North-American background who worked in Brazil, like Zachary Taylor and others. Even details of Weber’s thesis, concerning, for instance, the emphasis on the consequences of sectarianism (“Sektentum”) are present in mid 19^th century’s Tavares Bastos. It is very unlikely that Weber ever read Bastos (who wrote in Portuguese), or even knew he had existed. While such forerunners do not necessarily reach the same level of theoretical, indeed of theological refinement as does Weber, they view adhesion to Protestantism (albeit, at times, in a rather cultural and secularized sense) as a necessary condition for modernization and economic development. A common source to Weber and, on the other hand, the forerunners, may have been Hegel’s Lessons on the Philosophy of History which, directly or indirectly, did not take long to reach Brazil and, of course, France. Weber’s own formulation of the thesis seems to represent a largely secularized version of a central tenet of Protestant apologetics. Again in largely secularized terms, this is still, in early 21^st century, a fully living, indeed burning issue in both France and Brazil, being but a continuation of the Kulturkampf, the culture war, which has for so long opposed the Protestant and Catholic conceptions of society and modernization.