ABSTRACT
The Protestant ethic, seldom mentioned today in lay circles and possibly not much discussed there even during its highest point in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, has nevertheless been a prominent social force in the development of Western society. Culturally and structurally, this powerful personal orientation among small-enterprise capitalists of the day left its mark, such that it is still being felt in the present. The Protestant ethic is, at bottom, about the will to work.
