Protestant work ethic

God chooses us based on no work but we find ourselves working as hard as we possibly can in order to demonstrate to ourselves that we have in fact already been According to the absolutely brilliant German sociologist Max Weber, the founder of the discipline of sociology, who pioneers the study of the sociological impact of Protestant theology at the beginning of the twentieth century, it is precisely this and cruel logic that's responsible for what he – and it's an enormous claim, essentially insupportable – but it's this backwards, crazily inverted logic that's responsible for the economic progress of the northern Europeans.

It's responsible for what Weber calls the emergence of the Protestant work ethic.

and in fact have many times taken issue with a lot of Weber's historical claims.

But he's invaluable, I think, for our purposes in the understanding of Milton and for a lot of the cultural business of the seventeenth century in