On John Winthrop's A Model of Christian Charity

Was America born capitalist? it is often asked. Ever since Max Weber proposed a causal relationship between early Protestants' longing for order and rational control and the spirit of modern capitalism, the question has consumed the attention of generations of sociologists and historians. Weber's ideal types were too abstract, it is now clear. The careful accounting and control of the self that the Puritans so conspicuously valued was only one of the cultural traits on which capitalist economies have thrived. Others, like the risk-taking and labor exploitation on which the tobacco and slave economy of early Virginia was founded, could be successfully capital-generative as well. Capitalism's identifying features lie as much in its institutions of trade, property law, and labor as in the inner ethos that captured Weber's imagination.