| Missing, Now Found in the Eighteenth Century: Weber's Protestant Capitalist | The American Historical Review, 108.1

Missing, Now Found in the Eighteenth Century:
Weber's Protestant Capitalist

MARGARET C. JACOB and MATTHEW KADANE

Few historical theories have lived the long life of Max Weber's Protestant Ethic thesis. As a recent surveyor of Weber's importance reckons: "Since its publication in 1904–1905 as a two-part article, Max Weber's thesis on the Protestant ethic has been the focus of the longest running debate in modern social science." ¹ It is therefore impossible to pull Weber out of the bag without the baggage of a century's worth of critics. Some of his more incautious critics, in particular those who have attacked him for naïve idealism or for saying that Protestantism caused capitalism, can be disregarded since they did not carefully read The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904–05). To have analytical power still to this day, Weber's text had also to be subtle enough to risk exposure to consistent misinterpretation. ² Yet, as more perceptive critics have pointed out, the Weber who placed too much emphasis solely on the doctrine of double predestination in shaping inner-worldly asceticism, ³ who took Richard Baxter as a typical seventeenth-century Calvinist, ⁴ who never had an adequate explanation for why certain Catholic (not to mention Jewish) communities in parts of Europe could be more successful than their Calvinist counterparts ⁵ —that Weber is in need of a refinement. We agree, but we also believe that Weber was "onto something."

The invocation of Weber seems inevitably to bring with it the history of the historians' debates about the thesis itself, the sagas of capitalism and Protestantism, and the enormous historiography those subjects have generated. Not least, invoking Weber conjures up a host of methodological disputes—about the value of sociological models, the limits of empiricism, and the utility of cultural history, to name just a few. Given its thorniness, why invoke Weber's thesis yet again? On the most general level, as even the very un-Marxist Patrick Collinson has recently said in passing of Karl Marx, Weber formulated the questions we still ask. ⁶ Those questions concern the relationship between economy and culture, and their answers treat culture not as epiphenomenal but as a source of meaning itself. It is no accident that the recent work of economists and economic historians with an interest in culture, so-called "economic anthropologists," has been described as overarchingly neo-Weberian. ⁷ Weber set the terms for making ideas and culture matter alongside the material, and in this general sense we are summoning the spirit of Weber, theorist of social systems.

But we are equally interested in Weber as historian, and the more specific reason we have called him back into the historians' debates is our rediscovery of the 14,000-page spiritual journal of an all-but-lost historical figure: Joseph Ryder, a Leeds clothier (1695–1768), who flourished on the eve of industrialization in the geographical heart of Britain's dynamic economy. ⁸ In spite of the length of his written account of his spiritual self, not much is known about many of the details of Ryder's life. He was born to religious, nonconformist parents, that is, to non-Anglican Protestants also known as Dissenters. His father died three months before his birth, but his mother, with whom he was close if also often at odds, lived until a month before he turned forty-eight. ⁹ He married at the comparatively late age of forty in 1735 to a woman he never names but who he does reveal was ten years to the day his junior. ¹⁰ Nineteen years later, his wife died of a drawn-out illness, which also goes unnamed. Childless and lonely in the hours when he was not working or busy with his church duties, Ryder never remarried. ¹¹

Slightly more can be said about the details of his working life, less because of what he writes about it directly than because of what we also know about other clothiers from Leeds in the middle third of the eighteenth century. ¹² By the 1730s but probably earlier, Ryder rode into the Yorkshire countryside almost weekly, collecting from cottagers the spun woolen yarn that he then arranged to have made into whole cloth, much of it destined for London and a national, if not international, market. ¹³ Contemporary evidence also suggests that merchants like Ryder and their spouses may have spun with their hired clothiers in workdays that could stretch up to fifteen hours long. ¹⁴ The capital for the mercantile venture was theirs alone, but exactly how much capital Ryder possessed is hard to know. It is clear that it varied over time. His will reveals that he left a little over £200 to his friends and family and allocated another £50 for funeral expenses. He also had both property and goods to give to others, although he does not specify how much property or the nature of his goods. ¹⁵ But significantly, he also seems to have lost some—maybe a good deal—of his wealth as he reached old age and his health declined further. Two months before his death on November 10, 1767, for example, he records both his material condition and his abiding faith: "I find that I sink in my termporall things much, I find my health much impair'd, creature comforts much diminish'd, but I dare not indulge a hard thought of providence, for God takes nothing from me but what He first gave, for Naked came I into the world, and naked shall I return."

Ryder straddled the two worlds between which so many other mid-eighteenth-century British entrepreneurs stood poised. The first and earlier one had been driven by the need to find markets, to hustle for profit, and it was defined by an economy still based on hand labor and family sources for credit. ¹⁶ The second took shape only in the 1770s and gradually became an economic and industrial order where productivity met a robust consumption and where technological innovation in steam and cotton opened an unprecedented set of opportunities. However unmechanized its industry—and Ryder still lived in an age of wooden machines, muscle power, labor forces, and capital resources that rarely extended beyond the family circle ¹⁷ —over the course of the eighteenth century, Yorkshire's share of Britain's wool and worsted industry rose from 20 to 60 percent, with the West Riding at the center of this growth. ¹⁸ We do not mean to imply that in Leeds prosperity was automatic. Early in his career, Ryder, in his own words, faced "a probability of want of money for necessary supplys." ¹⁹ But within a year, he made "provision for food for my household in a plentifull manner." ²⁰ Ryder stood firmly in a preindustrial world; only, as his voluminous spiritual diary begun in 1733 reveals, as he prospered, Joseph Ryder, "entrepreneur and capitalist" (neither word would have been known to him), was not quite of this world.

In spite of Ryder's otherworldliness, but also because of it, Weber would have found him to have been scripted for the part of the early capitalist in The Protestant Ethic: "some young man from one of the putting-out families [who] went out into the country, carefully chose weavers for his employ, greatly increased the rigour of his supervision of their work, and thus turned them from peasants into labourers." ²¹ This ideal type of the capitalistic entrepreneur, Weber continued, "avoids ostentation and unnecessary expenditure, as well as conscious enjoyment of his power, and is embarrassed by the outward signs of the social recognition which he receives. His manner of life is, in other words, often . . . distinguished by a certain ascetic tendency." ²² The question we had to ask on first reading Ryder's diary, which is a thirty-five-year elaboration on these archetypal characteristics, is whether or not the correspondence between Weber's description of the ideal type of capitalist and Joseph Ryder was merely coincidental? If it is not—and what a striking coincidence it would have to be for Weber to have described so well the behavior of a man about whose spiritual life we have immensely detailed evidence but of whom Weber knew nothing—then the Weberian archetype of the early modern capitalist deserves a reconsideration.

We are arguing that Joseph Ryder is the German sociologist's missing, now found, case study. Weber's three key features of ascetic Protestantism—diligence in spiritual and vocational calling, making use of one's time, and material asceticism—read like bullet points at the top of Ryder's spiritual résumé. Despite the complex and largely German context of The Protestant Ethic, ²³ Ryder's diary reveals that Weber got very close to certain aspects of this new ethos so beneficial to capitalism. As Weber puts it, close to identifying an ethic about "the earning of more and more money, combined with the strict avoidance of all spontaneous enjoyment of life," an ethic that "is above all completely devoid of any eudaemonistic, not to say hedonistic, admixture." ²⁴ Weber recognized that, at its very origin, the ethos of capitalism for everyday, ordinary practitioners like Ryder could entail a radical self-disciplining, as well as through their chapel life a communal and not simply an individual effort to save one's soul while prospering amid plenty for the few.

But—and this is also our argument—had Weber uncovered Ryder's diary, he would have needed to call his thesis back for revision on at least two points. The first is theological. Weber argued that predestination was an all-important theological doctrine, that it led believers into a despair from which, in the context of a Protestant world "disenchanted" of the soul-relieving practices of Catholicism like confession and absolution, only work that glorified God—and which over time came to glorify the secular "common good"—could rescue them. ²⁵ Ryder, however, was the product of a particularly transitory theological climate. ²⁶ One foot still waded in predestinarian waters, if only because of his fears of the heresies lurking in new theological doctrines. ²⁷ But Ryder did not expressly believe that the souls of all had been predestined to be saved, or damned, before the fall of Adam and Eve. Certainly he embraced watchfulness, the habitual monitoring of himself and the world around him that was so common among predestinarians of an earlier generation. (See Figure 1.) But Ryder's watchfulness came less from his predestinarianism, of which we hear only muted articulations in the diary, than from his providentialism. The weather, news from abroad or from his neighborhood, military victories, the defeat of the Jacobites, his and others' changing material fortunes—all were signs that for Ryder signified God's approving, or disapproving, providential hand in human affairs. Any and all events could be read as texts that held clues to salvation and that led him to greater watchfulness. ²⁸ And more on the providentialist side of the theological spectrum—and thus less frightened by fate than his predestinarian forebears—Ryder was also freer to imagine the rewards of his striving.

Figure 1 : May 25, 1733. Joseph Ryder's first entry prefigures the "watchfulness" that would become his trademark activity. Photo courtesy of the John Rylands Library of Manchester.

In revising the key theology he singularly identified by his thesis, Weber would need a closer look at Ryder's religious milieu. Ryder came out of the world of radical Dissent, and by mid-century it had adopted a kinder, gentler face. Ryder wrote that a forgiving "Christ has in his word assured every penitent believer . . . tho his sins be red as crimson he can make them as wool"—an unsurprising metaphor, given his occupation. ²⁹ Yet Ryder's openness to new doctrines, even ones as tepid as belief in the forgiveness of Christ, only went so far. The doubt-ridden Ryder thought that assurance was never "out of ye reach of Doubting because by our Sins we render ourselves liable to be attacked with doubts&fears notwithstanding our former attainments, Much less in any Degree of assurance attainable as should render us unsecure or unwatchful." ³⁰ As much as the most anxious Elizabethan Puritan, Ryder was plagued by uncertainties about his salvation and struggled to find a way to live a pious life, which he consistently felt to be beyond his capabilities. If his "election" to heaven was not determined millennia before his birth, salvation still seemed unattainable, left to his own meager devices. In Ryder's estimation, he continually failed to live up to his own model of piety. ³¹ Yet if Weber unduly stressed doctrinaire predestination, he nevertheless captured—and here is why he is still important for the case we want to make—the despair that stemmed from uncertainty over salvation. Ryder never believed that an assurance of grace could mitigate the uncertainty. The watching that predestination instilled in the first generations of Reformed Protestants, the children and grandchildren of John Calvin, carried over. Even if not fully imbued with the doctrine of predestination, the watchfulness was every bit as present in Ryder. It formed the core of his religious outlook and his economic drive and restraint. By the 1830s, faced with an economic miracle that Ryder could never have imagined, Protestant intellectuals seeking to understand the new political economy in Britain still made recourse to doctrines about salvation and sin, backsliding and atonement. ³² In Calvin, Weber rightly spied a theorist whose staying power vastly exceeded even his own.

The second point for revision of Weber's thesis concerns what he did not consider, or did not know: the path that Ryder's religious behavior was meant to travel, as it became more prosperous and hence worldly, was agonizingly difficult. Its spiritual perils were as dangerous as his countless harrowing journeys into the Yorkshire countryside that he continually reminds us was still infested with highwaymen. At stake were Ryder's spiritual health and his physical well-being, the latter seeming to deteriorate as his anxiety over the former increased. Weber did not emphasize enough how much the religious entrepreneur agonized in the bargain he continually negotiated with God. The dark side of capitalism lay not in its inequities. They could be explained by reference to the "inequality" of providence, and Ryder seldom dwells on the poverty he must have seen in town and countryside. Rather than simple destitution, the life of the market had the potential to ensure eternal damnation. Questing for riches, prosperity, even comfort—for the things of this world—required a certain kind of courage as well as the ability to beg and humble oneself in the quest for grace. Ryder sought to be prosperous in this world, but simultaneously he could never be sure of his godliness.

In his very first volume, when he faces the probability of a want of money for supplies, he lays out the bargain of moderation he is trying to negotiate with the deity. Throughout this essay wherever possible, we will let him speak in his own words: "This day considering a Little about my family affairs, and seeing a probability of want of money for necessary supplys I thought what a poor Empty Thing it would prove to any man Tho he was never so furnished with Trading Commodities if so be he wanted bread . . . and further Thought what an Empty Thing ye World with all its Enjoyments would prove in ye want of ye Grace of God." ³³ Ryder's diary presents page after page of evidence that acquiring the capitalist spirit, which he never really did fully possess, did not always come easy. Thus we must exempt him from a point recently made in John Smail's excellent book on eighteenth-century Yorkshire wool merchants. Smail writes that "profit maximization was as much the goal of entrepreneurs in 1700 or 1750 as it was in 1800." ³⁴ Not only was profit maximization something Ryder never took for granted, it is never clear that he wants to live in a world in which he could take it for granted.

We have so naturalized capitalism around the globe that we are in danger of losing our ability to understand the texture and nature of the ascetic worldliness to which Ryder's spiritual life attests. We have made economic actors so "rational" that we have lost sight of the fact that nearly a century ago Weber identified a problem worthy of explanation. He took for granted the greed of humankind and saw the acquisition of money as nothing out of the ordinary. What Weber wanted to understand concerned the linkage between specifically religious values, the ethos of Protestantism, and its relationship to worldly success of a capitalist variety. He wanted to understand why certain religious values that promoted steady accumulation and reinvestment, and that Joseph Ryder's life and beliefs notably exemplify, became normative and commonplace, the possessions of countless ordinary but entrepreneurial men and women. Some critics have said that Weber was looking for a religious phenomenon that never existed, that no linkage can be seen between the spiritual life encouraged by early modern Protestantism and a propensity for disciplined commercial life. ³⁵ But consider the following meditation by Ryder—one among countless—and notice the intricate linkage between providential assistance, piety, and prosperity: "looking upon some poor people, and Considering of their Circumstances, How poor&Low their case was with respect to this world compared with mine, I was so far from despising them, that I begun rather to admire ye Liberality of providence Towards me Who might in Justice have placed me in Circumstances as Low or Lower When of his bounty he had rather made me Instrumental of such poor peoples relief." ³⁶

There may have been many Joseph Ryders in eighteenth-century England who saw themselves as benefiting because of divine providence, who congregated in chapels and churches where preachers as diverse as latitudinarian Anglicans and itinerant chapel lecturers addressed their concerns for salvation amid the evidence of their worldliness. ³⁷ Such merchants would have espoused an ethic that associated one's economic fortunes with the depth and degree of providential grace and with one's success in striving for it. Protestant entrepreneurs may have been busy before 1700, but to the best of our knowledge only Ryder's diary lays out so clearly, and for so many years, the striving and pious ethos, the spiritual discipline they imagined as needed for success. Ryder's entire economic life entailed a negotiation between the need for profit and the dictates of his religious desires; indeed, the latter drove the former, or, at the very least, naturalized and civilized his economic needs. His lifelong central preoccupation thus concerned the fate of his soul, especially in relation to the ever-pressing demands of his disciplined and, we are suggesting, religiously sanctioned worldliness. (See Figure 2.) His porosity to the world was matched only by the porosity of his soul as it strove for grace and hence salvation. In his diary, he lays out the dilemma presented by the wealth he coveted: "I thought if ye Rich dye but safe if they were interested in Christ,&had a title to glory then all was well but if it was not thus with them I think it not worth desiring to be rich if it is but to descent with Pomp into ye pit." ³⁸ All his life, Ryder was an amateur religious poet, and so he also sang about his plight as Christian and entrepreneur. Put in the rhythm of one of his countless inimitable verses:

Our Danger's Great while we on Wealth do place
Our best affections slighting offered Grace. ³⁹

Ryder's aspirations for wealth were contained by a nervousness about his spiritual path that, whether fully consciously or not, also valorized his middling social place and led him to consider those richer than himself as mired in sin: "a Neighbours profits and Incomes by business far to exceed mine I hope by ye blessing of God it was that I Immediately thus reason'd with my Self that I had ye favour of God&a Competency." ⁴⁰ The clothier's religious ethic thus gave de facto endorsement to the prosperous middling sort, who traded, employed, traveled, and could imagine their betters as more in danger of damnation than themselves. Such an ethic made their own mobility easier—though by no means effortless—to accept. "God gave me a heart as well as ability to Communicate to ye necessity of Others&not to Covetous hoarding." ⁴¹

As if he were written for the part, Ryder exemplifies the positive and negative aspects of Weber's thesis: the striving for worldly achievements that suggested success in the afterlife and the worry that too much success in the here and now augured failure in the hereafter. In his mind, he had metaphysical business partners, God and his son, Jesus Christ, but the partnership required daily attention and self-monitoring in order to locate its enemies—those that lurked in his own sinful nature and, although he appears infrequently, in the wiles of Satan. ⁴² The battle God and Mammon waged for Ryder's attention kept him attentive to both, and on occasion Ryder spells it out: too much success in this world breached the Mosaic covenant. ⁴³

Figure 2 : August 6–11, 1738. The busy summer months kept Ryder uncharacteristically concise and even more concerned to "be kept above the world." Photo courtesy of the John Rylands Library of Manchester.

This was Joseph Ryder's life. God's covenant with him aided his economic striving, but in that help God gave him the greatest, most agonizing trial—how to balance the worldly and spiritual. That balancing act was, moreover, a lifelong concern. ⁴⁴ When he was in his early seventies, contemplating his retirement from trade, Ryder summed up his partnership with God, his desire for profit here and in the afterlife, and his own work ethic: "This day I endeavoured to mind my business and finds it necessary while I follow trade, but finding so little or nothing of profit arising it is apt to damp a little, for I always think that this is the greatest motive to industry whether it be in things relating to this world or a better, next to Obedience to Gods comment, but then I do not think a prosperous condition without its snares,&great ones too . . . God knows what is for ye best, for if riches Increase much, we often set our hearts too much upon them . . . Lord kill the root that's in my heart That I may not from Thee Depart." ⁴⁵

Before going any further into Ryder's diary , we should pause to say what we know about the text itself. Unlike the work of the prolific seventeenth-century diarist Samuel Pepys or Ryder's nearer contemporary James Boswell, Ryder's spiritual journal was not written with posterity in mind or to record the details of daily life. His stated intention in keeping a written account of himself was first and foremost to maintain a watch over the state of his soul. With an almost literary foreshadowing, he wrote on the first page of his journal, "May the Lord help me to keep in mind the Solemn Warning which Christ left his Disciples upon record, and consequently all his followers, in the single word—Watch." ⁴⁶ He could have just as easily, and accurately, written the same on the last page, for he consistently tried to examine his own life—to catch himself sinning, to detect signs of "election," to monitor his moral and spiritual duties and excesses in his accumulation of material wealth—and to examine—the watching was also directed outward—the external world in order to locate God's providential hand. In his moments of authorial self-reflection, Ryder always desired that his diary "may prove a means to keeping Watchfull" ⁴⁷ of his manifold and omnipresent temptations, including sexual passions, which he occasionally suggests marked his early years. ⁴⁸ But unlike the youthful sexual transgressions that he could unequivocally condemn, his business successes constantly teetered between sinful and permissible. In Ryder's preindustrial world, profit maximization was no more a given than sexual freedom. And his inability to draw a firm distinction between sinful greed and meritorious moneymaking left him little choice but to monitor himself in greater detail. "If Riches Should Encrease upon me, I might not set my heart upon them,& thought withal they were a sorry portion unless I or any Other have ye Comfortable&Additional blessing of ye Grace of God . . . a market Day for ye Body, too often makes but small addition to ye benefit of ye Soul." ⁴⁹ Until his failing health becomes a major preoccupation in the late 1750s, almost every diary entry begins with the state of his business and ends with the worry that either he might become poor and would have to be accepting of this state, or that his concern, we might say obsession, with "those things here below" might "encroach not upon my Religious hours nor upon Sabbath Time." ⁵⁰ The monitoring of business and soul were two sides of the same coin, and each fed into the striving needed to maintain the other.

At the time that Ryder wrote his first entry about the need to "watch," examining the self in writing was at least a hundred-and-fifty-year-old practice among Reformed Protestants. The Bible offered the oldest prescription for keeping a journal, but the genre that Ryder's text more closely resembles in structure is the Puritan diary, that remarkable artifact of devotional practice appearing first in the 1580s among the godly identified with experimental Calvinism. Experimental Calvinists, as Tom Webster has recently put it, were "those who made more than an intellectual assent to the dogmas of Calvinist soteriology, predestination, election and assurance, who made the search for the marks of election central to a practical divinity." ⁵¹ Experimental Calvinism thus encouraged intense self-examination in order that the practitioner might read the world, and his and God's activities in it, as a text that held the clues to salvation. The diary, in turn, became for many self-examiners the place where the "godly self," again in Webster's words, "was maintained, indeed constructed, through the action of writing." ⁵² "Experimental Calvinism" as a theological description no longer had historical precision in Ryder's lifetime, but Ryder's providentialist outlook shaped his habits of self-maintenance and godly self-making in much the same manner that the staunchly predestinarian version of Calvinism affected the Puritan diarists of the 1580s to 1640s. Writing, for Ryder, a man with a natural literary sensibility, as evidenced by hundreds of original verses in the diary, in turn functioned as a kind of technology of the self that could assist his watching.

The question persists, why did Ryder write so much? He answers us on one occasion as if he were asking himself the same thing: "This Morning considering about ye making and keeping of this Diary,&ye Seeming Difficulty at first entrance . . . I Concluded that Gods mercies to them that fear him are New Every morning, Great is Gods Faithfullness . . . [M]y main End and design may be by Gods Assistance to keep alive upon my heart a Sense of Gods Great Goodness, and that it may prove a means to keep me Watchfull." ⁵³ The best means to determine if he was a beneficiary of God's mercy was to read his experiences for signs of his potential salvation. What better way literally to read that text of his experience than to write it down, daily? The fact that some entries are naturally less interesting, but no shorter, than others can be painful to Ryder's modern reader, but the logic Ryder used to explain his behavior—a logic predicated on his theology—was consistent to such a degree that his life as a spiritual writer was quantitatively, and therefore probably qualitatively, very different from the kind of life led by his less literate or verbose peers. His first entry was on May 25, 1733, his last, in shaky handwriting, on January 3, 1768. ⁵⁴ Each day for over thirty-four years included the goal of writing in the journal, and for the longer entries, especially those with rhymed verses, the time spent must have approached an hour. The arithmetic here is not meant to be precise, but even roughly approximated numbers illustrate that a significant piece of Ryder's earthly waking time, on average as much as a half hour each day, was spent writing in his journal. He never talks about leisure, except on the rare occasion to express with remorse probably an equally rare experience of it. So it may be safe to assume that when he was not working long days, traveling, attending religious services, or doing various things of biological necessity, Ryder was writing.

If, for Ryder , his massive, forty-one-volume spiritual journal served to maintain his moral vigilance, above all else it also illuminates for us the agony of his striving. ⁵⁵ On the most basic level, that striving was ever present because, by his own estimation, he never watched his soul well enough: "I resolve to be more particular in self-examination, that great Christian Duty," he recorded, in a list of other resolutions at the end of his second volume. ⁵⁶ "This day I was much concerned to begin a more strict watch over all my ways," he resolved anew several years later. ⁵⁷ Even toward the end of his life, on what for others would have been the happy occasion of temporary relief from health problems, he still prayed in verse, "Lord may a sense of thine allseeing eye/make me more watchfull till the day I dye." ⁵⁸ Watching was also the means to determine if he was failing to watch sufficiently. Ryder's spiritual self-analysis was always governed more by negation than affirmation. He rarely praised himself, and when he did it was usually for not failing. The main purpose of his self-surveillance was therefore less to search for spiritual successes than to look for sin, which presented itself, hour by hour, in a multitude of forms. "Sin has a tyrannizing power in this heart of mine," he wrote shortly after starting his journal. "I find a strange alienation in my heart to what is Good, a strange inclination to sin," to which he continually returned like "the dog to his vomit." ⁵⁹ Whole days Ryder consigns to his possessing "a fatall hypocrisy," to being "infested with Vain Thoughts, Base Desires,&Sinfull Conceptions." ⁶⁰ Even when he allowed his family leave from their chores to go to the Thursday lecture at chapel, he examined his generosity: "I thought I preferr'd ye welfare of my Family's Souls before my own Temporal Interest&Advantage." But then in the next sentence, he wondered if his "Coldness or Lukewarmness in ye Service of God" might lie at the root of his generosity. ⁶¹

Sin was especially frightening to Ryder because it signified his potential damnation, which in turn was especially frightening when death always seemed around the corner. Yet Ryder never reveals in any kind of detail the full range of his past and present sins. He can be both vague and explicit about what generally will lead to his spiritual demise: "turning aside from the good ways of God . . . my heart and affections are running after other objects." ⁶² "The outward grosser sins," which he earlier defines as "drunkenness, swearing, fornication," occurred with the more specific "speculative wantonness, worldly desires, and forbidden pleasures" and lurked everywhere he turned. ⁶³ All the phrases are suggestive, and we can occasionally infer what Ryder did before his conversion at age thirty, or what he may have felt the impulse to continue doing. On hearing Thomas Whitaker preach, he writes that he "discovered how we were Guilty of Uncleanness, not only by Adultery,&Fornication but by obscenity in ye Imagination, we had ye Dismall Effects of this Sin Discovered, to be poverty, Disgrace, Loss of reputation (Tho valuable) and many Loathsome Diseases, and if unrepented of, Eternall Death. We were Cautioned against Lascivious Pictures, unclean Songs&Books, ye Effects whereof has been of bad Consequence filling the World so with this Vile Sin against all Intemperance, which tends Greatly to Lead the Soul aside to this Sin. Many and Great have been my Temptations to this Vile Sin." ⁶⁴ Rarely is Ryder so explicit about his thoughts or the kinds of books he may have read or purchased. As was typically the case with Puritan diarists a century earlier, Ryder's intended readers were himself and God, and both knew the details. ⁶⁵ The point of a spiritual journal was to record the feelings: the penitence for sins about which we can only speculate, the despair induced by an unnamed employee, the gratitude after returning from travels to places never described more specifically than "abroad." On October 23, 1733, he writes with typical asceticism that he does not want "any great profit or Increase" but rather desires "God's assistance and Blessing not to grow great but good." "Too Great an attachment to worldly care and pleasure," he warned himself three years later, "is a considerable hindrance of the success of the Gospel." ⁶⁶

Max Weber would have been delighted to find Ryder's explicitly stated wishes for an ascetic life of moderation. Unlike Weber's favorite, Benjamin Franklin, however, who also offered the advice to "avoid extremes," Ryder could not always confidently draw the line between success and theft, and thus chart his future as saved or damned. ⁶⁷ On one occasion, he thankfully records that so far "he had fared very well and . . . with Moderation knew no want to any Thing. But his recognition of his own success fueled by moderation turned to fear of greed: "Let him that Stole Steal no more but rather let him Labour working with his hands ye Thing that is Good that he may have to Give to him that needeth." ⁶⁸ The direct products of his labor did not constitute theft (although here he is saying that the fruits of his labor should be redistributed charitably), but the accumulation of any extra profit was tantamount to stealing. The equation was simple: material success could be a sign of election, but too much success meant sinking into the bottomless pit of worldly desires. Where exactly to draw the line between profiting and pilfering rarely seems to Ryder to have been so easy.

The preachers in the commercial town of Leeds, whom he heard at weekday and Sunday devotions, generally attended in both morning and evening, addressed many of the same concerns that reappear constantly in his diary, in particular the tension between commercial and religious life. Ryder's spiritual diary also contained a profoundly social dialogue between himself and countless preachers whom he heard and pious neighbors with whom he visited and worshiped. "Mr Capp[e] preach[es] . . . while many attend publick ordinances they are often ye greatest part of the Time asleep or else wandering after other Things, some have their hearts in their Marketts, Others have their hearts in their fields . . . and so the Word becomes unprofitable to them." ⁶⁹ In his own words, Ryder echoed Joseph Cappe's admonition later in the year. "This day was much of it spent in worldly business somewhat throngly being markett day. In the evening I was visiting so that little was done in work of a spirituall nature . . . Lord keep me watchfull against every sin, and watchful of every duty, and make me to grow in grace." ⁷⁰ Yet the preachers also condoned prosperity. Again, Cappe gave the consoling advice: "Beloved I wish above all things that thou mayest prosper&be in health even as thy soul prospereth. Whence we had it declared that Soul prosperity is ye best prosperity but Where a man Enjoys both they render him abundantly usefull,&give him a much greater opportunity of Doing Good." ⁷¹

The local ministry saw little purpose in putting itself at loggerheads with the aspirations for comfort, even wealth, that plagued Ryder and his friends. Indeed, at moments, Ryder even suspected that "ye Rich have ye Advantage to be Religious having nothing else to mind." ⁷² But in general, Ryder and the preachers to whom he listened so avidly, again in his words, believed in moderation in riches and their pursuit: "considering of these times,&of my Desires at some times to be rid of Business, in Order to a Greater Leisure for ye Business of Religion, [I] was ready to conclude That too much ease as well as too much hurry were Both prejudicial to Religion&that Moderate Labour might prove advantageous to soul and body." ⁷³ When profits were up, when "finding a comfortable Increase of ye Fruits of my Labour, I hope I was Thankful . . . was very Desirous that if riches should Increase, I may not set my heart upon them." ⁷⁴

In adverse times, the chapel lecturers, such as Thomas Whitaker, could also reassure the congregation. In spite of general growth in the Yorkshire cloth industry, the early and mid-1750s could be difficult for smaller clothiers, and for the sake of his chapel folk Whitaker "took to vindicate ye divine providence correcting and afflicting ye Good or upright, while wicked enjoy'd health, ease and prosperity . . . [W]e had but one part to cut,&if we but act it well whether it was prosperous or poor . . . this is but a state of tryal." ⁷⁵ The linkage between worldly success or travail and providence had to be maintained in times harsh as well as sweet. In the same year, 1753, the visiting lecturer from Hackney, Mr. Sandercock, "warned against an inordinate pursuit of temporall concerns," but he also cautioned that those of slothful tempers should not take him in a literal sense. ⁷⁶ Within the week, another visitor, Mr. Oldraid of Morley, reminded the congregation of God's justice and "inequality." "He showed that if Good men were all ways prosperous, if they were always rewarded here, there would be no room for faith, in the rewards of another world." ⁷⁷ The temptation to think that piety translated directly into prosperity must have been alluring. Writing in that same year while his wife's health declined, Ryder noted God's goodness to him amid temptation. He found himself with "tryalls to Conflict with from ye world, from the flesh,&from the Devill." But Jesus Christ is "Captain of my Salvation," and in addition "God has been pleased to hand me out a plentifull supply of temporall things today, while many are in Great want, Oh [that] I may never overlook these blessings nor ever rest satisfied with them as my portion." ⁷⁸ Contentment was never the order of the day for Joseph Ryder. (See Figure 3.)

Agonizing on a daily basis could lead to a kind of despair, and there are many passages in the diary suggesting that Ryder suffered from mild depression, possibly exasperated by his unfailing ability to "watch" and to find himself spiritually wanting. ⁷⁹ The depression may also have led to physical ailments, even if Ryder saw it the other way around. "This Day, or some part of it, was spent but in a disconsolate way, my corruptions seemed to gain ground which dejected my spirit, my Body was in some disorder which helped forward the distress; was somewhat afraid of impatience getting the advantage of me, and still adding to my affliction." So he wrote on April 26, 1734. Seven years later to the day, it was as if no time had passed. "Again persons of a melancholy frame are much to be pitied who are harassed with blasphemous thoughts in Duty, but this is often from ye constitution of ye Body for as that is restored to its former health ye mind frequently returns to its composure." ⁸⁰ The pain of his body, attended by the afflictions visited on his wife and the orphans whom they oversaw, was nevertheless an inescapable source of anguish, and the Book of Job never far from his mind, or from the preaching at his chapel. And then there was Satan. "This Day I have had many disquieting thoughts . . . either from Satan, or my own heart or both, and much ado I found to keep from dejection." ⁸¹ So tormented that day, Ryder invoked Job and declared that he would "sell a rich value upon ye light of Gods Countenance esteeming it above riches." Ryder would have given just about anything at certain times to escape the dejection visited on him by Satan and his own heart.

Yet depression also logically followed from his theological views. Even if Ryder saw a connection between his physical ailments and his despair, which we can now see must have come in part from intense self-scrutiny, the thought of being any less consumed by despair was a troublesome indication of his failure to attain salvation. "Some part of this Day I meditated . . . saying things that happened so much to heart might be prejudicial to my health, and hereupon thinking on these words a merry heart does good like a medicine resolves if I could to carry more chearfully under whatever befell me . . . Yet again thought of perhaps giving way to chearfulness, Levity should come in upon me and so I should fall short at last, may God in love show me ye right way and enable me to walk in it." ⁸² The "thought of perhaps giving way to chearfulness" suggests that Ryder felt a degree of control over his depression. But he wasn't always so confident of his own powers. "This Evening I found some difficulty upon the appearance of distress to gett into a chearfull frame . . . Oh that I had a more chearfull and thankfull and submissive frame of spirit to the will of God whatsoever it may be concerning me." ⁸³ As if we need to be reminded, life in the mid-eighteenth century offered many more daily occurrences of bodily afflictions about which a sensitive soul like Ryder could be depressed. ⁸⁴

Figure 3 : May 25–26, 1754. Two entries shortly after the death of Ryder's wife. Photo courtesy of the John Rylands Library of Manchester.

Chapel life was also not without its afflictions. Only occasionally do we glimpse in Ryder's entries the religious ferment that preoccupied Protestants at mid-century. He met with Methodist women who tried to talk him out of the remnants of his predestinarianism, and he heard Unitarians preach. Certainly Joseph Cappe, the minister at Mill Hill Chapel, was an Arian, though still a Trinitarian; Ryder's great favorite, Thomas Whitaker, probably evolved into Arianism; and Thomas Walker, Cappe's replacement after 1748 at Mill Hill, was both unabashedly anti-Trinitarian and a denier of the doctrine of Atonement. ⁸⁵ Ryder also had kinsmen and women who denied the Trinity. ⁸⁶ Indeed, the latter and their clergy were remarkably active in Presbyterian chapels, many of which turned into Unitarian congregations, with Joseph Priestley as their most famous exponent in the 1760s. Priestley went to Leeds in 1767 as the minister of the Mill Hill Chapel, but by that date Ryder was somewhat infirm and probably not moved by the theological controversy that Priestley's views generated. ⁸⁷ At times, not coincidentally during the ministry of the anti-Trinitarian Walker, Ryder refers to the Savior as "a man of sorrows and acquainted with Grief." ⁸⁸ At others, he announces, "there is one God and one Mediator between God and man, ye Man Christ Jesus." ⁸⁹ What metaphysical nature Ryder ascribed to Christ cannot be known with certainty, but it seems clear that Christ's humanity drew Ryder to him. Yet on May 18, 1753, Ryder, perhaps driven by his sense of probity, recorded his consternation over an anti-Trinitarian kinsman. ⁹⁰ The Reverend Walker too would often give him pause. On November 21, 1754, Ryder records Walker sermonizing that he "knoweth no man, nor the Son, but the Father, Hence [Walker] showed that Some would Say that he knew it as God, but not as man, which way of arguing he show'd to be trifling and Jesuitical, which I must own Gave me much Concern, while I took him in that Christ was not God."

We think of Unitarianism as a rationalizing of faith, the foundation of what Priestley called "a rational theology," but it could have its deeply emotional side. The ferment about Christ's nature could have had the effect of drawing men like Ryder to him. "All Such as do on Christ rely/Shall in him find a rich Supply." Perhaps the remarkably large number of congregations that turned to the Unitarian credo by mid-century—with Leeds as the center of this ferment—did so out of the pressure created by the striving for salvation and worldly success. Only a being's humanity, however elevated, could understand the necessity for such striving and the toll that it took. ⁹¹

Not only around the doctrine of the Trinity but also in the most general way, Ryder was caught between worlds. From our distance, we can describe these worlds as "preindustrial" and "modern." Ryder was well aware of his liminal state, only he would have said that he vacillated between the secular and the spiritual, or, more specifically, the realm of moneymaking that suggested his salvation and the darker world of excess that he thought would lead to his eternal death. It is only natural that he longed for equilibrium, for a balancing of the hours of each day. "[T]hese considerations at times occasion much trouble and concern of mind . . . I find somewhat of comfort upon this or the like reflection that . . . these things here below encroach not upon my religious hours nor upon sabbath time." ⁹²

The management of his hours lay close to the heart of Ryder's agonies about salvation, and finding a solution to his dilemma meant making better use of time. "This Day I have had much Business relating to this present Life, my affections has been but too much carried away after ye Things of time . . . I long for a good Improvement of Time." ⁹³ In Ryder's mind, time was palpable, an entity to be managed and worried about. He was utterly ignorant of the new science of the day—at least as far as his diary tells us—but his understanding of time is remarkably like that of another deeply devout Protestant, Isaac Newton, who died in 1727. For Newton, as for Ryder, time is an absolute, an actual entity, not merely a relative marker created by the passage of events. An obsessive concern for time also appears early in Ryder's many verses. ⁹⁴

Being ever vigilant and fearful of his own capacity for sloth gave Ryder an acuity about time. It represented worldliness; indeed, time is the world, and given his religious anxieties Ryder had not internalized time as we have. Instead, he obsessively monitored himself in relation to it. "Some part of this Day I have spent in Visitt amongst Friends&acquaintance. Yet upon reflection cannot find that It has been any way Beneficiall to my better Part being a great part of it spent in Trifling about Insignificant Subjects or needless Diversion . . . I could have prized an hours communion with God. Nay a Quarter of an hour communion . . . May God assist me in a better Improvement of Time." ⁹⁵

Ryder's many and careful discussions of time suggest that he owned and used a pocket watch, which, along with the rhythm of the weekly religious days, Thursday lectures, and the Sabbath feast, would have given him a material sense of the clock ticking and yet another way to engage with that singular dictum, "watch." ⁹⁶ At war within his time zone were the obligations of business and his worshipful duties toward God, "that my business had hindered me of ye opportunity of attending a private meeting . . . This Day being worried&fatigued with ye toal and Business of the preceding Day . . . I was in a Dilatory frame for Duty Either with respect to Soul or Body. I own it ungratefull of me that I spend or Trifle away any one Day." ⁹⁷ At moments, the necessity of moneymaking competed with his religious duties and heightened Ryder's anxiety about his relationship to the temporal. At other times, business saved him from sinfulness by literally absorbing so much of his time that he had no consciousness capable of evil thoughts. ⁹⁸ But Ryder could not rest content or take consolation from his economic striving. ⁹⁹ The temporal business of this world had Ryder in a trap—"I look upon my Self to be a poor Vile&polluted Creature and I really admire Gods patience towards me," he wrote on December 20, 1733. On the eve of Christmas celebrations, there was little joy in the soul of Joseph Ryder. He believed that there was "my appointed time" and that "God will make me cheerfully willing to go when it does come." Only eternity would be timeless, which made damnation all the more unthinkable.

Charity offered Ryder one acceptable outlet for excess profits and a solution to the salvific dilemma that too much material success posed. This was often the message of the sermons of Whitaker, his pastor and main theological influence. On November 16, 1735, Ryder approvingly recorded Whitaker's sermon against the vices to which "affluent circumstances too frequently led men . . . pride, luxury, voluptuousness, tyranny and oppression of ye poor, forgetfullness of God." Whitaker did not condemn wealth or inequality; he argued that the right thing to do with one's wealth was offer relief for "indigent brethren." But in his journal, Ryder took Whitaker's sermon to its ultimate conclusion. He follows his entry for the day with a poem "On Death," the ultimate leveler. "The Poor and Rich on equall levell stand," he wrote in language redolent of the 1640s, "Both yield to death when God gives out command." ¹⁰⁰ Death was never far off in Ryder's mind; neither was charity, presumably as a means to allay anxiety over the former. Two years before hearing Whitaker's sermon, Ryder made note of "wonderfull" news of a woman in Vicar Lane giving birth to "three living children." Out of pity, he writes, "I was ready to resolve if she was an object of charity to do something, as soon as opportunity served, for her relief." ¹⁰¹ This rare occurrence in the eighteenth century of successful triplet births presented the parents with a potentially enormous financial burden, which Ryder was prepared to relieve, no doubt in the process relieving his own anxiety. But the triplet birth was a wondrous divine action. Poverty arising from less than divine activity was the "product of sloth." "If any man all his affairs neglect/His poverty his neighbours soon expect." Just as surely as drawing profits in excess of the labor of one's own hands was stealing, so doing no work at all was negative proof of one's salvation:

Give me an active Frame in Courts below
That I the Riches of thy Grace may know
Let me not like the Slothfull servant hide
Thy Talent, and in slothfull frame abide
But make me active while my strength remains
May it Thro Christ prove my perpetuall gains. ¹⁰²

Ryder could hardly be clearer. A productive life on earth was a sign of the "riches" of grace; gains on earth were proof of "perpetuall gains" in the hereafter; a slothful frame proved nothing about one's salvation—it strongly suggested failure. Ryder was a self-made man who apparently never sold his own labor and who knew from experience that poverty could be avoided as long as one maintained the proper discipline. He could approvingly record the message of Whitaker's sermon on the story of Lazarus: "In the finall day of judgment how ye poor and rich stand upon an equall levell and shall be rewarded not according to their greatness but according to their goodness." ¹⁰³ But charity—and Whitaker was not talking about class leveling—was meant only for those incapable of work. "This is not to be encouraged while a man can work," Ryder wrote two weeks earlier about someone begging for bread. ¹⁰⁴ We can again imagine Franklin and Weber—if for vastly different reasons—nodding in agreement. When Ryder was at the peak of his trade, charity had its distinct limits. In the 1730s, he owned a shop in Leeds and in 1738 mentions selling a man's goods in payment of a debt "which left the wife in a poor and low condition." ¹⁰⁵ Charity could allay the tumult of his anxious imagination, but in practice it also took second place to the justice of the market.

However reluctantly and latently, Joseph Ryder exhibited many of the characteristics of a late eighteenth-century capitalist and suffered the despair endured by the rigid predestinarians who lived in the century and a half before his birth. Yet he was never fully possessed by the spirit of capitalism nor did he completely tailor his theology to his economic needs. He is a long way from Daniel Howe's comfortable American Unitarians of the nineteenth century, where "the search for redemption through suffering was alien to the dominant spirit of New England Unitarianism." ¹⁰⁶ So too at the same time, the devout Methodist and Lancashire cotton mill owner David Whitehead, as zealous for Methodism as Ryder had been for his watching, evinces none of the agony induced distinctively by even the fading doctrine of predestination. ¹⁰⁷ Precariousness of market and health, as well as a much more visible class hierarchy, made mid-eighteenth-century Englishmen like Ryder far more nervous and agonized than their American or British cousins after 1800 could have even imagined. ¹⁰⁸

Progress in worldliness had been made, however, from the Protestant sermonizing and temper of the pre–civil war days. Cristina Malcolmson describes the great poet and Reformation Protestant George Herbert (1593–1633) as reproducing in his sermons on vocation an insistence "on hard work [while condemning] as deviant both social mobility and the acquisition of wealth for its own sake." ¹⁰⁹ Paul Seaver writes that, for the London turner Nehemiah Wallington (1598–1658) "riches were not a reward for honest labor but a consequence of sharp practice, of 'lying and oppression,' of 'cruelty and unmercifulness to the poor.'" ¹¹⁰ Wallington did not actively seek out poverty, and—this is an important point—"voluntary poverty is never praised as a Christian virtue," but "successful enterprise seemed all too often . . . a hazard to one's eternal soul for the sake of vainglorious and temporary show." ¹¹¹ Ryder never regarded his mobility and creature comforts as deviant; rather, they taxed his religiosity without ever being condemned tout court. James Clegg (1679–1755), a Derbyshire minister and medical practitioner, was closer in both time and religious temperament to Ryder, but in Clegg's diary we find very little interest in economic life. ¹¹² For the most part, Clegg's fascinating diary is full of medical notes (the vast majority of his comments about his nine children, for example, concern the nature of their often fatal diseases and little else) and words of devotion. Yet, even in this comparatively short journal, we occasionally hear echoes of the characteristics Weber identified. On October 30, 1730, with his son James "dangerously ill of a Fever," Clegg apprehends that God is punishing him for his excessive confidence in his "sober and diligent" son's business acumen, which Clegg thought would "make a considerable figure in the world." ¹¹³ Perhaps Ryder's sensibility has something in common with that found among the poor of Brazil, who in our time acquire through Pentecostalism a sense of control over, or "at least certainty about" a destiny in another world. Riddled by the same anxiety over salvation, those who turn toward evangelical Protestantism find strictness and discipline and a sense of spiritual empowerment available only to the believer as he journeys through a precarious and dangerous but fleeting world. ¹¹⁴

However many cases we cite, there is an inevitable problem associated with determining Ryder's representativeness. When we survey the surviving evidence of personal writings of men (or women) ¹¹⁵ of Ryder's milieu, often missing are the kinds of intensely private, spiritual sources that would tell us if other early entrepreneurs felt as Ryder did. ¹¹⁶ Of course, this only means that the implications of the dearth of evidence cut two ways: among his immediate contemporaries, Ryder may have been uniquely distraught over his material successes. (Yet would anyone have really known just how troubled he was if only his account books had survived?) ¹¹⁷ By the same token, can we take the absence of comments of a spiritual nature in many of the ledger books from the eighteenth century as evidence that their authors were unconcerned about the potential otherworldly consequences of their worldly activities? To quibble too much with the "representativeness" of Joseph Ryder's spiritual (and now we may add, commercial) diary runs the risk of us saying that we must sample the entire ocean in order to know that it is salty. It also ignores the compelling evidence of Ryder's engagement with the sermons he heard two and three times a week. The ministers were not talking into a void, and we doubt that Ryder's were the only ears attuned to the issues of striving, salvation, and the lure of prosperity. Quite possibly, Ryder—by the very fact of his having so compulsively recorded his spiritual state—was saltier in matters religious than most of the clothiers and wool merchants who sat in chapel with him. But whether there was one or a plethora of Joseph Ryders, the tensions expressed in Ryder's diary can still be read as culturally symptomatic. On the subject of the usefulness of diaries as historical sources, Steven Ozment has recently remarked, "What these sources lack in representativeness they more than make up for in depth and opportunity for precise analysis. Such sources give entry to the private worlds of their subjects at an emotional and intellectual level rarely accessible through any other contemporary record." ¹¹⁸

Language is part of an intricate web that is deeply social. Sermons in particular are performative speech acts, imbedded in time and place, and, as we know from Ryder's diary, oftentimes on the mark, speaking to the innermost thoughts of a congregation. Most important for the larger cultural argument, Ryder's diary makes clear that every week for over thirty years the sermons he was hearing resonated with his fears and spiritual aspirations in the face of his worldly success. Priestley, whom Ryder heard briefly in Leeds before Priestley was dismissed for his Unitarianism, devoted many sermons to the issue of worldly success and the Christian life. When he spoke in Birmingham in the 1780s, he assumed that prosperity sat before him in the chapel pews. ¹¹⁹ In a spirit that Ryder would have understood, Priestley admonished his congregation to remember that "riches, honors and pleasures . . . are but secondary things for us. We are to receive them thankfully, and above all, to improve them properly, if, in the course of Divine Providence, they fall to our lot." ¹²⁰ In the industrial take-off of the 1780s, Priestley walked a finer line than his predecessors in Dissent like Ryder's beloved Thomas Whitaker (who would have appreciated Priestley's warning that accumulation and its enjoyment are acceptable provided they do not "come in competition with our duty, and our obedience to the commands of Christ"). ¹²¹ But the rigors of mid-century Dissent would probably have precluded Priestley's composure in the face of affluence, his willingness to tell his Birmingham congregation of the 1780s that there was nothing wrong in "mixing with the world, and sharing the emoluments of it . . . this is unavoidable." ¹²²

A previous generation of English historians, born earlier in the twentieth century and brought up amid deep class divisions and the poverty at their root, better understood the tensions about worldliness with which eighteenth-century Protestants grappled. Possessed of a Christian and socialist background, R. H. Tawney would have seized on Ryder's diary as a text in need of a social and economic reading. In a magisterial set of lectures delivered in 1922, Tawney endorsed Weber's thesis but then sought to historicize it. He opined, "the heart of man holds mysteries of contradiction," and then invoked the contradictory tendencies toward the revolutionary and the restrictive found in the Puritanism of the 1640s. ¹²³ In those tendencies lay the roots of the Dissenting tradition to which Ryder belonged. He attended chapels that were both Independent and Presbyterian; both sects formed the core of the Puritanism that defeated and beheaded Charles I in 1649. Then, and again in Ryder's lifetime, "godly discipline" lay at the heart of Puritan and Dissenting sensibilities. But within Ryder's lifetime, the Dissenting churches also enjoyed religious toleration and laid down a stake in the stability that became Hanoverian England. Only dimly in Ryder's prose do we hear echoes of the revolutionary rhetoric of the 1640s. He believed that the great and the lowly are level in the eyes of God, but in all political matters Ryder was conformity itself. He comments occasionally on politics but with strict neutrality and a political passion aroused only by the appearance of men who would persecute him for his religion. ¹²⁴ The energy that the godly and disciplined put into politics during the seventeenth century translated in the eighteenth century into the striving of business and trade.

Tawney's intellectual heir, Christopher Hill, the leading historian of the English Revolution from the 1960s to the 1980s, took the Weber thesis seriously from his earliest, major work on the economic problems of the English Church. In 1956, Hill proclaimed, "I do not accept the view that ideas can be disregarded merely because they can be shown not to have been quite as disinterested as the people who held them may have believed . . . The Weber-Tawney analysis still puts the ideas of the Puritans in the forefront of any explanation of the great social changes which took place in England." ¹²⁵ Hill is often severely criticized because of his Marxism, and hence his materialism, by the so-called revisionists (and also conservatives) who came to dominate seventeenth-century English—and increasingly British—historiography in the 1980s. But unlike many of them, Hill asked the big questions and was not afraid to take seriously the implications of Weber's thesis and the challenge it had been intended to offer to a rigid Marxism. Consistently, Hill defended the validity of Weber's insight while nevertheless wanting always to note the human ability to dwell on doctrines in ways that encourage one's own prosperity. ¹²⁶ He used the term "ethos" with comfort and always saw the doctrine of predestination as central to it. ¹²⁷ "I shall assume without argument that there is such a thing as the protestant ethic," he writes in his magisterial The World Turned Upside Down, a book that at the same time never mentions Weber by name. ¹²⁸ Yet, in the final analysis, Hill, like Tawney when viewing the Protestantism available to Daniel Defoe (and hence to Ryder), awarded priority to capitalism, and Protestantism was ultimately a product of e