If you have yet to read Reformation and Modernization Part I, I would loosely advise you to do so, but I have tried to make “Part II” sufficiently self-standing.
In Part I, I used 17th century foundational settlements on the American continent as a vehicle to draw a line connecting the Reformation to Protestantism, Protestantism to Calvinism, Calvinism to Puritanism, and Puritanism to the birth of the first modern nation-state. However, the long arc of the Reformation doesn’t stop there; there are still many effects that draw from its general pattern. It’s a revolutionary pattern that finds provenance in the notion of individualism.
It can be characterized through a distinct process seen in various historical phenomena in which power escapes from a central node (e.g., the Pope and/or Catholic Church), to the individual. It’s likely present throughout history to some extent, but most consequentially in the Reformation due to the chain reaction it ignited, pulling the world from the social-political era of absolute monarchy and feudalism, and into the world of the modern nation-state. The King’s subjects became the state’s citizens, and so on.
Within this pattern, “Pope” and “King” are treated as synonyms as they symbolically represent a stabilizing leviathan, who upon dethronement leave a Hobbesian anarchy. An easy example, from which we derive the political terms left and right, is the French Revolution and resultant regicide of Louis XVI, who was beheaded by a violent mass of newly individualized individuals. This lead us to our second (some argue first- some argue third- who cares) “modern nation state.” Prior to that, the same pattern occurred in the American Revolution, which was nothing if not a violent insurrection against King George III.
Preceding both of these conflicts was the English Civil War, and the bulk of my last post discussed 17th century Puritans who were its contemporaries. The Puritan cause was not an exclusively American phenomenon, and it underpinned the English conflict of the 1640s.1 Puritans backed the Parliamentarian cause as they fought the Royalists and ultimately beheaded King Charles I, but this intrastate conflict finds its roots in a religious dispute that took place under James I. It was under King James that the subjects of my last post left the ‘Old World,’ and it was under this King that Max Weber describes unmendable fault-lines forming between Puritan-Parliamentarians and the Crown.2
I position the English civil war as being more consequential in the historical arc this series aims to describe, as it was more foundational than either the American or French Revolutions that followed. And I began with the 17th century because that is when this religious pattern most clearly overlaps with the (purportedly secular) political pattern. But make no mistake, the religious to political axis remains to this day, and the two factors are deeply interwoven to the point of being effectually synonymous—it only becomes less apparent as they deviate from the source over time. That 'source' as I argue, is the Protestant Reformation, which established our aforementioned (and now over-mentioned) pattern.
I use the Reformation as a period of history, but not necessarily as a 'thing in itself.' With that, I am in directional agreement with Max Weber who in his seminal The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism, recognizes that the source, i.e., the Reformation, has many internal and antecedent sources within. Most importantly Weber notes that there are various “psychological drives which led people to behave in a certain way and held firmly in this path.”3 For the sake of narrative convenience, I will be ignoring most of the precedent factors that led to the Reformation (for now) and will instead treat it as a single unit from which we can trace a simplifying understanding of the chain of events that followed.
Again, it’s quite important to know that this is an era in which the social-political order tumultuously shifts from feudalism and absolute monarchy, and toward the modern nation state. Nation-state’s tend to favor democratic forms of government, which in this model, is understood to be individualized governance. But that much has been treated. There is also an economic form of individualism that not-so-coincidentally arises alongside this arc into modernity:
Capitalism has an ill-defined and much debated origin story, but I often see it treated as an emergent property of the industrial revolution. I am (again) in accordance with Max Weber in inverting the causal arrow here; Weber recognized that there was a discernable “spirit” of capitalism antecedent to its formalization, which finds its roots in Reformed theology. No matter, whether industrialization solidified capitalism, or whether capitalism gave rise to the industrial revolution, both “events” are to be considered emergent properties of Reformation induced individualism (for our purposes). Unfortunately for me, this is where the subject becomes well-trodden ground, as I can now essentially only provide reiteration of Weber’s 1905, The Protestant Ethic and The ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism.
Weber opens the text with a scathing review of Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography, in which “the first American” reflects on his New England-Puritan father’s instillment of Calvinist workaholism. Franklin treats his upbringing as an essential ingredient in his, albeit secular, religious devotion to working as an end in and of itself. Honesty and repayment of debt are treated as a good, but only for the sake of reputational advantage and accumulation of wealth.
I tell you this to reestablish the (possibly forgotten) connection between Puritanism, Americanism, economic individualism (capitalism), and it’s subcategory of free trade economics (stay tuned). If the aside about Benjamin Franklin did nothing to that end, I may remind you that that Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations was first published in 1776, but I digress.
Intriguingly, Americanism, Puritanism, capitalism, and free trade-ism are all British inventions. But more importantly, the confluence of these, which emanate from the German Reformation, leads to industrial revolution and subsequent globalization—as profit becomes more important to the individual than does loyalty to the state, or anything higher than the self.
Following from that notion, Weber identifies a world in which “man exists for his business, not vice versa.”4 Capitalism has this ability that Marx accurately recognized, to transform ideas like the “nation-state” and even “nationalism” into subsumed categories contained within itself. As does the individual, a nation begins existing for the sake of business. This leads to logical conclusions such as population replacement. Importing cheap labor becomes advisable so long as it raises GDP—the metric of good governance in the modernized world.
This chrematistic worldview doesn’t solely rely on mass-migration through its mandate of increasingly lower costs of labor, but first it induces a growing endogenous population, which we saw throughout the industrial revolution5. Then it further transforms social norms by integrating women into the workforce to further raise the supply of labor and thus lower its cost. This is when population numbers begin to decline, but capitalism has a solution: Population growth continues until labor can be cheaply replaced by non-organic, technological means: The advent of AI (LLMs) will undoubtedly hasten this process of total human-devaluation.
It is here that I hope to establish the connection between capitalism and liberalism: The first step to understanding liberalism (in the way I want you to understand it) is in the reluctant admiration of the soft power aspect of it. It must be recognized that this aspect works, really really well- or at least it did throughout “the long American century”— an idea we will return to (stay tuned x2). The second step, requires an adjustment of thought. I’m going to need you to think relationally here: Whatever your notion of liberalism is, it is wrong unless embedded within it is the notion of these two, inseparably crucial ideas: (1) international free trade and (2) democracy. The democracy aspect should be obvious, but what is less obvious is its interconnectedness with free trade. Each of the two mutually reinforces the other in a positive feedback loop, yielding a political path dependence that becomes almost impossible to disrupt once established in conjunction with international interdependence.
Assuming you already know what democracy is, what then becomes essential is how it’s mechanistically tied to international free trade, and how one reflects back on the other. With that, I wish to introduce another book even more seminal than Weber’s. Published in 1795, eight years after the drafting of the Constitution, Perpetual Peace by Immanuel Kant. In my not-quite-humble opinion, Perpetual Peace (which I will henceforth refer to as “PP” because I find that to be rather amusing) formalizes liberal optimism more so than any other written text, and explains quite perfectly the original intent of the liberal worldview.
Like all people who think themselves clever, I tend to like using POSIWID. However, the original intent of things can be just as useful in analysis. Original intent of a thing helps explain the arc of it’s history, and in doing so, reveals inherent mechanistic components–which can then be leveraged against it or defended to its benefit at your discretion. The intersection of democracy, free trade, their synthesis and resultant liberalism, can all be found at the level of original intent–which Part III will explore more deeply than this mere “set up.”
This original intent, I believe, was a noble enough one: Roughly speaking, to reduce conflict and make money. The ‘making money’ part is implicit in any reference of free trade. Yawn. Boring. So we’ll ignore it for now. The ‘reducing conflict’ component however, is actually rather interesting in its less-obviousness. In a follow-up I intend to post, we will walk through the logic behind it, which should serve to explain how it relates to where we started (the Reformation) where we are (the post-materialist 21st century) to where we’re going (the death of our era, and an excitingly bleak entrance into another).
(Stay tuned x3.)
Puritanism, Encyclopaedia Britannica, accessed November 26, 2025, https://www.britannica.com/topic/Puritanism
Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and Other Writings, ed. Peter Baehr and Gordon C. Wells (London: Penguin Books, 2002), 70.
Weber, Protestant Ethic, 69.
Weber, Protestant Ethic, 23.
Weber, Protestant Ethic, 17.