Puritan spiritual self-validation produced unconditional trustworthiness that built modern capitalism

Evidence

On the Weberian theory, Protestantism in Europe made its adherents loyal to the norms of their calling, irrespective of advantage. (They did not think other-worldly advantage could be bought, and did not wish to buy advantage in this world.) This made them individually and unconditionally trustworthy and thus, according to the theory, they made the modern world possible. In the traditional world, ‘rational’ economic accumulation was not rational at all: the state would deprive you of what you had ‘rationally’ accumulated. But the puritans, on this theory, were irrationally rational. They accumulated anyway, to prove their spiritual status to themselves, whether or not it was going to pay off economically. And behold, for once it did pay off. Because there were enough of them, their mutual, spiritually motivated trustworthiness benefited them all collectively; and for once the state could not or would not despoliate them, or at least it did not do 80 everywhere. And where it failed to do so, modern capitalism was born. — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 2029

On the Weberian theory, Protestantism in Europe made its adherents loyal to the norms of their calling, irrespective of advantage. … This made them individually and unconditionally trustworthy and thus, according to the theory, they made the modern world possible. In the traditional world, ‘rational’ economic accumulation was not rational at all: the state would deprive you of what you had ‘rationally’ accumulated. But the puritans, on this theory, were irrationally rational. They accumulated anyway, to prove their spiritual status to themselves, whether or not it was going to pay off economically. And behold, for once it did pay off. Because there were enough of them, their mutual, spiritually motivated trustworthiness benefited them all collectively; and for once the state could not or would not despoliate them, or at least it did not do 80 everywhere. And where it failed to do so, modern capitalism was born. — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 2029

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to the Luhmann/Hardin frame: unconditional trustworthiness arising not from observability constraints but from internalized norms — the inverse case where trust needs no external monitoring because motivation is spiritual.
• DEFINE: Defines the mechanism by which ‘unconditional’ (irrational-advantage-independent) trust can arise: internalized calling-norms as a substitute for observable constraint.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 2029