Calvin was a product of Renaissance humanism, a student of the Greek and Roman classics who reread Cicero every year, a writer of exceptional grace and lucidity in both Latin and French, a man of prodigious learning, who did not dwell on damnation but rather exulted in a sovereign but not at all distant God, a God whose glory was manifest in the goodness of the world and the potential of humanity.
…Calvin’s legacy has been traced in everything from modern marriage and modern science to modern liberal government and of course modern capitalism. By many accounts, he is a major source of modernity’s very understanding of the self.
…Max Weber’s famous 1905 thesis “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism” has been dealt so many body blows that the wonder is that it staggers on. Weber may not have got the historical details or the psychological dynamism right, yet when he proposed religious, especially Calvinist, roots of the calculating rationality, incessant striving and this-worldly asceticism fueling early capitalism, he was on to something.