------------ EH.NET BOOK REVIEW --------------  
Published by EH.NET (March 2006)  
  
Rodney Stark, _The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to   
Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success_. New York: Random House,   
2005. xvi + 281 pp. $26 (cloth), ISBN: 1-4000-6228-4.  
  
Reviewed for EH.NET by Eric Jones, Melbourne Business School and   
University of Exeter.  
  
  
Rodney Stark is a sociologist and historian of religion at Baylor   
University whose work I have much admired, especially _The Rise of   
Christianity_. He writes in a direct, no-nonsense way, perhaps as a   
result of an earlier career in journalism. His new book is a   
mono-causal explanation of the Rise of the West, a _histoire a these_   
written with passion in order to attribute the whole process to   
Christian rationality. It aims to dispose of other interpretations in   
the belief that they do not take religion into account (news to those   
of us raised on the Protestant Ethic, though Stark denies this is the   
proper religious explanation) and that some of the factors commonly   
mentioned are really part of what needs to be explained (surely   
Europe's geography cannot fall into this category?)  
  
A strong focus makes a book cohere. The particular line here is a   
variant of cultural explanation and suffers from the standard problem   
of the cultural as well as the mono-causal approach -- of being too   
sure from the outset which is the cart and which is the horse. The   
advantage of assuming that Christian thought is the horse while the   
economy is the cart permits the historical material to be neatly   
organized. Its disadvantage is that, though it would not be fair to   
say Stark pays the alternative no attention at all, this gets short   
shrift. The possibility that economic change reacted back on   
religious thought and continually modified it is not fully worked out.  
  
This, then, is a volume attempting to explain a great economic and   
political phenomenon that is not written by an economic historian,   
which is for better and for worse. For better: the prose is not   
intrinsically off-putting to non-specialists. Stark amuses with   
utterances such as 'adapting the term [capitalism] for serious   
analysis is a bit like trying to make a social science concept out of   
"reactionary pig"' (p. 55). Yet a lack of familiarity with recent   
writing on economic history is for the worse. Sins of omission   
usually matter less than those of commission but in this case lead to   
excessive claims that the author is inventing the wheel. An example   
is the assertion that others have rarely taken Europe's geography   
into account. Moreover the religious writings that Stark relies on   
suffer the usual difficulty of being hard to connect with the grubby   
details of everyday economic life, and in fact are not systematically   
connected here.  
  
Much of the text is a fairly familiar account of European history, on   
which I have no space or need to comment. The narrative runs on to   
consider the relative performance of North and South America, because   
the publisher wanted to have it included. This is a pity because   
after all what one is seeing is just the working out of two   
hypertrophies of European societies in different settings. The space   
might have been better used to expand the rather brief sections on   
Ancient Greece, Islam and China, which are employed, very properly   
but not in detail, as 'controls' on the rise of Christendom.  
  
The analytical core of the book is the argument that Christianity,   
and among religious and philosophical systems Christianity alone,   
chose the path of reason, which sufficiently accounts for economic   
growth and democracy in the West. Everything good, progressive and   
innovative is Christian and everything else is at best ineffective.   
At least the book is not politically correct! But what is really   
shown, amidst the wealth of learning we have come to expect from   
anyone who tackles such broad themes (and where Stark is certainly no   
slouch) is something different. It is that Christianity is highly   
adaptive, not least (in my view, though not in Stark's) because it is   
so prone to schism and hence offers space for dissent.  
  
Christianity may well have been much more adaptive than Confucianism   
or the Greek or Islamic religions, a trait that cannot have harmed   
Europe's development. This is not, however, the same as showing that   
Christian attitudes were, to coin what seems the apposite phrase,   
_fons et origo_. People were engaging in capitalistic activity before   
the church came round to rationalizing it. Stark emphasizes the   
point. He repeatedly insists that economic change came very early and   
most definitely within Roman Catholicism. Medieval monks and nuns, he   
quotes Randall Collins as saying, '"had the Protestant ethic without   
Protestantism."'  
  
The author does recognize that the relative primacy of religious   
thought and economic action is an issue but he condemns economic   
historians for arguing, post-Weber, that capitalism gave birth to the   
Protestant ethic rather than vice versa. Yet of his five authorities,   
four predate 1935 and the other is dated 1961. They were merely   
showing, he says, that the Reformation arose out of the bourgeois   
ferment of the sixteenth century. He demonstrates instead that   
economic activity had already produced a Puritanical backlash around   
Milan as early as the twelfth century. This was the minority movement   
of ascetics called the Humiliati who, reacting against their own   
material success, adopted a Puritan lifestyle within Roman   
Catholicism. Puritan culture was a response not a cause. This is   
credible but scarcely consistent with a 'culture first' thesis. As   
Stark says when he turns to Latin America, religion is always   
embedded in society.  
  
Stark admits only one satisfactory survey of the Protestant upsurge   
in Latin America. This shows that committed Roman Catholics are   
scarcely distinguishable from Protestants in economic and political   
attitudes. But if it demonstrates that one sect creates no more   
economic advantage than the other, it still does not show that   
religion as a whole is the prime source of economic advantage: it   
shows only that the economically purposeful are more attracted to   
collective religious expression than are less successful people. The   
Rise of the West continues to resist single-factor explanations.  
  
  
Eric Jones is Professorial Fellow at Melbourne Business School and   
Visiting Professor at University of Exeter. He is author of _The   
European Miracle_ (Cambridge University Press, third edition, 2003)   
and _Cultures Merging: A Historical and Economic Critique of Culture_   
(Princeton University Press, 2006)  
  
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