Syphilis, Puritanism and Capitalism

Abstract

Emile Durkheim’s methodological rule that social phenomena must be explained in terms of other social phenomena was a useful corrective to the abuse of biological analogies in the sociology of his time. But as a rigidly applied limitation it is just as obscurantist as the superstition about ‘the mode of production’ as the final and irreducible cause of everything else. In the light of knowledge available today we might find the views of Montesquieu and Adam Ferguson on the influence of climate too simplistic; but it would be absurd to deny that climate affects the culture. Recently the ecological movement has drawn our attention to the various ways in which pollution might put an end to progress. A well-supported thesis (by Derek Bryce-Smith, Professor of Chemistry at Reading University) has been put forward that lead poisoning is an important factor in the causation of juvenile delinquency. Here, accepting Weber’s thesis that the puritanical ingredients of Protestantism constituted an essential factor in the development of capitalism, I shall try to trace the causation further back and inquire into the effects of another factor which might have constituted an equally crucial link, and which is neither religious nor economic but medical.