Max Weber's 1905 essay linking the rise of capitalism to a set of psychological dispositions he traced to ascetic Protestantism-particularly Calvinism's doctrine of predestination-remains one of the most contested arguments in the historical sociology of economic life. Weber proposed that believers anxious about their unknowable salvation status sought reassurance in worldly success achieved through disciplined labor and reinvestment rather than consumption, and that this "spirit of capitalism," initially a religious byproduct, gradually detached from its theological origins and became a self-sustaining cultural disposition even among the religiously indifferent. Subsequent economic historians have raised an empirical objection: regions of early modern Europe that industrialized rapidly, including parts of Catholic Belgium and northern Italy, did so without any comparable Calvinist presence, while some heavily Calvinist regions industrialized comparatively late. Weber's defenders respond that this objection targets a claim the essay does not actually make. Weber was explicit that he sought to identify one contributing disposition among the causes of a specific national trajectory-English and, more broadly, Anglo-American capitalism-not a universal precondition for industrial development wherever it occurred; a region's industrializing without Calvinist influence would falsify a stronger thesis than the one on offer, but leaves Weber's more modest causal claim about English development untouched. A more difficult objection concerns direction of causation. Skeptics note that regions with early commercial development were often precisely the regions where Protestant doctrines found their most receptive urban audiences to begin with, since a merchant class already oriented toward calculation and deferred gratification may have found ascetic theology congenial rather than formative. Weber's original argument anticipated a version of this worry and attempted to address it by tracing the psychological mechanism-anxiety over predestination resolved through works-independently of any prior economic disposition, but critics argue that documenting a plausible mechanism does not establish that the mechanism, rather than a shared underlying disposition, did the causal work.