What does an esoteric concept like Calvinist soteriology have to do with the rise of modern economics? Does laissez-faire have its roots in the arcane Quinquarticular Controversy? Can one find the origins of the welfare state in postmillennialist eschatology? Questions like these, according to the Harvard economist Benjamin M. Friedman, are essential to understanding his discipline today.

Friedman has made an important contribution to the literature on the intertwining of Western economic thought with religious beliefs. His detailed tracing of the philosophical and theological roots of free market economics is well researched, well written, and well worth reading..

The book’s title is misleading—Mr. Friedman’s narrative is about the evolution of economic thought, not capitalism. He alternates between theological debates and developments in economic thought. On economics he is compelling, on theology disappointingly tendentious. Mr. Friedman unselfconsciously presents as fact a host of skeptical—and highly debatable—claims about Christianity and biblical texts. More important, he relies on a caricatured version of Calvinism, especially the New Testament-based doctrine that God predestines some to be saved, to set up his central claim: The weakening of traditional Calvinism, he contends, spurred a more optimistic conception of human potential, which helped to inspire key innovations in economic thought.

Friedman exposes the profound influence of the religious thinking pervading the eighteenth-century Scottish intellectual environment in which Smith and Hume worked. More specifically, Friedman illuminates the effects on both thinkers of the displacement of dour Calvinism by a newly optimistic Protestantism affirming the benefits of individuals freely making choices while pursuing their own self-interests.

Friedman is an engaging narrator, but his book may try the patience of many readers. His weaving together of so many strands of human history is a remarkable achievement, but his non-linear and frequently repetitive prose make for an overly long book. Most crucially, the argument he is trying to make is often obscured by the plethora of detail. A little streamlining might, in fact, have left room for a sorely needed last chapter: how a global pandemic has shone a merciless light on the economic precarity of our society and discredited the policies long supported by religious and economic conservatives..

Following in the footsteps of Max Weber and R.H. Tawney (from whom he takes his title), Friedman, a professor of political economy at Harvard, deepens the case that throughout modern history in the West, religious thought and economic policy have been reciprocally enmeshed.

Harvard political economist Friedman (Day of Reckoning) delivers an ambitious intellectual history of Christian influence on the development of economic thought, from the Enlightenment to the present day.