Cattolicesimo ed etica del lavoro. La riflessione dimenticata di Werner Sombart

This paper aims to investigate the contribution of the Catholic religion to the birth of the first capitalism and, in particular, to the work’s ethic, starting from the perspective of the German sociologist Werner Sombart. It focuses on the link between religious ethics and the spirit of capitalism, on the implications of this link in terms of work’s ethic and, finally, on the forms that the latter takes since the epoch of mature capitalism. The aim is represented by the analysis of processes through which the spirit of capitalism is born, in order to understand the drifts of current capitalism in the light of its cultural history.