I noticed the other day that I spent about twice as long with the Review section of the Weekend (Wall Street) Journal than I’d done with the entire NYT. It’s such a great section. This piece — a review essay of a new biography of the late British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper — was the best of a wonderful lot. Here’s something from it that I did not know:

Weber launched his thesis about the Protestant ethic and capitalism at the turn of the century and for the next hundred years everybody said it was All Wrong—in other words, Weber was onto something. Trevor-Roper recognized this, then pursued an explanation. The capitalists were not especially Protestant, he showed, and the Protestants were not especially capitalist. The difference with Catholicism was that the Counter-Reformation in Europe, beginning in the mid-16th century, drove out the capitalists with taxes and bureaucracy, so they set up in Holland, or England, or America—just as happened, though Trevor-Roper did not spell this out, with the Jews of Central Europe in the 1930s. It was emigration, not religion, that made the difference. The explanation was an ingenious one, though in some ways it does just push the question back, leaving questions about the Counter-Reformation unaddressed.