In their excellent article, “Missing, Now Found in the Eighteenth-Century: Weber's Protestant Capitalist,” published in 2003 in the American Historical Review, Matthew Kadane and Margaret Jacob reflect on the inner struggles of a Leeds clothier named Joseph Ryder (1695–1768), who left behind a 14,000-page spiritual journal that he kept for nearly thirty-five years. Comparing Ryder to Max Weber's ideal-type capitalist, Kadane and Jacob discovered an industrious entrepreneur who was constantly striving to be successful in his earthly calling yet always mindful of worldly temptations. He struggled to live up to his own severe notion of piety. While Ryder embodied the same kind of industriousness and asceticism as Weber's capitalist, he offered a much richer description of what it was like in the eighteenth century to try to serve God and Mammon at the same time. In Kadane and Jacob's article, a picture emerges of a tortured soul who was obsessed with profits and salvation, an internal battle that was played out on a daily basis, making for a melancholic, if not depressed, hero of industrialization and modern capitalism.

Kadane's recently published monograph offers an elaboration on the themes covered in his coauthored article. While the book does not significantly revise any of the conceptual discussions, the extra space allotted by the format allows Kadane to do justice to the tremendously rich source material and provide a much more detailed and nuanced account of Ryder's life, thoughts, and internal struggles. We learn much more about Ryder's professional and personal life; his meticulous method for watching his soul; his double-mindedness and split vision between the present and the afterlife; and his agonizing balancing act between material success and spiritual well-being, which almost certainly yielded bouts of depression during different moments of his life. Kadane is also able to explore in much greater detail the genre, rationale, and practice of spiritual journal writing in eighteenth-century England, as well as to properly evaluate whether Ryder might be considered emblematic of eighteenth-century industrialists.

At the center of Ryder's spiritual journals was the practice of watching—described as a relentless examination of the self, the external world, and the divine. As opposed to Weber's claim that predeterminism was first and foremost on the mind of early modern Protestant capitalist, Ryder's process of watching grew out of the distinctly Protestant notion of providentialism. Every occurrence could be read—and indeed was read in an incessant manner—by Ryder as a sign having to do with his own salvation. Success was frequently read as a favorable sign, yet the ever-vigilant Ryder quickly recognized the spiritual dangers always lurking within worldly success. What made the watching and the associated spiritual judgment more complicated was that Ryder was in large parts making it up as he went along, because he was lacking firm and fixed guidelines as a result of living at a moment when the standards of both material acquisitiveness and spiritual propriety were in flux—topics that Kadane elucidates with great competency.

The question that plagued Ryder for his whole life—whether it is possible to be a virtuous person while at the same time enjoying commercial success—was of course the same question that motivated much of the philosophical debate in Britain. Following in the wake of Mandeville's scandalous intervention, Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, and Adam Smith, among many others, were preoccupied with the possibility that either nature or nurture might equip people with the requisite self-control to enjoy the abundant fruits of commercial modernity, while at the same time acting selflessly enough to engender a morally refined society. Kadane makes numerous interesting connections between Ryder's efforts to reconcile wealth and virtue to the prevailing secular philosophical debate, including the overlap between Ryder's and Hume's celebration of the middle-class mind and the commonalities between Ryder's process of watching and that of Smith's impartial spectator. Yet, while Hume and Smith—in particular the former—were able to find a harmonious balance between commercial success and moral refinement, Ryder was stuck, his entire lifetime, fighting a torturous battle between material and spiritual success, never feeling as if he struck the proper balance.

Kadane's detailed description of a rather unhappy, yet quite successful, dyer and putting-out entrepreneur, who was constantly pulled back and forth between the rules and motivations of the market and the dictates and admonitions of Puritanism, makes for fascinating reading. Overall, the book suffers few weaknesses. By carefully situating Ryder's diary in eighteenth-century English culture, religiosity, and business, the overwhelming reliance on and extensive quotations from one single primary source never becomes a burden. So, apart from the somewhat speculative discussion in chapter 6, applying Freudian diagnostics to the question of whether Ryder was suffering from clinical depression, Kadane has produced a consistently excellent piece of scholarship that challenges and adds many layers to Weber's classic statement on the spirit of capitalism. Any historian interested in the moral psychology of merchants and manufacturers during the early phase of industrialization will be well served by this well-written and engaging book.