As the title suggests, this work of history is engaged directly with Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905), as well as other major theoretical works on the subject. In this respect, the book is consonant with recent work by Martijn Konings (The Emotional Logic of Capitalism, 2015) and Eugene McCarraher (The Enchantments of Mammon, 2019), both of whom have explored the enchanting or re-enchanting qualities of the development of capitalism, over and against classic theories of modernity that point to the relentlessly rationalizing and disenchanting qualities of contemporary economic life. While Konings and McCarraher are deeply concerned with understanding the continuing psychic and emotional appeal of capitalism, for Coleman, a specialist in the Enlightenment and French Revolution, the focus in his study of economic theology is rather on capitalism’s origins and rise.

With attention trained on Catholic France and a genealogy of Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism, Coleman’s organizing concept of economic theology illuminates the “always already economic” dimensions of religious thought and practice in early modern France (pp. 34, 100). In turn, the author uses economic theology’s (1) “belief in the economy as a means of redemption and fulfillment and (2) economy of belief by which persons and objects were designated as sources of value” (3) to better explain many aspects and episodes in the development of the eighteenth-century French economic order, especially in contrast with narratives placing an abstemious Protestant or Jansenist ethic at the center of analysis. Coleman’s economic theology is an analog to political theology, “a body of secularized religious concepts that structure modern categories of sovereignty and the state” first theorized by Carl Schmitt (p. 11). In addition, he sees economic theology as an extension of political culture, the dominant interpretive paradigm for eighteenth-century French history, into spiritual and material depths left unplumbed by most historical accounts. Economic theology thus functions as both forerunner and silent partner to political economy as the discipline is commonly understood. Armed with a wealth of un- and underutilized primary sources mainly from the eighteenth century, the crucible epoch for the emergence of modern economic thought, and a bracingly original theoretical apparatus, Coleman is an elegant guide to an occluded dimension in the history of capitalism.

The Catholic Church, forced to respond to the monumental challenge of the Reformation, elected to double down on the sacraments, most importantly the Eucharist. A helpful synecdoche for Catholic economic theology writ large, the Eucharist’s capacity to “transform otherwise banal matter into sublime substance,” and its promise of renewal and abundance to the faithful set the tone for an economic disposition meaningfully oriented toward consumption and growth (p. 38). In early modern France, the Church also governed vast productive domains and played a key role as partner and creditor to the monarchy. In addition to these better-known economic functions, Coleman illuminates the importance of new confraternal societies and the veneration of the rosary. Mass membership in sacred organizations and the mass production and consumption of sacred objects further channeled and shaped this distinct Catholic ethic whereby an ordered system of value inhered in religious practice, in turn influencing thought about worldly economic affairs.

The book’s later chapters bring this economic theology to bear on major controversies in France’s eighteenth century, especially with respect to concepts of money, usury, luxury, and commodity fetishism. We learn how the renowned luxury debate over what scholars today refer to as the consumer revolution was stamped on both sides by clerical authors, by turns denouncing the feminized idolatry of the nascent fashion industry and praising the “ghost in the economic machine” represented by desire and jouissance (p. 241). Harnessing rather than repressing the instinct of desire could be the order of the day, a source of expansive if not limitless demand. The financial schemes associated with John Law’s Banque Royale and the Mississippi Bubble were frequently compared with transubstantiation and alchemy (p. 129). Catholic economic theology was woven through the outpouring of theorizing that accompanied the enormous controversy of the eventual royal bankruptcy, whether expounding the promise or highlighting the dangers of erecting credit and paper money as a Eucharistic practice at the heart of an emerging commercial society. To follow the foregoing examples through Coleman’s analytic is to witness the sublation of Catholic practices and theology into more recognizably modern economic concepts.

As Coleman astutely notes, “the consumer revolution is bourgeois revolution for a postindustrial age” (p. 8). And insofar as his view of Catholic economic theology can help us move beyond a purely psychopharmacological view of how sugar, coffee, tea, and tobacco triggered that revolution, this account is to be saluted. But by the same token, Coleman’s minimalist definition of capitalism as “the rule of the commodity form” following recent work by William H. Sewell Jr., may itself be too postindustrial (p. 10). This definition is undeniably well suited for the empirical evidence brought to bear in the analysis as well as for his central concept of economic theology, but it may be underspecified for social scientists unwilling to yet part ways with the centrality of the wage relation, or indeed capital itself, for our understanding of capitalism.

In their effort to explain the evolution of economic thought and practice, historians of capitalism understandably tend to emphasize the most novel aspects of production, circulation, and consumption in contrast with those of so-called traditional societies. Coleman’s rejoinder that they also attend to economic theology as an integral facet of capitalism is useful and welcome, both for our conception of the eighteenth century and for considering the way religious concepts and thought have dovetailed with some of the most enduring puzzles in economics, such as the question of value and the orientation toward an uncertain and unknowable future. Activating the process of capitalist accumulation, it turns out, required not only the worldly asceticism of Weber’s Protestant sects but also the all-consuming desire of the Catholic economic ethic.