A Kind of Life Imposed on Man: Vocation and Social Order from Tyndale to Locke

Gordon DesBrisay is an assistant professor of history at the University
of Saskatchewan.

Paul Marshall’s slim, elegant work of intellectual history provides
the first systematic study of the idea of vocation as it developed in
England from the Reformation to the end of the 17th century. Vocation or
calling—a summons from God to His service in a specific position or
line of work—was a theological notion with vast social, economic, and
political ramifications, as Max Weber famously noted in his work on the
“Protestant ethic.” But as this book shows, there was never a single
agreed-upon definition of vocation in early modern England.

Marshall traces the varied strands of vocational discourse through the
published works of Luther and Calvin, More’s circle, early Anglicans
and Puritans, Levellers and Diggers, post-Restoration Anglicans and
Nonconformists, and John Locke. One of his aims is to restore clarity to
historical categories that have, in his view, been unjustly blurred in
recent years, not least by Quentin Skinner. Thus, the doctrine of
callings, Marshall argues, was a distinctive belief of early Protestants
that set them firmly apart from Humanists still extolling the
contemplative life. Ideas of vocation also divided Anglicans from
Puritans, with the former tending to stress status and acceptance, the
latter work and activity. Marshall reminds us, however, that all notions
of calling ultimately rest on a conservative acceptance of existing
social structures. Even the Levellers, whose version of vocation
justified political activism, seemed to accord the existing social order
divine sanction. Yet in introducing a sense of vocation grounded in
necessity (which may or may not issue from God), they opened the door
for a more secular understanding rooted in natural law and natural
right. In Locke’s idiosyncratic synthesis, work itself was a
vocation—both a response to God’s call and a factor of production.

This is a fine book. The prose is lucid, the argument well organized,
clearly stated, and tightly focused. Familiarity with the historical
context is presumed, but senior students of political theory and anyone
interested in revisiting the Weberian origins of modernity will find the
book bracing and provocative.