Quentin Skinner has argued forcefully that the kind of humanistic ethics Doria and Genovesi were attempting to revive, which set this idea of the ‘wellordered republic’ at the centre of all social relations, employed a similar conceptual vocabulary to Calvinism; that — to put it the other way round — the social ethos of Calvinism can be seen to constitute a special case of classical republicanism (Skinner 1974a; 1974b). If we accept this view then many of the problems historians have had with Weber’s famous thesis on the association between Calvinism and the rise of capitalism disappear, since it might be maintained that it was not a specifically Calvinist or Puritan work ethic which encouraged economic take-off in the Protestant cities of the seventeenth century, or Christianity itself in the medieval cities of north and central Italy, but the secular ethic of classical republicanism.

XREF: Directly engages Weber's Protestant ethic thesis, reframing it as a special case of classical republicanism rather than a distinctively Calvinist work ethic.

Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking…, loc. 1862