Both the Calvinist doctrine of predestination and the Lutheran precept that faith rather than works represented the key to salvation tended to belittle the values of worldly success. This pious religious outlook remained deeply tinged by the Protestant saw that God helps those who help themselves. Following Weber, he contends that the tragic lot of American cultural development is that it has become soulless and materialistic. Ours is a society that lacks higher purposes and spiritual concerns. To the puritan the beauty of unselfishness lies in his being able to enforce it on others.
Fanaticism is alive and well today just as it was in Puritan times.
Only charismatic leaders had the capacity to give the age of bureaucracy an imaginative jolt and set it on a less deadening and more creative course. Weber never concealed his admiration for Nietzsche's notion of the will to power. In a Nietzschean spirit, he reasoned that only extraordinary individuals possessed the will necessary to transcend the inertia of mass democratic societies. He never saw that the liberal idea is a value-choice of substance. It is rather a relief to turn from Weber to Dewey, who knew that the best cure for an ailing democracy is more democracy.