John Calvin trained as a lawyer, fled France as a religious fugitive, and built a theocratic city-state in Geneva that reshaped Western civilization. His theology of predestination, discipline, and worldly vocation created what Max Weber would later call the “Protestant work ethic” — the psychological infrastructure of capitalism itself. Every time someone treats financial success as a sign of moral virtue, they are living inside Calvin’s framework.

This episode traces Calvin from his French legal education through his conversion, his exile, the construction of Reformed Geneva, and the theological system whose influence on economics, politics, and culture dwarfs most secular philosophies.

• Calvin’s legal training and the sudden conversion that turned him from lawyer to reformer
• His flight from France and the unlikely path that made him dictator of Geneva
• Predestination, the elect, and the theology that Weber linked to the spirit of capitalism
• The Consistory’s moral discipline, the execution of Servetus, and Calvin’s authoritarian theocracy