Catholic Social Thought and Liberal Institutions

Freedom with Justice

Michael Novak

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351529839
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

Increasingly, the religious leaders of the world are addressing problems of political economy, expressing concern about the poor. But will their efforts actually help the poor? Or harm them? Much depends, Michael Novak asserts, upon what kind of institutions are constructed, that is, upon realism and practicality.

His thesis may be simply stated: Although the Catholic Church during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries set itself against liberalism as an ideology, it has slowly come to admire liberal institutions such as democracy and free markets. Between the Catholic vision of social justice and liberal institutions, Novak argues, there is a profound consonance (but not identity). Both celebrate realism, respect for institutions, and prudence or practical wisdom. The Catholic tradition adds to liberal individualism a strong communitarian sense.

This book was first published in 1984 as Freedom with Justice. This new edition adds both a lengthy introduction carrying forward the original argument and a long concluding chapter on Pope John Paul IPs controversial new encyclical of early 1988, Sollicitudo Rei Socialis.

Part 1

CATHOLIC AND LIBERAL

Nor is prudence a knowledge of general principles only: it must take account of particular facts, since it is concerned with action, and action deals with particular things. This is why men who are ignorant of general principles are sometimes more successful in action than others who know them … [often] men of experience are more successful than theorists.

—ARISTOTLE Nicomachean Ethics

All virtue is necessarily prudent.

—ST. THOMAS AQUINAS On the Virtues in General

Nothing less than the whole ordered structure of the Occidental Christian view of man rests upon the preeminence of prudence over the other virtues.

—JOSEF PIEPER Prudence

CHAPTER 1

Theology and Economics: The Next Twenty Years

The practical task of social science is to give prudence access to a more enlightened condition. Thus the progress of social science is well in line with the requirements of prudence, whose duty it is to extend, in the obscurities of contingency, the work of the reason down to immediate contact with the world of action.

—YVES R. SIMON The Tradition of the Natural Law

Since Prudence has for its matter, not a thing-to-be-made, an object determined in being, but the pure use that the subject makes of his freedom, it has no certain and determined ways or fixed rules; … for applying the universal principles of moral science, precepts and counsels, to the particular action to be produced, there are no ready-made rules; for this action is clothed in a tissue of circumstances which individualize it and make of it each time a truly new case.

—JACQUES MARITAIN Art and Scholasticism

In her doctrinal affirmations the Church is confident, even optimistic…. On the other hand, the Church is prudent, even cautious, in the area of practice. Her concrete counsels to her children have not the same confidence as her doctrinal statements; they are touched with an accent of warning, even of fear. She boldly urges the truth; she carefully guides action.

—JOHN COURTNEY MURRAY We Hold These Truths

During the past four years, a voracious reader would have encountered more articles and books on matters of political economy than at any earlier period in his life—including a mounting number of statements on economics by religious leaders. Whether the subject is tax policy, capital formation, monetarism, unemployment, welfare, infrastructure, “supply side,” “industrial policy,” or international trade, those not formally trained in economics have rather suddenly had to do considerable homework.

Religious leaders and theologians are awakening to the fact that their accustomed periodicals have ill-prepared them for this hour. Books on church and state, religion and politics, religion and the arts, religion and psychiatry, and religion and sex outnumber books on theology and economics by a very large factor. Moreover, concerning even elementary concepts of economic thought, religious leaders and theologians commonly find themselves without exact and clear definitions. To create a new subdiscipline of theology, “a theology of policital economy,” will take a generation of hard work.

1. Three “Habits of the Mind”

Some of this work has already been done, particularly in the Catholic tradition. Since the soon-to-be Bishop von Ketteler of Mainz (1811–1877) first raised the “social question” in his lectures of 1848, a distinguished line of German scholars, several of them Jesuits, has maintained a vital tradition of critical reflection on the interpenetrations of economic and religious realities.¹ Among the most distinguished names of this tradition are Heinrich Pesch, S.J. (1854–1926), Oswald von Nell-Breuning, S.J. (b. 1890), Gustav Gundlach, S.J. (1892–1963), Goetz Briefs (1889–1974), and Franz Mueller (b. 1900).² One American scholar, Father John A. Ryan (1869–1945), quite independently of the Europeans, also created a distinguished body of work (including A Living Wage, Distributive Justice, and The Reconstruction of the Social Order) which had considerable impact upon the administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, as is suggested in the title of Ryan’s biography, Right Reverend New Dealer.³ Joseph Schumpeter has described the European branch of this tradition in his History of Economic Analysis.⁴

Since 1891, moreover, the Roman Catholic popes have discussed the connections between religion and economics in a series of official letters addressed to all Catholics of the world (this is the meaning of the term “encyclical”). Cumulatively, these letters have created a self-conscious tradition of concepts and descriptive analyses, basic principles and prudential judgments, about existing political economies. They form a running commentary on the flow of worldly events during the last one hundred years. Among the basic landmark texts, usually issued on anniversaries of the first, are Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum (1891), Pius XI’s Quadragesimo Anno (1931), John XXIII’s Mater et Magistra (1961) and Pacem in Terris (1963), Paul VI’s Populorum Progressio (1967) and Octogesima Adveniens (1971), and John Paul II’s Laborem Exercens (1981).⁵ The first two of these focus, for the most part, on the political economies of Western Europe. The later ones assume worldwide perspectives. Since over half the world’s Catholics now live in so-called Third World nations, the latter emphasis may be expected to continue.

For more than one hundred years, meanwhile, the “social gospel” movement in American Protestantism, like the many movements of Christian socialism in Europe, has also developed basic texts in religion and economics.⁶ In successive generations, the writings of Walter Rauschenbush (1861–1918) and Reinhold Niebuhr (1892–1971) became the focal points of extensive discussion and remarkable activism.⁷ The life-work of Walter Muelder (b. 1907) of Boston University, one of the teachers of Martin Luther King, Jr., has also been an important intellectual force.⁸ In 1937 the Oxford Conference, a subsequent set of eleven volumes on religion and economics, and many other study projects of the World Council of Churches and the National Council of Churches have created a potent Protestant corpus on this subject.⁹ In the period 1960–1980, the preoccupations of Protestant social thought, at least in the United States, turned to other matters, such as race and civil rights, the war in Vietnam, feminism, and the environment. But in recent years there has been a marked return to economic questions, led by adversarial work on the multinationals, dependency theory, the Nestlé boycott, and studies of “corporate responsibility” and “business ethics.”

In recent years the Presbyterians, Methodists, and others have maintained high-level study groups on various economic issues. Finally, the evangelical churches, too, are being drawn into fierce public debates that carry them well beyond the traditional individual experience of faith and into activism concerning issues of political economy.¹⁰

For at least three reasons, moreover, we can expect religious leaders—and lay study groups, universities, and the religious press—to devote yet more attention to religion and economics. First, the continuing struggles of the developing nations will weigh heavily on the consciousness of all. Second, the twenty or so democratic capitalist nations (some would say “mixed economies” or “welfare states”) of the world have had unprecedented success in bringing the great bulk of their populations far above the levels of subsistence known in 1891. This sudden rise to affluence has altered the terms of the debate and raised new questions. Third, the “welfare states” themselves seem to have reached the upper limits of the state-guaranteed benefits they can easily offer to their citizens. From now on, they may safely be expected to face increasingly difficult choices in which, frequently, one good will have to be traded off for another.

For these and other reasons, political leaders will continue to spend a disproportionate amount of their time facing economic difficulties. Citizens will become engaged in intense public arguments concerning taxes and benefits, ends and means. The churches will become, to some extent, activist pressure groups on various economic issues.

This movement of social forces may, or may not, proceed with intelligence, civility, and practical wisdom. It will surely proceed in many different voices and styles. To help establish a workable framework for discussion, three typical habits of mind will here need to be distinguished, since each bears in a different way upon public policy. Let me call these habits of mind the charismatic, the scientific, and the prudential.

The charismatic habit. Often at religious study centers one hears that all should be “converted” to “peace and justice.” This habit of mind deserves the name charismatic precisely because of its appeal to conversion, as if from outside-in. This approach seems to have arisen in Latin America, in the experience of conscientization, in which ordinary people in prayerful reflection on their political-economic circumstances (it is said) burst into a gospel-filled “analysis” of their situation. Whatever its origin, this charismatic habit of mind must be distinguished from the religious habit of mind in general, since obviously most religious persons do not share it and have to be “converted” into it. It must also be distinguished from another sense of “charismatic” becoming common in evangelical and nowadays in Catholic circles, by which is meant an individual “moved by the Holy Spirit” in a sudden rush of deeply felt experience. Typically, the evangelical sense of the charismatic leads to concern with one’s own soul in relation to God and one’s neighbors. By contrast, the charismatic habit of mind I have been pointing to is aimed at social activism in political and economic matters: “peace and justice.”

The scientific habit. Among professional economists, the scientific habit will need little exposition. It is the habit of disciplining one’s perceptions, procedures, and judgments according to established canons of inquiry, in such a way that one’s own activities may be replicated by similarly disciplined others. These canons are often summed up by the word “objectivity.” They make possible the confirmation or disconfirmation of theories in accord with rules for presenting evidence.

The prudential habit. As all political economists have traditionally observed—witness John Stuart Mill in the preface to his Principles of Political Economy¹¹—the scientific investigator employs a habit of mind different from that of the statesman or man of affairs who is an activist in the same field. The statesman faces pressures of time, since he must often act (or fail to act) before a scientific account of the circumstances can possibly be executed. Moreover, he must make estimates of how various other free agents may react, if he himself acts thus or so. He must make decisions about human character, current circumstance, and future probabilities, about which science cannot afford him certain judgments in advance. Yet, although the statesman cannot be held to scientific standards, he is not thereby released to standards that take no account of rationality at all. On the contrary, wise decisions are still distinguished from foolish. The standard of rationality applied in such cases has long been called by the classical name of prudence (Aristotle’s phronesis).¹² The prudential habit of mind is the acquired skill of recognizing and doing the right thing at the right time and in the right way, so as to be judged by history as having acted wisely rather than foolishly. Since prudence must cover decisions made in all circumstances, under all contingencies, it is not easy to define its workings through some fixed set of standardized procedures. Its presence or absence is, nonetheless, remarked in every human decision.

There is a reason for keeping these three habits of mind distinct. Some, but not all of those who are most active in bringing religious judgment to bear on economic matters operate from within the charismatic habit of mind. Sometimes, but not always, economists who, as fate would have it, are engaged in argument with them, argue from within the scientific habit of mind. Typically, the issue to be addressed can be wisely approached only within the prudential habit of mind.

Economists need desperately to begin paying attention to claims about economic reality being made among religious leaders and by theologians. For when the churches become gripped by certain ways of thinking and feeling, they do move public opinion; the campaign for the nuclear freeze may serve as an instance. Simply as teachers, economists have a right and a duty to protect the integrity of their field. Moreover, the fate of millions of the poor is involved. Ideologies whose predictable result is economic misery and political tyranny need to be criticized while they are still in infancy, before they assume gigantesque proportions. A thorough review of the economic teachings of the World Council of Churches, the National Council of Churches, and the papacy is very much in order and desperately needed.

On the other hand, too narrow a view of the vocation of the scientist removes the professional economists from this task. An economist may concentrate on his scientific work as a shoemaker sticks to his last. Second, and rather less likely, an economist may imagine that his scientific discipline contains all that needs to be known or recognized in dealing with matters of political economy. Pope John Paul II refers to this narrow perspective as economism.¹³ This is the vice of making a science into an ideology, a vision of ends, a denial of the legitimacy of other methods of inquiry. In practice, few economists seem vulnerable to this charge; most point out frequently that they canot tell others what they ought to do, but can, through their methods, help to calculate material (and sometimes other) costs and benefits of any such choice. Typically, the economist qua economist knows that he is a scientist, not a statesman nor even an investor or a businessman. And he commonly recognizes that when he is acting as either of the latter, he assumes the prudential habit of mind.

In any good argument, it is crucial for all participants to find their way into the same habit of mind, so that the rules of discourse and the canons of evidence are clear and mutually agreeable. In the sorts of arguments religious persons are eager to have with economists, this typically means that the argument is not supposed to be scientific. The alternative is not that it must then become charismatic in the sense described above. The proper alternative is that it should become prudential. In that case the economist will not be expected to argue merely as a scientist (although he will be expected not to forget his science), but, rather, as a statesman or person of affairs: as a prudent person facing concrete cases and the contingent circumstances of decisions about future policies. This seems fair enough. On the other side, the religious leader or theologian must be subject to exactly the same expectations.

No doubt each party to the debate will go often to his own strength, the religious leader to religious principles or ideals about the future, the economist to economic principles and his own ideals about the future.

2. Defining the Terms

The problem is that here, too, there is considerable slippage. On occasion, the same words are used with different meanings rooted in quite diverse intellectual traditions. Four examples of such systematic verbal miscommunication are “self-interest,” “acquisitiveness,” “profits,” and “markets.”

1. Self-Interest

When an economist uses this term, he means autonomous choice. He says nothing at all about the moral content of the choice; in the eyes of the economist, that frame is deliberately kept empty. Self-interest means whatever a person has chosen, whether it is sanctity or truth, pleasure or material benefit. The concept is as general and empty as possible, in order to be universalizable.

The very same word, however, has quite different meanings in theology. In Islamic and Jewish traditions, for example, “self-interest” does not typically have negative connotations. It is understood as an elemental commonsense duty to oneself, quite reasonable and basic. In this context, the commandment “Love thy neighbor as thyself’ has a sound basis. A fundamental and proper love of self (including love for one’s family and community, one’s duties, and one’s vocation) is no cause for moral uneasiness.

In the Christian tradition, however, “self-interest” has acquired a pejorative connotation. There are two reasons why this is so. First, Christianity strives to go “beyond the law.” Under this impulse, which is not necessarily orthodox, Christians often feel obliged to reject (or to disguise) self-interest as imperfect, flawed, self-enclosed. Secondly, the Christian understanding of love, especially as agape (self-sacrificial lo...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copy Right Page
• Content Page
• Introduction
• Preface to the Transaction Edition
• Acknowledgments
• Part 1 Catholic and Liberal
• Part II The Development of Catholic Social Thought (1848–1982)
• Part III Ethos, Virtues, and Institutions: The Future Development of Catholic Social Thought
• Notes
• Index