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The Economic System: The Evangelical Basis of a Social Market Economy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Michael Novak
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Extract

The world is entering yet another age of economics. Virtually all the major problems which preoccupy governments are economic problems — problems of growth and limits, food and fuel, employment and inflation, productivity and expanding populations, development and justice. The official documents of the churches since Rerum Novarum (1891) seem more and more preoccupied with economics. Yet there is hardly a less developed area in the tradition of Christian thought, whether in philosophy or in theology, than the relation of Christianity to economics.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 43 , Issue 3 , July 1981 , pp. 355 - 380
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1981

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References

1 Maritain, Jacques, Reflections on America (New York, 1958), pp. 101, 118.Google Scholar

2 Maritain states his thesis in the following way: “The important thing for the political life of the world and for the solution of the crisis of civilization is by no means to pretend that Christianity is linked to democracy and that Christian faith compels every believer to be a democrat; it is to affirm that democracy is linked to Christianity and that the democratic impulse has arisen in human history as a temporal manifestation of the inspiration of the Gospel” (Maritain, Jacques, Christianity and Democracy, trans. Anson, Doris C. [New York, 1948], p. 37).Google Scholar

3 See the chapter entitled “Too Much Modesty — The Need for an Explicit Philosophy,” Reflections on America, pp. 101–120.Google Scholar

4 In practice, democratic socialist societies like those of Sweden, West Germany and Israel retain large components of a democratic capitalist society. Intellectual and political traditions differ — moral-cultural resources differ — so that different societies approach similar structures by different routes.

5 I will offer such reasons in my forthcoming book, tentatively titled The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism, scheduled for publication in 1981 by Simon & Schuster.

6 Among the small but growing literature on the intellectual biases against capitalism, I cite the following: Hayek, F. A., ed. Capitalism and the Historians (Chicago, 1954)Google Scholar; von Mises, Ludwig, The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality (South Holland, Illinois, 1972)Google Scholar; van den Haag, Ernest, ed., Capitalism: Sources of Hostility (New Rochelle, N.Y., 1979)Google Scholar; Novak, Michael, ed., The Denigration of Capitalism: Six Points of View (Washington, D.C., 1979)Google Scholar, especially the chapter by Norman, Edward R., “Denigration of Capitalism: Current Education and the Moral Subversion of Capitalist Society,” pp. 7–23.Google Scholar

7 Concerning the need for a theory of the American “transformation of the economic system,” Maritain wrote: “This country should never, and will never, give up the experiential approach, which is a blessing for it; but … it would be quite beneficial for it to develop, at the same time, an adequate ideological formulation, an explicit philosophy, expressing its own ideal in communicable terms. This does not mean, of course, that it would be advisable to manufacture an ideology for the sake of propaganda, God forbid! It means that the development of a greater general interest in ideas and universal verities is a presupposed condition without which no genuine possibilities of intellectual communication can emerge” (Reflections on America, pp. 101, 118).Google Scholar

8 See especially: Letwin, William, “Adam Smith: Re-reading The Wealth of Nations,” Encounter, 03 1976Google Scholar; Wills, Garry, “Benevolent Adam Smith,” New York Review of Booh, 9 02, 1978Google Scholar; Kristol, Irving, “Adam Smith and the Spirit of Capitalism,” in The Great Ideas Today: 1976 (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1976)Google Scholar; Viner, Jacob, Religious Thought in Economic Society, eds. Melitz, Jacques and Winch, Donald (Durham, N.C., 1978)Google Scholar; Wilson, Thomas and Skinner, Andrew S., eds., The Market and the State: Essays in Honour of Adam Smith (London, 1976).Google Scholar

9 See the chapter, “Reinhold Niebuhr: The First Neo-Conservative,” in my forthcoming book, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism. For Niebuhr's mature view of socialism see especially: The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness (New York, 1944), chap. 3Google Scholar; “Why is Communism So Evil?” in Christian Realism and Political Problems (New York, 1953), pp. 33–42Google Scholar; Our Moral and Spiritual Resources for International Cooperation (New York, 1956)Google Scholar; “Biblical Faith and Socialism: A Critical Appraisal,” in Religion and Culture, ed. Leibrecht, Walter (New York, 1959), pp. 44–57Google Scholar. On Niebuhr's abandonment of socialism, see Bennett, John C., “Reinhold Niebuhr's Social Ethics,” and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., “Reinhold Niebuhr's Role in American Political Thought and Life,” in Reinhold Niebuhr: His Religious, Social and Political Thought, eds. Kegley, Charles W. and Bretall, Robert W. (New York, 1956), pp. 46–77Google Scholar; 125–150; Cort, John C., “Can Socialism Be Distinguished from Marxism?” Cross Currents, 29 (Winter 1979–1980), 427–428.Google Scholar

10 Bell, Daniel, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (New York, 1973), see especially pp. 12–13Google Scholar; idem, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (New York, 1976)Google Scholar, see especially the introduction. Bell writes: “Against the holistic view of society, I find it more useful to think of contemporary society (I leave aside the question of whether this can be applied generally to the inherent character of society) as three distinct realms, each of which is obedient to a different axial principle. I divide society, analytically, into the techno-economic structure, the polity, and the culture. These are not congruent with one another and have different rhythms of change: they follow different norms which legitimate different, and even contrasting, types of behavior. It is the discordances between these realms which are responsible for the various contradictions within society” (The Contradictions of Capitalism, p. 10).Google Scholar

11 For the best treatments of Weber's famous thesis, see: Trevor-Roper, H. R., “Religion, the Reformation and Social Change,” in The European Witch-Craze of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries and Other Essays (New York, 1969), pp. 1–45Google Scholar; Little, David, Religion, Order, and Law (New York, 1969)Google Scholar. Also among the classic secondary literature; Tawney, R. H., Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (New York, 1926)Google Scholar; Fischoff, Ephraim, “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism: The History of a Controversy,” Social Research, 11 (1944), 53–77Google Scholar; Giddens, Anthony, “Marx, Weber, and the Development of Capitalism” Sociology, 4(1970), 289–310.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

12 “An economy consists of people whose performance determines its material advancement. Economic achievement depends primarily on people's aptitudes and attitudes (e.g., interest in material success) and their social institutions and political arrangements (e.g., in encouraging people to take long views). Societies, groups, and individuals differ widely in these matters … Differences in these human determinants largely account for differences in economic achievement and rates of progress” (Bauer, P. T., “Foreign Aid, Forever?” Encounter, 03 1974, p. 17).Google Scholar

13 See Hazlitt, Henry, The Conquest of Poverty (New Rochelle, N.Y., 1973)Google Scholar; Koerselman, Gary H. and Dull, Kay E., eds., Food and Social Policy 1 (Ames, Iowa, 1978)Google Scholar. On population, see Clark, Colin, Population Growth and Land Use, 2nd ed. (London, 1977), table III.i.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

14 McGovern, Arthur J. S.J., Marxism: An American Christian Perspective (Maryknoll, N.Y., 1980).Google Scholar

15 See Trevor-Roper, , “Religion, the Reformation and Social Change,” pp. 24–33.Google Scholar

16 See Smith, Adam, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (New York: Modern Library, 1937)Google Scholar; cf. Madison, James, The Federalist, No. 47Google Scholar; and Meyers, Marvin, ed., The Mind of the Founder: Sources of the Political Thought of James Madison (Indianapolis, 1973).Google Scholar

17 Maritain, , Christianity and Democracy, p. 37.Google Scholar

18 Maritain described transformations in the unions, the corporations, the political system, and the beliefs of individuals in Reflections on America, pp. 105–11.Google Scholar

19 Maritain, , Reflections on America, pp. 112–13Google Scholar; he is here quoting the words of Nichols, William I. in “Wanted: A New Name for Capitalism,” This Week, 4 03 1951.Google Scholar

20 Maritain, , Reflections on America, pp. 114–15.Google Scholar

21 Ibid., pp. 113, 115–16.

22 Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr, A World Split Apart (New York, 1978), pp. 47–51Google Scholar. See also Berman, Ronald, ed., Solzhenitsyn at Harvard (Washington, 1980).Google Scholar

23 Nisbet, Robert, History of the Idea of Progress (New York, 1980).Google Scholar

24 See Lerner, Ralph, “Commerce and Character: The Anglo-American as New-Model Man,” William and Mary Quarterly, 36 (01 1979), 16.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

25 Adam Smith, in his criticism of mercantilist theories of political economy, decries the “mean rapacity” and “monopolizing spirit of merchants and manufacturers”; he goes on to say that they “neither are, nor ought to be, the rulers of mankind” (Wealth of Nations, p. 460)Google Scholar. Later, in his criticism of certain agriculturalist theories of political economy, he paraphrases the commonly held belief that “proprietors and cultivators … [exhibit] liberality, frankness, and good fellowship,” while “merchants, artificers and manufacturers … [exhibit] narrowness, meanness, and a selfish disposition, averse to all social pleasure and enjoyment” (ibid., pp. 632–33). He neither disputes nor endorses this view, but he does find a “capital error … in … representing the class of artificers, manufacturers, and merchants, as altogether barren and unproductive” (ibid., pp. 638–39). Cf. Forbes, Duncan, “Sceptical Whiggism, Commerce, and Liberty,” Essays on Adam Smith, eds. Skinner, Andrew S. and Wilson, Thomas (London, 1975), p. 197.Google Scholar

26 Addressing the Second International Conference of UNESCO in 1947, Maritain remarked: “How is an agreement conceivable among men … who come from the four corners of the earth and who belong not only to different cultures and civilizations, but to different spiritual families and antagonistic schools of thought? Agreement … can be … achieved … not on the affirmation of the same conception of the world, man, and knowledge, but on the affirmation of the same set of convictions concerning actions” (Man and the State [Chicago, 1951], p. 77).Google Scholar

27 See my “A Lesson in Polish Economics,” Washington Star, 15 12, 1979.Google Scholar

28 See Lonergan, Bernard, Insight, rev. ed. (New York, 1958), especially pp. 121–28.Google Scholar