On Political Economy

by Cardinal Manning

I am now, I fear, going to utter a politico-economical heresy. I have great respect for political economy. I entirely believe as you may have seen in the law of supply and demand and free exchange and safety of capital, which are the first conditions of industry; but there is one point on which I am sorry to say I am a very lame political economist, and I cannot keep pace with others. I find political economists denouncing all interference, as they call it, of Parliament with the supply and demand in any form of any article whatsoever. They argue that as a reduction of the price of bread gives the poor more food, and as the reduction of the price of cloth gives the poor more clothing, so the reduction of the price of intoxicating drink gives the poor a greater abundance of comfort Now, gentlemen, I do not introduce this for the purpose of giving any expression on the Permissive Bill. I have done that at other times and elsewhere; this is not the place for it, neither was I invited for that purpose. But I give that instance to show that the principle of Free Trade is not applicable to everything.

Why is it not applicable? Because it is met and checked by a moral condition. There is no moral condition checking the multiplication of food and the multiplication of clothing the multiplication of almost every article of life which is not easily susceptible of an abuse fatal to men and to society. Well, now, I am afraid I am going to tread upon difficult ground, but I must do so. I am one of those, which is of no importance, but Mr. Brassey is also one of those, and that is of a great deal more who are of opinion that the hours of labour must be further regulated by law. I know the difficulty of the subject, but I say the application of unchecked political economy to the hours of labour must be met and checked by a moral condition.

If the great end of life were to multiply yards of cloth and cot'ton twist, and if the glory of England consists or consisted in multiplying without stint or limit these articles and the like at the lowest possible price so as to undersell all the nations of the world, well, then, let us go on. But if the domestic life of the people be vital above all; if the peace, the purity of homes, the education of children, the duties of wives and mothers, the duties of husbands and of fathers, be written in the natural law of mankind, and if these things are sacred, far beyond anything that can be sold in the market, then I say, if the hours of labour resulting from the unregulated sale of a man's strength and skill shall lead to the destruction of domestic life, to the neglect of children, to turning wives and mothers into living machines, and of fathers and husbands into what shall I say, creatures of burden? I will not use any other word who rise up before the sun, and come back when it is set, wearied and able only to take food and to lie down to rest; the domestic life of men exists no longer, and we dare not go on in this path. I am not going to attempt a prescription: I should fail if I were to attempt to practise in an art which is not my own, but this I will say Parliament has done it already. Parliament, at the instance of Lord Ashley, now Lord Shaftesbury, whom all men honour for his life of charity, has set the precedent. . . . Parliament has again and again interposed to forbid the employment of children in factories before a certain age. Parliament has interposed over and over again with the freedom of labour.

More than this, Parliament has interposed to prevent fathers and mothers from selling the labour of their children. . . . They may not use the labour of their own children to enrich themselves if the employment of that labour be injurious to the child. Do not let it be said, therefore, that Parliament has not interposed in the question of labour and in the question of the hours of labour. I will ask, is it possible for a child to be educated who becomes a full-timer at ten or even twelve years of age? Is it possible for a child in the agricultural districts to be educated who may be sent out into the fields at nine? I will ask, can a woman be the mother and head of a family who works sixty hours a week? You may know better than I, but bear with me if I say I do not understand how a woman can train her children in the hours after they come home from school if she works all day in a factory. The children come home at four and five in the afternoon; there is no mother in the house. I do not know how she can either clothe them, or train them, or watch over them, when her time is given to labour for sixty hours a week. I know I am treading upon a very difficult subject, but I feel confident of this, that we must face it, and that we must face it calmly, justly, and with a willingness to put labour and the profits of labour second the moral state and the domestic life of the whole working population first. I will not venture to draw up such an Act of Parliament further than to lay down this principle.

I saw in my early days a good deal of what the homes of agricultural labourers were. With all their poverty they were often very beautiful. I have seen cottages with cottage gardens, and with scanty but bright furniture, a hearth glowing with peat, and children playing at the door; poverty was indeed everywhere, but happiness everywhere too. Well, I hope this may still be found in the agricultural districts. What may be the homes in our great manufacturing towns I do not know, but the homes of the poor in London are often very miserable. The state of the houses families living in single rooms, sometimes many families in one room, a corner apiece. These things cannot go on; these things ought not to go on. The accumulation of wealth in the land, the piling-up of wealth like mountains in the possession of classes or of individuals, cannot go on if these moral conditions of our people are not healed. No commonwealth can rest on such foundations.

I have endeavoured to draw out before you what is the dignity of labour. It is the law of our state, the law of our development and perfection, the source of invention, the power of creation, and the cause of manifold capital in money and in skill. And as to its rights, I have shown that it is true property, true capital; that it has a primary right of freedom, a right to protect itself, and a claim upon the law of the land to protect it. I will only add that there can be nothing in a working man undignified unless he be himself the cause of it. Forgive me if I use a very common proverb, and if I make another like it: "An idle man is the devil's playfellow; and an intemperate man is the devil's slave." As to the rights, I know nothing that can ever limit the rights of a working man excepting his committing wrong. If he commits wrong, the strong may retaliate; if he does no wrong, the supreme power of law will protect him.

Now, gentlemen, I have detained you a great deal longer than I ought a great deal longer than I intended. I will therefore bring what I have said to an end. . . .

I ought to have my say, but at the beginning, not at the end, of an evening ; and therefore with ethics I will conclude. The science of morals rests on four foundations on prudence, which guides the intellect; on justice, which guides the will; on temperance, which governs the passions; and on fortitude, which sustains the whole man in the guidance and government of himself. These four cardinal virtues of the natural order perfect the character of man; and to-night I am not speaking in any other sense. They underlie all the dignity of man, and they justify all his rights. The labourer in our common field of toil who is prudent, just, temperate, and brave, is indeed "A workman that needeth not to be ashamed " (2 Tim. ii. 15).

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Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953)

JOSEPH HILAIRE PIERRE BELLOC, ONE OF THE TRUE LORDS of the English language, was not an Englishman by birth. His father was French, his mother was Irish; and when he married, his bride was an American. But he looked more like the traditional figure of John Bull than any Englishman could. He wore a stand-up collar several sizes too large for him. His rotund head was crowned with a black hat-sometimes tall, sometimes of the pancake variety. He was big and stocky and red of face, and a typically British great-coat draped his beefy form except in the warmest weather.

Hilaire Belloc-he dropped the other appendages at an early age-was born at La Celle, near Paris, on July 20, 1870. His father, Louis Swanton Belloc, was well known as a barrister throughout France. Bessie Rayner Belloc, his mother, was of Irish extraction. Somewhere in his immediate background was an infusion of Pennsylvania Dutch blood. His mother, who lived into her nineties and died in 1914, was a remarkably intellectual woman, noted as one of the signers of the first petition ever presented for women's suffrage.

Her son studied at the Oratory School at Edgebaston, England, and at Balliol College, Oxford, where he matriculated in 1893. In his third year he was Blackenbury History Scholar and an honor student in the history schools.

Between Oratory School and his matriculation at Oxford, Belloc served in the French Army, where as a driver in the Eighth Regiment of Artillery, he was stationed at Toul. It was from this spot that, years later, he was to set forth on the pilgrimage afoot to St. Peter's that furnished material for the book that many critics consider his best,- The Path to Rome.

In 1903 Belloc became a British subject and in 1906 was returned to Parliament by the South Salford constituency. He was a member of the Liberal party in the brilliant House of Commons created by the Tory debacle of the preceding year. He made his maiden speech in the House early in 1906 and it won him an immediate reputation as a brilliant orator. He had already attracted considerable attention during his campaign. In the year of his return to Parliament he was also the nominee of the British Bishops to the Catholic Education Council.

Belloc's literary career began immediately after Balliol. He rapidly achieved success as a newspaper and magazine writer and as a light versifier. His first book, published in the year of his graduation, was Verses and Sonnets, and this was followed within a year by The Bad Child's Book of Beasts, in which his reputation as a master of whimsy was fully established. One of the most famous in this category starts out thus:

The nicest child I ever knew
Was Charles Augustus Fortesque;
He never lost his cap or tore
His stockings or his pinafore;
In eating bread he made no crumbs.
He was extremely fond of sums.

Another, more dire, ballad about an untruthful maiden named Mathilde was a famous forerunner to the Ogden Nash style of rhyming:

It happened that a few weeks later
Her aunt was off to the theatre
To see that entertaining play
The Second Mrs. Tanqueray.

Belloc sat in the House of Commons from 1906 to 1910, but refused to serve a second term because, in his own words, he was "weary of the party system," and thought he could attack politics better from without Parliament than from within. From that time on he devoted his entire efforts to writing and lecturing.

Belloc's wife, the former Elodie Agnes Hogan of Napa, California, whom he married in 1896, died in 1914. He never remarried. His eldest son, Louis, was killed while serving as a flier in World War I, and his youngest, Peter, a captain of the Royal Marines, died during World War-II. Belloc made his home with his elder daughter, Mrs. Eleanor Jebb, wife of a member of Parliament, in Horsham, Sussex. Besides Eleanor, he had another daughter, Elizabeth, a poet, as-well as another son, Hilary, who lives in Canada. Belloc's sister, Mrs. Marie Belloc Lowndes, also a noted British writer, died in 1947.

By Pope Pius XI, Belloc was decorated with the Grand Cross of the Order of St. Gregory the Great in 1934 for his services to Catholicism as a writer. In the same year, his alma- mater, Oxford, conferred upon him the honorary degree of Master of Arts. He shared with the then British Prime Minister, Sir Winston Churchill, the distinction of being the only persons to have their portraits hung in the National Portrait Gallery while they were alive.

Mr. Belloc visited the United States on many occasions. In 1937 he served as a visiting Professor of History at the Graduate School of Fordham University in New York. From the matter of these lectures came his book, The Crisis of Civilization.

A prolific writer, he was the author of 153 books of essays, fiction, history, biography, poetry and light verse as well as a vast amount of periodical literature. He was largely responsible for G. K. Chesterton's conversion to Catholicism, and the two of them became ranked as not only among England's greatest writers but as the most brilliant lay expounders of Catholic doctrine. The two were also close friends and frequent collaborators, especially on the magazine which came to be known as G. K's. Weekly, and in which they came to wage many a valiant crusade together. As a critic noted: "To Hilaire Belloc this generation owes big glimpses of the Homeric spirit. His mission is to flay alive the humbugs and hypocrites and the pedants and to chant robust folk-songs to the naked stars of the English world to a rousing obligato of clinking flagons."

Because of his antagonism to many British sacred cows and his free and caustic criticism of them, he was not a wholly popular man in England. Nor did his espousal of the Franco cause against the Communists during the Spanish civil war add to his popularity there. But Belloc had never been a man to purchase popularity at the price of integrity.

Just four days before his eighty-third birthday, while dozing before the fireplace in his daughter's home, he fell into the flames and was so badly burned that he died in hospital at Guildford, Surrey, soon afterward on July 16, 1953.

Despite his own prediction to the contrary, his place in English letters is forever secure, primarily as a poet and as the author of The Path to Rome.

©Catholic Authors Press

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Opposing the Austrian Heresy

by Christopher Ferrara

I am privileged to introduce Dr. Peter Chojnowski's article "Corporation Christendom: The True School of Salamanca," which deftly exposes how the teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas, Sts. Bernadine of Siena and Antonino of Florence, and the late Spanish Scholastics on just prices and wages has been misrepresented by proponents of the so-called Austrian School of economics.

Dr. Chojnowski's article is an important first step in mounting a traditional Catholic response to the swelling ambitions of the Austrian school, whose two major divines, the deceased liberal Jewish thinkers Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard, wrote the foundational works of the Austrian movement: the massive tome Human Action (1949) by Mises, and the equally massive Man, Economy and State (1962) by Rothbard. These two books comprise the Old and New "Testament" of what amounts today to a cult of radical social and economic laissez faire, which, sad to say, claims a growing number of Catholic adherents.

A CULT OF LAISSEZ FAIRE

I do not use the phrase "swelling ambitions" or the word "cult" lightly. The Mises Institute, founded to preach a gospel of social and economic "liberty" to the world, boasts of the movement's success in near-messianic terms. As the Institute—headed by a Catholic, Lew Rockwell—recently declared:

We have been remarkably effective in building a global movement for liberty and its intellectual foundation. Today Austrians and libertarians form a cohesive movement the world over, united on principles, publishing as never before, and teaching the multitudes through every means available. For this reason, the Austrian School has been called the most coherent and active international intellectual movement since Marxism.1

The Mises Institute's tribute to Rothbard on the tenth anniversary of his death savors of a cultic dulia:

And so, to dear Murray, our friend and mentor, the vice president of the Mises Institute, the scholar who gave us guidance and the gentleman who showed us how to find joy in confronting the enemy and advancing truth, the staff and scholars of the Institute offer this tribute, alongside the millions who have been drawn to his ideas. May his works always be available to all who care to learn about liberty and do their part to fight for the cornerstone of civilization itself. May his legacy endure forever [!] and may we all become happy warriors for the cause of liberty.2

Heaven and earth may pass away, but Rothbard's words will not pass away.

WHAT KIND OF THOMIST IS THIS?

Rothbard befriended a number of prominent Catholics during his life, but evidently was converted by none of them. He professed to be a "neo-Thomist" because of his peculiar secularized notion of "natural rights" detached from any divine endowment. Rothbard (and other Austrians) attempted to pass off his version of natural rights as likewise sanctioned by the Spanish Scholastics, but of course no Scholastic philosopher ever held that there could be natural rights without a divine Obligor to give them the force of natural law, which is man's innate participation in the eternal law. There can be no rights without an obligor, nor law without a lawgiver. And if there is no divine Creator who endowed man with a fixed nature, what sense does it make to speak of human "nature" and "natural" rights in the first place? Rothbard's "scholarship" attributing to St. Thomas and Suarez the "absolute independence of natural law from the question of the existence of God…"3 was not only shoddy; it was nonsensical on its face.4

Rothbard's natural-right theory was limited to the (non-existent) "ownership" of one's own body and the ownership of private property attaching on first appropriation of unused resources.5 Since these were the only two natural rights Rothbard recognized as universally binding, he (like the strict utilitarian Mises) would limit the power of government to the protection of those rights only. Thus, he defined "freedom" as "the absence of invasion [his emphasis] by another man of any man's person or property."6

Based on his concepts of natural rights and freedom, whose deviance from Catholic teaching needs no demonstration, "dear Murray" advocated not only the legal right to abortion but also the right to sell one's children (i.e., to sell the ownership of parental rights), or, if one prefers, to let one's children starve to death. The latter "right," wrote Rothbard, "allows us to solve such vexing questions as: should a parent allow a deformed baby to die (e.g., by not feeding it)? The answer is, of course, yes…."7 Rothbard was certain, however, that "in a libertarian society, the existence of a free baby market will bring such 'neglect' down to a minimum."8 These views of "dear Murray" are enunciated in his Ethics of Liberty, which Mr. Rockwell promotes as part of "the core" and one of the ten "must haves" of Austrian literature.9

FREEING PRICES AND WAGES FROM MORALITY

In demonstrating that the Austrians have not accurately presented the Scholastic teaching on the just wage and the just price, Dr. Chojnowski has done much more than to make an academic point. As he points out, Mises (and, even more so, Rothbard) advocated a social order that negate[s] Christendom and every social, economic, and moral teaching of the Catholic Church [and] also renders "inoperative" the entire Classical moral and philosophical tradition.

Dr. Chojnowski is here referring to a fundamental truth of human existence affirmed by Western man from the time of the pagan philosophers to the great anti-liberal popes of the 19th and early 20th centuries: i.e., that man is ordered by his very nature to life in society under a common ruler and set of laws, and that this arrangement, called the State, is necessary not only for the maintenance of peace but also for the achievement of virtue, which means "becoming as like to God as it is possible for man to become."10 As Pope Leo XIII declared in Libertas, his monumental encyclical on the nature of human liberty:

Even the heathen philosophers clearly recognized this truth, especially they who held that the wise man alone is free; and by the term 'wise man' was meant, as is well known, the man trained to live in accordance with his nature, that is, in justice and virtue.11

The Misesian-Rothbardian system, going even beyond the French Revolutionaries and The Declaration of the Rights of Man, utterly rejects this concept of the State. As Rothbard wrote in Ethics of Liberty:

[T]he great failing of natural-law theory—from Plato and Aristotle to the Thomists and down to Leo Strauss and his followers in the present day—is to have been profoundly statist rather than individualist.

That is, the entire Western tradition is wrong and "dear Murray" is right. Following Rothbard, many (if not most) contemporary Austrians would not only limit the power of the State to the mere prevention of violence and theft (a la Mises), but would abolish the State altogether in favor of a Utopian "anarcho-capitalist" polity in which social order is maintained entirely by insurance companies 13 and other private contractual agencies. As the libertarian scholar Ralph Raico explains:

Contemporary Austrian economists, following in Mises's footsteps, have by and large adopted a more radical form of liberalism. At least one of them, Murray N. Rothbard…has gone even further in his anti-statism. It is to a large degree due to Rothbard's "libertarian scholarship and advocacy"…that Austrianism is associated in the minds of many with a defense of the free market and private property to the point of the very abolition of the state, and thus of the total triumph of civil society….14

Thus, Marxist and Austrian alike envision a withering away of the State, although they arrive at their dreamland from opposite sides: the one by way of abolishing private property, the other by exalting it to the summum bonum of politics (even if, as Rothbard allowed, "personal ethics" might have a higher aim in view).

Seen against this background, the Austrians' attempt to cast the Spanish Scholastics as proto-Austrians, an undertaking begun by Rothbard, is highly significant. The aim here is to persuade us that it is perfectly Catholic to believe that "the market price is the just price" without further moral inquiry, and that this is true always and everywhere, both as to wages and commodities. Of course, to accept this dictum is to reject the teaching of seven consecutive popes, both pre- and post-conciliar, who hold quite to the contrary on the question of just wages: Leo XIII, St. Pius X, Pius XI, Pius XII, John XXIII, Paul VI, and John Paul II have all insisted on precisely the point that the "market wage" and the just wage are not morally equivalent, as an employer is bound in justice to pay, whenever conditions allow, a living wage sufficient for the ordinary support of a dependent worker and his family, no matter what "the market" supposedly dictates. As Pope Leo declared in Rerum Novarum (§63):

[T]here underlies a dictate of natural justice more imperious and ancient than any bargain between man and man, namely, that wages ought not to be insufficient to support a frugal and well-behaved wage-earner. If through necessity or fear of a worse evil the workman accept harder conditions because an employer or contractor will afford him no better, he is made the victim offeree and injustice….

As the Austrians would have it, the Spanish Scholastics shared their theory that prices and wages arise from the sum total of subjective utility assessments by parties to exchanges (i.e., what each party thinks the good or service to be acquired or given up is worth in terms of serving needs or wants on his personal scale of values), rather than by such objective factors as cost plus reasonable profit, what is needed to maintain one's station in life, or the commonly estimated intrinsic value of a good. As Dr. Chojnowski shows, however, the Austrians' own writings admit (or at least inadvertently reveal) that the Scholastics did not teach this absolutist view. Rather, as the renowned traditional Catholic economist Heinrich Pesch, S.J., pointed out in Volume V of his encyclopedic treatise on economics, Lehrbuch der Nationalokonomie, the Scholastic teaching on the just price involved "a combination of 'subjective' and 'objective' factors, as these exert decisive influence on the price formation." These factors included not just subjective utility but also "the qualitative capacity of the goods for satisfying human wants," the "work and costs involved in producing and making the goods available," and, most damaging to the Austrian claim, "the general [objective] value estimation and the officially set price" in keeping with the common legal practice in medieval times of ceiling prices fixed by the prince, especially as to the necessities of life.15 Indeed, even on the question of wages the Spanish Scholastics were in general agreement with the later papal view that in the labor market "compulsion was possible due to disadvantage in bargaining power held by either employee or employer" and that "[c]ollusion associated with labor market combinations might require an impartial observer to establish the just wage, properly reinforced by legal rule"16—not exactly music to Austrian ears.

Why the Austrian insistence on an exclusive subjective utility theory and the resulting "free agreement" as the only criterion of justice in prices and wages? Why do the Austrians seriously defend Scrooge 17 and the practice of price-gouging desperate consumers during emergencies,18 when the voice of conscience in every reasonable man cries "outrageous" and "unfair"? The answer is that if there is no objective standard of a just price or wage, and if the just price or wage is—in every case, always and everywhere—simply the market price, then the market becomes totally "self-regulating" and thus immune from moral correction of its abuses by either the Church or public authority. If the just price is nothing more than the market price, then, conveniently enough, the market never fails to achieve justice so defined. This means that the market's marvelous "self-regulating" capacity can then be cited in favor of an entire "free market society" based on "the market principle," wherein human action in general is free from any "external" norm of justice imposed by law, save that which governs economic exchange: i.e., the absence of violence or theft. As Rothbard argued in a passage full of loaded terminology:

Every time a free, peaceful unit-act of exchange occurs, the market principle has been put into operation; every time a man coerces an exchange by the threat of violence , the hegemonic principle has been put to work. All the shadings of society are mixtures of these two primary elements. The more the market principle prevails in a society, therefore, the greater will be that society's freedom and its prosperity. The more the hegemonic principle abounds, the greater will be the extent of slavery and poverty….19

THE AUSTRIAN HERESY

The effort to "baptize" what has rightly been called (in a broad, non-canonical sense) "the Austrian heresy" would lead us only to a "purified" form of the same social order condemned by every pope from Pius VI through Pius XII. As faithful Catholics understand, however, Murray Rothbard had no idea what "freedom" means, nor any authority to teach the world about the nature of social liberty. The whole truth about social liberty is to be found only in the teaching of the Magisterium, a single paragraph of which contains more wisdom than the entire bloated corpus of Austrian political philosophy. As Pope Leo taught in Libertas Praestantissimum:

[T]he eternal law of God is the sole standard and rule of human liberty, not only in each individual man, but also in the community and civil society which men constitute when united. Therefore, the true liberty of human society does not consist in every man doing what he pleases, for this would simply end in turmoil and confusion, and bring on the overthrow of the State; but rather in this, that through the injunctions of the civil law all may more easily conform to the prescriptions of the eternal law….What has been said of the liberty of individuals is no less applicable to them when considered as bound together in civil society. For, what reason and the natural law do for individuals, human law, promulgated for their good, does for the citizens of States.20

Pope Leo here describes with marvelous concision the only concept of social liberty to which Catholics can adhere. Nor should we entertain the argument by certain Catholic Austrians that the Church's concept of social liberty is out of the question today, and that we must settle for an expedient compromise with "the facts." Speaking of precisely this sort of liberal Catholic, Pius XI declared:

Many believe in or claim that they believe in and hold fast to Catholic doctrine on such questions as social authority, the right of owning private property, on the relations between capital and labor, on the rights of the laboring man, on the relations between Church and State, religion and country…on the social rights of Jesus Christ, Who is the Creator, Redeemer, and Lord not only of individuals but of nations. In spite of these protestations, they speak, write, and, what is more, act as if it were not necessary any longer to follow, or that they did not remain still in full force, the teachings and solemn pronouncements which may be found in so many documents of the Holy See, and particularly in those written by Leo XIII, Pius X, and Benedict XV. There is a species of moral, legal, and social modernism which We condemn, no less decidedly than We condemn theological modernism.21

Finally, we can reply to these social modernists, who call for a compromise of the Catholic ideal, by citing against them Rothbard's own exhortation never to forsake a "radical idealism":

The free-market economist F. A. Hayek, himself in no sense an extremist, has written eloquently of the vital importance for the success of liberty of holding the pure and "extreme" ideology aloft as a never-to-be-forgotten creed. Hayek has written that one of the great attractions of socialism has always been the continuing stress on its "ideal" goal, an ideal that permeates, informs, and guides the actions of all those striving to attain it….Hayek is here highlighting an important truth, and an important reason for stressing the ultimate goal: the excitement and enthusiasm that a logically consistent system can inspire.22

Catholics can certainly subscribe to Rothbard's sentiment in "holding aloft" their own "never-to-be-forgotten creed" concerning true liberty. The Catholic creed of liberty is to be found in the doctrine handed down to them, not by liberal Jewish thinkers, but by the Church that God Incarnate founded to make disciples of all nations. We can only thank Dr. Chojnowski for standing in opposition to those, including misguided Catholics, who would advance another ideal of human society.

Mr. Ferrara is President and Chief Counsel of the American Catholic Lawyers Association, Inc., a religious organization dedicated to defending the civil rights of Catholics in litigation and public discourse. Mr. Ferrara's next book, Liberty, the God That Failed: The Church's Answer to Social and Economic Liberalism, will be published in June.

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1. "Mises Institute Supporters Summit: Radical Scholarship," http://_www.mises.org /upcomingstory.asp?control=68.

2. "The Unstoppable Rothbard," Jan. 7, 2005.

3. Rothbard, Murray, The Ethics of Liberty (New York: New York University Press, 2002), p.4.

4. As Fr. Copleston observed, Suarez certainly taught that "God is, indeed, the author of the natural law; for he is Creator and He wills to bind men to observe the dictates of right reason." History of Political Philosophy, Vol. III, p.385. Without the divine will, natural law and natural rights as such cannot exist, for what obliges man to observe the "natural rights" of others if there is no God to impose the obligation? The later Scholastics merely emphasized the intrinsic goodness of the natural law against the nominalism of William of Occam, who held that the validity of the natural law depended solely on the arbitrary will of God, Who could, if He so willed, make murder a natural right.

5. Ethics of Liberty, p.43.

6. Ibid., p.42.

7. Ibid.

8. Ibid.

9. See ("Ten Must Haves") http:// www.mises.org/store/category.asp7Customer ID= 848567 &ACBSessionID= euoZXmrhabgTmkMTw5DX&SID=2&Category JD=10; ("The Core") http://www.mises.org/ Study Guide Display.asp?SubjID=116. Like all doctrinaire liberals, Rothbard allowed that abortion and the willful starvation of children could be seen as morally wrong according to "personal ethics," but he insisted that the State has no right to prohibit such conduct.

10. Copleston, A History of Philosophy, Vol.1, p.218 (concerning Plato's definition of the pursuit of virtue).

11. Libertas Praestantissimum, §6.

12. Rothbard, Ethics of Liberty, p.21.

13. See, e.g. Hans Hermann Hoppe, [I]Democracy: The God that Failed (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2004), p.247: "Widespread agreement exists among liberal-libertarians such as Molinari, Rothbard… as well as most other commentators on the matter that defense is a form of insurance and that defense expenditures represent a sort of insurance premium…the most likely candidates to offer protection and defense services [in place of government] are insurance agencies."

14. Ralph Raico, "The Austrian School and Classical Liberalism," at: mises.org/etexts/aus-trian liberalism.asp.

15. Heinrich Pesch on Solidarist Economics, Excerpts from the Lehrbuch der Nationalokonomie (Oxford: University Press of America, 1998), p.218.

16. Ibid., p.475.

17. Michael Levin, "In Defense of Scrooge," Dec. 18, 2000, at http://www.mises.org/ fullstory.aspx?control=573.

18. John R. Lott, Jr., "Especially During Disasters," http://www.lewrockwell.com/lott /Iott29.html. Lott, apparently, is not a formal Austrian, but his arguments, published on this major Austro-Libertarian website, are typical of this school.

19. Murray Rothbard, Power and Market, Online Edition, p. 1363.

20. Libertas Praestantissimum, §10.

21. Ubi Arcano Dei, §§60-61.

©January 2005
Vol. XXVIII, Number 1
The Angelus

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Liberty: The God that Failed

by Christopher Ferrara

The renowned Anglican covert to Catholicism, Henry Edward Cardinal Manning, once observed that “All human differences are ultimately religious ones.”[i] This is a truth even secular reason is forced to recognize. As the Satan-worshiping anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon admitted in his Confessions of a Revolutionary: “It is surprising to observe how constantly we find that all our political questions involve theological ones.” In reply, the renowned Catholic counter-revolutionary of the mid-nineteenth century, Don Juan Donoso Cortés, wrote: “There is nothing in this to cause surprise, except it be the surprise of Proudhon. Theology, being the science of God, is the ocean which contains all the sciences, as God is the ocean in which all things are contained.”[ii]

The history of Western civilization over the past 250 years is a chronicle of the decline of men and nations in consequence of a theological decision with profound political effects. That decision was the definitive refusal to conduct the art of politics according to the fundamental theological premise that an almighty and eternal God has revealed Himself in the person of Jesus Christ. What confronts us now is the prospect of life in a terminal civilization that has rejected the ancient dictum, in force throughout the West for more than a thousand years, that “Christianity is the law of the land.”[iii] We are the victims of what Christopher Dawson described as “the reversal of the spiritual revolution which gave birth to Western culture and a return to the psychological situation of the old pagan world…”[iv]

More particularly, the collapsing societies of the West groan under the consequences of what one liberal commentator has characterized as “a fundamental orientation toward politics chosen by early-modern Europeans in order to free themselves from the intellectual and spiritual influence of the Catholic Church…”[v] That is, the condition of contemporary Western civilization reflects the final destruction of the Catholic social order that endured in one form or another from Imperial Rome under the Emperor Constantine in the 4th century until the fall of the Imperial House of Hapsburg under the Emperor Charles I at the dawn of the 20th century.

By Catholic social order is meant a society with its organs of government, traditionally referred to collectively as the State[vi], which recognizes the Catholic Church at its summit and is responsive to her teaching. Such a State orders its laws and institutions (however imperfectly) to the Christian moral code and the final end of man as a creature of God, destined for either eternal beatitude or eternal punishment. This State may be monarchical, democratic or republican in its political constitution, and we have seen examples of all three forms of government (or mixtures thereof) within the dominant Western mode of Catholic social order. What was essential to this social order, known as Christendom, was the presence of an organic link between the Catholic Church and the State in virtue of which the Church was the conscience of the State. It is that link which was broken, and the result has aptly been likened to the decomposition of a human body from which the soul has departed.

One of the great triumphs of the new “fundamental orientation,” otherwise known as “classical liberalism,” is to have banished from the mind of contemporary Western man the memory that Christendom was the form and pattern of our civilization for most of its history. Classical liberalism is the system of thought which progressively divorces the art of politics from divine law and man’s final end in God, leaving the approach to God strictly to the individual members of civil society, artificially severed from its organs of government to allow for the fiction of the “private” believer. The liberal disjunction between civil society and the State, reducing the latter to merely value-neutral organs of government, was a radical break with the Western tradition that goes all the way back to Plato and Aristotle. Christendom, which combined the inspiration of supernatural grace with the natural truths of the Philosophers, was the historical fulfillment of man’s divine ordination to life in the State, producing nothing less than all of the greatest achievements of Western culture in an alliance (by no means without its own peculiar problems) between the Church and political authority.

In place of a great civilization ordered to Christ, the forces of liberalism­—quite suddenly in historical terms, and by force of arms at each critical juncture—established a new order whose god is “Liberty.” We ought to call Liberty a god because, like any idol that man sets up for himself, its claims are deemed to supersede those of man’s Creator. Whereas Christ declared that His apostles were to “make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost” and teaching them “to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you,”[vii] the god of Liberty declared the age-old baptism of nations to be annulled and the Christian commonwealth to be abolished. Whereas Christ taught that political authority descends to man from God, even in the case of the procurator who unjustly sentenced Him to death, Liberty decreed that political authority ascends from the “sovereign will” of the people, so that even God’s law could be subjected to popular repeal.

Whereas Christ taught that His truth will make men free, Liberty insisted upon a previously unknown conception of freedom in society: the mere absence of constraint on human action by the State, save for that necessary to prevent violence and to protect the right to the ownership, use and enjoyment of private property in the pursuit of whatever thing each individual deems to constitute happiness. Without the conformity of human law to the law of the Gospel, the term violence inevitably contracted, while the terms property and happiness expanded in proportion to what unrestrained human weakness and popular consensus demanded. Hence today human life in utero may, at the option of its “owner,” be destroyed and disposed of as waste, or extracted and inventoried at the embryonic stage for sale as a consumer good. And not even the political opponents of these crimes against humanity are willing to oppose them on any ground but an appeal to the same sovereign popular will that put Liberty on its pedestal.

In sum, the god of Liberty has imposed upon Western civilization what Pope Leo XIII succinctly denounced as “that new conception of law which was not merely previously unknown, but was at variance on many points with not only the Christian, but even the natural law.”[viii] This new conception of law expressed itself in utterly revolutionary principles which contemporary man, abysmally ignorant of his own Christian heritage, now unquestioningly accepts as the received wisdom of the ages:

[T]hat all are equal in the control of their life; that each one is so far his own master as to be in no sense under the rule of any other individual; that each is free to think on every subject just as he may choose, and to do whatever he may like to do; that no man has any right to rule over other men….that the judgment of each one's conscience is independent of all law; that the most unrestrained opinions may be openly expressed as to the practice or omission of divine worship; and that every one has unbounded license to think whatever he chooses and to publish abroad whatever he thinks…[ix]

That these principles would destroy the foundations of our civilization was self-evident. Only forty years after Leo, Pope Pius XI observed that “With God and Jesus Christ, excluded from political life, with authority derived not from God but from man, the very basis of that authority has been taken away, because the chief reason of the distinction between ruler and subject has been eliminated. The result is that human society is tottering to its fall, because it has no longer a secure and solid foundation.”[x] But perhaps not even Leo and Pius could have imagined the full extent of the civilizational debacle Liberty has wrought: not only the abortion holocaust, but an epidemic of divorce, the universal practice of contraception, the depopulation of Western nations, the relentless advance of homosexualism, the destruction of the family, the spread of orgiastic consumerism, the debasement of art, music and architecture, and finally the emergence of a veritable neo-pagan social order in which Christians increasingly face persecution for mere utterances against the orthodoxy of “liberty.”

In place of the Christian commonwealth, Liberty has erected a market-driven “culture of rights,” founded on the fiction of the isolated individual in a mythical pre-social, pre-religious state of nature, who is said to possess “rights” abstracted from any divine ordination to life in the State or any collective social duty to God. These “rights” are merely elaborate explications of Liberty’s one commandment: thou shalt not interfere in human action. Denying any ordination of the State to an objective common good conformable to Christ and eternal beatitude, the culture of rights has led to a tyranny of public opinion, enforced by despotic popular regimes which crush any attempt to secure true freedom through restoration of the Christian moral order, with its divinely ordained limits on human action and its positive duties in justice and charity toward one’s fellow man.

Under such conditions the pursuit of any common good in the State is impossible, and society becomes a mere arena for the pursuit of what each individual deems his proper good, without regard for the total impact of these individual pursuits on life in society as a whole. Thus Christians are forced to live in a global, free-market Gomorrah in which a trip to the supermarket invites an attack upon the innocence of their children, which is assaulted on every side. The culture of rights has produced a culture of death—physical, moral and spiritual—that oppresses not only the Christian life, but truth, beauty and goodness themselves.

The libertarian acolytes of Liberty argue that it is not Liberty but the State that oppresses us. Rejecting the entire Western tradition, they declare that life in the State is not natural to man. The State, they maintain, arises from the unnatural imposition of organs of government upon a naturally free civil society by an age-old conspiracy of nefarious ruling elites, who have somehow managed to persuade generation after generation, in virtually every place on earth, that government is necessary. If only the unnecessary organs of government—kings, parliaments, presidents, congresses, governors, public magistrates, and so forth—can be eliminated, the “monopoly of force” by which the elites have for so long oppressed the Western masses will be ended, and civil society will triumph in the freedom and prosperity of the “spontaneous order” that arises from voluntary human cooperation. The State will wither away, just as it does in the dreams of Marxists. It will be the Second Coming of Liberty, whose first coming in 1776 ended with Liberty’s crucifixion by the Federalists, who gave the world yet another State.

Mass democracy, the libertarians concede, is a god that failed, just as communism failed.[xi] Democracy failed not because of Liberty (so the argument goes) but because the State’s “monopoly of force” enabled one group to oppress another through taxation, regulation and the threat of force in violation of the “free-market principle” of untrammeled interpersonal exchange. The libertarians conveniently overlook the indispensable role of the “free” market itself in fostering democratic tyranny by destroying social adherence to the objective moral order–a role de-ethicized secular governments are only too happy to facilitate with judicial decisions that bar any substantial legal limitation on the market’s promotion of vice and corruption. Christians are pressed between what Wilhelm Röpke called the “bloated colossus of the State” and the “cult of the colossal” in the marketplace. Even the Protestant Röpke, one of the foremost free-market defenders of the 20th century, was constrained to issue the warning that market competition “must not be allowed to predominate and sway society in all its spheres, or it will poison men’s souls [and] destroy civilization…”[xii] In Catholic social order it was not possible for the market to have this effect, for both the law of the Gospel and civil law protected public morality. In liberal social order, however, that effect was inevitable.

The libertarians do not see, or will not acknowledge, that the god of Liberty reigns equally over secular government and free market, constantly maintaining a symbiotic adjustment between these two basic elements of de-ethicized liberal social order. The de-ethicized government exacts from the de-ethicized market a tribute of taxation and regulation which merely dampens a still immense and growing material prosperity, and in return the market receives from government legal protection against the moral claims of Christianity, so that profit may abound from the sale of anything and everything for which entrepreneurs can create a demand, including embryonic human beings. Röpke, who was no advocate of Catholic social order, observed this symbiosis in his own renowned critique of economic liberalism: “[T]he economic liberalism of the last two centuries has disastrously gone astray in a manner fully paralleling the mistakes of political liberalism and ultimately stemming from the same source.” [xiii]

The dreamers of the libertarian dream fail to perceive that it is not the State as such, which will exist as long as there is human society, but rather the theology of the State that has led to tyranny. The worst of the “absolute” monarchs of Christendom was a model of limited government compared with the presidents and prime ministers of modern secular regimes who owe no allegiance to Rome. Even a leading libertarian scholar has acknowledged, apparently without recognizing the significance of his admission, that “the historic transition from monarchy to democracy represents not progress but civilizational decline.”[xiv] The monarchies in question were Catholic states embodying Catholic social order—the very order overthrown in the name of Liberty.

The liberal political philosopher Pierre Manent candidly observed that “the distinction between civil society and the state, and their union through the idea of representation [i.e. democracy], sets off a natural oscillation between two extreme possibilities: the ‘withering away’ of the state on the one hand, and the absorption of civil society by the state on the other. It is a distinction that calls out for negation, a negation that can benefit only one of the two terms.”[xv] Yet both terms have been supplied by liberal political philosophy in service of its great project: “the radical discrediting of the Church’s political claims…”[xvi] Hence both terms are in line with liberalism’s fundamental movement away from the Church’s vision of Christocentric social order, which alone can preserve the State from the oscillation between absolutism and anarchy.

As “statist” and libertarian devotees of liberty debate the future of their idol, we live amidst the ruins of the Christocentric civilization Liberty has leveled to the ground. Narcotized by the material comforts an endlessly inventive marketplace provides, Christians in general and Catholics in particular (with a few noble historical exceptions) have offered little resistance to Liberty’s inexorable demolition of nearly everything that was good and holy in the commonweal. Today there is only the occasional verbal protest from among the few “fundamentalists” who actually understand what we have lost. But even the fundamentalists have been effectively converted by the new order. As the proto-libertarian Benjamin Constant observed with smug certitude concerning the Catholic reactionaries of post-revolutionary France: “in declaring themselves champions of earlier centuries… [they] are, in spite of themselves, men of our century [who] have neither the strength of their convictions nor the hope that ensures success.”[xvii]

Liberty makes certain we remain deprived of the hope that ensures success by convincing us that the overthrow of Catholic social order was inevitable and is now quite irreversible: There will be faction and violence if any effort is made to topple me, Liberty warns us. For only Liberty can control the chaos that Liberty has unleashed. Our entire civilization has fallen prey to an ideological protection racket. But we are not protected. In fear of violence we pay tribute to violence. Each year abortion alone claims more victims for Liberty than all of the major wars in world history combined. And now ultimate violence approaches.

It is not as if our deliverance from this predicament were inconceivable. Another triumph of the new orientation is that it has blinded us to the political significance of the spiritual reality that, even today, the great preponderance of the population of the Western world consists of baptized Christians, with the overwhelming Western popular majority[xviii] remaining at least nominally Catholic. If this majority were to be aroused from its silent apostasy by the leaders of a Catholic Church returned to militancy, the world would certainly change again. As Dawson observed of our situation: “However secularized our modern civilization may have become, this sacred tradition remains like a river in the desert, and a genuine religious education can still use it to irrigate the thirsty lands and to change the face of the world with the promise of new life.”[xix] The leaders of the new order themselves, who erupt in nearly hysterical outrage at any sign of effective Catholic opposition to secular orthodoxy, evince an acute awareness of the immense spiritual power that lies dormant under the desert they have created. They know how easily an awakened fraternity of the baptized could topple the god of Liberty.

And topple Liberty we must, in the name of true freedom—the freedom that comes from the idea that we are the children of a loving God, who bestows upon us both temporal blessings and eternal happiness, if only men and nations will follow His counsels. But beyond a simple plea for a return to faith, Catholics must be prepared to argue that reason itself suffices to demonstrate that only a reconstruction of Christendom, or something approaching it as an interim step in the revival of the West, can avert the coming catastrophe, and that otherwise we are at the end of history. As the currently reigning Pope remarked when he was Cardinal Ratzinger: “[N]o society will long survive if in its public structure it is built agnostically and materialistically and wishes to permit anything else to exist only below the threshold of the public.”[xx] The Anglican scholar John Milbank, who represents the growing intellectual trend toward a radically Christian critique of secular social order, has expressed this conviction in a startling way: “Only a global liturgical polity can save us now from literal violence.”[xxi]

What of the objection that we are advocating the “impossibility” of a reconversion of the Western world to Roman Catholicism? I reply that this “impossibility” ought really to be seen as nothing less than the only reasonable course of action to save a dying civilization, which, after all, is still predominantly composed of baptized Catholics. At this point in the civilizational debacle, anyone who calls himself a Christian should at least be willing to make an effort to examine our situation from the traditional Catholic perspective, standing outside the framework of liberal premises whose adoption was no less an act of the will than the common faith that sustained Christendom for century upon century. As Milbank has observed, the governing assumptions of secular social theory “are bound up with the modification or the rejection of orthodox Christian positions. These fundamental intellectual shifts are… no more rationally ‘justifiable’ than the Christian positions themselves.”[xxii]

Let us argue, then, on the ground of reason in the hope that, for the skeptical, faith will follow. Even in the absence of faith, however, reason alone ought to impel the thoughtful man to rise up against Liberty, the failed god whose reign has brutalized and degraded us all in one way or another.

Notes

[i] Cited in Wilhelm Röpke, A Humane Economy (South Bend:Gateway Editions), 1958), pp. 4, 75.

[ii] Don Juan Donoso Cortes, Essay on Catholicism, Authority and Order, (New York: Joseph F. Wagner, 1925), p. 1.

[iii] Christopher Dawson, Understanding Europe (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1952), p. 18.

[iv] Ibid, p. 14.

[v] Pierre Manent, An Intellectual History of Liberalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), p. viii (preface by Jerrold Siegel).

[vi] I use the term “State” in the classical sense of the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition, which recognizes the indispensable organic relation between civil society and government. In libertarian thought, on the other hand, “State” means merely the organs of government, especially in the nations of the post-Christian West, whose varying absolutism is actually a departure from Catholic teaching on the nature of the just State.

[vii] Matthew 28: 19-20.

[viii] Immortale Dei, n. 23.

[ix] Ibid., n. 24.

[x] Quas Primas (1925).

[xi]Cfr. Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Democracy: The God That Failed (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2004). The author rejects both democracy and monarchy, advocating instead a never-before-seen society governed by private contractual agencies, thus correcting classical liberalism’s “error” in accepting the concept of public authority—i.e., government. Ibid., p. 229.

[xii] Wilhelm Röpke, A Humane Economy, (South Bend: Gateway Editions, 1958), p. 128.

[xiii] Wilhem Röpke, The Social Crisis of Our Time (New Brunswick: Transacation Publishers, orig. pub. 1942), p. 48.

[xiv]Ibid., p. 69.

[xv]Manent, op. cit., p. 27.

[xvi]Ibid, p. 12.

[xvii]Cited in Manent, p. 91.

[xviii]I employ here and throughout the classical definition of the Western world: Western Europe and all the territory settled by Catholic Europeans in North America, Latin America (the countries of the Western hemisphere south of the United States) and Oceania, and the Eurocentric Christian culture and laws resulting from the vast Catholic expansion of the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries.

[xix]Dawson, Understanding Europe, p. 255.

[xx] Cited in Thomas Storck, “John Locke, Liberal Totalitarianism, and the Trivialization of Religion,” Faith and Reason, Vol. 26, No. 3 (Autumn 2001).

[xxi]John Milbank, “The Gift of Ruling: Secularization and Political Authority” (Dominican Council/Blackwell Publishing, Ltd., 2004) (reprinted essay), p. 238. Millbank and others of the school of “Radical Orthodoxy” fail to appreciate that the answer they seek to the civilizational crisis is contained entirely within the traditional social doctrine of the Catholic Church, which needs only to be reasserted by the Church’s teaching authority. The Church has not “failed,” as Millbank suggests. Rather, her human element has failed to defend what even Vatican II called the “traditional Catholic doctrine on the moral duty of men and societies toward the true religion and toward the one Church of Christ,” thus allowing the impression to arise that the Magisterium has reversed itself, which is impossible.

[xxii]John Milbank, Theology and Social History: Beyond Secular Reason (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), p. 1.

©2005 The Remnant

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