Christian Democracy in the collision of moral and economic imperatives
This is an interesting read for me, as a socialist with religious roots who is interested in the politics of the good, as against a neutral public sphere that sees only subjective choice and a "conflict pluralism" that is agnostic in relation to competing goods. The latter is the liberal view. A disenchanting science has made existentialists of us all by placing us in an objectively valueless and meaningless world. As Weber puts it, in such a disenchanted terrain, individuals are free to choose their own gods, which may also be devils, since there is no objective standard by which to evaluate competing claims. "Where there is nothing, both the Kaiser and the proletarian have lost their rights." (Weber, Politics as a Vocation). I'm interested in recovering a "something."
This is an interesting article on a tradition that sought to ground politics in value commitments outside of conventionalism (rights as something more than conferred - or withdrawn - by the state, subsidiarity etc).
I see Christian Democracy as a religious version of the Hegelian Sittlichkeit with a multi-sectored, multi-layered democracy of person, place and purpose enfolded within a common, consensual devotion to a transcendent God or ethic, as against the atomistic conception of the democracy of irreducible subjective choice, preference, and opinion in modern liberal capitalist society.
My favourite thinkers have sought to secularise this notion. Kant, for example, with his categorical imperative. Thinkers I admire like Jacques Maritain and Alasdair MacIntyre think this emphasis on self-legislating reason self-defeating, involving an individualism that closes back in on itself. The view emphasises the need for solidarity in both moral and social terms if democracy is to work. Maritain does great work on solidarity as something more than economic, but as the moral and social condition of a viable society and polity.
The article makes interesting reference to Patrick Deneen and his book "Why Liberalism Failed." This book is well worth reading for the way it challenges the libertarianism of the free market right (which is implicated in unravelling economies as well as the planetary ecology) and the libertarianism of the left (which is implicated in dissolving moral bonds and social ties through a cultural and ethical relativism).
I am interested in relating the criticisms of political ideologies - liberalism and socialism are targeted in this article - to the critique of political economy.
We need to understand that the capital system is something much more than the mere institutions of capitalism, but involves the capital relation and rule grounding an accumulative dynamic. The expropriations of capitalism are easily enough challenged with a change in the title deeds to property, the personnel are also easily enough replaced. The transition to socialism goes much deeper than expropriation as an institutional process.
It is also crucially important to understand that the capital system is not a public domain, which is something amenable to legal regulation, moral persuasion, and democratic control, but a regime of private accumulation and totalizing alien control which imposes inexorable economic imperatives. “Accumulation, accumulation,” Marx wrote in Capital I, is “Moses and all the prophets.” Keynes agreed: “‘Modern capitalism is absolutely irreligious, without internal union, without much public spirit, often, though not always, a mere congeries of possessors and pursuers.’ Keynes, J.M., ‘A Short View of Russia’ in Essays in Persuasion (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1932).
In the past, I have made the case for Germany's Sozialmarktwirtschaft. This is often called the “social market,” but translates more accurately as the “socially responsible market” economy. The problem is that the capital system is a system that is fundamentally subjectless, uncontrollable, and irresponsible. The responsibility we seek, either in terms of a legislative and regulative framework conducive to the public good or moral force via the cultivation of character, modes of conduct or virtues, is insufficient to constrain the force of accumulative imperatives. The constraints sought by an Adam Smith or a Montesquieu have proven insufficient.
We have still to address the passages with which Max Weber closes The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism; we have not yet come to terms with the disenchantment of the world and Nietzsche's “death of God”. Weber writes incisively on how the "light cloak" of religious faith has been turned into the "steel hard cage" of economic "force" within capitalist modernity:
"The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so. For when asceticism was carried out of monastic cells into everyday life, and began to dominate worldly morality, it did its part in building the tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order.. This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which today determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force. Perhaps it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt. In Baxter's view the care for external goods should only lie on the shoulders of the 'saint like a light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment'. But fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage. Since asceticism undertook to remodel the world and work out its ideals in the world, material goods have gained an increasing and finally an inexorable power over the lives of men as at no previous period in history. Today the spirit of religious asceticism - whether finally, who knows? - has escaped from the cage. But victorious capitalism, since it rests on mechanical foundations, needs its support no longer. The rosy blush of its laughing heir, the Enlightenment, seems also to be irretrievably fading, and the idea of duty in one's calling prowls about in our lives like the ghost of dead religious beliefs. Where the fulfilment of the calling cannot directly be related to the highest spiritual and cultural values, or when, on the other hand, it need not be felt simply as economic compulsion, the individual generally abandons the attempt to justify it at all. In the field of its highest development, in the United States, the pursuit of wealth, stripped of its religious and ethical meaning, tends to become associated with purely mundane passions, which often actually give it the character of sport. No one knows who will live in this cage in the future, or whether at the end of this tremendous development entirely new prophets will arise, or there will be a great rebirth of old ideas and ideals, or, if neither, mechanised petrification, embellished with a sort of convulsive self-importance. For of the last stage of this cultural development, it might well be truly said: ‘Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilisation never before achieved'". (Weber 1985 181/2).
It takes more than moral restatement to overcome this condition. Any notion of a Christian Democracy, or a democracy of function premised on solidarity and (co)responsibility at every level of society, entails a degree of faith in the fundamental controllability of the capitalist economic system that is inadvisable in light of all we have come to learn this past century or more. Many continue to express that faith. Take the work of Philip Pettit, who compares the capitalist economy to a tiger. He rejects the free market right for unleashing the tiger and allowing it to predate upon society, dividing it from within; he rejects, too, the left who would seek to kill the tiger, destroying economic life in the process (in Pettit's view). Instead, he argued, we should seek to ride the tiger through an appropriate regulatory framework. To which I would ask: haven't we been trying to do that? Pettit’s view sounds like a restatement of Hegel's Sittlichkeit to me, with the state as the agency of the universal interest, grounded in a rich interimbrication of social institutions, family and civil society, with the economy as 'the system of needs' serving human interests in its own sphere.
'You cannot skin a tiger claw by claw; vivisection is its trade, and it does the skinning first. Those were the words of R.H. Tawney, a Christian Socialist rather than a Marxist.
Tawney also writes:
"'Modern capitalism', writes Mr Keynes, 'is absolutely irreligious, without internal union, without much public spirit, often, though not always, a mere congeries of possessors and pursuers.' It is that whole system of appetites and values, with its deification of the life of snatching to hoard, and hoarding to snatch, which now, in the hour of its triumph, while the plaudits of the crowd still ring in the ears of the gladiators and the laurels are still unfaded on their brows, seems sometimes to leave a taste as of ashes on the lips of a civilization which has brought to the conquest of its material environment resources unknown in earlier ages, but which has not yet learned to master itself. It was against that system, while still in its supple and insinuating youth, before success had caused it to throw aside the mask of innocence, and while its true nature was unknown even to itself, that the saints and sages of earlier ages launched their warnings and their denunciations. The language in which theologians and preachers expressed their horror of the sin of covetousness may appear to the modern reader too murkily sulphurous; their precepts on the contracts of business and the disposition of property may seem an impracticable pedantry. But rashness is a more agreeable failing than cowardice, and, when to speak is unpopular, it is less pardonable to be silent than to say too much. Posterity has, perhaps, as much to learn from the whirlwind eloquence with which Latimer scourged injustice and oppression, as from the sober respectability of the judicious Paley - who himself, since there are depths below depths, was regarded as a dangerous revolutionary by George III." (R. H. Tawney ‘Religion and the Rise of Capitalism’ 1926 ch 5).
This next article is written for Catholics, but the arguments from scripture are applicable to all Christians (although maybe beyond literalists).
It’s more complicated than you think.
The conclusion of the article is that a capitalist economy is consistent with Christianity only when strongly regulated. I've posted on Christian Democracy above, but the same strictures apply to Social Democracy as involving an institutional framework, moral infrastructure, and social structure that ensures a responsive and responsible economy that is consistent with principles of justice.
To people of faith, the world can seem like a very secular place. I would just bear this in mind, though. The only revolution in English history took place in an age of faith, and its more radical proponents - Levellers, Diggers, and late Quakers - were people of deep, active faith.
There are interesting words on the EU in the main article. I emphasised the Christian Democratic roots behind the German "Social Market" - more correctly translated as the "socially responsible market" - and the process of European integration in my economics papers from Keele University.
chapters 16 and 17 INDUSTRY AND EUROPE - PROBLEMS AND UNCERTAINTIES IN A GLOBAL ECONOMIC ENVIRONMENT vol 1 The Integration of the European Community
vols 3 and 4 arguing for a global institutional and structural transformation