The final dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 heralded the victory of Western democratic societies over communism and the ideologies of collectivism. Proponents of the market economy now had definitive proof that central economic planning cannot outperform a decentralized market order, in terms of creating goods that people value and distributing them in a timely, efficient manner. With the evident failures of national socialism in view, some believed the final decade of the twentieth century would see the spread of individual freedoms of speech, religion, trade, and association. Formerly communist countries would democratize, granting widespread rights of political participation to their citizens. A global order of peace and cooperation would ensue. The “end of history” was nigh.
Three and a half decades of subsequent history have proved such optimism to have been misguided. Many in the developed world, especially since the Global Financial Crisis of 2008, have become more openly skeptical about the desirability of Adam Smith’s “liberal plan” of “equality, liberty, and justice” in which each is free to pursue “his own interest his own way” within the rule of law. Others disagree with Thomas Jefferson’s claim in the Declaration of Independence that human beings have a set of self-evident, natural rights, including to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, that ought to constrain the activities of the state. The tradition that built from the sensibilities informing Smith’s and Jefferson’s ideas, which came to be called “liberalism” in the nineteenth century, continues to be subject to many criticisms, from friendly correctives to radical rejection.
The most relevant aspects of the criticisms of liberalism for the present volume (A History of Christian Political Economy) are the negative assessments of the market economy, understood as a largely unregulated system in which individuals are free to buy and sell as they see fit, to whom they see fit, and at prices they see fit, within the rules of private property and contract. Many of the negative assessments are reprisals or continuations of older traditions, some of which are openly hostile toward Christianity, and others which are self-consciously rooted in Christian theology. The perspectives hostile toward Christianity include varieties of progressivism and Marxism, including critical theory. Recent perspectives rooted in Christian theological reflection include distributism and postliberalism, which are both largely—but not exclusively—Roman Catholic phenomena.
Some critics of the market economy focus on identifying ill effects of unregulated commercial orders. The market economy, it is often claimed, fosters higher levels of undesirable outcomes—income inequality, monopolization of industries, poverty, financial instability, environmental degradation, and more—than would otherwise occur. Many such charges are overblown or misguided, in our view. Market orders do, of course, lead to undesirable outcomes. But simply pointing to the presence of something undesirable does not prove that alternative arrangements will do better—and the radical alternatives to the market economy very often generate demonstrably worse social outcomes than the market itself. “That ideal equality,” Pope Leo XIII wrote, “about which [the Socialists] entertain pleasant dreams would be in reality the levelling down of all to a like condition of misery and degradation.”
Many of the critics of the market economy, Christian and otherwise, are guilty of the charge levied by the British Unitarian minister Philip Wicksteed in 1908 against the early twentieth-century socialists: they fail to comprehend the “almost unrealisable extent our present [economic] organisation has succeeded.” Wicksteed by no means believed the market order to be perfect—however one might construe “perfection” on this side of eternity. He said he “would have the community constantly vigilant for means of doing better for itself, by deliberate planning, than the spontaneous adjustments of individuals” through the market. But despite what he judged to be the “woefully defective” results of the market in some particular instances, he appreciated and celebrated the remarkable feats of the system that “solidly feeds, clothes and shelters, say, nine-tenths of the inhabitants of London, by agencies which neither they, nor anyone else, have traced out.”
The comparative amounts of poverty, inequality, instability, and environmental degradation produced by market economies can be investigated and discussed through contemporary methods of social science. Deeper challenges to the market economy have come from those who reject such methods of social science themselves—especially the methods of mainstream modern economic science. In attacking the methods of economics, some critics focus on discrediting what are sometimes described as economic dogmas. These dogmas range from common propositions economists make about the mutual benefits of free trade, which critics claim to derive from inappropriate degrees of abstraction, to more substantive charges about philosophical—and even tacitly theological—presuppositions.
On the philosophical front, critics charge modern economists with promoting a materialistic worldview that degrades the dignity, agency, and rationality of the human person, crowds out the formation of virtue, and even encourages selfishness. In 1969, Kenneth Boulding identified the “widespread feeling that trade is somehow dirty . . . and that especially the labor market is utterly despicable as constituting the application of the principle of prostitution to virtually all areas of human life.”
Many attribute to economic science the ethos that Wilhelm Röpke described as “economism.” Economists, in this view, are card-carrying members of what Röpke called the “cult of the standard of living” that “only thinks of bread and never of those other things of which the Gospel speaks.” Walter Rauschenbusch put the point bluntly in 1907, with a charge that resonates with the more recent movement in Radical Orthodoxy: the modern science of political economy is “an oracle of the false god of mammonism.” The charge that modern economics is guilty both of over abstraction and idolatry has come to the foreground in the work of one of the central critics of the liberal project in the past ten years, the Roman Catholic political theorist Patrick Deneen. Through the free market order, he claims, “varying economic cultures are dismantled in the name of homogenous ‘laws’ of economics, disconnecting the pursuit of appetite from the common good, and relying upon the unreliable enforcement of abstract and distant regulation of markets, backstopped by the promise of punishment by the liberal state.”
The extent to which Western democracies have actually had free markets in the postwar period is open for debate. Critics of the market economy would be better served by deeper engagement with concrete case studies in economic history instead of merely laying social ills at the feet of “neoliberalism” or so-called market-fundamentalists. Nonetheless, it is clear that our time calls for substantive reflection on issues in political economy from social, philosophical, and ultimately theological perspectives. The growing body of criticisms of the market economy and the discipline of economics itself, from both the political right and the left, indicate a recognition of the truth of the Scriptures that man does not, indeed, live on bread alone.
History did not end with the fall of the USSR. The breathtaking economic growth of the twentieth century did not bring heaven down to earth. Events including the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the Great Financial Crisis of 2008, the COVID-19 pandemic, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the terrorist attacks carried out against Israeli civilians on October 7, 2023, and the subsequent Israel-Hamas war on the Gaza Strip make clear that technological progress and material abundance have not solved our fundamental human dilemmas. They have merely transposed them into new contexts.
“When a society is perishing,” wrote Pope Leo XIII, “the wholesome advice to give to those who would restore it is to call it to the principles from which it sprang.” This volume (A History of Christian Political Economy) and the accompanying anthology (Sources in Christian Political Economy) aim to provide guidance for those looking to reflect on issues in political economy by recovering a rich variety of historical Christian perspectives rooted in understandings of the moral and theological purpose of economic life. In our own ongoing efforts to understand the political economic dimensions of our societies and communities, these perspectives are a valuable resource. They can guide us as we, as Christians, strive to bring the teachings of God, revealed in the Scriptures, to bear in efforts of social reform and improvement. As Abraham Kuyper, the Dutch Reformed theologian and statesman, said, “As Christians we are to emphasize as strongly as possible the majesty of God’s authority and the absolute validity of his ordinances. For all our condemnation of the rotting structure of our society, we are never to help erect any structure other than one that rests on the foundation laid by God.”
This essay is adapted from the conclusion to the volume by Jordan J. Ballor and Erik W. Matson, A History of Christian Political Economy: From the Patristics to the Present (B&H Academic), a survey textbook which serves as a companion to the edited volume Sources in Christian Political Economy: A Reader (B&H Academic).
