The Online Library of Liberty

A project of Liberty Fund, Inc.

• Introduction
• Part 1: Economics and Ethics
• Chapter 1: Are Economists Basically Immoral? *
• Chapter 2: Economics and Ethics: the Problem of Dialogue *
• Chapter 3: Income and Ethics In the Market System *
• Part 2: Economics and Theology
• Chapter 4: Can Homo Economicus Be Christian? *
• Chapter 5: Economic Scientists and Skeptical Theologians *
• Chapter 6: Christian Theological Perspectives On the Economy *
• Chapter 7: Controlling Stories: On the Mutual Influence of Religious Narratives and Economic Explanations *
• Part 3: Economics, Theology, and Justice
• Chapter 8: Justice, Natural Law, and Reformation Theology *
• Chapter 9: The Concept of Economic Justice In Religious Discussion *
• Chapter 10: The U.s. Catholic Bishops and the Pursuit of Justice *
• Part 4: Economics and History
• Chapter 12: Christian Social Thought and the Origination of the Economic Order *
• Chapter 13: Clerical Laissez-faire: a Case Study In Theological Ethics *
• Part 5: On Teaching and Learning
• Chapter 14: “the Nature of Man”: What Are We After? *
• Chapter 15: Researchers and Degree Purchasers *
• Part 6: Teaching Economics
• Chapter 16: Economics Is a Way of Thinking *
• Chapter 17: Teaching Introductory Economics *
• Chapter 18: Teaching Economics By Telling Stories *
• Chapter 19: Between Sterility and Dogmatism *
• Part 7: Economic Method
• Chapter 20: Ethics On the Road to Serfdom and Beyond *
• Chapter 21: Measures of Wealth and Assumptions of Right: an Inquiry *
• Chapter 22: The Foundations of Law and Economics: Can the Blind Lead the Blind? *
• Part 8: Policy Commentary
• Chapter 23: What Is the Responsibility of Business Under Democratic Capitalism? *
• Chapter 25: An Economic Perspective On Illegal Drugs *
• Chapter 26: Economics, Ethics, and Ecology *

PART 4

Economics and History

CHAPTER 12

Christian Social Thought and the Origination of the Economic Order*

Perspective is important to have, but difficult to acquire. A history of Christian thought regarding the economic order may be able to provide us with valuable perspective as we try to come to terms with that order in our own time. But it’s hard to gain perspective on such a long and complex history. I began the preparation of this paper far more certain than I am now of what I wanted to say. The investigations undertaken to support my various theses repeatedly revealed how much I had forgotten to consider, how little I really knew about the general topic, and how much of what has been confidently asserted in this area has subsequently proved to be naive and hopelessly uninformed. What started out to be a definitive statement has turned into a mere series of suggestions.

1

“It has been said,” Franklin Gamwell tells us at the beginning of his keynote address,

That’s a puzzling claim, at least upon first consideration. The production of wealth has been a cooperative social task in every society of which we have any knowledge. It would seem to follow, then, that an economic order must have existed in every known society. And if something so important existed, how could it have escaped recognition?

Karl Polanyi has given the clearest answer to that question. Until roughly the end of the eighteenth century, he contended, the economy was thoroughly “embedded” in society.

If Polanyi and Gamwell are correct—and I believe they are—my task of providing a historical overview of the ways in which Christian thinkers have understood the relationship between Christianity and the economic order is greatly simplified. Prior to 1800, Christians did not discern an economic order that “might become a subject of moral deliberation, debate and decision.”

2

Was the concept of an economic order discovered or invented? Polanyi wanted to claim that it was largely invented, and to lament the invention.

The concept of the economic order was invented, according to Polanyi, as a way of making room for the machine.

We transformed Aristotle’s zoon politikon into Homo economicus, a creature motivated by the fear of hunger and the desire for personal gain. Then we made the rest of society fundamentally dependent upon the exchange-directed system of production and distribution that Homo economicus generated and so we surrendered to the determinism of the market.

Polanyi’s hostility toward the “market mentality” may have misled him, however.4 The market system is not as artificial or unnatural as he wanted to make it. The eighteenth-century founders of economic science were describing something that was actually at work; they were discovering the economic order, not inventing it.

There is too much design in the account that Polanyi gives us. There were no “we” who decided that the advantages of machinery could not be obtained without a self-adjusting system of markets, and who consequently cast “our” thoughts and values in the appropriate mold.

3

The discovery of a distinct economic order is closely bound up, as we might expect, with the development of a separate science to explain its working. That science, known as political economy through most of the nineteenth century and as economics since then, had no name at all before 1800. Like the order it would explain, it was in the process of being discovered.

In the eighteenth century the term “political economy” still had the meaning suggested by its etymology. Economy was the art of managing a household, and political economy was the analogous art of providing for all the wants of a state. The “principles” of political economy were the principles that ought to guide a statesman or legislator. Thus the subtitle of Sir James Steuart’s 1767 Inquiry into the Principles of Political Economy is “An Essay on the Science of Domestic Policy in Free Nations.”5 Similarly, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in the article on political economy which he wrote for the Encyclopédie, defined his subject as the wise and legitimate government of that larger family, the state.6 Steuart and Rousseau simply take for granted that, as an oikonomia must have an oikonomos, so must a political economy have a statesman to set it in order. And the principles of political economy are the maxims to be observed by sensible rulers who want “to secure a certain fund of subsistence for all the inhabitants, to obviate every circumstance which may render it precarious.”7

Adam Smith understood the term political economy in much the same way, as management of the society.8 He dissented forcefully, however, on how much management was required. The first four books of The Wealth of Nations attempt to show how wealth is produced without the guidance of an oikonomos, and why it is likely to increase more rapidly the less control the statesman tries to exert. At the end of Book IV, before discussing the proper tasks of government, Smith sums up his central thesis:

If Smith deserves to be called the founder of economic science, it is because he provided the first comprehensive explanation of the order that establishes itself in wealth-producing activities in the absence of any “visible hand.” Others, of course, had made important contributions before him. Richard Cantillon’s Essay on the Nature of Trade in General, written around 1730 but not published until 1755, and A. J. R. Turgot’s Reflections on the Formation and Distribution of Riches, composed in 1766 and published three years later, were exceptionally lucid expositions of the economic order. Both these works present a sort of natural history of national wealth, in which events develop by a logic of their own rather than as a consequence of anyone’s design.10

Cantillon, Turgot, and Smith certainly described what we would today call an economic order. But was it sufficiently differentiated, in their treatments, from kinship and political associations to become “a subject of moral deliberation, debate and decision”? That is less certain. None of these writers seems to have thought of economic activity as something distinct from other purposive human action.

Even Polanyi, who criticizes Smith in The Great Transformation, conceded, in notes distributed to his students in economic history courses at Columbia University, that Smith still belongs with the “societal” writers. He considered economic life to be only an aspect of national life, bound to reflect the health or ill health of national life. All through his writings, Polanyi concludes, Smith’s approach is “institutional, historical, and societal.”11

4

Bernard Mandeville was a key figure in the development of eighteenth-century thought on the workings of society.12 His Fable of the Bees, first published in 1705 as a poem of 400 lines, and subsequently much enlarged, elaborated, and defended in 1714 and 1729 reprintings, was widely read and discussed. Mandeville’s scandalous thesis was that private vices led to public benefits. His significance for economics and social science lay in the success with which he expounded the notion that social order can and will emerge without the benefit of any advance design, that economy in the larger society does not require an oikonomos to direct it. But he also claimed that it was vice, or selfish and anti-social motives, which supplied the principle of coordination. Despite Adam Smith’s careful refutation of Mandeville on this score, the belief that the economic order is held together by the operation of essentially immoral motives survived to shape nineteenth-century conceptions of that order and eventually the reactions of Christian thinkers trying to come to terms with it.

Smith himself never claimed that the economic order was maintained through the operation of selfish interests. He speaks of self-love, of one’s own advantage, security, gain, and interest; and of the “uniform, constant, and uninterrupted effort of every man to better his condition.”13 None of this can be equated with selfishness, however. Smith’s attack on Mandeville in The Theory of Moral Sentiments clarifies his own position.

After reviewing Mandeville’s “wholly pernicious” argument, to the effect that all actions, including those that seem most generous and self-sacrificing, stem in reality from selfishness and mean motives, Smith writes:

The desire to better our condition, which Smith believes is the dominant motive in social interaction among all classes of people, prompts most of them to pursue “an augmentation of fortune,” because this is “the means most vulgar and the most obvious” toward bettering one’s condition. This desire leads people to work and to save, which in turn fuels the process of economic growth.15

And what are people ultimately after? “[W]hat are the advantages which we propose by that great purpose of human life which we call bettering our condition?” Smith answers: “To be observed, to be attended to, to be taken notice of with sympathy, complacency, and approbation, are all the advantages which we can propose to derive from it.”16

This often culminates in sheer vanity, which is the desire to be praised for what one knows is not genuinely praiseworthy. But it need not produce that result. The crucial point Smith makes against Mandeville is that the desire for approval can take the form of the love of virtue or the love of true glory, as well as mere vanity. The love of virtue is “the desire of doing what is honorable and noble, of rendering ourselves the proper objects of esteem and approbation.” The love of true glory is “the love of well-grounded fame and reputation, the desire of acquiring esteem by what is really estimable.”17 Thus the Homo economicus in Adam Smith’s system of moral philosophy, while he adapts means to ends, does not necessarily pursue base or ignoble ends. The desire to better one’s condition is common to the virtuous and the vain.

The notion that Adam Smith glorified the pursuit of gain could never be maintained by anyone who had read the companion volume to The Wealth of Nations.18

5

The publication in 1798 of Malthus’ Essay on Population was a crucial event, both for the subsequent development of economics and for Christians who would later reflect on the economic order.

In his book on the “Clapham Sect,” Saints in Politics, Ernest Marshall Howse writes:

But this is not what Smith taught; it is the Malthusian vision of the human situation. Ricardo employed Malthus’ population theory, along with the law of diminishing returns in agriculture, to construct his model of the economic system. But even Ricardo did not maintain that poverty was inevitable. In his influential essay On the Principles of Population and Taxation (1817), Ricardo expresses the hope that the laboring classes will acquire a taste for luxuries and so will limit the size of their families.20

How did Malthus’ gloomy view of the human situation come to be so widely accepted as the central teaching of classical political economy? The undiluted doctrine of the first edition of Malthus’ essay did not, in fact, command general acceptance among political economists in Malthus’ time, not even in England.21 It does seem to have convinced Malthus’ theological colleagues, however. As Anthony Waterman has shown in a recent article on “The Ideological Alliance of Political Economy and Christian Theology, 1798-1833,” a number of Anglican theologian-economists subscribed to Malthus’ basic doctrine and turned it into a grim theodicy. Poverty and inequality were God’s way of propelling mankind, “despite its brutish inertia, toward the higher possibilities of earthly existence.”22

Here is the surprising solution to the puzzle of how Christian thinkers in England were able to accept so easily the teachings of the dismal science: they were its principal teachers. The doctrines of the Reverend T. R. Malthus conformed more readily to their natural theology than did the teachings of that optimistic deist, Adam Smith.23

Christian social thought at the end of the eighteenth century was profoundly conservative. Order was of God, almost without regard to the nature of the order. Inequalities were not inequities, but rather divinely ordained differences that enabled the social organism to function. The church’s traditional hostility toward the desire for gain, we must remember, was part of a static conception of the social order, in which people were expected to be content with the lot assigned to them in this life and to avoid envy or covetousness. Respect for property was part and parcel of respect for government, ecclesiastical authority, and Providence itself. And in the last decade of the eighteenth century, there were the chilling lessons of the French Revolution for anyone inclined to doubt that respect for established institutions was the foundation of social order.24

6

Some would have argued in the early nineteenth century that the social theology of Malthus and the clerical political economists was more “natural” than Christian. No such charge would have been made, however, against William Wilberforce, Henry Thornton, and the other members of what subsequently came to be known as the Clapham Sect. This small group of wealthy and powerful individuals were committed Evangelicals and active social reformers. How did they approach the problems of the economic order?25

The Clapham “Saints,” to use the derisive label applied to them in their time, were certainly less tolerant of whatever social wrongs they saw and much more willing to make personal sacrifices to remedy them. Their long struggle to secure abolition of the slave trade provides ample evidence of their Evangelical piety, their conviction that true religion entailed concern for the problems of this world, and their refusal to substitute pious words for personally costly actions. There is no evidence, however, that they saw the economic order in any way fundamentally different from the way in which it was perceived by Malthus or Thomas Chalmers.

Twentieth-century critics have sometimes faulted the members of Wilberforce’s circle for attacking slavery abroad while ignoring “wage slavery” at home.26 Even Howse, in his sympathetic history of the Clapham Sect, and while defending them against unfair and often uninformed criticism in this area, speaks of their “heartlessness,” their indifference toward “civil injustice,” even their “cruelty” when it came to the legal rights of wage earners.27 But there is no heartlessness, cruelty, or injustice in accepting what one genuinely believes cannot be changed, or in opposing policies which have kind intentions but are thought to produce cruel consequences.

The Clapham Saints did not believe that the condition of the laborer could not be improved, though they certainly entertained expectations more modest in this respect than those that came to be held later in the century. They simply believed that combinations and strikes were far more likely to damage the working classes than to help them, especially in the long run. If they were wrong about this, it was not because they had averted their eyes from the conditions of the laboring classes or refused to consider reasoned arguments to the contrary. Their views in this area were generally consistent with the views of the leading political economists of their day and even of the next generation. (It may be noted in passing that Henry Thornton, in whose house in Clapham the Saints regularly met to map their strategies, was probably the most astute monetary economist of the nineteenth century.28 )

7

According to Polanyi, Malthus played a crucial role in the establishment of an institutionally separate economic sphere in society, by invoking Nature herself to secure “the autonomy of the economic sphere.”29 For those who followed Malthus, the laws of the market were not the mere will of particular social classes or arbitrary governments; they were the very decrees of Providence.

How was the economic order perceived in the first half of the nineteenth century by Christian social thinkers who accepted Smith but rejected Malthus? The United States provides an interesting case study.

Neither Malthus nor Ricardo ever acquired in the United States anything like the authority they commanded in Britain.30 The basic doctrine of Malthus (and the foundation of Ricardo’s distribution theory), that the pressure of population on limited agricultural land will keep wages at subsistence, had little to commend it in a country where land was abundant and labor was chronically scarce. The European textbook most widely used in the United States was J. B. Say’s Treatise on Political Economy.31 In this work, the topic of population isn’t even taken up until the end of the second (of three) books, and then no gloomy conclusions are drawn. Moreover, the editor of the American edition of Say’s Treatise, Clement C. Biddle, chastises the English translator in his introduction for inserting footnotes that defend Malthus and Ricardo against Say. Biddle informs the American reader that he has “entirely omitted” all notes by the translator that “are in opposition to the well-established elements of the science, and have no other support than the hypothesis of Mr. Ricardo and Mr. Malthus.”32

A statement by the Rev. John McVickar fairly summarizes the position of most American Christians who discussed the economic order in the first half of the nineteenth century:

The Rev. Francis Wayland, whose Elements of Political Economy quickly became and long remained the most widely-used textbook in the United States after its publication in 1837, taught that God had established laws governing the accumulation of wealth. Chief among these was the truth that those who honestly strive to promote their own welfare promote thereby the welfare of the whole society. It is our task “so to construct the arrangements of society, as to give free scope to the laws of Divine Providence.” And that means allowing each person to keep all that he has justly acquired by his industry, while compelling the slothful to suffer the consequences of their idleness.34

Henry F. May uses the apt term “clerical laissez-faire” to characterize the most influential school of political economy in the United States at least up to the Civil War.35 Christian social thinkers who followed the optimistic Smithian line agreed at least in this respect with those who subscribed to the more dismal Malthus-Ricardo position: the laws of political economy were the laws of God, and they basically ordained non-interference, by government or charitably-inclined private parties, with the consequences that flow from the individual choices of the industrious or the indolent, the frugal or the improvident.

8

Why did so many Christian thinkers in the first half of the nineteenth century embrace the newly-discovered economic order with such unqualified enthusiasm? Why didn’t a social system so dependent for its functioning on the pursuit of gain pose a greater ethical problem of thinkers inheriting a long tradition of firm hostility to commerce and turpe lucrum? Part of the answer, I believe, is that they saw in the economic order described by the new science of political economy the possibility for a radical transformation of the human condition. The newly-discovered economic order offered an opportunity for people—everyone, in principle, and perhaps most people in practice—to better their condition in life.

The three quotations above are from Rerum Novarum, Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical on the condition of the working classes.36 They don’t prove the thesis; indeed, they are hardly even evidence for it, coming as they do almost a century after the discovery of the economic order. Nonetheless, they do suggest how powerfully the ideal of bettering one’s condition may have influenced social theology in the nineteenth century. The encyclical does not argue the point; it takes for granted that wage-earners are eager to improve their condition and that this desire is not only compatible with Christian virtue but almost a sign of its presence. We are a long way from the medieval world in which the desire to better one’s condition is cupiditas.

9

How shall we account for the growing dissatisfaction with the workings of the economic order that Christian spokesmen begin to express after the middle of the nineteenth century? E. R. Norman has become somewhat notorious for claiming that churchmen’s pronouncements on social issues do little more than express the shifting opinions of the intellectual classes to which they belong (or aspire). Norman’s summary of this thesis, in the Introduction to his Church and Society in England 1770-1970, is worth extended quotation:

If Norman is correct, an explanation of changing Christian views on the economic order over the past two centuries would have to provide an explanation of the changing intellectual and political culture of the Western world. That task would carry me far beyond my assignment or competence and your patience. But is Norman’s thesis correct? I am convinced it is. His detailed account of changing Anglican views on society between 1770 and 1970 offers overwhelming evidence to support his thesis with respect to England. As one who has read extensively in the American literature, I am prepared to defend the thesis with respect to mainline Christianity in this country.38

I can understand why the Norman thesis would offend many churchmen. But could matters possibly be other than as Norman describes under what Franklin Gamwell has called the conditions of “modernity”?39 If “appropriate standards of belief and action are those which the reasoning human individual sets for himself or herself” (Gamwell), how could we expect Christian thinking about the economic order to reflect anything except “the surrounding intellectual and political culture” (Norman)?

Gamwell thinks that two recent discussions of Christian ethics and the economic order disagree with his claim “that religious ethics is not credible in the modern world unless its judgments and proposals are defended by humanistic appeal.” Philip Wogaman and Robert Benne, as Gamwell reads them, “finally justify their normative judgments by exclusive and, therefore, heteronomous appeal to characteristic convictions of the Christian faith.”40 I think he misreads them. Wogaman, who claims that ideological thinking is unavoidable in this area, also says:

Benne is even more explicit. He appeals to the general evidence of the social sciences for his factual claims and to the political philosophies of Reinhold Niebuhr and John Rawls for “criteria of judgment.”42

One does not, of course, make a “heteronomous appeal to characteristic convictions of the Christian faith” by citing Reinhold Niebuhr in support of an argument, especially since Niebuhr himself often wondered whether there was anything uniquely “Christian” about his social analysis.43 One can also quote the Bible to support an argument without implying anything more thereby than that the text quoted makes a valid point.

To summarize then: Christian thinkers began to offer theological criticisms of the economic order in the second half of the nineteenth century because that order was coming under attack “from the surrounding intellectual and political culture.” The process gathers momentum in England around the middle of the century. In the United States it is delayed for about a generation, partly because the slavery issue had to be resolved first, partly because the problems that the economic order generated were less obvious and probably less severe in this country. I know far less about what was happening in other countries. The 1878 encyclical of Leo XIII attacking socialism, Quod Apostolici Muneris, and the highly conservative Rerum Novarum of 1891 certainly suggest that the Roman Catholic Church was not in the vanguard of those offering criticisms of the economic order in the last part of the nineteenth century.

10

Although the economic order was discovered in the eighteenth century and clearly recognized at the beginning of the nineteenth century, it did not immediately “become a subject of moral deliberation, debate and decision.” We do not engage in moral discussion of forces that we consider inexorable; and inexorableness was, I think, a dominant perceived characteristic of the economic order in the early nineteenth century. This claim must be distinguished from the quite different and erroneous notion that laissez-faire reigned unchallenged in the first half of the nineteenth century.

It is easy to exaggerate the extent to which laissez-faire thinking on the part of Christians derived from the laissez-faire teachings of nineteenth-century political economy. When churchmen later in the century wanted to proclaim a new departure in Christian social thought, they found it convenient to blame the dogmas of the economists for earlier positions they were now repudiating. “We were misled” is an acceptable excuse. Moreover, it removes the necessity of explaining why the pronouncements of Christian social theorists should be correct now when they were wrong earlier. The flaw in this excuse is that secular political economists in the nineteenth century were generally not advocates of laissez-faire.44

In any event, laissez-faire is a policy, and as such it can be “a subject of moral deliberation, debate and decision.” The sense of inexorableness to which I am referring was something else, and was expressed in a variety of ways. I shall illustrate from the writings of Smith, Malthus, and Marx.

Adam Smith expresses it in a passage that is actually critical of the excessive claims made by François Quesnay and the Physiocrats on behalf of laissez-faire policy:

Malthus, who wasn’t even an advocate of free trade in grain, much less of laissez-faire, expresses what I am calling inexorableness in the first chapter of his Essay on Population:

The strongest expressions of the inexorableness of the economic order are found in the writings of Marx, whom no one ever accused of partiality toward laissez-faire (or Malthus!). Here is what he wrote in the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy:

The same idea is forcefully presented in part I of The German Ideology, the long essay that Marx and Engels wrote together in 1845-46 in an effort to clarify to themselves their position over against Hegelian philosophy.48 An even clearer and certainly more concise statement is in a letter written by Marx at the end of 1846 to P. V. Annenkov, who had asked his opinion of Proudhon’s new book The Philosophy of Poverty:

Marx and Engels were notoriously contemptuous of those who wanted to make the economic order the “subject of moral deliberation, debate and decision.” In The Communist Manifesto they summarize their attitude toward such utopian socialists:

11

In the end, however, the economic order must be recognized as an invention, an imposition on our way of conceiving the social world. It wasn’t a mere fabrication. Something was discovered. But the nineteenth century misunderstood it, and Christian social thought has suffered greatly from that misconception.

There is finally no economic order that can be distinguished from other forms or orders of social interaction. There are no economic goals, economic motives, or economic institutions. Economic action is simply purposive action, action that tries to use means to achieve ends.51

Activity aimed at securing food, clothing and lodging was once the basic, essential, and therefore in a sense controlling activity in every human society.52 Exactly when that ceased to be true in Western industrialized societies, or when it became more false than true, can be debated. But it certainly happened a long time ago in the United States. When Americans “make a living” today, they are not aiming to produce the material conditions of their existence. The materialist interpretation of history once functioned as a powerful critique of wishful thinking disguised as social philosophy. Today it is largely irrelevant. The new social needs which have been created in the course of history, through the operation of the powerful social forces that Marx and Engels emphasized, have removed us so far from anything that might be defensibly designated “material” that the materialist interpretation of history is today an obstacle to realistic social analysis. To identify “economic” with “material” only compounds confusion.

Since economic action is purposive action, it is necessarily “individualistic”; only individuals can have action-directing purposes. Economic action necessarily aims at “gain”; that’s an essential part of the meaning of purposive. So economic action aims at individual gain. But this only explicates the meaning of purposive action. It says nothing about what counts as gain for any particular individual. Fellowship, conviviality, discussion, group process—all these could be the gain at which particular purposive actions might be aiming. Who of us knows exactly what we’re aiming at, or what our ultimate goals might be? Ends become means to further ends in the process of living, and the process itself is an important “end,” even when we aren’t explicitly conscious of that fact. We want to win; but we also want a good game.53

Is money perhaps the thread which we’re seeking? Does money have some essential link to the economic order that might enable us to differentiate that order, or to separate economic actions from non-economic actions? Money is a medium of exchange. It is a means to more effective social exchange. It facilitates cooperation. Through the use of money, we can more effectively use the resources under our control to secure from others the cooperation that we need to achieve our purposes. The social institution of money encourages “rationality,” the ends-means approach to life, by facilitating the accomplishment of purposes. It extends the planning horizon, by establishing more predictable connections between immediate actions and distant goals. The increasing monetization of social interactions—“everything has a price”—extends the realm of social, as distinct from merely physical or biological, order.54

We have been learning, since the eighteenth century, that order will emerge from the interplay of human purposes without the existence of any overarching design. We have been slowly discovering the precise conditions which make such orders more or less satisfactory.55 We have begun to realize that the vantage points from which we once thought we could control the chaos or cruelty of “unplanned” social orders are themselves subject to the control of social orders that no one controls.56 Politics has no veto over economics, and economics does not control politics; people simply interact, on the basis of the costs and benefits that they anticipate.

This was first discovered in a sphere where it was most readily apparent: the social production of food, clothing, and lodging. It was most apparent there because this was, by necessity, the sphere of the most consistently “rational” action. Through this accident, the social production and distribution of the basic necessities of life came to be thought of as “the economic order”; the regularities or “laws” governing the production and distribution of these necessities were called “the laws of economics”; and the failings, moral or material, of such unplanned social orders were attributed exclusively to the misconceived economic order.57 It was supposed that there were other forms of rational, purposive association that could correct the errors and fill up the deficiencies of the “competitive,” “individualistic,” “selfish,” “materialistic,” “amoral” (if not “immoral”) economic order.

When Christian social theorists became disillusioned with the idea that the “laws of economics” were the decrees of Providence, they began to substitute the belief that the economic order was perfectly malleable. This is an attractive belief. I do not think, however, that there is anything peculiarly Christian or even religious about it. It isn’t even true. It does nonetheless seem to possess an enormous power to stir the soul of intellectuals and to stoke the fires of moral indignation.58 That is probably enough to guarantee it many more years of vigorous life.

CHAPTER 13

Clerical Laissez-Faire: A Case Study in Theological Ethics*

In a recent essay on the evolution of Roman Catholic social thought in the United States, James V. Schall laments his church’s failure to take seriously the productive achievements of the American economy. He writes:

A similar statement could not be made about Protestant Christianity in America, at least not by anyone familiar with its nineteenth century history. Protestant clergymen played a prominent part in the early teaching of economics in the United States, especially prior to the Civil War, and their doctrines generally lauded the productive as well as the moral virtues of the American economy. The Rev. John McVickar of Columbia University, a contender for the title of first academic economist in the United States,2 was expressing the general conviction of nineteenth century clerical economists when he attributed the rapid advance of the United States in wealth and civilization largely to her respect for the divinely ordained laws of morality and political economy. These laws called for individual responsibility, private property, and minimal government intervention in the economy.3 This position acquired almost axiomatic status in the second quarter of the nineteenth century among clerical economists, prompting the historian Henry F. May to speak of “a school of political economy which might well be labeled clerical laissez-faire.”4

What exactly did these theological economists teach? On what were their doctrines based? And what was the fate of these doctrines? Those are the questions to which this paper is addressed.

Francis Wayland, 1796-1865

The most influential member of the school of clerical laissez-faire was Francis Wayland, author of The Elements of Political Economy, first published in 1837. Michael J. L. O’Connor, in an exhaustive examination of the origins of economic instruction in the United States, says that Wayland’s Elements “achieved more fully than any other textbook what appear to have been the ideals of the clerical school.”5 It also achieved, in its original version and in the abridged version published for secondary school use, immediate and widespread adoption; it was by far the most popular political economy textbook prior to the Civil War. Even after its sales declined in the 1860s, its influence continued to be exerted through adaptations and imitations. Because of the authority and prestige that Wayland commanded as clergyman, educator, and moral philosopher as well as author and teacher in the field of political economy, I will use him as a paradigm case in exploring the origins, nature, and eventual fate of “clerical laissez-faire.”6

The basic facts of Wayland’s life may be quickly sketched. He was born in New York City in 1796 of devout Baptist parents, who had migrated from England in 1793. His father set himself up in business as a currier, became a deacon in his church, received a license as a lay preacher in 1805, and by 1807 had given up his business to become a full-time minister. Francis entered Union College in 1811 as a sophomore, graduated in 1813, and began the study of medicine. About the time he completed his medical studies, Wayland experienced a deep religious renewal and decided to study for the ministry. He entered Andover Seminary in 1816, but left after one year, because of severely straitened circumstances, to accept an appointment as tutor at Union College. In 1821 he was called to the First Baptist Church in Boston and ordained as a minister. In 1826 Wayland accepted an offer to return to Union College as a professor of moral philosophy. Before he had moved his family from Boston, however, he received news of his election as President of Brown University, a Baptist institution. Wayland took up his duties in Providence in 1827. He exerted enormous influence on Brown and on American higher education generally until his resignation in 1855. After a vigorous “retirement” devoted to preaching, teaching, writing, and active work on behalf of a variety of social causes, Wayland died in 1865.7

Wayland introduced the study of political economy and took on the duty of teaching it soon after assuming the presidency of Brown University in 1827, at the age of 31. In church-related colleges in the first half of the nineteenth century, it was generally the president’s prerogative to teach moral philosophy to the senior class, and political economy was considered a branch of moral philosophy. The only training in the subject required of a teacher or author was the sort of philosophical background that a well-educated clergyman would be assumed to possess.8

In the preface to his Elements of Political Economy, Wayland wrote:

Moreover:

Tariffs

Wayland nonetheless promised not to intermingle the principles of these two disciplines in his textbook, but rather to argue “economical questions on merely economical grounds.” He offered the issue of protective tariffs by way of illustration.

As we shall see, Wayland did not consistently fulfill this promise. It may be impossible for anyone to maintain a clear distinction between what is moral and what is wise when discussing the organization of economic life. The separation will be especially difficult to maintain if one believes, as Wayland did, that the science of political economy presents the laws to which God has subjected humanity in its pursuit of wealth.

It may be objected, of course, that Wayland was only making a conventional bow to current piety when he referred to the laws which the sciences discover as the laws of God. The Memoir published by his sons two years after his death, however, offers persuasive evidence to the contrary. Wayland’s religious faith was deeply and sincerely held, and he continually tested his academic labors for conformity to what he perceived as the will of God. The Memoir contains extensive excerpts from Wayland’s personal journal, and the following extract is quite representative:

Wayland always thought of himself as a theologian first and only secondarily as a moral philosopher or political economist.

The interesting view which Wayland held on the invariability of divine laws almost certainly affected his conclusions in the area of economics. He presents his position near the beginning of his textbook on moral philosophy:

We should therefore not expect to find in Wayland much sympathy for the idea that different eras, different nations, or different cultures will have their own distinct laws of political economy. Wayland’s position is at the opposite pole from the historical relativism imported into American economics from Germany in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.

Wayland’s Political Economy

Wayland apparently learned political economy largely by teaching it. He wrote the following, shortly before his death, in a reminiscence reviewing his experience as a teacher:

The textbook he used from 1828, when he began teaching the subject to Brown seniors, until 1837, when he published his own text, was J. B. Say’s Treatise on Political Economy, translated from the fourth French edition and published in the United States in 1821. Since Wayland rarely cites authorities or indicates a source and since the Memoir contains only a few paragraphs on the subject of political economy, we have no way of knowing how many other European economists influenced his thinking. We can be fairly certain, however, that he had read extensively in the work that had influenced Say: Adam Smith’s Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Smith is sometimes cited specifically. What is more conclusive, however, is Wayland’s use of Smithian classifications, premises, and analyses as well as what might be called a Smithian “tone” on particular topics.

Wayland’s discussion of what governments may do to promote the increase of knowledge, for example, brings immediately to mind the language used by Smith in his section “Of the Expense of the Institutions for the Education of Youth.”15 The causes Wayland lists for differences in wage rates are Smith’s famous five circumstances that explain differences in pecuniary returns.16 Wayland’s extended discussion of money and banks frequently teaches notions that could only have been derived from Adam Smith’s fatefully erroneous explanation of the ways in which metallic and paper money function in an economy.17 Wayland’s refutation of arguments for restrictions on imports reveals the clear influence of Smith’s treatment.18 Though Wayland, unlike Smith, preferred direct to indirect taxes, his analysis shows that he had considered Smith’s arguments.19

The authority of Adam Smith’s ideas must have been increased for Wayland by their embodiment in the “Scottish school” which exercised such powerful influence on American colleges in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.20 In his student days at Union College, Wayland studied The Elements of Criticism by Lord Kames (Henry Home) and Dugald Stewart’s Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind.21 When he began teaching at Brown, fifteen years later, he used as texts both these books and also The Philosophy of Rhetoric by George Campbell, a member of the famous Aberdeen Philosophical Society.22 It may also be noted that Wayland greatly admired the Scotch theologian-economist Thomas Chalmers.23 Chalmers was one of the “heretics” who rejected the “orthodox” position of British classical political economy by asserting the possibility of “general gluts.” Wayland’s treatment of this topic, under the heading “Stagnation of Business,” seems unclear and unsure of itself, a reflection, perhaps, of Chalmers’ influence.

Ambivalence was not generally characteristic of Wayland’s teachings on the subject of political economy. God had ordained laws governing morality and laws governing the accumulation of wealth, and Wayland did not expect to find contradictions between them. “In political economy as in morals.” Wayland insists,

Wayland often pauses to call his reader’s attention to the divinely intended harmony in the relations he is describing.

Trade, especially international trade, is a fulfillment of God’s plan for amity:

Toward the end of the book, after discussing some common causes of inefficiency, Wayland comments:

Wayland is so impressed with the mutually beneficial aspects of self-interested behavior that he has trouble recognizing or acknowledging that interests can also conflict. Don’t poor harvests in one region cause higher prices and greater prosperity for farmers in other regions? Don’t sellers sometimes benefit from the greater scarcity that is caused by the misfortunes of others? Wayland is reluctant to admit this. He appeals to the true but irrelevant argument that sellers benefit from the prosperity of their customers, and applies the label “short sighted, as well as morally thoughtless” to merchants who expect “to grow rich by short crops, civil dissensions, calamity, or war.”30

Monopoly, from this perspective, is self-defeating. If the agricultural interests of Great Britain had not tried to maintain high prices through the Corn Laws, but had allowed imported grain to lower the price of food, population growth and industrial growth over the most recent fifty years would have more than compensated for the landed proprietors’ loss. Wayland concludes a somewhat vague analysis with the observation:

Wayland on the Relation Between Economics and Morality

The essential unity that Wayland saw between the laws of political economy and the laws of morality emerges most clearly in his chapter “Of the Laws Which Govern the Application of Labour to Capital.”

Section 1 of the chapter explains how the laws on this subject are founded on “the conditions of our being,” conditions that Wayland summarizes in seven paragraphs.32

• 1. God has created man with faculties adapted to physical and intellectual labour.
• 2. God has made labour necessary to the attainment of the means of happiness.
• 3. We are so constituted that physical and intellectual labour are essential to health. Idiocy or madness is the consequence of intellectual sloth; feebleness, enervation, pain, and disease appear in the absence of physical labour.
• 4. Labour is pleasant, or at least less painful than idleness. People crave challenges on which to exercise their faculties.
• 5. God has attached special penalties to idleness, such as ignorance, poverty, cold, hunger, and nakedness.
• 6. God has assigned rich and abundant rewards to industry.

Wayland’s seventh paragraph draws the conclusion: We are required “so to construct the arrangements of society, as to give free scope to the laws of Divine Providence.” We must “give to these rewards and penalties their free and their intended operation.” We are bound, at the very least, to try these means first if we want to stimulate economic growth, and to avoid other policies “until these have been tried and found ineffectual.” Everyone should be “permitted to enjoy, in the most unlimited manner, the advantages of labour,” and all should suffer the consequences of their own idleness.

In Section II Wayland explains what is required if each is to enjoy, in the greatest degree, the advantages of his labor.

The first condition can be achieved by abolishing common property and assigning all property to specific individuals. These individually-held property rights must then be enforced against potential violation either by individuals or by society. Individual violations are held in check through the inculcation of moral and religious principles—the most certain and necessary method of preventing violations—and through equitable laws firmly and faithfully applied. Violations by society, through arbitrary confiscation, unjust legislation, or oppressive taxation, are more destructive than individual violations, because they inflict wrong through an agency that was created for the sole purpose of preventing wrong and thereby they dissolve the society itself. The best preventative is an elevated intellectual and moral character among the people and a constitution which guarantees immunity from public as well as from private oppression.34

The second condition is achieved when individuals are allowed to use their labor and their capital as they please, without legislative interference, so long as they respect the rights of others.35

In Section III Wayland shows what must be done to make sure that everyone “suffers the inconveniences of idleness.” If the dishonest acquisition of property is prevented “by the strict and impartial administration of just and equitable laws,” then, in a regime of private property, “the indolent” will be left “to the consequences which God has attached to their conduct. . . . they must obey the law of their nature, and labour, or else suffer the penalty and starve.”36

What about charity? Where people are poor because “God has seen fit to take away the power to labour,” God has also commanded generosity on the part of those who have wealth to bestow. But no one is entitled to support merely by virtue of being poor, and institutions that provide relief to the indigent without any labor requirement are “injurious.”

Dependency

Poor laws violate “the fundamental law of government, that he who is able to labour, shall enjoy only that for which he has laboured.” By removing the fear of want, they reduce the stimulus to labor and the amount of product created. By teaching people to depend on others, they create a perpetual pauper class. This process, once initiated, grows progressively. Eventually it destroys the right of property itself by teaching the indolent that they have a right to be supported and the rich that they have an obligation to provide that support. Poor laws thereby foster class conflict.37

In cases where a person has been reduced, by indolence or prodigality, to such poverty that he is in danger of starving, he should be “furnished with work, and be remunerated with the proceeds.”38

Section IV explains how the accumulation of capital increases the demand for labor and the rate of wages. Section V argues for “universal dissemination of the means of education and the principles of religion” on the grounds that intellectual cultivation and high moral character among a people promote prosperity.39

In Section VI Wayland reluctantly takes up “bounties and protecting duties, as a means of increasing production.” His reluctance is due to his inability to discover how they can produce this effect; but he knows that popular opinion holds otherwise and so he cannot pass the subject by in silence. After presenting a careful and quite classical criticism of such measures on economic grounds,40 Wayland raises the moral question: By what right does society interfere in this way with the property of the individual, and without offering compensation? He declines to answer, however, on the grounds that this question belongs not to political economy but to moral philosophy; but he clearly thinks that no satisfactory answer can be given to his essentially rhetorical question.41

After stating and criticizing, again in an orthodox classical manner, the arguments in favor of legislative stimulus to industry, Wayland raises the Smithian question of whether it is not unjust for a government to abolish a restrictive system upon which people have come to depend. “To this objection,” he says,

The section and chapter conclude with a brief account of what governments can do to promote industry and increase production. They can enact and enforce equitable laws; promote education and learning; manage strictly experimental farms and manufactures; and above all:

Wayland was not, strictly speaking, an advocate of laissez-faire. As we have just seen, he supported government-sponsored industrial research, and he believed that what economists today call “externalities” justified government efforts to increase and disseminate knowledge.44 He argues that religious institutions also confer benefits upon the state and upon people who have not contributed to their support; but he refuses to draw the conclusion that this entitles religious institutions to a share of the funds from public taxation.45 He doubts that public funds ought to be used to finance most internal improvements, such as roads, canals, or railroads; these are better left to individual enterprise, which will undertake them when they are profitable and leave them alone when they are not. There will be exceptions, however, such as works of exceptional magnitude or where the public importance of the work is too great for it to be entrusted to private corporations. Works for the improvement of external commerce, such as the improvement of coasts and harbors, are assigned entirely to government.46

The relief of the sick, destitute, and helpless is a religious duty, in Wayland’s view, and for that reason ought to be left to voluntary efforts. He recognized, however, that purely voluntary relief would occasionally be inadequate and might in addition strain the resources of the most charitable. So he was willing to allow some provision out of tax revenues “for the relief of those whom old age, or infancy, or sickness, has deprived of the power of providing the means necessary for sustenance.” For the sake of these people themselves, as well as for the sake of the economy, relief should be provided in return for labor in the case of all those capable of work.47

Wayland’s Theological Economics

American economists of this period, unlike their European counterparts, were not much concerned with the Malthusian problem.48 Wayland was no exception. Near the beginning of his chapter on wages, he takes up the possibility that human beings will reproduce too rapidly for the real wage-rate to be maintained above the subsistence level. This does occur, he asserts, and the consequences are “painful to contemplate.” But after quoting Adam Smith on the high infant mortality rates in the Scottish Highlands and in military barracks, Wayland abruptly changes direction.

God could scarcely have intended so many to die in infancy from hardship and want. It therefore follows that the normal wage level for industrious, virtuous, and frugal workers will be one “which allows of the rearing of such a number of children as naturally falls to the lot of the human race.” Improvidence, indolence, intemperance, and profligacy can interfere with this happy outcome; but in such cases “the correction must come, not from a change in wages, but from a change in habits.”49

It is at first difficult to reconcile this position with Wayland’s explanation of how the supply of labor adjusts itself to the demand, or his account of the relationship between the growth of capital and the growth of population. His conclusion to the latter discussion is especially puzzling:

The clear implication is that, unless God intended many to perish in infancy, capital can always and everywhere be accumulated at least as fast as the population chooses to expand.

Wayland has an escape from this strong implication, however. God is not responsible for evil that is the consequence of immoral behavior, and the rate of capital accumulation is crucially dependent upon moral considerations. Frugality increases it, prodigality diminishes it, laws of entail diminish it, as do all restrictive laws that “fetter and dispirit industry.” Above all, however, war diminishes the rate of capital accumulation:

In a properly ordered society of moral persons, capital accumulation will be adequate for the number of people and “we shall hear no more of the evils of excess of population.”52

This analysis still leaves room for paupers to blame their plight upon others, albeit immoral others. Wayland closes that door with the claim that almost all crime and pauperism in the community is caused by intemperance, and the further claim that America, which has few beggars, would have none at all if intemperance and vice were eliminated.

Wage Determination

The laws that regulate wage-rates are finally beyond the power of individual capitalists or laborers to affect. The competition that will naturally exist where there are no restrictions on the mobility of capital or labor will “bring wages to their proper level; that is, to all that can be reasonably paid for them.” Combinations among capitalists or workers designed to raise or lower wage-rates are “useless,” Wayland asserts, because combinations cannot change the laws by which remuneration is governed. Without pausing to defend this non sequitur, he hastens to add that combinations are also expensive, because they expose capital and labor to long periods of idleness. And combinations are unjust, because they deprive the capitalist of the right to employ labor and workers of the right to be employed on terms to which the parties have freely agreed. Is this another case where moral philosophy has crowded out economic analysis? The injustice of a particular combination does not guarantee that the combination will be unable to increase the wealth of those who participate in it.

Wayland has the same sort of difficulty when he tries to explain why political economy finds laws regulating interest rates “injurious to the prosperity of a country.” His first reason is that such laws violate the right of property. One could make this an “economical” rather than an ethical argument by incorporating into it Wayland’s case for the dependence of prosperity on respect for property rights. If this is done, however, the distinction between questions of right and questions of expediency collapses.

The point here is not that Wayland ought to have maintained a clear distinction between economic and ethical arguments, but rather that he claimed to be doing so when in fact he was not. The nature of his argument is consequently obscured at important points, and the critical reader is left uncertain about the kind of evidence and arguments that would be required to buttress or to refute his conclusions.

What evidence and arguments are we supposed to consider in evaluating Wayland’s claim that labor expended in the creation of a value gives one an exclusive right to the possession of that value? Or his claim that different laborers are “entitled” to dissimilar wages? Or that the liability of all property to depreciate in value must be taken into account when estimating the job-destroying effects of machinery? That “the act of creating a value appropriates it to a possessor” and “this right of property is exclusive”? That a college graduate is “fairly entitled” to a wage that will compensate him not only for the cost of his education but also for the forgone interest on the amount invested? That the capitalist comes into the market “on equal terms” with the laborer because “each needs the product of the other”? Or that the capitalist “may justly demand” a greater interest the greater his risk?53

Incorrect Generalization

At one point in The Elements of Political Economy Wayland finds it “worthy of remark” that human ingenuity has done more to increase “the productiveness of labour” in manufacturing and in transportation than in agriculture. A generalization of that kind presupposes the solution of some rather formidable problems of definition as well as measurement. What is the common denominator in terms of which one can meaningfully compare rates of productivity growth when it is the usefulness of diverse products that matters? But Wayland is sure that his generalization is correct, sure enough to add these comments:

Francis Wayland apparently misread “the will of the Creator”: in the United States today fewer than 3 percent of the workforce are employed in agriculture. The error in this case may be unimportant, but the problem to which it points is not. Those who look for the will of God behind concrete social arrangements thereby incur an added risk of failing to perceive the social arrangements correctly. Those who concern themselves too quickly with the moral implications of social interactions may become less able to see how those interactions are evolving. And an empirical proposition that supports an important theological or moral conviction can become extraordinarily resistant to anything as inconsequential as empirical evidence and argument.

The Reaction Against “Clerical Laissez-Faire”

Twenty years after Wayland’s death and half a century after publication of his textbook on political economy, many influential thinkers and writers still maintained that economics and religion were and ought to be intimately linked. When the American Economic Association was formed in 1885, Protestant clergymen were prominent among its founders. The dominant figure in the organization of the Association was Richard T. Ely, a young economist who insisted upon the necessity of basing economics upon ethics and who wanted to make applied Christianity the foundation of economic reform. Religious impulses played such an open and major role in the Association’s early history that even sympathetic participants believed it might be interfering with the scholarly impartiality essential to a scientific body.55

The banner under which they organized, however, was decidedly not one behind which Wayland could have marched. The prospectus which Ely sent out in his call for the organization of the American Economic Association included a four-part platform. The first paragraph read as follows:

The laws of God, which ordained a minimal role for government in economic life according to Wayland, required a vast extension of state activity according to Ely. How did Ely and his associates justify this remarkable about-face? How did they criticize the theological-ethical arguments that had been advanced by Wayland and his school and which were still being taught in the 1880s by prominent academics? The answer is that they did not attempt to do so.

Conflict

The most prominent exponent of “clerical laissez-faire” in the 1880s was probably the Reverend Arthur Latham Perry, professor of history and political economy at Williams College, author of several widely used textbooks in economics, and trusted adviser of government officials.57 Moreover, Perry attacked Ely by name in his Principles of Political Economy for urging that government take a hand in the determination of wages. “The fine old Bentham principle of laissez-faire,” Perry wrote,

Ely was not one to steer clear of conflict. He often responded to his critics, and he took the lead in the 1880s in attacking the “old school” of political economy. Moreover, ethical and religious premises consistently played a large part in the arguments he advanced on behalf of a reconstruction of economics. Nonetheless, he never attempted a systematic critique of the theological-ethical claims of his opponents or tried to show in what specific ways his own theological-ethical premises were more adequate. His fundamental contentions were that the “old school” relied upon an obsolete deductive method, that it employed much too narrow a conception of economic science, and that it refused to take account of the results of historical research.59

Charles Howard Hopkins, in his history of the Social Gospel in American Protestantism, writes:

But condemnations of unrestricted competition or inhuman treatment of laborers do not constitute a criticism of classical economic theory. Hopkins refers to an 1866 article by George N. Boardman as “one of the most searching utterances of its kind in this period.”61 It may be unfair to take this compliment too seriously, especially since Henry F. May finds Boardman’s essay “generally in support of contemporary economic theories.” But the fact remains that Boardman’s critique is far from searching; that it does not show a wide acquaintance with the literature it purports to discuss; and that the religious critics of “unrestricted capitalism” in the last part of the nineteenth century did not really address the arguments that had been advanced by Wayland or his successors. Neither the economists like Ely nor the clergymen—Washington Gladden, W. D. P. Bliss, and George Herron are more representative figures than Boardman—take the claims of the “clerical laissez-faire” school seriously and respond to them.62

Refutation?

These views, of course, have been widely repudiated, both in the 1880s and in our own time. But repudiation is not the same as refutation. Contemporary critics have generally assumed that to refute such views as Wayland’s it was enough to describe them. Thus Henry F. May, after quoting Wayland on the divine imperative to labor, says: “From this simple proposition Wayland deduced the whole platform of the New England mercantile interest.” A page later he refers to Wayland as one of the “simple dogmatists of the thirties and forties [who] set the tone of American political economy for many years to come.” May also speaks of “the pat theories of Francis Wayland,” his “all-sufficient optimistic formulae,” and his “simple, dogmatic method.”63 Simple dogmatisms, pat theories, and all-sufficient optimistic formulae don’t have to be taken seriously, especially if they are in reality a defense of special interests rather than an honest effort toward understanding.

One problem with this approach is that it works equally well when applied to the simple dogmatisms, pat theories, and all-sufficient optimistic formulae of Richard Ely and the clergymen who responded so enthusiastically to his call for organization of the American Economic Association. Consider the conclusions of John Rutherford Everett, at the end of his sympathetic study of the relation between religion and economics in the work of Ely and two of his prominent collaborators in the founding of the American Economic Association, John Bates Clark and Simon Patten:

Moreover, many of the “empirical” conclusions wielded with such assurance by Ely and his colleagues in the 1880s now seem quite as a priori as the deductive theories they condemned. And their confident assumption that they were the “new” and “scientific” school of political economy destined to control the future looks almost pathetic in hindsight; most of them seem to have been completely unaware in the 1880s of the “marginal revolution” taking place at that very time, through which “abstract-deductive” economics would acquire a renewed and more powerful hold on the discipline.

“Clerical School”

It would be unfair to fault May too severely, since his understanding of “clerical laissez-faire” and Francis Wayland was derived from the scholarly work of Joseph Dorfman and Michael J. L. O’Connor. Dorfman’s The Economic Mind in American Civilization is the indispensable source for anyone interested in American economics in the nineteenth century. O’Connor’s investigation of The Origins of Academic Economics, May’s principal source, is actually an examination of the origins and rise to prominence in the northeastern United States of what O’Connor called the “clerical school.” As such it was especially useful to someone like May who was interested in Protestant analyses of economic issues but was not himself an historian of economics. The biases of both authors ought to be kept in mind, however, by anyone using their work.

Dorfman tends to present economic theory as a reflection of the theorists’ social circumstances, with the result that arguments are sometimes not so much explained as explained away. This tendency is especially marked in the case of early economists with whose policy positions Dorfman is not in sympathy. That would emphatically include Francis Wayland, whose treatment by Dorfman comes close to cynicism.

In the ten pages he devotes to “The Reverend Francis Wayland: Ideal Textbook Writer,” Dorfman tells us that Wayland studied at Union College under “the famous Reverend Eliphalet Nott, who was highly successful in acquiring a fortune for himself, in obtaining funds from the New York legislature for the college, and in teaching students the ways of God and the world.” He states that Wayland received at Union “a thorough indoctrination in the Common Sense philosophy.” He sketches Wayland’s changes in vocational plans in a way that suggests flightiness or instability. He tells us that Wayland “took an active interest in all the movements that a respectable person should” after becoming President of Brown. His account of Wayland’s position on slavery is highly misleading and seems designed to discredit Wayland rather than to present his actual views. The same might be said of his sketch of Wayland’s position on the wage-fund doctrine. Dorfman seems almost to postulate bad faith and apologetic intent, as in the claim: “As the cry for tariffs and government relief became more insistent with every depression, Wayland became increasingly adept at mollifying the one and denying the other.”65 The reader would never suspect, for example, that Francis Wayland taught pacifism in his textbook on moral philosophy, raising and rejecting each of the standard arguments by which traditional ethical thought had attempted to exempt national governments from the prohibition against returning evil with evil.66 Dorfman’s ad hominem arguments are not only irrelevant but also often unfair and occasionally even false, or at least as false as innuendo can ever be.

Omission

May’s principal source, however, was O’Connor’s meticulously researched Origins of Academic Economics in the United States. Because Wayland’s Elements of Political Economy was the most important text to emerge from the “clerical school,” O’Connor presents its contents in some detail. The account is careful and balanced; but there is no systematic criticism of Wayland’s economics. The reason for this omission emerges in the concluding chapter, where O’Connor lays out the lessons he would have the reader draw from his study.

The clerical school of political economy, according to O’Connor, was the social instrument of the northeastern merchant-capitalist elite, valuable to them because it taught an ideology that was useful in countering populist political pressures. These religious economists, in supporting the theory of automatic natural-law control, were in reality endorsing the social power of the merchant-capitalist groups and making it easier for that class to enjoy its privileges with a clear conscience. The clerical economists were rewarded with financial aid for the institutions they headed. Their influence lasted well into the twentieth century because cultural lag is so prominent among academics, and because they are willing to use textbooks for sixty or seventy years. The time has now come, however, to purge this obsolete but lingering ideology from economics courses and textbooks and to create a new economics that will “reflect the current social forces of the country” and enable these social forces “to play as directly as possible upon the introductory courses.”67

In short, there is little point in criticizing Wayland or other representatives of clerical laissez-faire because their economics merely reflected their objective social position. The task now is not to construct an economics that will more adequately explain social reality, but to construct a system of economic education that will “command the faith of the people.” O’Connor concludes:

If what purports to be “pure” economic theory can so easily be dismissed by critics as ideology, what fate awaits an economics that is explicitly theological? O’Connor may be extreme in his willingness to reduce social theory to class-based ideology; but he is probably representative in his reluctance to take seriously any theological-ethical justification or defense of a social system of which he disapproves.

Conclusion

This paper began with James Schall’s comment on the church’s failure to relate Christian ideas to the productive achievements of capitalism. After examining one major effort to do exactly this, we find ourselves wondering at the end what worthwhile purpose it serves. Does theological economics do anything more than polarize discussion? Those who already approve a particular economic system are generally pleased to read arguments showing that the system is also superior by theological and ethical criteria. Those who disapprove of the system are much less likely even to read a theological-ethical defense of it, and the likelihood is still less that they will read it fairly and sympathetically.

Theological economics or economic theology seems to possess a powerful capacity for turning conjectures into convictions and for making the rejection of favored hypotheses seem like moral cowardice. Significant issues that could be illuminated or even resolved by careful empirical inquiry are instead “settled” on the basis of what fits most comfortably into the system. That healthy suspicion of one’s own argument which is always difficult to keep alive when one is working toward a thesis seems almost impossible to maintain in theological economics. Even more serious is the tendency of those who practice theological economics to assess the cogency of their opponents’ arguments by attacking imputed (and, of course, assumed) motives. It is so tempting and so easy, when we imagine ourselves to be standing on the high ground of theology or morality, to slander our opponents by accusing them of slander—or other hidden and malicious intent.

The fate of George Gilder’s Wealth and Poverty strikes me as sadly instructive. Here is a popularly-written but nonetheless serious and well-documented attempt to examine some of the relationships between economic behavior and religious beliefs. The book deserves the careful attention of any American who is both concerned for the health of the United States economy and convinced that an adequate economic system must satisfy important ethical criteria. The point is not that Gilder is correct: it is rather that he has raised most of the important questions in a careful and responsible way, citing his evidence and spelling out his reasoning. The sadly instructive fact is that his argument for the moral merits of capitalism has not been taken seriously by the moral critics of capitalism within the churches. The book has hardly been reviewed in the religious press. Where it is mentioned, it is usually caricatured, with some such phrase as “a bible for those who have recently come to make absolute claims for private enterprise.”69

There is little to be learned from those who make absolute claims about economic systems, and even less to be learned from those who imagine that a caricature constitutes a rebuttal.

[* ] Unpublished typescript of a paper presented to a conference titled “Christianity and the Economic Order,” at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago, 9-11 April 1984. Reprinted by permission of Mrs. Juliana Heyne.

[1. ] Franklin I. Gamwell, “Freedom and the Economic Order: A Foreword to Religious Evaluation,” p. 1.

[2. ] Polanyi discusses this issue at length in The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (c. 1944) and in several of the essays in Primitive, Archaic and Modern Economies: Essays of Karl Polanyi (c. 1968), edited by George Dalton. The quotation is from “Aristotle Discovers the Economy,” reprinted in Primitive, Archaic and Modern Economies (Doubleday Anchor), p. 85.

[3. ] Polanyi, “Our Obsolete Market Mentality,” Primitive, Archaic and Modern Economies, p. 59. See also The Great Transformation (Beacon Paperback, 1957), pp. 57, 68-76.

[4. ] “Only since the market was permitted to grind the human fabric into the featureless uniformity of selenic erosion has man’s institutional creativeness been in abeyance.” “[L]aissez-faire philosophy, with its corollary of a marketing society, . . . is responsible for the splitting up of man’s vital unity.” “[I]n a truly democratic society, the problem of industry would resolve itself through the planned intervention of the producers and consumers themselves. Such conscious and responsible action is, indeed, one of the embodiments of freedom in a complex society.” The quotations are from “Our Obsolete Market Mentality,” pp. 71, 73, and 76-77 respectively.

[5. ] Sir James Steuart, An Inquiry into the Principles of Political Oeconomy, edited and with an introduction by Andrew S. Skinner (1966), p. 2.

[6. ] The Encyclopédie article was translated and printed with The Social Contract and other essays by Rousseau in the Everyman’s Library series (1935). See p. 249.

[7. ] Steuart, op. cit., p. 17.

[8. ] Smith defined political economy as “a branch of the science of a statesman or legislator” in his introduction to book IV of The Wealth of Nations. All his other uses of the term are consistent with this definition. As Jacob Viner has remarked, given Smith’s “dim view of the benefits to be derived from national economic policy, political economy must for him have been nearly synonymous with ‘economic poison.’ ” From Viner’s article on Smith in The International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, (1968-79), vol. 14, p. 328.

[9. ] Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, book IV, chapter IX. The quotation is on p. 687 of the 1976 Glasgow edition, p. 651 of the 1937 Modern Library edition. The editions will henceforth be referred to as (GE) and (MLE).

[10. ] The detached, purely descriptive tone is particularly striking in Cantillon’s Essay.

[11. ]Primitive, Archaic and Modern Economies, pp. 127-29.

[12. ] F. A. Hayek, “Dr. Bernard Mandeville,” a lecture reprinted in New Studies in Philosophy, Politics, Economics and the History of Ideas (1978).

[13. ] Some key passages in The Wealth of Nations: book I, chapter II, pp. 26-27 (GE), p. 14 (MLE); book II, chapter III, pp. 341-49 (GE), pp. 324-32 (MLE); book IV, chapter II, pp. 454-56 (GE), pp. 421-23 (MLE).

[14. ] Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, part VII, section II, chapter IV, pp. 308-9 in the Glasgow edition (1976).

[15. ] This is the theme of book II, chapter III in The Wealth of Nations.

[16. ]The Theory of Moral Sentiments, part I, section III, chapter II, p. 50. For an elaboration of Smith’s thought on this issue, see all of chapter II and chapter III in section III of part I and also chapter I of part IV.

[17. ]Ibid., p. 309.

[18. ] It should not be maintained even by someone who has read only The Wealth of Nations. It is maintained, unfortunately, in Max Lerner’s introduction to the Modern Library edition.

[19. ] Ernest Marshall Howse, Saints in Politics (1952), p. 128.

[20. ]Op. cit., chapter V, p. 100 in the Sraffa edition. See also p. 96 and the quotation from Robert Torrens in the footnote.

[21. ] It was turned rather quickly into the innocuous proposition that population is limited by the supply of foodstuffs.

[22. ] A. M. C. Waterman, op. cit., Journal of Ecclesiastical History (April 1983), p. 238.

[23. ] In addition to the essay cited above, see Waterman, “Malthus as a Theologian: The First Essay and the Relation between Political Economy and Christian Theology,” in Malthus Past and Present (1983), and J. M. Pullen, “Malthus’ Theological Ideas and Their Influence on His Principle of Population,” History of Political Economy (Spring 1981), pp. 39-54.

[24. ] For the effects all this had in delaying the success of Wilberforce and his friends in securing abolition of the slave trade, see Howse, Saints in Politics, pp. 28-64, and especially pp. 42-45.

[25. ] My account depends heavily on Howse, op. cit., especially pp. 116-37.

[26. ] Charles E. Raven, in presenting the historical background to the Christian Socialist movement, writes as follows: “Very characteristic is their great hero William Wilberforce, whose private life was a shining example of consistent and earnest goodness, who had a real belief in freedom and spent years in the struggle for the abolition of slavery, and who never realised that, while he was bringing liberty to negroes in the plantations, the white slaves of industry in mine and factory were being made the victims of a tyranny a thousandfold more cruel.” Raven, Christian Socialism 1848-1854 (1920), p. 12.

[27. ] Howse, op. cit., pp. 117-18, 127-29.

[28. ] Henry Thornton, An Enquiry into the Nature and Effects of the Paper Credit of Great Britain (1802), reissued in 1939 under the editorship of F. A. Hayek with a long and scholarly introduction by the editor.

[29. ]Primitive, Archaic and Modern Economies, p. 131.

[30. ] George Johnson Cady, “The Early American Reaction to the Theory of Malthus,” Journal of Political Economy 39, no. 5 (October 1931): 601-32.

[31. ] Michael J. L. O’Connor, Origins of Academic Economics in America (1944), pp. 120-35.

[32. ] Jean-Baptiste Say, A Treatise on Political Economy, translated from the fourth edition of the French, by C. R. Prinsep; New American edition, containing a translation of the introduction, and additional notes, by Clement C. Biddle (1836). The advertisement by the American editor to the fifth edition contains Biddle’s complaint against Prinsep for yielding ground to Malthus and Ricardo, p. ix.

[33. ] The statement is in one of the many footnotes McVickar wrote for Outlines of Political Economy (1825), which is basically a reprinting with commentary of J. R. McCulloch’s essay on Political Economy in the Encyclopedia Britannica (1825), p. 69.

[34. ] Wayland’s theological economics are discussed at some length in a forthcoming article titled “Clerical Laissez-Faire,” which I originally wrote for a 1982 conference on religion and economics. The book containing the article is to be published by the Fraser Institute of Vancouver, British Columbia.

[35. ] Henry F. May, Protestant Churches and Industrial America (1949), p. 14.

[36. ] I have added the emphasis in quoting from The Church Speaks to the Modern World: The Social Teachings of Leo XIII, edited and with an introduction by Etienne Gilson (Doubleday Image Book, c. 1954), pp. 207, 220, 226.

[37. ] E. R. Norman, Church and Society in England 1770-1970: A Historical Study (1976), pp. 10-11.

[38. ] The mildly interested reader could examine James Dombrowski, The Early Days of Christian Socialism in America (1936); Charles Howard Hopkins, The Rise of the Social Gospel in American Protestantism, 1865-1915 (1940); and Henry F. May, Protestant Churches and Industrial America (1949). Anyone over thirty years of age can consult his memory.

[39. ] Gamwell, op. cit., pp. 1-3.

[40. ]Ibid., p. 2.

[41. ] J. Philip Wogaman, The Great Economic Debate: An Ethical Analysis (1977), p. 33.

[42. ] Robert Benne, The Ethic of Democratic Capitalism: A Moral Reassessment (1981), pp. viii-ix and the entire first chapter.

[43. ] Reinhold Niebuhr, Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic, reissued with a foreword by Martin E. Marty (c. 1929, 1956, 1980). Pp. 166-67 and 196-97 offer some typically Niebuhrean comments on Niebuhr.

[44. ] Lionel Robbins, The Theory of Economic Policy in English Classical Political Economy (1952). Of course, if laissez-faire is redefined to cover any predisposition against adding to the agenda of government, then the classical economists were indeed defenders of laissez-faire.

[45. ] Smith, The Wealth of Nations, book IV, chapter IX, pp. 673-74 (GE), p. 638 (MLE).

[46. ] Thomas Robert Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, Norton Critical Edition (1798, 1976), p. 19.

[47. ] I have quoted from The Marx-Engels Reader, Second Edition, edited by Robert C. Tucker (1978), pp. 4-5.

[48. ] It was not published until 1932.

[49. ]The Marx-Engels Reader, pp. 136-37.

[50. ]Ibid., pp. 497-98.

[51. ] The definitive discussion of these matters is still the series of articles that Frank Knight published in the 1920s in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, which were reprinted as the first three essays in Frank H. Knight, The Ethics of Competition and Other Essays (1936).

[52. ] This is what accounts for the early economists’ tendency to assign a superior productivity to agriculture. The Physiocrats made agriculture exclusively productive, and labelled manufacturing and trade “sterile.” In modern jargon, they were calling attention to the low marginal productivity of non-agricultural production. Cantillon’s Essay makes all this remarkably clear.

[53. ] A point regularly insisted upon by Knight.

[54. ] My attempt at description should not be understood as an unqualified endorsement.

[55. ] Clearly-defined rights (or powers) with few restrictions on the exchange of rights turn out to be significant conditions.

[56. ] Marx and Engels never explained how order would be achieved once “social control of the means of production” had been established. Engels occasionally raised the question—in the preface he wrote to The Poverty of Philosophy, for example, where he pithily demonstrates the unworkability of socialism as advocated by Rodbertus—but always walked away without actually answering.

[57. ] “Reflection will reveal,” according to Frank Knight, “that it is rather an accident that internal social conflicts take the economic form. This will be clear if one pictures the situation which would result if every adult were granted the power to work physical miracles, and could bring about any desired physical result simply by wishing, thus eliminating all problems of production and distribution. Problems of associative life would then arise only in the other two of the three main forms of interest and activity we have recognized, i.e., in play and culture. But without some revolutionary change in human nature, conflicts in these fields would be fully as acute as those to which economic interests give rise, and they would not be essentially different in form. It is probable that the necessity of economic activity and co-operation actually reduces social conflict on the whole. Man is by nature self-assertive and competitive, and is also disposed to gang up in conflicts and contests, whether or not any real advantage is at stake.” From Frank H. Knight and Thornton W. Merriam, The Economic Order and Religion (1945), p. 99.

[58. ] An excellent example is provided by Knight’s collaborator in The Economic Order and Religion, Thornton Merriam. See especially his chapter on “Economic Intentions of Christianity,” pp. 190-205.

[* ] Reprinted from Religion, Economics, and Social Thought, ed. W. Block and I. Hexham (Vancouver: The Fraser Institute, 1985), 125-52, by permission of The Fraser Institute. First draft presented at a Liberty Fund/Fraser Institute conference on “Religion, Economics, and Social Thought,” directed by Walter Block, Paul Heyne, and A. M. C. Waterman in Vancouver, British Columbia, 2-4 August 1982.

[1. ] James V. Schall, “Catholicism and the American Experience,” This World (Winter/Spring 1982), p. 8.

[2. ] Edwin R. A. Seligman conferred this distinction on McVickar in “Economics in the United States: An Historical Sketch,” reprinted in his Essays in Economics (1925), p. 137. Michael J. L. O’Connor, in the course of surveying existing literature on the origins of American economics, has shown that McVickar’s title is open to challenge. O’Connor, Origins of Academic Economics in the United States (1944), pp. 6-18.

[3. ] “That science and religion eventually teach the same lesson, is a necessary consequence of the unity of truth, but it is seldom that this union is so early and so satisfactorily displayed as in the researches of Political Economy.” John McVickar, Outlines of Political Economy: Being a Republication of the Article upon that Subject [by J. R. McCulloch] Contained in the Edinburgh Supplement to the Encyclopedia Britannica, together with Notes Explanatory and Critical, and a Summary of the Science (1825), p. 69. See also McVickar’s notes on pp. 88, 102-3, and 159-60 and his Concluding Remarks on pp. 186-88.

[4. ] Henry F. May, Protestant Churches and Industrial America (1949), p. 14.

[5. ] O’Connor, op. cit., p. 189.

[6. ] Charles Dunbar, in a centennial review of “Economic Science in America, 1776-1876,” mentioned “President Wayland’s book” as “the only general treatise of the period which can fairly be said to have survived to our day.” Charles Franklin Dunbar, Economic Essays, edited by O. M. W. Sprague (1904), p. 12. Joseph Dorfman devotes a chapter to “The School of Wayland” in The Economic Mind in American Civilization, Vol. II (1946), pp. 758-71. John Roscoe Turner’s 1921 essay on The Ricardian Rent Theory in Early American Economics states: “[Wayland’s] Elements of Political Economy (1837) was, as a text, the best work previous to the Civil War, and probably as popular as any American text on this subject. It survives, and is used as a text in some places to this day.” p. 61.

[7. ] See A Memoir of the Life and Labors of Francis Wayland, D.D., L.L.D., assembled and written by his sons Francis Wayland and H. L. Wayland, originally published in two volumes in 1867 and reprinted in a single bound volume by Arno Press in 1972.

[8. ] Gladys Bryson, “The Emergence of the Social Sciences from Moral Philosophy,” International Journal of Ethics (April 1932), pp. 304-12.

[9. ] Francis Wayland, The Elements of Political Economy, p. iii. All page references will be to the 1857 edition (Boston: Gould and Lincoln).

[10. ]Ibid., p. iv.

[11. ]Ibid.

[12. ]Memoir, Vol. I, p. 380.

[13. ] Francis Wayland, The Elements of Moral Science, p. 25. The edition used is the 1854 edition (Boston: Gould and Lincoln).

[14. ]Memoir, Vol. I, p. 233.

[15. ] Wayland, The Elements of Political Economy, pp. 128-30; Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Book V, Chapter I, Part III, Article 2d.

[16. ] Wayland, ibid., pp. 311-13; Smith, ibid., Book I, Chapter X, Part I.

[17. ] Wayland, ibid., pp. 188-288, especially pp. 211-12, 231-32, 259-61, 278-79; Smith, ibid., Book II, Chapter II.

[18. ] Wayland, ibid., pp. 145-51; Smith, ibid., Book IV, Chapter 11.

[19. ] Wayland, ibid., pp. 391-97; Smith, ibid., Book V, Chapter II, Part 11.

[20. ] Bryson, op. cit., p. 309.

[21. ]Memoir, Vol. I, p. 32.

[22. ]Ibid., p. 227.

[23. ]Ibid., Vol. II, pp. 39-40, 289-90.

[24. ] Wayland, Political Economy, p. 171.

[25. ]Ibid., p. 46.

[26. ]Ibid., pp. 55-56.

[27. ]Ibid., p. 91.

[28. ]Ibid., pp. 159-60.

[29. ]Ibid., p. 378.

[30. ]Ibid., pp. 176-77.

[31. ]Ibid., pp. 343-44.

[32. ]Ibid., pp. 105-8.

[33. ]Ibid., p. 108.

[34. ]Ibid., pp. 109-13.

[35. ]Ibid., pp. 113-18.

[36. ]Ibid., p. 119.

[37. ]Ibid., pp. 119-20.

[38. ]Ibid., p. 122.

[39. ]Ibid., pp. 123-32.

[40. ]Ibid., pp. 133-40.

[41. ]Ibid., pp. 140-41.

[42. ]Ibid., p. 151.

[43. ]Ibid., p. 152.

[44. ]Ibid., p. 128. For his views on how government should offer financial assistance to education, see pp. 399-403.

[45. ]Ibid., pp. 403-4.

[46. ]Ibid., pp. 184-86. 404-5.

[47. ]Ibid., p. 405.

[48. ] George Johnson Cady, “The Early American Reaction to the Theory of Malthus,” Journal of Political Economy (October 1931), pp. 601-32.

[49. ] Wayland, Political Economy, pp. 293-94.

[50. ]Ibid., p. 305.

[51. ]Ibid., pp. 305-7.

[52. ]Ibid., p. 308.

[53. ]Ibid., pp. 19, 26, 98-99, 154, 297, 301, 320.

[54. ]Ibid., pp. 47-48.

[55. ] For an excellent and fairly recent survey of these events, see A. W. Coats, “The First Two Decades of the American Economic Association” (American Economic Review, September 1960), p. 555-74. Joseph Dorfman probably offers the best general introduction to the period in The Economic Mind in American Civilization, Vol. III (1949), pp. 113-212.

[56. ] Ely reproduced the prospectus in his autobiography, Ground Under Our Feet (1938), p. 136.

[57. ] Dorfman, op. cit., Vol. III, pp. 56-63; O’Connor, op. cit., pp. 265-66.

[58. ] Arthur Latham Perry, Principles of Political Economy (1891), pp. 251-52.

[59. ] See especially Ely’s contributions to the 1886 exchanges in Science between the “old” and the “new” sciences of political economy: Ely, “Economics and Ethics,” Science (June 11, 1886), pp. 529-33; “The Economic Discussion in Science,” ibid. (July 2, 1886), pp. 3-6 (a rejoinder to Simon Newcomb); and his reply to a negative review by N[icholas] M[urray] B[utler] of his book The Labor Movement in America, ibid. (October 29, 1886), pp. 388-89. For Ely’s comments on Perry, see Ground Under Our Feet, pp. 127-28.

[60. ] Charles Howard Hopkins, The Rise of the Social Gospel in American Protestantism, 1865-1915 (1940), p. 25.

[61. ] George N. Boardman, “Political Economy and the Christian Ministry,” Bibliotheca Sacra (January 1866), pp. 73-107; Hopkins, ibid.

[62. ] The best survey of this literature with which I am familiar, covering both the social gospel and the “new” political economy, is that of Sidney Fine, Laissez Faire and the General-Welfare State: A Study of Conflict in American Thought, 1865-1901 (1956), pp. 167-251.

[63. ] May, op. cit., pp. 15, 16, 91, 111, 141.

[64. ] John Rutherford Everett, Religion in Economics (1946), pp. 143-44.

[65. ]Ibid., Vol. II, pp. 758-67. Dorfman’s treatment of the slavery issue should be compared with Wayland’s Elements of Moral Science, pp. 206-16. Dorfman accords John McVickar, the other leading clerical economist of this period, a similar treatment: Ibid., pp. 515-22, 713-20.

[66. ] Wayland, The Elements of Moral Science, pp. 390-95.

[67. ] O’Connor, op. cit., pp. 277-89.

[68. ]Ibid., p. 289.

[69. ] The phrase is from John C. Bennett’s lecture on “Reaganethics,” reprinted in Christianity and Crisis (December 14, 1981), p. 340.