What We Stand For

Ever since the fall of Communism at the end of the 1980s, the contest has been no longer between socialism and capitalism but between varieties of capitalism.

In the encyclical Centesimus Annus (1991), Pope John Paul II endorses the market economy. Nevertheless, he also writes there about the "limits of the market", and the need for economic and political freedom to be circumscribed by a "strong juridical framework" (nn. 34, 40, 42, 39). A market in which goods are exchanged is only "free" within certain limits: those limits are constituted juridically, and such limits reflect the moral-anthropological assumptions of the law-makers. It is however not simply a matter of adding some ethical controls from "outside" the market. The market itself could already be said to be a juridical framework. Every economy is a kind of game; and a game is constituted by the rules which define what it means to play the game (what counts as property, as fair exchange, and so on).

John Gray writes: "The forms of property, and of contractual liberty, which go to make up the market are themselves legal artefacts, human constructs that human design may amend or reform. The idea, common among latter-day liberals, of the market as a spontaneous order may be illuminating in so far as it generates insight into the ways in which unplanned market exchanges may coordinate human activities better than any plan; but it is profoundly misleading if it suggests that the institutional framework of the market process is given to us as a natural fact, or can be deduced from any simple theory. There will, in fact, be considerable variation, across countries and over time, in the forms of property, the varieties and limits of contractual liberty and the kinds of competition which the institutions of the market encompass. The view of the market that is to be rejected, accordingly, is that (common in the United States) which theorizes its institutions as flowing from some underlying structure of rights."

For Gray (who is not a Catholic), both market institutions and rights are social or cultural artefacts, justifiable mainly in terms of the human well-being they promote. This is surely not far from the Pope’s view. An "economy" does not exist at all except as a set of patterns and customs of behaviour: i.e. as the material aspect of a moral-cultural system. Economic activity - like political activity - is a subset of cultural activity. It has a moral structure of its own, as well as requiring certain standards of human behaviour in order to function harmoniously. This structure will either be compatible with Christianity or not. If it is not, Christians may be obliged to push for a more radical change in the economic system than, say, a few restrictions on pornography, arms sales or the accumulation of wealth.

The Church’s social doctrine concerns the overcoming of the split between the Gospel and culture (this formulation is from Paul VI’s Evangelii Nuntiandi, based on Gaudium et Spes). While the Church’s magisterium is careful not to offer us any "model economic system", it asks members of the Church, especially the lay faithful who are most fully engaged in economic society, to develop such models by applying the principles of Catholic social teaching to their own concrete historical and personal circumstances. This is one area where more work is urgently needed - not least to prevent Catholics from being swept away by the ideologies which still dominate in this field, and which may lead us to fail to recognize the cultural and moral logic of the economic system itself.

The premise of our Sane Economy project is that every economy is a "cultural economy", and fundamentally an "ethical economy", the expression of an ethos. Morality, in turn, is rooted in anthropology, meaning a vision of what we are as human beings: our goal and calling. Christianity claims that our nature fulfils itself only in self-giving love. If this is true, it affects the goals and methods of economics. What kind of "sane economics" might emerge from such a transformation is the question that our project seeks to ask, if not to answer.

Stratford Caldecott