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Social Justice for Democratic Capitalists

How some Catholics contort Church teaching to fit a Cold War paradigm of economics and politics.
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A few years ago, the Catholic public intellectual Michael Novak traveled to Poland to receive an award for his role in supporting the Solidarity movement of the 1980s. Standing with the Polish president on a thoroughfare across from the U.S. Embassy, he lit a candle in front of a bronze statue of Ronald Reagan. It was, as Novak describes in his newest book, a “lovely visualization” of “solidarity as an appeal for the freedom and dignity of all individuals everywhere.”

In Social Justice Isn’t What You Think It Is, Novak and co-author Paul Adams are clear from the first chapter: They want to redefine or reclaim or re-invent—I’m not sure exactly which—the concept of social justice. In their view, it should be understood as a purely individual and subjective thing—a personal “virtue” rather than an objective standard of justice in society. They want to talk about social justice, but they only want to talk about it, in Adams’s words, as a habit “internalized by individuals.”

In a way, they aren’t wrong. But they are also only half right. Their version of justice is reductionistic, which is to say that it is true in what it contains, but false and pernicious in what it ignores—and it ignores a lot. Half of the picture, to be precise. Novak and Adams end up with a truncated notion of justice that precludes them from dealing properly with their subject matter from the start.

To clarify what I mean, consider St. Thomas Aquinas’s definition of the traditional understanding of the two species of justice:

On the first place there is the order of one part to another, to which corresponds the order of one private individual to another. This order is directed by commutative justice, which is concerned about the mutual dealings between two persons. On the second place there is the order of the whole towards the parts, to which corresponds the order of that which belongs to the community in relation to each single person. This order is directed by distributive justice, which distributes common goods proportionately. Hence there are two species of justice, distributive and commutative.

The new paradigm laid out by Novak and Adams allows only for one species, commutative justice, which is the individual and subjective side of the problem. They leave out distributive justice, which pertains to the corporate and objective side of things. Thus, the argument immediately short-circuits because social justice, the theme of the book, belongs to distributive justice, which is the species of justice the authors reject. As a result, they have to try and fit social justice into a strictly individualistic context where it does not belong. But they make it fit—like a square peg being sledge-hammered into a round hole, and it takes them about 300 pages to do it.

This is telling with respect to the motivations of the authors. According to the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church:

From a subjective point of view, justice is translated into behavior that is based on the will to recognize the other as a person, while, from an objective point of view, it constitutes the decisive criteria of morality in the intersubjective and social sphere.

By reinventing social justice as a subjective concept, the authors have eliminated what, according to the Compendium, is the “decisive criteria of morality” in the social sphere. That’s a pretty big deal. Before we even finish the first chapter, we realize that the authors are not only rescuing social justice from contemporary progressives, but also from St. Thomas Aquinas and the Church.

Moving on from the thesis, however, we ought to talk about how much respect the authors actually show for the tradition. For example, if Novak and Adams had been willing to give Benedict XVI his due, they could have been saved. As the Pope Emeritus said in Caritas in Veritate:

The market is subject to the principles of so-called commutative justice, which regulates the relations of giving and receiving between parties to a transaction. But the social doctrine of the Church has unceasingly highlighted the importance of distributive justice and social justice for the market economy, not only because it belongs within a broader social and political context, but also because of the wider network of relations within which it operates.

But there is no room for this acknowledgement of a broader context in the paradigm of Novak and Adams. For them, Benedict XVI’s rich contribution to the tradition is dismissed because, according to Novak, “if we hold each sentence of Caritas in Veritate up to analysis in the light of empirical truth…we will find that it is not nearly so full in its veritas as in its caritas.” In short, Benedict meant well but didn’t know what he was talking about.

If that’s the treatment Benedict receives, then you can imagine the sort of regard they show for Pope Francis. As we have become accustomed to seeing, Francis is represented as the naïve crusader from Argentina. Uninformed and guided by his emotions, we can forgive him for lashing out at capitalism since Argentina has “bad capitalism,” but we can’t take him seriously when he tries to speak to us about economics, because we have the good kind of capitalism. The authors assure us, however, that Pope Francis will come along, just like John Paul II before him, who eventually “came to see this historical reality. His insights are still in the treasury of Catholic social teaching, and naturally they will come to the attention of Pope Francis.” But until then, what Francis says and does is largely irrelevant to the authors.

This book was completed too early to include any commentary or insights from Francis’s latest encyclical, Laudato Si’, but it seems clear from their treatment of Evangelii Gaudium that, even if that weren’t the case, it wouldn’t matter much. I don’t think it would have altered anything for the authors, and that is perhaps the worst thing I can say about their book.

In the end, Novak and Adams are engaged in a re-invention of Catholic Social Teaching in the image of Hayek. They state, in no uncertain terms, that Hayek was in fact a model of their “virtue of social justice,” even if he did not fully understand the concept.

The resulting construction is a bizarre creature indeed. Novak comes up with his own version of the principles of Catholic Social Teaching. Those familiar with the traditional line-up (solidarity, subsidiarity, the common good, private property, etc.) will be surprised to discover some interesting additions.

One of the first principles is called “The Cause of Wealth.” Under this “principle” we are told that we should not ask questions like “What are the causes of poverty?” According to Novak “that is a pointless question, a useless question.”

So what do we need to ask? And what is this new principle? In what is probably the most confusing paragraph in the book:

In a word, the cause of wealth has been uncovered during the past 200 years…That discovery has generated a new moral imperative: All the world’s poor must be helped out of poverty. They must be helped in the most vital way: to make the discovery of the cause of wealth (their own human capital) in their own lives, so as to experience a freedom from penury never known before.

I really have no idea what that means, but there you have it. Another principle is: “The Right to Give to Caesar What Is Caesar’s, But to God the Things That Are God’s.” Here Novak gets out the sledge-hammer again and starts juxtaposing odds and ends which amount to a defense of religious freedom that is somehow also related to taxes.

Some of the sections were familiar, like the one on private property, but when we get there we’re forced to read John Stuart Mill.

Finally, despite the fact that the most glaring problem with the book is its truncated understanding of justice and a sparse usage of Church documents, what can one say about the accuracy of the information that is presented?

We are told in one section that “the root of evil in socialism is forced equality.” No. According to Pope Leo XIII the error lies in the abolition of private property.

We are told that Leo XIII “feared that liberalism left the lonely individual too much at the tender mercies of the omnivorous state.” No. He feared liberalism because,

by degrees it has come to pass that working men have been surrendered, isolated and helpless, to the hardheartedness of employers and the greed of unchecked competition…To this must be added that the hiring of labor and the conduct of trade are concentrated in the hands of comparatively few; so that a small number of very rich men have been able to lay upon the teeming masses of the laboring poor a yoke little better than that of slavery itself.

We are told that Leo was uncertain in his position regarding liberalism (capitalism): “He was not ready to condemn liberalism, but he was not ready to give it a clean bill of health either.” No. Before he wrote Rerum Novarum, Leo XIII wrote another encyclical, Libertas, the sole purpose of which was to refute liberalism in all its forms, including the economic.

They even attempt to call in Pius XI to defend the notion that Leo really had a soft spot for liberalism, failing to mention that in Quadragesimo Anno, Pius XI explains that “He [Leo] sought no help from either Liberalism or Socialism, for the one had proved that it was utterly unable to solve the social problem aright, and the other, proposing a remedy far worse than the evil itself, would have plunged human society into great dangers.” Pius XI, like Leo, knew that liberalism was the father of socialism.

I could go on, but why bother? When the popes aren’t being ignored (Benedict XVI, Francis) or being selectively proof-texted (Leo XIII, John Paul II), Novak is engaged in a sort of linguistic gymnastics. He tells the reader that clear terms are actually obscure (like capitalism, liberalism, and mercantilism) and that general terms are actually quite specific. He teaches the reader that when the popes say capitalism, they really mean bad capitalism (apparently they don’t understand the use of qualifiers). And when the popes say “market economy,” they mean capitalism. I on the other hand tend to assume that if the popes wanted to distinguish between reformed and unreformed capitalism, they would have made that distinction for themselves.

Ultimately, if your understanding of Catholic Social Teaching requires you to ignore a significant portion of the tradition, condescend to various popes, discount certain documents, or invent your own paradigm in order to make sense of it, then you’re probably taking the wrong approach.

This book has novel value as an attempt by two liberal enthusiasts (liberal in the Leonine sense, of course) to construct a subjectivist version of Catholic social teaching that can fit within a capitalist ideology. Unfortunately it maintains only a tenuous connection with its source material.

Daniel Schwindt is the author of Catholic Social Teaching: A New Synthesis (Rerum Novarum to Laudato Si’).

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