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“a
thing of immortal make, not human, lion-fronted and snake behind, a goat in
the middle and snorting out the breath of the terrible flame of bright fire.” Homer on the Chimera, The Iliad The origin is what really needs explanation. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of
Capitalism No area of contemporary life, with the possible
exception of sexuality, is as surrounded by myth as economics. When it comes
to Capitalism, the great mythmaker of our day is Michael Novak. After
beginning his career as a Christian socialist and promoter of sexual
liberation, Novak joined the staff of the American Enterprise Institute in
1978, just as the neoconservative movement was gaining steam and moving from
Trotskyite to Reaganite politics. In 1982 Novak wrote The Spirit of
Democratic Capitalism, which attempted to come up with a theological
justification for Catholics wishing to abandon the Democratic Party and
support the Reagan Administration’s crusade against Communism. Supporting the Reagan agenda had other sequelae less congenial to the
Catholic mind, like the assault on unions that began with the firing of the
air traffic controllers, but those and other negative consequences of the
Reagan era, like opening up the American auto market to the Japanese in exchange
for the purchase of Treasury bills, did not seem apparent at the time. One of the main reasons they did not seem apparent at the time was
Michael Novak. Professor Stephen M. Bainbridge referred to Novak as “the
foremost Christian thinker on the economy,” and to The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism as “undoubtedly his magnum opus.” The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism,
Bainbridge continues, “appeared in a samizdat
. . . edition in Poland during the 1980s and had an obvious impact on the
Solidarity movement. Its reasoned defense of democratic capitalism as being
grounded in the humane values of the Judeo-Christian tradition also helped
give a moral center to the neoconservative movement”—or at least the
appearance of a moral center.
How is it then that Catholic thinkers can come to such contradictory
conclusions about Novak’s magnum opus, The
Spirit of Democratic Capitalism? Well, it may be because the book itself
is based on a contradiction. At
the heart of Novak’s book we find a mythological creature, not unlike Homer’s
chimera, known as “democratic capitalism.” This creature is an incoherent
composite which purportedly has the powers attributable to the animals out of
which it was made, powers hitherto unknown in the realm of economic thought.
According to Novak’s economic theory: “political democracy is
compatible in practice only with a market economy”[2] (In reality democracy and capitalism, like liberty
and equality of French Revolution fame, are antithetical. Capitalism always
concentrates wealth—and, therefore, power—into fewer and fewer hands. Has
Michael Novak ever heard of China?) “Modern democracy and modern capitalism proceed from identical
historical impulses”[3]
(As in Elizabethan England?
Revolutionary France? Florence under Savonarola? Each of these instances
had either capitalism or democracy but not both. Plato reminds us that
democracy follows plutocracy as its antithesis when the younger generation
realizes that their elders had sold their birthright. The thesis of Kevin
Phillips book Wealth and Democracy is
that American history is a contest between wealth and democracy. In other
words, the two are antithetical not complementary.) “the natural logic of capitalism leads to democracy”[4]
(This statement is true in a certain sense. As Plato pointed out in The Republic, aristocracy leads to
plutocracy, which leads to revolutionary democracy, which leads to tyranny.) “Except in Adam Smith’s book, the concept of development did not exist.
In 1800, a judgment like that of Ecclesiastes, ‘There is nothing new under
the sun,’ blanketed a mostly torpid world. In most regions, economic
enterprises stagnated.”[5] (All of the economic advances upon which modern Capitalism is
based—including double entry book-keeping, bills of exchange, and fractional
reserve banking—were all in place in the city-states of northern Italy by the
beginning of the 15th century, which is to say 400 years before
Novak says they appeared in England.) “The invention of the market economy in Great Britain and the United
States more profoundly revolutionized the world between 1800 and the present
than any other single force. After
five millennia of blundering human beings finally found out how wealth may be
produced in a sustained systematic way.”[6]
“The churches did not understand the new economics. . . . Latin Culture
did not understand Economics.”[7] (Does Mr. Novak consider Italy as part of “Latin Culture”? Is the Roman
Catholic Church part of “Latin Culture.” Is the headquarters of the Roman
Catholic Church in Rome? Is Rome in Italy? In order to maintain his
thesis—England created modern economics, the Church is ignorant of economic
principle—Novak has to claim that Italy was an economic backwater, when in
fact the exact opposite was true. Italy was the financial center of Europe
for centuries. During the high middle ages, when Italy was establishing
banking houses in Bruges, dominating commerce in Europe, and coming up with
the financial advances that would revolutionize commerce, England’s main
export was raw wool.) “The Catholic Church . . . has tended, particularly because of the
Vatican’s location within Italy . . . to rest uncomfortably in the past with
only a tenuous connection to liberal societies. In a word, it has stood
outside of and has, I think, misread the liberal democratic capitalist
revolution.”[8] (Novak’s framing of the issue is so tendentious that it needs to be
unpacked a bit before it can be refuted. Does Novak consider Florence under
Savonarola a “liberal society.” Savonarola certainly promoted democracy, but
he opposed plutocracy, which is another word for Capitalism, as manifested at
the time by the Medici banking interests. Faced with an unprecedented
expansion of commerce in Italy during the 13th, 14th,
and 15th centuries, the Church was deeply and intimately involved
in sorting out which economic developments were beneficial to society and
which were not.) “North
and South America were founded upon two radically different ideas of
political economy. The one attempted to recreate the political-economic
structure of feudal and mercantilist Spain. The other attempted to establish
a novus ordo seculorum, a new
order, around ideas never before realized in human history.”[9] (North
and South America were founded under exactly the same system. It was known as
Mercantilism. Novak ignores the fact that that system found acceptance by all
of the colonial powers in North America—England, France, Spain, and Holland.
Novak attempts to draw deep theological conclusions from the fact that the
United States has a larger economy than individual South American countries,
even though for much of the 20th century Argentina was not far
behind. The outcome of colonial conquest in North America was not decided by
the triumph of a superior idea. In terms of economics, all of the colonial
powers had the same idea. The conquest was brought about by force of
arms. Mercantilism was another name
for economic warfare. All of the mercantilist powers fought wars over the
exclusive economic privileges which went with the right to colonize North
America. In these wars, England defeated both France and Holland. What
theological/economic lesson does Mr. Novak derive from England’s defeat of
Holland, a country more Calvinistic than England?) “Latin
Americans do not value the same moral qualities North Americans do.”[10] (Statements
like this may make sense to the Neoconservatives who were Novak’s employers
at the American Enterprise Institute at the time he wrote The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism,
but they are incomprehensible to Catholics, including those who live in North
and South America. Catholicism is the target of Novak’s book precisely
because the Catholic Church is the main institution which claims that
economic policy should be subordinated to the moral law.) “Now
that the secrets of sustained material progress have been decoded, the
responsibility for reducing hunger and misery is no longer God’s but ours.”[11] (Have
these secrets reached Detroit?) “No
region of the United States is poorer that it was in 1900.”[12] (See
above.) LOCKE
ON STRAWBERRIES “John
Locke once wrote that the inventors of new economic processes and
products—quinine, for example—were greater benefactors of mankind than
earlier givers of charity. ... It may have been John Locke (1632-1704) who
first articulated a new possibility for economic organization. Locke observed
that a field of, say, strawberries, highly favored by nature, left to itself
might produce what seemed to be an abundance of strawberries. Subject to
cultivation and care by practical intelligence, however, such a field might
be made to produce not simply twice but tenfold as much strawberries. In
short, Locke concluded, nature is far wealthier in possibility than human
beings had drawn attention to before.”[13] Novak’s
invocation of the name of John Locke is the infallible sign that the chimera
of “democratic capitalism” resides in a mythical realm known as Whig History.
One of the heroic figures of Whig history is John Locke. Since Novak is
writing Whig history, he needs to drag statements about Locke, no matter how
preposterous, into his narrative, and give them an importance which their
banality does not deserve. Whig
history is based on the ability to draw grand theological conclusions from
dubious historical premises. We’re talking about things like Locke’s
discovery of the theological significance of strawberries. Or Novak
attributing to Locke statements that were either commonplaces of Catholic
thought for centuries, e.g. “Locke’s vision of a novel and invigorating sense
of the human vocation.”[14]
Or statements that were flat out wrong, as when he claims that, “History was
no longer to be regarded as cyclical.”[15]
What man living in Europe at any time after the birth and crucifixion of Our
Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and familiar with a Bible which begins with the
creation of the world and concludes with a description of the end of the
world believed that history was cyclical? Determined to pile Pelion on Ossa,
Novak goes on to claim Locke’s influence was so great that it affected our
perception of the way God works on history: After Locke, reflection on God’s ways with the
world—theodicy—was altered. The way
God works in history was now thought of as progressive, open, subject to
human liberty and diligence. The
vocation of the human being came to seem ennobled. No longer were humans to
imagine their lot as passive, long-suffering, submissive. They were called
upon to inventive, prudent, far-seeing, hardworking—in order to realize by
their obedience to God’s call the building up and perfecting of God’s kingdom
on earth.[16]
Whig
history is notorious for taking an historical fact, in this instance the
decline of commerce in the Mediterranean when compared with the rise of
commerce in the Atlantic which followed from the discovery of the New World,
and then loading it down with theological significance, all of which is to
show the superiority of English Protestant culture in the wake of the
Glorious Revolution. Novak further loads the dice by referring to those
nations engaged in the Mediterranean trade as “strongholds of the
Counter-Reformation,”[18]
making it all but certain that the reader will ascribe any change in economic
fortune to their Catholicism. Sure enough, Novak uses Trevor-Roper’s
tendentious resurrection of the Black Legend as a stick with which he
proceeds to beat the Church, as when he writes, For Trevor-Roper, the decisive fact [in the development of
Capitalism] was a new alliance of church and state, more intolerable with
each passing year, which drove the new class of Catholic businessmen in some
cases out of their church but in many more cases out of their native cities
and homelands. They sought out cities no longer under the control of princes
and bishops; they sought self-governing cities of a republican character.”[19]
This
is because: The Counter-Reformation state impugned the religious value
of commerce. It banned or restricted enterprise in the private sector. It
licensed certain entrepeneurs to develop state monopolies; it favored state
mercantilism over private mercantilism.[20] To
begin with, there is no such thing as private mercantilism. Mercantilism is,
by definition, government-sponsored economic activity. Secondly, when it
comes to an intolerable alliance of Church and State was any government more
repressive than Elizabethan England? Is Novak claiming that there was no
alliance of Church and State in England during the 16th
century? Is he claiming that Elizabeth did not grant state monopolies? Is he
claiming that Elizabeth did not favor the pleonasm known as “state
mercantilism”? Finally, where were the “self-governing cities of a republican
character”[21]
which Novak praises? Were they in England? Was London one
of them? No, “self governing cities of a republican character,” places like
Venice, Milan, Florence, Siena were to be found in Italy, where they had been
in the forefront of economic advance for centuries. In
Novak’s attempt to resurrect of the Black Legend, all of history becomes a
morality play in which English forces triumph over their Catholic opponents
because of the innate superiority of their ideas, all of which revolve around
the emancipation of economic life from moral supervision. According to Novak,
the failure is all on the Catholic side, i.e. in “the failure of Catholic
thinking to grasp the creative potential of democratic capitalism.”[22] Amintore
Fanfani, who was familiar with the claim that the development of capitalism
was more intense in Protestant than in Catholic countries, was reluctant to
conclude that the rise of England as an economic power came about because of
the superiority of English ideas, specifically the English idea later
espoused as Capitalism. More important from Fanfani’s point of view was “the
displacement of trade from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic”[23]
as well as the disadvantages which arose from the fact that Italy was
“economically divided into innumerable markets,”[24]
while “the national state of England is already making giant strides toward unification,
of which it enjoys full benefit at a time when in Italy there are but a few
individuals who dimly realize the advantages to be derived from agreements
between the various Italian states with a view to definite economic and
political results. The capitalistic
importance of a vast and unified market—which is far greater than the form of
religion—can be seen by summary of the economic history of France and
Germany.”[25]
There is, Fanfani concluded, “no need to seek for
mysterious influences.”[26] Novak’s
thesis rests on a particular explanation of the origins of Capitalism known
as the Weber Thesis. In
1904 and 1905 the German Sociologist Max Weber wrote two articles on the
origins of Capitalism which were later published posthumously, after Weber’s
death in 1920, under the title, The
Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. The heart of the Weber
thesis is the contention that Capitalism was created by pious Protestants in
the 17th century: “The force which produced it was the creed
associated with the name of Calvin. Capitalism was the social counterpart of
Calvinist theology.” This explains why the “business leaders and owners of
capital . . . are overwhelmingly Protestant.”[27]
If
Novak goes out of his way to confer the aura of “sanctity” (his term) on
economic dealings which the Catholic Church had always considered sinful, it
is because he got the idea from Weber. The Reformation (and the way it
is viewed in residually Protestant
countries like the United States) is
the term which makes this transvaluation of values intellectually plausible,
as when Novak writes: To the Calvinist, Weber argues, the calling is not a
condition into which the individual is born, but a strenuous and exacting
enterprise to be chosen by himself, and to be pursued with a sense of
religious responsibility. Baptized in the bracing, if icy, waters of
Calvinist theology, the life of business once regarded as perilous to the
soul—summe periculosa est emptionis et
venditionis negotiatio—acquires a new sanctity.[28]
“Is
it possible,” Fanfani wonders, “for the essence of the thing—and for Weber
the capitalist spirit constitutes the essence of capitalism—to come into
existence long after the thing itself?” Weber’s thesis ignores the
capitalistic “facts” which had been established long before Protestantism
came into existence, and, Fanfani continues: if we admit that they could not be capitalistic unless
they were produced by the capitalistic spirit, we must conclude that the
capitalist spirit existed before Protestantism. If we reason logically from
the data with which Weber supplies us, we cannot fail to reach this
conclusion. Therefore, we cannot
accept the idea of vocation as the origin of the capitalist spirit, or else
we must say that it existed at an earlier time. ... Weber’s explanation is
therefore inadequate.[31] The
real origin of capitalism was not England in the 17th century but
Italy in the 15th century. The new, “capitalistic” mentality
appeared at a point further back in time—between the 14th and 15th
centuries—in regions such as Tuscany, Lombardy, and Flanders. This mentality,
according to Fanfani, “guided the late medieval economy of the merchants and
their first clever and unscrupulous entrepreneurs and traders; a mentality
which Weber had identified as occurring much later in regions chiefly
influenced by Protestantism.”[32]
As
the editors of the I H S edition of Fanfani’s book point out: In substance, Capitalism was born, at least as a mentality
if not a fully developed economic structure, in the merchant world of
Florence, Flanders, and the Hanseatic ports, particularly in the 14th
century, as a secularized form of
that Christian activism that aimed to transform the world. That Christian activity traced its roots
to the “Prayer and Work” of the Benedictine Rule.[33] It
wasn’t virtuous Puritans who gave us Capitalism; it was decadent Catholics.
Fanfani “saw in this very same spirit not a development but an inversion,
almost a degeneration, of the ethics of the gospel” which entailed “the
weakening of influence of the social conception proposed and supported by
medieval Catholicism. That and not Protestantism “is the circumstance which
explains the manifestation and growth of the capitalistic spirit in a
Catholic world.” Capitalism came about because of “the growing distance,
especially of the entrepreneurial and mercantile classes, from Catholic
ethics. . . . The decrease in influence exercised by the church, following
the breakup of Christendom incident to the birth of Protestantism, had
ultimately accelerated a process which, nevertheless, was not born of the
Reformation, but had its origins further back in time.”[34] Contemplating
this historical background leads Fanfani to his most fundamental conclusion,
and the premise upon which he builds his economic theory, namely, that the
Catholic ethos is anti-capitalistic. Catholicism is the system that places other criteria above the
economic that is the adversary of capitalism. . . . Catholic theology and
philosophy posit a religious criterion as the supreme rationalizing principle
of life, even in its economic aspects, and again Catholic philosophy
subordinates economic rationalization to political rationalization in that it
relates the material well-being of the individual to the material well being
of his neighbor and subordinates purely economic well-being to individual and
social well-being in the widest sense of the word.[35]
As
Fanfani says at another point in the same book, “there is an unbridgeable gap
between the Catholic and the capitalistic conception of life.”[36]
The reason for this unbridgeable gap is the moral law. Catholicism sees all
purposeful human activity as governed by the moral law. Economics is nothing
if not purposeful human activity; therefore, economic activity must be
governed by the moral law. Capitalism,
on the other hand, means nothing if not the exclusion of moral considerations
form the field of economic endeavor. It purports to be a science similar to
physics or mathematics as a way of covering over Capitalism’s essence, which
is the barring of any moral criticism from a science which is based, not on
physical motion, but on the vagaries of human choice. Because
it is based on human choice, economics is inexorably bound up with ethics.
Ethical considerations are built into its grammar, both in the form of the
institutional constraints on individual action which it presupposes, but also
in the model of individual conduct—of profit-seeking and the absence of any
true altruism—on which it is founded. Furthermore, the telos of economic policies and even legal-economic regimes is
based on a conception of what is good for society. In these ways, morality is
as intimately related to economics as mathematics is to physics. This is
precisely the link which the ideology of Capitalism suppresses. Fanfani’s
critique exposes the “new sanctity” of the Weber thesis as ultimately little
more than a rationalization which lends moral credibility to behavior that
was hitherto considered sinful. But the repression of economic reality and
moral reality which Weber’s appropriation of religion attempts never quite
succeeds. The repressed always returns. The more Novak tries to explain the
“new sanctity” of Capitalism, the more the repressed returns unbidden to his
explanation, as when Novak claims that: the notion that the sustained application of practical
intelligence to economic activities could open up new and unprecedented
horizons awaited the capitalist spirit. Weber distinguishes the spirit of
sustained incremental effort from adventure, piracy, luck, a windfall.[37] Novak
mentions piracy repeatedly. The
new capitalism is not a matter of adventure or piracy but of continuous
enterprise, planned and organized, evaluated for profit and loss. Without the invention of double-entry
bookkeeping, without mathematical sophistication, without the techniques of
analysis made possible by modern science, continuous calculation would not be
possible.[38] Novak
gives the impression that only the English genius could come up with
something this advanced. The only trouble is that the English, in spite of
Locke’s profound statements about strawberries, had virtually nothing to do
with the invention of the economic advances upon which capitalism was based.
Double-entry book-keeping was invented by the Italians, as were bills of
exchange, and fractional reserve banking.
So much for Latin incapacity when it comes to economic science. PIRACY The
English, on the other hand, were notorious promoters of piracy. This fact
finds its way inadvertently into the best exposition of the Weber thesis in
the English-speaking world, R. H. Tawney’s Religion and the Rise of Capitalism. Tawney writes: “Weber, in a
celebrated essay, expounded the thesis that Calvinism in its English version
was the parent of capitalism.” According to Weber, “religious radicalism . .
. went hand in hand with an economic radicalism.”[39]
In
attempting to substantiate the Weber thesis, however, Tawney unwittingly
refutes it. Every instance of Puritan thought which Tawney cites to show the
transition from Puritanism to Capitalism goes awry. Richard Baxter, the
Puritan divine whom both Tawney and Weber cite as a thinker in the new
Capitalist mode, is thoroughly Scholastic in his economic theories, as when
he writes that a man “must not secure a good price for his own wares ‘by
extortion working upon men’s ignorance, error, or necessity.’” Or when he
writes that “no man may secure pecuniary gain for himself by injuring his
neighbor.”[40]
Or when he writes that “He must not improve (i.e., enclose) his land without
considering the effect on the tenants, or evict his tenants without
compensating them, and in such a way as to cause depopulation.”[41]
The Christian, Baxter concludes, “must so manage his business as to ‘avoid
sin rather than loss,’ and seek first to keep his conscience in peace.”[42] Oblivious
to the fact that he has just disproved Weber’s thesis, Tawney writes: The first characteristic to strike the modern reader in
all this teaching is its conservatism. In spite of the economic and political
revolutions of the past two centuries, how small, after all, the change in
the presentation of the social ethics of the Christian faith![43]
Tawney
then goes on to make the same point in an even stronger fashion when he
writes that: Baxter . . . discourses of equity in bargaining, of just
prices, of reasonable rents, of the sin of usury, in the same tone, if not
with quite the same conclusions as a medieval Schoolman, and he differs from
one of the later Doctors, like St. Antonino, hardly more than St. Antonino
himself differed from Aquinas.[44]
Religion,
in other words, did not bring about the rise of Capitalism. The Puritans were
as conservative as the Schoolmen when it came to economic thought, especially
if we take into account the conclusions of the later Schoolmen at the Lateran
Council of 1515. The conclusion to be drawn from Tawney’s sources is
inescapable. The source of the great change in the course of Western
Civilization known as Capitalism was clearly not religion.
One
hundred years before Puritans like Baxter and Ames put pen to paper, the acts
of Henry VIII and Parliament, severing the connection between England and the
Church of Rome, “produced a sweeping redistribution of wealth, carried out by
an unscrupulous minority using the weapons of violence, intimidation and
fraud and succeeded by an orgy of interested misgovernment on the part of its
principal beneficiaries, it aggravated every problem and gave a new turn to
the screw which was squeezing peasant and craftsman.”[46] Tawney
is, if anything, more eloquent that Weber in describing what actually
happened in England at the real birth of the Capitalist era: Lords, no longer petty sovereigns, but astute businessmen
were leasing their demesnes to capitalist farmers, quick to grasp the profits
to be won by sheep-grazing, and eager to clear away the network of communal
restrictions which impeded its extension.[47] The revolution in prices . . . after 1540 . . . injected a
virus of hitherto unsuspected potency, at once a stimulant to feverish
enterprise and an acid dissolving all customary relationships.[48] The aim of the great landowner was no longer to hold at
his call an army of retainers, but to exploit his estates as a judicious
investment.[49] The haunting insecurity of a growing, though still small,
proletariat, [was] detached from their narrow niche in village or borough,
[and became] the sport of social forces which they could neither understand,
nor arrest, nor control.[50]
If, however, the problem was acute long before the
confiscation of the monastic estates, its aggravation by the fury of
spoliation let loose by Henry and Cromwell is not open to serious question.[51]
… Estates with a capital value (in terms of modern money) of 15 to 20 million
pounds changed hands. To the abbey lands which came into the market after
1536 were added those of the gilds and chantries in 1547.[52]
The
magnitude of what happened in England in the middle decades of the 16th
century was comparable to the “privatization” which took place in Russia
during the 1990s, and in the historical continuity which connects those two
events we can come to the true definition of Capitalism. Far from being an
expression of some vague “new
sanctity,” Capitalism was always the rationalization and promotion of looting.
The only thing that changed over the 500 years of its history was the
sophistication of the instruments which enabled the theft. Tawney is nothing
if not eloquent in describing both the theft and the thieves. Henry VIII
shared the loot because the Government “required a party to carry through a
revolution.” The looting even begat a financial genius to carry it out, Sir
Richard Gresham, father of Gresham’s law, a man who could hold his own in
sophistication with the leveraged buy-outs of the Boesky era or the Ponzi
schemes of Bernie Madoff. In fact the so-called “Reformation” had more to do
with real estate than theology and had much more in common with the
securitization of subprime mortgages than—pace, Messers. Weber, Tawney, and
Novak—predestination or any other theological issue. As Tawney himself put
it, the net result of the English Reformation was to alienate most of the land almost immediately and to
spend the capital as income. For a
decade there was a mania of land speculation. Much of the property was bough
by needy courtiers at a ridiculously low figure. Much of it passed to sharp
businessmen, who brought to bear on its management the methods learned in the
financial school of the City; the largest single grantee was Sir Richard
Gresham.[53] Before
long the opportunistic plundering of Church property had morphed into an
economic system: In London, groups of tradesmen . . . formed actual
syndicates to exploit the market. Rack-renting, evictions, and the
conversions of arable land to pasture were the natural result, for the
surveyors wrote up values at each transfer, and unless the purchaser squeezed
his tenants, the transaction would not pay.[54]
If
religion played a role in the rise of Capitalism it did so primarily as a
pretext for looting. In spite of his desire to substantiate the Weber Thesis,
Tawney gives the best description of the relationship between religion and
the rise of Capitalism when he writes that, “The upstart aristocracy of the
future had their teeth in the carcass, and, having tasted blood, they were
not to be whipped off by a sermon.”[55]
Still trying to save the appearances of the Weber Thesis,
Tawney writes nonetheless that “Puritanism, not the Tudor secession from
Rome, was the true English Reformation, and it is from this struggle against
the old order that an England which is unmistakably modern emerges.”[56]
This
may be true of the Reformation, but the exact opposite is true of Capitalism.
Capitalism began in England with the looting of the monasteries. It was the
systematic rationalization of that looting which came to be known as Whig
History, and not the Puritan religion, which gave birth to the creed “that
the individual is absolute master of his own, and within the limits set by
positive law may exploit it with a single eye to his pecuniary advantage,
unrestrained by any obligation to postpone his own profit to the well-being
of his neighbors, or to give account of this actions to a higher authority.
It was, in short, the theory of property which was later to be accepted by
all civilized communities”[57]
and came to be known as Capitalism. Looting—not
religion, and certainly not Puritanism—brought about the rise of Capitalism.
Tawney’s own testimony stands the Weber thesis on its head, when he tells us,
the most representative thinkers of the Church of England
had no intention of breaking with traditional doctrines. . . . The utterances
of men of religion in the reign of Elizabeth . . . had more affinity with the
doctrines of the Schoolmen than with those which were to be fashionable after
the Reformation. . . . In its insistence that buying and selling, letting and
hiring, lending and borrowing are to be controlled by a moral law, of which
the Church is the guardian, religious opinion after the Reformation did not
differ from religious opinion before it.[58]
Religion didn’t change economics, as Weber claims; on the contrary, economics changed religion. The so-called Reformation in England made use of a religious pretext to move a huge amount of wealth out of the hands of the Catholic Church and into the hands of the looters. That the newly established Church of England benefited from this transfer of wealth is undeniable, and that that windfall caused resentment among the free churches, i.e., the Puritans, who were cut out of dividing up the loot, is equally undeniable. The issue was not religious theory; the issue was theft and its religious justification. The crucial figure in all this was not some doddering Puritan divine whose economic doctrines were indistinguishable from St. Antonino of Florence but rather capitalists like “Sir Thomas Gresham, who managed the Government business in Antwerp.”[59] For people like Gresham, the idea of Divines prohibiting the lucrative returns on usurious loans was nothing but so much foolishness, because they construed all transactions from an economic point of view which ipso facto excluded moral considerations. The name of that economic point of view was Capitalism. The same truth applies today, suppression of the moral law in the economic sphere is the infallible sign of Capitalism. That along with looting, which is the praxis of Capitalism, are the constants which will accompany the progress of the “new sanctity” through the next 500 years of history, to our present day. Both
Weber and Tawney as well as epigoni
like Michael Novak, in other words, got it exactly wrong. Religion didn’t
bring about the rise of Capitalism; Capitalism brought about the corruption
of religion. The real situation was Weber’s thesis turned upside down. E. Michael Jones, the editor of Culture Wars, is writing
a book on Capitalism. This piece is an
excerpt from a lengthy feature article published in the February 2010 issue
of Culture Wars.
Individual copies of the issue are available for $6 each within the
U.S., or $10 if shipped internationally (prices include s&h). Notes [1] Amintore Fanfani, Catholicism, Protestantism, and Capitalism (Norfolk, VA: I H S Press, 2003), p.7. [2] Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism (New York: American Enterprise Institute/Simon & Schuster, 1982), p. 14. [3] Novak, p. 14. [4] Novak, p. 15. [5] Novak, p. 17. [6] Ibid. [7] Ibid. [8] Novak, p. 25. [9] Novak, p. 22. [10] Novak, p. 302. [11] Novak, p. 28. [12] Novak, p. 283. [13] Novak, p. 27. [14] Novak, p. 39. [15] Ibid. [16] Ibid. [17] Novak, p. 276. [18] Novak, p. 277. [19] Ibid. [20] Ibid. [21] Ibid. [22] Novak, p. 278. [23] Fanfani, p. 154. [24] Fanfani, p. 155 [25] Fanfani, p. 155. [26] Fanfani, p. 156. [27] Novak, p. 38. [28] Ibid. [29] Fanfani, p. 147. [30] Fanfani, p. 148. [31] Fanfani, p. 151. [32] Fanfani, p. 38. [33] Ibid. [34] Fanfani, pp. 38-9. [35] Fanfani, p. 93. [36] Fanfani, p. 118. [37] Novak, p. 39. [38] Novak, p. 44. [39] R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism: a Historical Study (Holland Memorial Lectures, 1922) (Gloucester, Mass: Peter Smith, 1962), p. 232. [40] Tawney, p. 224. [41] Ibid. [42] Ibid. [43] Ibid. [44] Tawney, p. 225. [45] Tawney, p. 138. [46] Ibid. [47] Tawney, p. 136. [48] Ibid. [49] Ibid. [50] Ibid. [51] Tawney, p. 138. [52] Ibid. [53] Ibid. [54] Tawney, p. 140. [55] Tawney, p. 143. [56] Tawney, pp. 198-9. [57] Tawney, p. 147. [58] Tawney, pp. 155, 157. [59] Tawney, p. 178. |
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