The Theological Origins and Critique of Political Economy

Political Theology and Political Economy Michael S Northcott University of Edinburgh Introduction It is well known that most academic economists failed to predict the Global Financial Crisis which occurred in 2008 and which led to a sustained period of low or zero growth, high unemployment, and budget cuts in public spending in affected economies. Economics students argued there was a need for a more pluralist approach to teaching economics, less reliant on mathematical models which do not predict what happens in the real world, and more self-critical of the methods and philosophy of economics (ISIPE 2014). Thus far this movement has not achieved significant change in the discipline which in major universities and national banks is controlled by a small number of high impact journals, many of whose articles are co-authored by researchers employed by the United States Federal Reserve Bank which exercises oligopolistic power on the production of economics research (Kane 1980). The main reason modern economists failed to predict the global financial crisis is because the attempt since the late nineteenth century to define economics as an academic discipline independently from its anthropological, philosophical and theological foundations was an intellectual error. The first modern political economists were philosophers and not mathematicians. Their conceptions of contracts, markets, prices, rents, utility and welfare rested upon anthropological assumptions. Attempts to hide the anthropological assumptions which inform modern political economy have driven economists to develop a mathematised version of reality that can be parsed and theorised in economics journals. But these mathematical models lack predictive power in the real world of human collective behaviours. Public and scholarly disagreements over economic policies are not explicable on the basis of mathematical theorems or economic models of market behaviours but instead rest primarily on underlying presuppositions about human nature, or anthropology, which inform different policy positions. I argue in this chapter that when we retrace the genealogical connections between political economy and political theology, it is possible to make sense of disagreements over economic policy and practice, including those which emerged in universities around the teaching of economics, and in the larger public realm around the nature and purpose of banking and the flaws of financialisation, as most vocally in the ‘Occupy’ movement birthed by the financial crisis (Juris 2012). In this essay I depart from much extant theological reflection on political economy, which tends to adopt Paul Tillich’s method of correlation (Tillich 1947). In this approach existential problems that arise in the academic discipline of economics, and in the field of behaviour characterised as the ‘economy’, are matched with analogous doctrines, ethics and practices which arise in the realm of churchly or religious experience, and in theological reflection upon these. Two well known theological commentators on economics who exemplify this approach are Ronald Preston and Kathryn Tanner (Preston 1991, Tanner 2016). This chapter will also resist the influential claim of John Rawls that metaphysical beliefs have no place in deliberation on public policy in plural democracies (Rawls 1985). Against this approach I argue, along with John Milbank, William Cavanaugh and Stephen Long, that reflection on metaphysics, including the given nature of persons and of creation – as revealed in scripture and tradition and in the evolution of cultures – is required to describe and theorise human collective behaviours, both political and economic, in such a way as not to reduce the human good to a principle or concept – such as ‘choice’ or ‘efficiency’ or ‘profit’ or ‘utility’ – which, when pursued as an overarching political and economic goal, cannot help but undermine the human good in the real world (Milbank 1991, Long 2000, Northcott 2004, Cavanaugh 2008). My thesis in this chapter nonetheless accords in one respect with the mainstream view in social science since Max Weber, which is that Christian doctrine, ethics and practices uniquely shaped modern political economy. On this view, capitalism, though now a global set of practices and procedures, emerged as a result of politico-theological developments in Northern Europe between the Reformation and the Enlightenment. However there is radical disagreement over the precise chain of causation. For Max Weber Protestant anxiety over predestination, and the secularisation of the holy calling of monks, were key cultural stimuli to the early modern turn from commons management, yeoman farming, and gift exchange to joint stock holding corporations, rent and wages, profit and loss, usury, and factories (Weber 1930). But against Weber, many now argue that it was innovations in Christian political theology, and not those factors Weber identified, which were generative of ideas and practices conducive to the development of capitalism, and in particular of primitive accumulation and the related development of a rentier and waged economy, first in England, and then in continental Europe and the European colonies. The key innovation that laid the groundwork for this development was the pessimistic turn in theological anthropology in northern European reformed theology. The core assumption of Reformed anthropology is that human beings are so marred by their intergenerational inheritance of original sin that, without grace and sanctification, they are intrinsically at odds with each other and with God. Furthermore, they are not capable of being redeemed through their participation as members of the Church in almsgiving, charitable works, public prayer, and sacraments. In the Reformed view, each individual stands alone before God, and their faith in the justifying and redeeming works of Christ alone has the potential to set them on the path of redemption. This individualistic and pessimistic anthropology is much in evidence in the political theology of Thomas Hobbes in which he set out the core liberal anthropology of modern political economy according to which the State, in underwriting private property and market contracts, is the principal device that prevents intrinsically self-interested individuals from killing each other and stealing each other’s property. This produces the ideological conditions necessary for the emergence of a modern economy premised on human society being a competitive ‘realm of lesser evil’ rather than a community characterised by mutuality, cooperation, and customs or practices that promote common goods, shared public spaces and so on (Michea 2009). Western Christianity after Hobbes is the source of the individualist anthropology that underwrites secular political economy from Adam Smith to Milton Friedman, and according to which humans have always had a tendency to truck and barter, and to seek their own self-interest in so doing (Graeber, 2011). Equally influential in the emergence of the customs, institutions and practices of modern capitalism was John Locke’s political theology in which he gave a definitive account of the ideas of economic productivity and private property ownership that are unique to modern capitalism. Locke first argued that by increasing the productivity of ‘nature’ by for example ploughing and planting crops on formerly forested land individuals acquire the right to own the part of nature whose productivity they improve (Wood, 2002). Locke is also crucial in the emergence in early modern Europe of modern banking and financialisation, since it was Locke who first argued that when humans generate a productive surplus by mixing human labour with land, and then turn this surplus into money, they are ‘redeeming’ the earth from its condition since the Fall of Adam of being unredeemed. In a striking reversal of early Christian and classical Greek economic thought, money for Locke becomes a key mechanism for the redemption of creation, and of human work. A third core theological contribution to the development of modern political economy was a group of influential eighteenth and nineteenth century Anglican thinkers including Robert Malthus, William Paley and John Bird Sumner. Along with the Scotsmen Adam Smith and Thomas Chalmers, these theological economists laid out the foundational anthropological innovation of modern economics: this is that humans have an enduring tendency to compete among themselves for the essentials, as well as the luxuries, of life because nature since the Fall has made these scarce. As the influential economic historian A. M. C. Waterman argues, Malthus was the first to describe scarcity of natural goods as the defining problem of human existence, and to represent it as a limit on growth in human numbers, and in the collective benefits that may be obtained by growth in manufacture and trade (Waterman 1991). And Malthus’ account of scarcity, competition and population dynamics influenced not only political economy and the subsequent theories of markets and money, but also biological science through Darwin’s theory of evolution. Gift and Livelihood from Adam to Christ In Christ’s parable of the Good Samaritan, a traveller in Judea, which is to him a foreign country, rescues a citizen of that country from a crime, brings him to an inn, pays for the inn keeper to take care of him, and then continues on his way. This drama between strangers is one in which no return is expected – it is a story of gift and not of exchange. It is told by Christ as a way of exemplifying what it means to ‘love a neighbour’: the Samaritan did not live in the same country as the man who ‘fell among thieves’, but he acted towards him as if he were a neighbour and a kinsman. The parable might be said to have economic significance when set alongside the economic saying ‘cast your bread upon the water and it shall return to you a hundredfold’ (Ecclesiastes 11.1). Christ refuses numbers when he considers the rewards of charity. But return and redemption he does envisage, most classically in the parable of the Last Judgment when the king who judges the righteous for having cared for the sick, prisoners, the naked and the hungry declares ‘inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren you did it to me’ (Matthew 25. 40). Those who in their earthly life act compassionately, giving themselves to relieve the suffering of others, in the parable are redeemed from death and judgment and received into Paradise. In his seminal essay The Gift, Marcel Mauss argued that before societies were organised around slavery and contract, rent and wages, human beings shared goods and services in ways that were not premised on a calculated or designated return (Mauss 1966). Mauss reflects on European anthropological misunderstandings of apparently wasteful tribal customs such as the potlatch and the kula in Native American and Melanesian societies. He argues that these customs, in which large quantities of goods were destroyed, indicated a culture in which honour required regular rituals in which differential wealth accumulation between households was levelled since inequity in ownership threatened mutual reliance and hence the moral basis of exchange in a gift economy. The anthropological misunderstanding of the social function of these rituals indicated for Mauss what was lost to modern Europeans by the ‘rational’ separation between economic exchange and moral networks and relationships (Pritchard 1966). Karl Polanyi argued analogously in The Great Transformation that economic exchanges were situated in, and sustained, communities, networks and social institutions until the nineteenth century adoption of the English liberal economy in which rent and wages came to dominate the provision of food, shelter, and livelihood in much of Western Europe (Polanyi 1943). For Polanyi the cultural root of the terrible wars of the twentieth century was the turn to competitive individualism, and coercive rent and wages, of the new liberal political economy, which had set Europeans in a ‘war of all against all’. Mauss and Polanyi’s work has been highly influential in political theology, including in readings of economics in the Old and New Testaments. The Book of Genesis begins with a story of an archaic society where food is gathered and shared among equals, mortals walk with God, and there is no violence. Genesis ends with sovereign power destroying an archaic economy, as farmers sign over their animals and their land to Pharaoh in exchange for stored grain in the famine years overseen by Joseph who, though said to be of Hebrew descent, acts as Pharaoh’s vice-regent. Genesis describes the cultural evolution of humanity, as it occurred in the ‘fertile crescent’ of the Levant from hunter-gathering to agriculture. It shows how advances in food and agricultural technologies, and in particular multi-year food storage, not only freed some from growing food to become builders, courtiers, chefs, magicians and scribes, but also made possible a cult of kingship which could subdue and enslave whole peoples in its ruthless and violent pursuit of power and wealth. The authors of Genesis imagined the early cultural state of humanity – as hunter gatherers – as a very small society occupying a garden idyll, literally ‘paradise’. In the beginning the first humans lived in the open air in a warm moist climate without clothing or furniture, and sustained themselves by gathering food without violence towards other kind or each other. They were non-hierarchical in their mutual relations, and they experienced companionable relationships with other-kind who were not afraid of them. As bearers of the divine image Adam and Eve are also imagined as enjoying a less asymmetric divine-human relation than the inhabitants of the cities of ancient Babylon and Egypt according to whose Temple cults and texts only the King imaged the divine. Eden describes an environment of primeval beauty, in which the essentials of life are not scarce but abundant, and in which human relations are characterised by mutual agreement and gift exchange, and there is no coercion or violence. In Eden there is no coercive king or law, there is no temple or temple hierarchy, and there are no liberal individuals since Adam and Eve ‘are of one flesh’ and are therefore intrinsically relational, and not isolated, persons. In Eden there is no scarcity, no competition over scare resources. In Eden the fruits of the earth are shared between humans and all creatures and there is no violent appropriation. In Eden there is no need for money as a medium of exchange and hence there is no debt, and no debt slavery. The fateful decision of Adam and Eve to select fruit from a forbidden tree is described as the origin of the primeval move of early humanity from a moist sub-tropical forest onto the plains of the Levant where agriculture was first developed. This move, described as ‘exile’, is in effect a ‘fall into agriculture’. As I have argued elsewhere the Eden and Exile narrative, and its aftermath in the murder of the pastoralist Cain by the crop-growing Able, and the further descent of humanity into violence and debauchery, said to have occasioned a primeval flood, may be read as the attempt by Israelite historians recently exiled from the land of Canaan in Babylon to set down a history which explains how humanity first became agrarian, and then warring, slave-keeping and imperious (Northcott 2014). Genesis ends with the famous Joseph saga in which an Egyptian born prince of Hebrew descent is said to redeem his family, and all of Egypt, from famine by storing up grain from an exceptional period of good harvests and rationing it during a period of bad harvests. Grain storage on this scale is indicative of an advanced agrarian civilisation, and Egypt was the first in the Levant. But Joseph’s forward planning came at a price. In exchange for Pharaoh’s stored grain, Joseph took possession first of the animals and then the land title of Egyptian peasant farmers. Hence in the beginning of the Book of Exodus the descendants of Israel and Joseph are depicted as slaves in Pharaonic Egypt, and among things making bricks for its building works. The early chapters of Genesis, and patristic commentary on them, provide the textual root of a Christian economic anthropology of original peace and ecological abundance according to which humans were not originally fated to fight each other, nor to compete for scarce resources. This anthropology inspired romantic critics of modern political economy, such as John Ruskin and Hamman, and are a key source for contemporary political theologians’ retrieval of Christian political economy (Milbank 1991, Cavanaugh 2008). Contemporary scientific reconstructions of the prehistoric transition from hunter gatherer to agrarian by anthropological archaeologists tend to confirm the Genesis account in a number of ways. Pre-agrarian and early agrarian societies were in the main egalitarian and internally peaceable though there was often fighting when other tribal groups were encountered. But as the capacity to grow surplus food, and to store it as dry grain, developed, more complex buildings and social structures emerged including large temple structures, such as the ziggurats of ancient Babylon and the Pyramids of Egypt. These were constructed with forced labour and the cults associated with them often included human sacrifice, as also in other early post-agrarian societies such as the Mayan temples of Mesoamerica (Flannery and Marcus 2012). Kingship, priesthood, religious objects of power, and palatial complexes of buildings, are also associated with the building of Temple-like structures. Slavery also emerged in the more complex societies, and this indicates that property, and especially land and stored food, were increasingly concentrated in fewer hands. A precisely analogous process of development in early agrarian societies is described in the Old Testament. After exile from the abundant luxuriance of Eden human beings are described as nomads, pastoralists and herders of animals. Some do grow crops, but the first crop grower in Genesis, Cain, kills his brother Abel with an agricultural implement. The descendants of nomads and animal herders are said to have ended up in in Egypt where they are ensnared in the irrigated agricultural and monument building economy of the Pharaohs. Their delivery from Egypt, after passage through the wilderness of Sinai, is effected through divine aid in taking the land of Canaan which is a land that favoured pastoralism and was characterised by rain-fed agriculture. The original occupation of Canaan is said to have resulted in a survey of the land, initiated by Joshua, which allotted to each Israelite family sufficient land to produce food and grazing for its members and animals. The gift of land as nahala (inheritance) is protected by laws recorded in Leviticus and Deuteronomy which seem to have been designed to prevent excessive inequality in landholding, and to underwrite intergenerational inheritance of land as the key productive asset which ensured that the people of Israel continued to enjoy a well-distributed economy in which debt slavery, usury, and wealth accumulation by merchants and courtiers were restrained (Northcott 2015). This idea of an economy in which wealth accumulation and powerful elites were restrained is described by Richard Horsley as a covenantal economy (Horsley 2009). However the Old Testament history books, and the Hebrew Prophets, describe the descent from an economy which honoured the divine gift of good land to an economy in which the rich prospered and the poor and the weak fell into debt bondage and lost their nahala. The Books of Kings of the Old Testament, and more fully the Hebrew Prophets, describe how the instructions in the Torah designed to restrain accumulation of land by the wealthy, were ignored by the wealthy who ‘added house to house’ (Isaiah 5. 8) and so deprived people of their inheritance (Michah 2. 1-2). Ezekiel describes the links between this economy of primitive accumulation and the growth of international trade in luxury goods which was driven by the immoral excesses of the rich. As Donald Hay points out the principal cause of the growth of an elite of wealthy landowners was the institution of the Hebrew Monarchy which the Hebrews were warned in 1 Samuel would create a court which would accumulate land to itself, conscript labour for its building works and for its wars (Hay 1989 40). Some argue that the economic laws and regulations described in Torah – such as the jubilee law which required that land should be returned after fifty years to the descendants of families which gave it up as debt security – are no more than idealistic accounts of what might have been if the Israelites had not been exiled by Persians and Babylonians (Silver 1983) But Hay argues that despite its demise, the economy of ancient Israel as described in Torah contains important principles of Christian political economy which ought still to be honoured in Christian contributions to modern economic thinking (Hay, 1989). The zero growth economist Herman Daly similarly argues that the Old Testament describes what was in effect an ‘eleventh commandment’ which was in effect that ‘there shall not be excessive inequality among you’ (Daly, 1996). The case for the continuing relevance of Torah to modern political economy is more fully put by Aaron Levine. In The Wealth of Nations Adam Smith first set out the consequentialist moral calculus of modern welfare economics, according to which the worth of an action is measured by whether it increases the wealth of society in the long run rather than whether it is intrinsically a good action, with good intention, and with benefit intended for those immediately involved. As Levine argues, Smith innovated relative to the received ethical view in the eighteenth century which was that actions motivated principally by private gain were contrary to ‘the interests of society as a whole’ (Levine 2012, 4). The contemporary form of Smith’s calculus is the ‘Kaldor-Hicks criterion’ according to which actions by individuals, firms, or governments which produce increases in wealth are judged beneficial regardless of whether these increases cause reductions in welfare to some individuals or parties in the process. So for example an inner city motorway that speeds movements of business and private vehicles may be judged beneficial even though it increases pollution in inner city streets and increases early mortality from particulate and nitrous oxide pollution. This moral calculus implies a willingness to price lives or souls competitively so that some lives – for example those of high earning business people are judged more valuable than those of inner city children in deprived areas whose health is harmed by vehicular pollution. This moral or ‘hedonic’ calculus was also a core feature of the political economy of John Stuart Mill and is much criticised by some economists and philosophers (e.g. Mishan, 1971, Sagoff, 1990). But it remains fundamental to modern economics and to the promotion of ‘growth’ as the transcendent goal of economic organisation. Against the hedonic calculus of Smith and Mill, Torah, and Christian command and virtue ethics, judge the worth of actions deontologically, according to whether they are intrinsically good, express good intentions towards others, and so demonstrate a good character on the part of the actors. Hence the fair and relatively equitable distribution of nature’s goods among the people of God in social arrangements is considered an intrinsic good which Torah is designed to protect (Levine 2012). And hence when Isaiah laid out the conditions of a redeemed social order, in which the good society is restored in a future Israel, he included distributed property ownership, and ownership of the means of production, among all householders: And they shall build houses, and inhabit them; and they shall plant vineyards, and eat the fruit of them. They shall not build, and another inhabit; they shall not plant, and another eat: for as the days of a tree are the days of my people, and mine elect shall long enjoy the work of their hands. They shall not labour in vain (Isaiah 65. 20-23) In the same vein as this prophetic announcement of the restoration of the distributed economy of pre-exilic Israel, Christ announced in his first sermon in Capernaum that in his public ministry the poor would have the good news preached to them, captives would be set at liberty, and the ‘acceptable year of the Lord’ had come (Luke 4.19). The ‘acceptable year of the Lord’ was an explicit reference to the Jubilee year in which debts were periodically forgiven and the poor received back the inherited allotment of the land of Israel which their fathers or grandfathers had lost through debt to the rich. More seminally, Christ taught that acting toward the good, as in the parable of the Good Samaritan, was how individuals were to live in such a way as to fulfil the goal and inner meaning of the Jewish law. The Samaritan, though a non-Jew banned from making sacrifices in the Temple, fulfilled the Jewish law, when a Jewish priest and a Jewish theologian failed so to do by performing an intrinsically good act by making himself the neighbour to the victim on the road. From the perspective of modern economics his time and money would have resulted in greater collective welfare if he had devoted it to improving security on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho rather than devoting it to rescuing a victim whom he happened to find on the road. But in performing an intrinsically good act the Samaritan shows right intention and directs himself to perform the good which is the goal and summation of the Jewish law. As for more direct economic teaching, Christ is also recorded as having given a significant number of warnings against the accumulation of wealth, and especially of surplus product from the land. There are two elements to his teachings on the danger of wealth. The first, as most powerfully in the parable of Dives and Lazarus, is that the wealthy risk their own souls by storing up for themselves in excess of what they need, and hence risk keeping from the poor the fruits of creation which were originally given by God for the poor and not only for the rich. The second, as in the saying that ‘a man cannot have two masters’ is that the wealthy risk their souls by becoming more desirous of their wealth and possessions than they are of God and the Kingdom. By placing too much trust in property for their security they neglect that ultimately their redemption depends on God and not on wealth. Alongside warnings about excessive wealth, and what is due to the poor, Christ’s kingship is also a counter-witness to the scarcity of food, drink, clothing and shelter experienced by the poor in imperially occupied Judea. Twice Christ is recorded as feeding large crowds of those who had followed him into desert places and these crowd feedings anticipate and display divine abundance as a counter-witness to imperially produced scarcity. Wealth and Poverty from Augustine to Malthus If Christ taught that the priority in economic terms was for his disciples to store up ‘treasure in heaven’, rather than surpluses on earth, this advice was taken quite literally by those of the Christian faith who also owned wealth in the centuries after his death and resurrection, as Peter Brown shows in his magisterial study of Augustinian and post-Augustinian attitudes to wealth. But this teaching was not taken in the redistributive direction that a reading of it alongside the Hebrew prophets, and the other economic and ethical teachings of Christ, suggests (Brown 2012). Not until nineteenth century Christian socialism, and Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum, is it possible to find influential advocacy by Christian theologians of the kind of moral and legal restraints on economic inequality, and on the mal-distribution of nature’s goods, that may be discerned in Torah. On the contrary the principal approach to political economy that emerges in the Christian tradition, and that endured in much of Europe until the Reformation, as Christianity became the dominant religion, was that the duty of the rich was to be charitable toward the poor, but that the poor had no reason to expect that such charity would render them non-poor before death. Augustine, like the early Christian fathers, taught that it was possible for the wealthy to be redeemed provided they gave alms to the poor. Augustine asserted this vociferously in the course of an ongoing argument with Christian perfectionists. Donatists and Pelagians, most influentially in the treatise De devitiis, argued that the wealthy could not be saved, and only those who had not sought wealth, or gave it all up on conversion, were redeemed and would enter heaven (Brown 2012, 310). Augustine mounted a preaching campaign against Donatist churches in North Africa, in which he argued that the Catholic position had always been that almsgiving expiated for sin, and that therefore the rich who gave alms would be saved (Brown 2012, 361). Augustine also lambasted the view of the perfectionists because it denied the full redemptive power of the work of Christ, of which the expiatory power of religious gifts was an analogue not a substitute. Augustine was not alone. As Jacob Viner argues, there is hardly a trace of redistributive justice, or what is now called socialism, in the early Church fathers, and indeed the Church grew wealthy, including owning slaves, precisely because its wealthier members gave property to the Church to expiate for their sins as church teaching required (Viner 1978, 26-8). While the Church used the surplus of its property for poor relief, particularly among poor church members, there is no suggestion in the fathers that the church had a duty to reduce general economic inequality, the main exception being when it occurred too visibly within a Christian congregation. In that case the Church ought to see to it that the rich ensure that the poor in the same congregation have sufficient to feed, clothe and house themselves and their children. But in the main the early church teaching, as with Augustine, was that the poor provide the rich with the opportunity to redeem themselves of their sins. It was in the main the ‘heretics’ who taught otherwise. Brown documents a striking change that occurred in the fifth century with the demise of Roman imperial structures, and this was a new mentality about wealth, poverty and souls which shaped Catholic Europe for the next thousand years. This mentality reflected first that with the demise of empire the Church found itself wealthy. And second it reflected the idea that when the rich gave to the poor and the Church, and especially when their gifts paid for new churches, and for ceremonial artefacts such as sanctuary lights, this would not only sanctify their wealth but speed the path of their souls from earth to heaven after death. The result was a view of wealth ‘subtly touched by expectations of eternity’ for in the gifts of the wealthy to the poor and the church, ‘time and eternity were joined’ (Brown 2012, 524-5). If this view of wealth and poverty held for a thousand years, it resulted in the accumulation by the Church, and religious houses, of vast wealth as rich Christians sought to secure their path to salvation by leaving gold, land and houses to the Church. This quantity of wealth inevitably corrupted religious houses which, according to the Benedictine rule, were supposed to be committed to poverty (Sorg 2003). It also resulted in the Church having oligopolistic economic and political power through most of Europe before the Reformation. It is not surprising that it took a sovereign revolt, most seminally in England, to produce a different doctrine from which, as I have already suggested, the lineaments of modern political economy emerged. But before this revolt took place, Luther had already powerfully argued, against the long consensus of Catholic teaching, that all are sinners constantly in need of redemption, and almsgiving does not redeem the rich. Rich and poor alike stand under the judgment of God, and the judgment is determined not by the religious gifts or good works performed either by rich or poor, but by the individual faith of each believer in God and in the expiating work of Christ. The seminal change in Christian economic teaching that Luther first heralded is that religious gifts are no longer expiatory of sins. It is however a paradox of this novel Protestant view that it produced a harsher view of poverty and a less redemptive view of wealth than the Catholic one. If wealth can no longer be redeemed by charity, then charity is no longer the required form of the relationship which ought to exist between rich and poor within the same Christian congregation, region, or nation. Furthermore if the rich are not redeemed by giving to the poor they have no need to be in a charitable relationship with the poor and so in Protestant countries the rich set to with a vengeance in the next two hundred years in clearing peasants and the poor from their lands. It is then unsurprising that Protestantism proved so hospitable to capitalism. But the source of this synergy is not so much a by-product of anxiety about salvation, or the Lutheran secularisation of the concept of vocation, as Weber argued. Instead it lies in the radical individualism of Reformed theology, and the freeing of wealth from its previous setting in the divine economy of redemption. Hence the Dissolution of the monasteries in England was the decisive break with the past and set in motion the modern form of primitive accumulation, which continues to this day in developing nations where peasants are still being driven off land and into vagrancy (Wood 2002). Primitive accumulation by the State and the nobility made possible the first large unitary nation state in modern Europe. It was followed up by a series of Acts of enclosure over successive centuries, and it was the seedbed for the birth both of British capitalism and of economic liberalism. The Dissolution turned over customary and collective farming arrangements to the English crown and nobility, and in so doing disrupted the collective manorial, monastic and post-feudal farming arrangements which, as Belloc argues, had produced a reasonable degree of heritable wealth distribution, and hence economic liberty, in England by the sixteenth century (Belloc 1912). The Dissolution performed in economic and material terms the liberation of wealth from the divine penitential economy, a process which also occurred in the Rhineland and the Low Countries after the Reformation. And the Dissolution set set in motion events which led to the English civil war, and in turn produced the pessimistic anthropology of Hobbes, and Locke’s new theology of redemption as the forcible turning of nature into private property and monetary wealth. As the Crown and nobility increased their power and estates they evicted hundreds of thousands of peasant farmers from their heritable lands, and enclosed most of the forests, grazing lands and marshes which had been common land. The poor were forced onto the road, and in large numbers attempted to squat on waste land and establish a right of abode, though Elizabeth I tried to ban the practice. Many became paupers who lived off the parish and increasingly were forced into workhouses, and their descendants into wage slavery in noisy polluting factories and insanitary slums where life expectancy among labouring classes until the late nineteenth century was an average of twenty-five years. Far from deploring this sorry state of affairs, mainstream Christian political economy in both England and Scotland tended toward the liberal Protestant and laissez fare view that individuals were responsible for their own fate, and the poor deserved their lot (Norman 1976). From the sixteenth to the nineteen century therefore the foundations of the discipline that is now called economics were laid in the Protestant Reformation and its aftermath. This is not to say that capitalism did not also develop in Catholic European countries. But in these countries a very different kind of capitalism emerged and it fostered a range of institutions and practices that contrasted significantly with those of Northern Europe. And the differences persist, as has been most sharply revealed by the European Union’s currency union or ‘Eurozone’. Attitudes to debt, money, production and wealth remain sharply divided between Northern and Southern Europe. But the Eurozone ignores these cultural distinctions, and these distinctions were a major feature of the economic crisis that afflicted the continent from 2008, though one that was not commented upon by economists or bankers who believe that their discipline and practices have no relationship to theology. But as the influential economic historian A M C Waterman argues, economics was a branch of moral theology in the Christian West until the eighteenth century, and it is impossible to understand economic thought without understanding ‘the metaphysical and theological presuppositions of its time and place’ (Waterman 2004, 107). The discipline that is now called ‘economics’, or sometimes political economy, only emerged as a distinct field of enquiry in the mid-nineteenth century. Until that time the key doctrines and insights of economic thought were advanced by moral philosophers and theologians, including most influentially Adam Smith and Robert Malthus. The theological background and presuppositions of Smith’s Wealth of Nations and Malthus’ Essay on Population were first those of Anglican religious and economic thinkers. George Berkeley was the most influential of these, and he argued as an Irish Bishop keen to reduce poverty in his diocese, that wealth, its creation and its increase are all good things which the Church should encourage and facilitate (Waterman 2004, 110). The second key influence was Bernard Mandeville, who in his famous Fable of the Bees was the first to claim that individuals pursuing their own private good could promote a general rise in prosperity (Mandeville 1924, A. O. Hirschmann, 1997). This claim was taken up by Bishop Butler in England and David Hume and Adam Smith in Scotland. Butler argued that the goals of private interest and public good coincide because of the work of divine Providence, while Hume secularised Butler when he argued, as did Smith, that the large number of different individual actions in societies where individuals are free to pursue their own best interests do result in the production of a ‘spontaneous order’ which advances collective wealth and welfare (Waterman 2004 110). Smith follows Hume on this in Wealth of Nations and, as Waterman argues, he relies on Newtonian natural theology, as well as ‘providence’, to underwrite it theologically. Nature for Newton is directed and sustained towards the good of humanity by God. So for Smith myriad human actions on nature by individuals which increase its productivity are directed by nature towards the good end of an increase in collective wealth, and increased returns on investment. Hence it is because the laws of supply and demand, which determine market prices, are natural that they are virtuous, and this natural theology is foundational to the modern conception of economy (Waterman 2004, 113-4). The essay that along with Smith’s Wealth of Nations established economics as a distinct discipline was Malthus’ Essay on Population (Malthus 1803). Malthus’ essay was written to oppose Jacobinist attacks on private property, and advocacy of egalitarian communism, along the lines of the French Revolution. Malthus argued that the state of nature is such that human beings experience distress in obtaining the material necessities of life, and that their scarcity a natural evil in nature which is a consequence of Original sin. But from this negative argument Malthus produced a positive economic doctrine that competition for scarce goods produces efficiency in their production and hence creates a surplus sufficient to sustain a given population, although Malthus also warned that where manufactures and machines enabled a population to grow there was a risk that scarcity would return to limit this growth by producing diminishing, rather than increasing, returns. As Waterman argues, Malthus did not stop there however. In the Essay Malthus also argued that effort and suffering in competing for the scarce provision of nature had been instrumental in bringing forth mind into existence in the evolution of Homo sapiens and in this arugment it is possible to see the influence of Malthus not only on economics but on Darwinian evolutionary biology (Waterman 1991, 99, fig. 1). For Malthus, as for Sumner and others in the Anglican tradition, the purpose of Christian political economy was to continue the work begun by Edmund Burke in resisting the subversive ideas associated with the French Revolution, and in making the case for the continuing divine wisdom and providential purpose in facilitating a market economy in which land and labour were priced according to the natural laws of supply and demand, and in which those who happened to own a lot of land therefore had in effect a divine to continue so to do. Christian political economy was an anti-revolutionary defence both of the landed aristocracy who had enriched themselves since the Dissolution, and of the established Church, against an ideology which for three years had prevented public Christian worship in France, desecrated many church buildings, and guillotined many landowners. But in its adumbration of a theory of scarcity, individualism, spontaneous order, and the natural laws of supply and demand, Christian political theology laid the groundwork for the development of economics as a standalone, secular and post-theological discipline. And in setting up the discipline, it also lent to it a set of moral beliefs which persist to this day including that ‘poverty and social inequality are the inevitable outcome of scarcity’ (Waterman, 1991 258), rather than, as Old Testament writers argued, a result of rich landowners taking more of the fruits of the earth than they need and using debt and penury to deprive others of their rightful shares. Theologically then the origin of economics as a ‘dismal’ science is precisely in the view that nature, and human nature, have been forever marred by the fall and Original Sin and that beatitude, happiness and redemption are ultimately not to be had in this life but in the next. And in this new theology the disposition of nature’s wealth on earth, nor even the relations of rich and poor, have little or nothing to do with the salvation of souls or the Christian theology of redemption. The Retrieval of Divine Economy from F. D. Maurice to Laudato Si Smith and Malthus were the crucial innovators in the theological justification of the market economy, including of the reduction of land and labour to the law of price, and hence of the gradual detachment of the exchange economy from local, regional and even national political communities which spread throughout Europe in the nineteenth century, in what Polanyi called the Great Transformation (Polanyi 1945). But there was inevitably a push back against the rise of the dismal doctrine of competitive individualism and the anthropological pessimism that accompanied it. Socialism was a phenomenon confined to Christian nations (Nitti 1895). It originated first in England and Germany in the enormously influential work of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and then in France with the writings of Henri Saint-Simon and Charles Fourier. Christian socialism also emerged in the nineteenth century, in the writings of John Ruskin, F. D. Maurice and R. H. Tawney, and this played a key role in reframing Christian political economy, as did Christian distributists such as Hiliaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton. Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum inaugurated the modern tradition of Catholic Social Teaching which represented a systematic attempt to resist socialism but at the same time to recover an account of Christian moral and social order in an industrial market economy. After the Second World War, political theologians, including Johannes B. Metz and Jurgen Moltmann, and the Latin American liberation theologians, took up the same challenge and are dealt with elsewhere in this volume. At the beginning of what I am calling the retrieval was John Ruskin who from his Lakeland sanctuary railed against the plague winds from darkest Manchester and the besmirching chimneys and railways which were spreading ugliness across the landscape and injustice and misery amongst the people. In Unto This Last: Essays on Political Economy he protests from the outset ‘the modern soi-disant science of political economy’ which was ‘based on the idea that an advantageous code of social action may be determined irrespectively of the influence of social affection’ (Ruskin 1862, 17). He argues it is morally wrong, unjust, and dishonourable to argue that a worker’s wages can be determined only by the laws of supply and demand and without reference to what he needs to live and care for a family. And he argues that to pursue a commercial interest without social affection is the reason why classical thought until modern times had regarded trade as dishonourable. In a play on words, he reminds his readers that the root of value is the Latin valorum which refers as much to valor, and valiant and that in Latin what is valuable is what ‘avails to life’ (Ruskin 1862, 99). That the science of economics and the laws of supply and demand operate land and labour markets which encourage the destruction of the beauty of nature and the enslavement of the worker shows what happens when value is detached from valor, and economics from ethics. The Anglican clergyman and scholar F. D. Maurice in his sermons and other writings resisted the French Revolution by arguing that the Church was the foundation of a social order, the ‘kingdom of Christ’ that was not merely made by men and women and therefore could not be overthrown by revolutionaries. But he also acknowledged the complaints of the revolutionaries about the treatment of working people in industrial cities. He therefore lamented that the established church had done little to ameliorate the miserable condition of working people in industrial cities, or of Irish peasants, and had instead allied itself with the aristocracy and the Crown against both dissenting English workers and merchants. Maurice argued that the Church was founded on earth to recover the divine order of created life by bringing all persons, even all creatures into ‘a fellowship of mutual love’ (Maurice 1959, 314; 322): and he called on the rich to perform the good works that the gospel had once commanded that they ought to pursue towards the poor in ‘our awful manufacturing districts’ (Maurice 1959, 320), and so recover a vision for a divine order of the kingdom on earth and not only in heaven. Maurice, along with Charles Kingsley, may reasonably be said to have founded the tradition of Christian socialism in England (Raven 1920). But in the first half of the twentieth century the figure who most influentially took it up against modern economic thought was R. H. Tawney. In Religion and the Rise of Capitalism Tawney first unfolded the medieval background to Christian or divine economy and argued that the medieval ban on usury, and the ‘just price’ and ‘just wage’ which were fostered by the trade guilds, were practices which were the fruit of Christian civilization and reflected the medieval theological belief that human life finds its felicity on earth when it is directed towards its ultimate end which is the beatific vision (Tawney 1937, 19). Those practices which fostered beauty and justice in medieval economy were indicative of a metaphysical view of society which saw all human activity is participating in divine grace and as therefore having a potentially sacramental quality (Tawney, 1937, 21). Religion therefore embraced and ordered all aspects of life towards its divine end, and fostered the view of society as a social organism in which the various lower and higher orders of society participated in a ethical order in which each was given his or her due. But while the medieval order was not an order that admired equality it was nonetheless an order in which mere money making, or avarice, was discouraged. The medieval mindset held that ‘economic interests are subordinate to the real business of life, which is salvation, and that economic conduct is one aspect of personal conduct, upon which, as on other parts of it, the rules of morality are binding’ (Tawney 1937, 31). This meant that at its core the Church’s economic teaching was that moral principles ought to take precedence over economic appetites and that Christian virtues ought to be knitted into the fabric of how a society is organized. And hence against the tenor of his age, Tawney argued that the Church had a duty to resist a secular economic doctrine which treated the poor as undeserving of philanthropy, and even fated to be poor, and to retrieve the earlier view, that religion, and especially those spiritual, just and charitable actions which fit those who perform them for the vision of God ought once again to be upheld both by Church and nation as of greater importance for collective wellbeing than money-making and trade for their own sake (Tawney 1937, 277-87). Christian socialism included within it an analysis of the ills of industrial society. And it fostered a set of practices – cooperatives, trades unions, mutual insurance and friendly societies, arts and crafts – and values – egalitarianism, freedom from coercion, beauty – that recalled Christian medievalism including Gothic craftsmanship, Guild labour associations, and local economic regulation of Just Prices and Just Wages. For Ruskin and Tawney, Christian socialism was a real world effort to infect economic practices, even in modernity, with the love of God and neighbour, to put life above wealth, and to honour goodness, truth and beauty above efficiency in monetary accumulation. This was a politics of hope which, like the redemptive vision of the Hebrew prophets, saw ‘expectation as a fundamental human attitude’ that a better society would come in this life and that progress towards a better society is an orientation that may be discerned in the direction of historical events (Tillich 1977 103). What Tillich called the ‘prophetic attitude’, and Bloch the ‘principle of hope’ (Bloch 1995), was at the centre of what became the dominant stream of political theology in Europe, and then in the developing world, in the second half of the twentieth century. Reinhold Niebuhr (1932) and Carl Schmitt (1986) dismissed Christian socialists as political romantics who were unrealistic about the intrinsic tendencies of humanity, particularly in collectivities, towards corruption and violence. After a hundred years of catastrophic and ‘total war’ in Europe and beyond, both argued that the fundamentals of the human condition had been mis-described by nineteenth century liberalism. The human condition in society is fundamentally one of conflict and not cooperation. Economics is the discipline which, properly ordered by the decisionary power of sovereign States, can channel conflict into productive activities. Christian realism also provided a way for Christian democrats to embrace the Humean separation of fact and value, economics and ethics, by confining religion to the movements of God in the inner life of the individual, and the worship of the Church. Nineteenth century Christian political economy had resisted the fact-value distinction by turning God into a merciless force of providence who used famine and scarcity to cull colonised peoples and the industrial working classes. Given the complicity of this tradition in the death and immiseration of millions of poor and working people in Britain and Ireland - from the Irish Famine to the Great Depression – it inevitably lost its hold on churchmen and women. In its place neo-orthodox theologians – including Karl Barth as well as Reinhold Niebuhr – suggested that there was no promise in the New Testament or the teachings of Christ that the Church would transform the conditions of sin and coercion which characterise human collectives. The Church might at best prevent secular powers from totalitarianism, by reminding them that they govern under a higher authority, but there was no justification in the Christian tradition for believing that the fallen powers could be sanctified, and indeed efforts to sacralise kingship and nationalism were, for Barth, crucial progenitors of German nationalism and national socialism. In this approach, the economy is a sphere of life characterised by sin in which competition for scarce material goods generates human ingenuity in creating wealth: economics is the scientific description and theorisation of this alchemy, which Christians have no reason to deconstruct or resist (Novak1982, Preston 1991). Christian realists were not alone in resisting Christian socialism. At the same time as Niebuhr was formulating Christian Realism, the Mont Pelerin Society (MPS), which included leading figures in central and private banks and in the economics profession from the United States and Western Europe, began annual meetings at Mont Perlin in the Swiss Alps from 1947, and was presided over until 1960 by Ferdinand Hayek (Mirowski and Plehwe, 2015). The MPS promoted a conception of a post-collectivist and the revival of a genuinely liberal ‘good society’ (Lipmann 1943). The core concern was to reassert the central liberal insight of the freedom of the individual consumer/producer against collectivism and coercion. The failure of liberalism was evident in Two World Wars, and in the rise of the State which had taken totalitarian form in Germany, the Soviet Union, China and beyond, and which, even in Western Europe and the United States, had grown immensely in its powers to direct and plan economic activities, from the American ‘New Deal’ to European welfare systems. Central to the neoliberal thought collective, whose influence now dominates economic policy, which began as a meeting of exiles from Nazi Austria, Germany and France, is that individual freedom from coercion resides in property rights, and the freedom of individuals to plan and order their own lives. The core claim of MPS was that government works best when it underwrites the rule of law, and least well when it involves deliberative and discretionary power, and the power to direct individuals towards certain ends such as, for example, reducing inequality or promoting welfare. Like Niebuhr, MPS members thought that only when individuals act according to their own moral lights is it possible for actions and practices to be directed toward moral ends. When governments attempt to direct societies towards moral ends the corruption of the collective subverts morality. Key figures in the MPS were Catholics, and neoliberalism bears striking resemblance to the natural law philosophy of Jacques Maritain in which the sphere of grace is confined to the individual and the sacramental life of the Church, while natural law is the origin of conceptions of property rights, the rule of law, and so on. But as Cavanaugh’s ethnography of Argentina shows, this religio-political division between nature and grace, the individual and political order, was no guarantee of freedom from totalitarianism since it underwrote the Catholic church’s complicity with many totalitarian regimes in Latin America after the Second World War including that of Auguste Pinochet (Cavanaugh 1998). And further the coercive imposition, through the rule of law, of neoliberal policies and goals – such as the private ownership of formerly public goods, including water, electricity, telecommunications, education, healthcare, and transport infrastructure – has led to a decline in citizen freedoms to plan and deliberate over their own welfare since the user fees of such services rise beyond the reach of many householders. Hence neoliberal policies led to a significant rise in mortality rates in the countries of the former Soviet Union, to a rise in suicides, homelessness and drug dependency in the United States and the United Kingdom, and to the rise of a range of health problems – from polluted water and air, from gender-bending and nerve corroding chemicals in food and water, and from restricted access to potable water and nutritious food – which had been in decline until the post-1979 imposition of neoliberal economic policies in high income and middle income nations. The Global Financial Crisis of 2008 was caused by the neoliberal deregulation of housing finance, debt and speculative investment trading in private and publicly listed banks. But neither in the USA nor Europe, many of whose largest banks and investments houses had to be rescued from bankruptcy with trillions of dollars of underwriting by central governments, the neoliberal thought collective continues to dominate economic policy-making. The United States Federal Reserve Bank lost $9 trillion in shoring up US banks in the GFC in little over 12 months. Alan Greenspan, the head of the Federal Reserve Bank and eminence grise of the neoliberal thought collective, admitted that the crisis revealed that his thinking had been flawed and that individuals could act corruptly in competitive but low regulation markets. But the ideology remains in place, and is competitively advanced in Europe and North America and Asia through a series of new free trade agreements which put corporate and investor property rights above the deliberative powers of nationally elected democratic parliaments. I have shown in this essay that Christian political theology is a poorly theorised but strong influence on medieval and modern political economy. Christian theological conceptions of scarcity, competition, individual freedom, the rule of law, and government as constraint on evil, have provided key ideological undergirding to the dominant economic ideologies of the last two hundred years, including nineteenth century laissez faire, mid-twentieth century social and Christian democracy, and late twentieth and twenty-first century neoliberalism. The work of Christian economists, such as Hay, Bruni and Michea, and of theologians such as Cavanaugh, Milbank and Long, in exposing the theological ideas which undergird contemporary economists, and help explain its failure either to predict the GFC or to advance a less fragile and more pluralist conception of economics since the GFC, is therefore not a sideline but arguably at the core of urgently needed reforms of accountancy, banking, competition law, trade agreements, procurement rules and much else. As Pope Francis argues in Laudato Si, when societies are dominated by a ‘magical’ conception of a market, that operates according to automatic rules not subject to moral deliberation or political restraint, it is only to be expected that this results in a ‘deified market’ (Francis 2015). The worship of idols, from ancient times, required human sacrifices. It was precisely in setting apart the worship of Yahweh from the cults of child-sacrifice and slavery followed by Israel’s neighbours, that Hebrew law makers and prophets first developed their the vision of a covenantal society redeemed from debt slavery through fairly distributed property rights to the divine creation, and by regular bouts of debt forgiveness, in what was the first attempt in human history to fairly manage what economists still recognize as the economic cycle. It was precisely because Israel’s theologians recognized wealth creation as a repetition of the divine act of original creation that they believed that rightly ordered and regulated the human economy was also a mirror of the divine economy. 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