In the foregoing posts, I chronicle how libertarian ideology has led the Republican Party astray, misleading the American public about the real problems and solutions for our common challenges. The resurgence of libertarian ideology started during the late 1970’s and the 1980’s when the post-WWII consensus about how advanced industrial societies should be governed came under question after the Vietnam War, the 1970’s energy crisis, and bouts of inflation. One of the more important Transatlantic figures in the resurgent right was British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, whose electoral victory in 1979 showed the way for Ronald Reagan’s electoral win in 1980. As a conservative MP of a new school, Thatcher was a student of the founder of neo-liberalism, Friedrich von Hayek, who attempted to create an economics based almost exclusively upon the action of individuals in the marketplace. Thatcher’s 1987 statement “that there is no such thing as society..only individuals and families” is an almost programmatic expression of Hayek’s beliefs and economic prescriptions.
While Thatcher apparently tried to back away from this statement in her memoirs, the absurdity of it has not been fully exposed and explored, given that at the time it was uttered, neoliberalism was in the ascendant and has continued to have an inordinate influence over political discourse in all parts of the political spectrum. Blindness to or denial of society runs throughout the libertarian/neoliberal philosophy; economic policy prescriptions from most political groupings to this day are marked by the avoidance of viewing society as a system or whole. Though President Obama is nominally from a political tradition that believes in government as an integrative force in society, his utterances in his first years in office have tended to support or be only mildly critical of this ongoing denial of how society and the economy function as a system; he has instituted policies that support social systems in a manner that is, to the say the least, subtle and seems half-hearted. He and the Democrats are now harvesting the consequences of their neglect of these issues.
On the other side of the aisle in American politics, an almost unanimous consensus supports a continuing denial of society. Even a supposedly moderate Republican, like NJ Governor Chris Christie has been swept up this reflexive denial of the need for government to address systemic failures and gaps.
“Augustinian” Neo-classical Economists and Right-wingers
In his provocative book, “Economics as Religion”, Robert H Nelson analyzes the division of economics into schools as a function of economics being not a science but a theological enterprise within which there are various schools. While I disagree with some of Nelson’s conclusions and analysis, he presents an interesting thesis for explaining how trends in economics have reduced the focus of certain schools of economics to the sum of the fates of individual economic actors. In discussing the influential conservative Chicago School of economists, Nelson believes that their relentless preference for individual solutions or society as composed of individual corporations and consumers is analogous to or even originates in a theological preference that emerged in the influential early Christian theologian/philosopher Augustine of Hippo. As Nelson believes that all economics has a theological component, he is not branding the Chicago school with this theological label. I believe Nelson’s argument would be stronger and more interesting if he had unpacked more what “theological” means to him, including an examination of philosophical and metaethical issues that economics raises, independent of religion.
Despite these reservations, Nelson has opened up an interesting line of inquiry. Nelson points out that Augustinian theology, as set out in City of God, focuses on the salvation of individual souls rather than the restoration of the real physical community of people. Augustine apparently wrote City of God in response to Romans’ questioning of the official Christian religion of the Roman Empire after the sack of Rome by the Visigoths in 410. Christianity became a tolerated then the official religion of the Western Roman Empire after the Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity almost 100 years before Augustine, though the process of Christianization was still ongoing at the time of Augustine. Some Romans blamed the abandonment of the old Roman gods for the weakening empire. A convert to Christianity himself, Augustine argued back that what mattered was not the fallen “City of Man” (worldly society) but the ascension of individuals to the City of God. I am not an expert on Christian theology but am recapitulating here Nelson’s argument.
In retrospect, Augustine’s focus on individual conversion and salvation meshes well with the time in which he lived where secular authorities (Roman emperors and the Roman army) were losing control of the Roman Empire and gradually, over a period of centuries, the Roman Catholic Church would become the most powerful institution in Europe. However, at the time, Augustine apparently thought of himself as contributing to the governance of Christian Rome, though thereby condemning the “City of Man”. Augustine’s preference for spiritual over worldly matters has an interesting counterpoint or source in his struggles with his own lustful behavior, including having a mistress.
Nelson’s hypothesis is that the focus on individual economic “salvation” by economists echoes Augustine’s approach to Christianity. The Chicago School in particular has emphasized how economics should be viewed as a market struggle between individual economic actors rather than the regulation of a large-scale composite social system with its own qualities. The dismissal by the Chicago School and other anti-Keynesians of the need by government to manage, among other things aggregate demand, echoes to some degree Augustine’s dismissal of the “City of Man” as being intrinsically “fallen” and therefore not worth attending to.
Protestantism, Economics and Individual Salvation
Augustine, though crucial to Roman Catholic theology, was also claimed by a number of founders of Protestant sects, including John Calvin and Martin Luther, as being a close cousin to their efforts to “re-individualize” Christianity. The focus upon a return to individual experience, reading of the Bible, and faith rather than good works (in the form of payments to the Catholic Church) was part of the experience by which Protestantism gained adherents, in part in protest of corruption within the Roman Church.
Max Weber famously linked the rise of capitalism to what he called the Protestant Ethic, though a recent historical study casts doubt on a direct link between confessional membership and business activity in early modern Europe.
In historical time, the effects of Protestantism, in particular the revival of fundamentalist Protestantism in North America in the last 40 years, would seem to be closer in time and in influence than Augustine’s work, which is claimed by Catholics, Protestants and some secular philosophers as well. Why Nelson decided to focus on ancient history in the person of Augustine rather than more recent Protestant theology is not clear to me in my first reading of his work.
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