Christianity's Summa Economica is certainly the Lehrbuch der Nationoekonomie of the
Rev. Dr. Henrich Pesch, S.J. Pesch's foremost American interpreter and translator is Professor of
Economics Rupert Ederer. Though employed by an emphatically mundane institution, SUNY Buffalo,
Professor Ederer has had no difficulty attributing infallibility to the Rev. Dr. Pesch's work:
The Jesuit Father Pesch produced the longest, most thorough, systematic and, in my opinion,
the greatest economics text ever written. It appeared between 1905 and 1926. To the best of my
knowledge, it is also the only economics text which bears the Imprimatur of the author’s bishop
and the Imprimi Potest of his religious superior. These acknowledge simply that wherever the material
touches on faith and morals as taught by the Catholic Church, it is free from
error.1
The Lehrbuch is indisputably long, with all five volumes running to nearly 4000 pages of
surprisingly readable German. Length itself can be an excellent defense against critique, as well
as against the appreciative epitome.
Fr. Pesch is properly credited with providing a technical vocabulary for the recent encyclical tradition that began under Leo XIII. Though an obvious over-simplification, we might represent the Encyclicals as Catholicism’s response to the dangerous potentialities liberated by the Enlightenment — especially those of nationalism and socialism. Pesch was among the first to observe that, unless obstructed, free competition eventuates in monopoly, which will inevitably meld itself with the state’s police powers to create socialism.
The Rev. Dr. Pesch inveighs against materialistic world views, whether free-market or collectivist. He particularized the Golden Rule so as to check capitalism’s natural tendency to consolidate in tyranny; and, in doing so, created the Encyclicals’ now familiar terminology:
Subsidiarity counsels regulation by the least-aggregated yet capable level of authority;
Solidarity specifies the obligation of charity, so that no party to a prospective transaction is ever coerced by abject need; and
Distributism advocates private property as the individual’s bulwark against the state.
A great concern of the Encyclicals is preservation of the family as a refuge from the raw state of nature that is the limit of free-market economics. Striving for economic advantage is proper insofar as it occurs in a sphere limited to that which can best advantage society as a whole: it is confined to occupations productive of direct material benefits; these occupations are limited to those who are fit for them; and mere advantage never becomes the whole of human interaction. Here we find the Catholic Church doing scientific materialism a great service by inscribing the field in which it might apply. Man shall not live by bread alone, for if he attempts it, he shall not even have bread summarizes this contribution to economics.
SFEcon has postulated that the Just Price debate is not resolvable in any context other than that of market capitalism. It was only when the enlargement of personal wealth through commerce became morally permissible that generally optimal (hence uniquely determined) prices became computable — these prices being co-definitional with the economy’s (singular) technical potential as shaped by the familiar idea of utility tradeoffs. Since price and utility reflect one another through exercise of the social arrangements subsumed in neoclassical economics, the several definitions of a Just Price are seen to coalesce in the general optimum.
SFEcon states no preference as to how these admittedly indispensible social arrangements might be created. For all our theory knows, these arrangements might be sanctified societal reverence for the Golden Rule, by the romantic sentiments of anarcho-capitalism, or by the propaganda of a police state. Our model of how the Just Price arrives is deterministic within boundary conditions that we know to be culturally and morally laden; but we do not presume to illuminate the boundary in these terms. Instead, we limit ourselves to the boundary’s quantification, and leave all responsibility for shaping that boundary with those competent to exercise moral authority.
This stance is apparently no more acceptable to our Church than it is to the apostles of reason cited earlier: Austrian economics sources all economic behavior in the Human Action expounded by their secular saint Mises; and this aligns quite well with any revealed religion’s natural concern for the individual soul. SFEcon stands in error with respect to this view because we think economic behavior only becomes visible in the collected activity of what social biologists would call the primate superorganism. The organizing principle of the superorganism is efficiency, which might or might not be sourced in individual ethics or morals. It all depends on the complexity of the organism whose superorganism we study.
As studied by SFEcon, the economic system is inhumane until humanity makes it otherwise. Professor Ederer has duly discovered Papal Authority opposed to our distinction between macroeconomic forces and the responses they evoke from a given human culture:
You don’t have to be a brain surgeon or a lumberjack to know that you can’t do brain surgery with a chain saw [sic] or cut down trees with a scalpel. Likewise you don’t have to be a brilliant mathematician to know that mathematics is not the proper tool for economic analysis. Economists have been trying, but so far with only preposterous results. One day hopefully our poor science will be what it is capable of being, just as alchemy eventually became chemistry and astrology gave way to astronomy. I spent a good part of my life getting Pesch’s work into a world language so that maybe someday young scholars brighter than I will be able to build on this foundation, rather than on Adam Smith or Karl Marx, or Walras or Schumpeter or some more recent genius, perhaps someone even at the University of San Francisco. This stuff may mystify, and even impress some souls, but it will never clarify the important reality of economic life. Pope Paul VI started calling the social sciences “human sciences.” Mathematics is the proper language for astronomy and for physics, but not for economics, which is a human science.2Having thus dispatched his obligations as Papal Nuncio to economic science, we note that Professor Ederer neglects what would seem to be the relevant Pesch text that he himself has translated into plain English:
we are undoubtedly placing ourselves in direct opposition to the newest trend in economics, which propose that any consideration of a goal and every kind of value judgment must be excluded from the study of economics. If the proponents of this approach were content to say simply: we want to confine ourselves to trying to determine only what is, there would be no cause against such a self-limiting approach.3If we properly understand traditional culture’s case against SFEcon as being that of our morally indifferent approach, then Professor Ederer’s performance would seem to be more opposed than commended by the source he considers Magisterial. When such sources no longer convince the Catholic mind, there is always recourse in the more au courant authority of atheistic Talmudism:
Economics, insisted economist Ludwig von Mises, is value-free. It describes rather than prescribes. It does not tell us what we ought to do. It merely explains the various phenomena we observe.4_______________________