These 1926 lectures by the famed Christian socialist are full of keen insights, lovely personal biases declared in shining prose and together form a coherent argument that the idea of the the liberated economic agent which is the basis of social theory since the Industrial Revolution cannot be understood separately to theological commitments arising from the Reformation that created the space in which the view we now take for granted could grow.
In other words, nuancing Weber, today’s capitalist is the mutant offspring of yesterday’s Puritan, who in turn was a prodigal son of Calvin. The intellectual family tree is complicated further by the fact that at the end of this, I’m even more convinced than ever that Karl Marx is in some important ways Thomas Aquinas’ long lost heir.
As I head into serious study on this topic in the next few years, I found this passage a useful warning to keep me from going astray and writing things that other church leaders or theologians think quite fancy but make absolutely no contact with the world we actually live in:
Usury, a summary name for all kinds of extortion, was the issue in which the whole controversy over ‘good conscience’ in bargaining came to a head, and such questions were only one illustration of the immense problems with which the rise of a commercial civilization confronted a Church whose social ethics still professed to be those of the Bible, the Fathers, and the Schoolmen. A score of books, garnished with citations from Scripture and from the canonists, were written to answer them. Many of them are learned; some are almost readable. But it may be doubted whether, even in their own day, they satisfied any one but their authors. The truth is that, in spite of the sincerity with which it was held that the transactions of business must somehow be amenable to the moral law, the code of practical ethics, in which that claim was expressed, had been forged to meet the conditions of a very different environment from that of commercial England in the seventeenth century.
Your Correspondent, Bade self-love and social be not the same