From the print magazine:
This essay was originally published in New Polity Issue 2.4 (Fall 2021).
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Abstract
There is a lot of talk these days about an increasing interest in socialism. It is quite the conundrum if approached within the assumptions of late liberalism: why indeed would the victors in the Cold War seek to become their vanquished enemies? Pope Pius XI helps us through this problem. He helps us see that socialism does not emerge out of nothing, but rather is produced out of liberal society. We have a rise in socialism precisely because we are increasingly liberal, increasingly capitalistic. Liberalism and socialism are locked in a battle that only occurs within the social space cleared by liberalism. As liberalism succeeds in its clearing, socialism always joins it by colonizing the empty space. Liberalism and socialism, individualism and collectivism, are, therefore, two sides of the same coin—a coin brought into being by replacing structures of solidarity with structures of self-interest. Opposition to socialism is therefore only coherent when it takes the form of a commitment not to liberalism but to social solidarity and so, ultimately, to Christianity.
“Before a man are life and death, good and evil, and whichever he chooses will be given to him.” — Sirach 15:17
The question before us is why there is an increased interest in socialism— and what we ought to do about it.[1] To help us reach an answer, I want to turn to the writings of Pope Pius XI. Pius is important for this question: first, because other than Leo XIII himself, and perhaps John Paul II, Pius XI is the most important contributor to the formation of social doctrine; second, because Pius occupied the papal throne from 1922 to 1939. This was a time in Europe in many ways similar to our own. It was a time of political and economic turmoil that saw the rise of the great 20th-century totalitarian movements: fascism and socialism. Pius developed Catholic social teaching to address this situation, and he directly addresses the question of why socialism was on the rise.
Pius’s answer to our question might be a bit hard to our ears. Pius blames capitalism (which he sometimes refers to as “individualist economics,” as the “current economic system,” or most often as “liberalism”). I know that many of us recoil from this. But this is a bias that we must overcome if we are going to understand the wisdom in Pius’s teaching. Pius asserts that we must navigate between the reefs of individualism on one side and collectivism on the other.[2] For Pius, collectivists are only the flipside of the individualist coin— collectivism is born out of individualism. They are bound up together like a two-headed monster. As Pius stated succinctly: “Let all remember that Liberalism is the father of this Socialism that is pervading morality and culture and that Bolshevism will be its heir.”[3]
Pius explains the connections between liberalism and socialism in part through a historical explanation.
In his telling, before liberalism, the social world was shaped by what we might call structures of solidarity. These were things such as the family, the community, the church, the guild, various professional associations, and then political structures such as the town or village. Such structures are rooted in neighborliness and friendship. Historically, these structures were ordered hierarchies of authority and care, governed by the moral law, that ascended all the way to the level of what we call the state. In principle, each level in this hierarchy of solidarity cared for or helped the level below, even while being obedient to and receiving the care of the levels above. The whole hierarchy was ordered toward the happiness, and ultimately the salvation, of each individual person: the highest, we might say, was for the lowest—power was for weakness. Pius developed the principle of subsidiarity in order to describe this type of social hierarchy.
Now, Pius was not naive, and he knew that the pre-modern world was not some sort of Christian utopia. That was not his point. His point was, however, that it had been better than the contemporary world because it had been rooted in the Christian imperative of love of God and neighbor, thus producing social authority that was always a participation in the very authority of God. An order of subsidiarity is an order of authority, rising from the authority of a simple father, and ascending to the authority of the king, and beyond even him to God himself. Authority comes from above in order to lift up what is below. [4] In this conception, political power was not from the people; it was from God. The popes of the 19th and early 20th century never tired of insisting on this point. All social power was from God: this was the heart of a society based on solidarity—love flowed down. This was what Pius XI referred to as the reign of Christ the King, which he devoted his pontificate to restoring.
What the pope describes in his many writings is how over the course of modern history these structures of solidarity were steadily pushed out and replaced with structures of self-interest. This was the replacement of a just political form with an unjust political form.
St. Thomas can help us understand what such a transition entails. Aquinas asserted that man was social in his nature; and part of what this means is that man is necessarily ordered in a hierarchical manner. Mastery of some people over other people is natural and inevitable. Thomas, however, described two forms this mastery can take. The first form is the form of justice. In this form, the master—the one with the power—uses his power for the good of the one over whom he wields it. The classic example is the power of a parent over his child. This is power as solidarity, which takes on the form of subsidiarity. The power of one is used to perfect another. The second form of mastery is that of injustice. Here, the powerful one uses his power over another for self-interest. In doing so, he reduces the weaker person to a mere instrument. The classic example is a master and his slave.[5] This type of power seeks to maximize itself, and so it takes shape in structures of centralized power and exploitation. It is important that we see that the moral distinction between just and unjust power has immediate systemic and structural implications. People build social structures in the pursuit of their ends. When power desires justice, just structures are, over time, built. When power desires injustice, unjust structures are, over time, built. The form of a society is tied directly to the end it pursues.
Pius argues that liberalism as a historical phenomenon was the process of replacing structures of justice with structures of exploitation, of replacing solidarity with selfishness.[6] This dynamic is, of course, present in the very theories of liberalism, which supposed society to be made up of self-interested actors who come together only to further their self-interest, and which thus replaced authority with the disinterested “invisible hand” of economic laws and the indifferent political enforcement of property rights.
F. A. Hayek, a liberal theorist who was very prominent at about the time Pius XI reigned, extolled liberalism’s achievement in this department, writing of a “gradual transformation of a rigidly organized hierarchic system into one where men could at least attempt to shape their own life.” He continues, “During the whole of this modern period ... the general direction of social development was one of freeing the individual from the ties which had bound him to the customary or prescribed ways.”[7] As a liberal, Hayek, of course, framed all of history within the individualist vs. collectivist dichotomy and so saw all the pre-modern structures as merely forms of stifling collectivism. Hayek and Pius see the same historical reality, the replacement of decentralized and personal forms with centralized, impersonal forms, from nearly opposite directions. Pius wrote:
things have come to such a pass through the evil of what we have termed “individualism” that, following upon the overthrow and near extinction of that rich social life which was once highly developed through associations of various kinds there remain virtually only individuals and the State.[8]
The liberals thought the reduction of society to the individual and the state was a good thing. Pius, following the tradition, asserted that it was not.
But this was not because Pius was a collectivist. Rather, it was because Pius understood humanity at a more profound level. In the Catholic reading, because real power differentials in human society are not just natural, but inevitable, liberalism could not achieve the actual equalization of society (of free individuals under abstract law);[9] rather, it achieved only the masking of true power behind merely formal equality, thus hiding (and effectively eliminating) this real power’s responsibility to care for the weaker members of society. Liberalism, for example, pretended that the boy working in the factory and the factory owner were equal. This freed the factory owner from the moral implications of his obviously greater power. All power, the Catholic tradition maintained, is a mediation of the power of God and so bears his image—and so must be ordered by justice for the perfection of all. The liberals, on the other hand, maintained that power ought not be a social phenomenon at all: equality under the law and universal negative rights were eliminating such concerns of a bygone age. Hayek, for example, asserted that policy makers ought to promote the expansion of competition into more and more of the social space—for him, wherever there were human relations not based on individualist competition, there was necessarily collectivism. Converting all pre-modern structures to liberal ones, then, was the liberals’ path to freedom.
This is mistaken. Because power is real and efficacious, the abandonment of the Christian conception of just power led to the construction of a society not of freedom but of slavery. It is important to grasp this. When powerful people use their power for self-interest, as a master over slaves, this has the social consequence of transforming the people, over time, into people who are servile. This is because power has real and unavoidable consequences. Think of a father with his son. It doesn’t matter if the father denies the existence of his power. That doesn’t make it go away. Even if he denies it, a father’s behavior forms his son into a certain type of person. Regardless of how “equal” to his son he pretends to be, the selfish and abusive father cannot avoid the consequences of the reality of social power: and so his son will always bear the scars of his abuse—most tragically, but all too often, by becoming abusive himself. Power—whether just or unjust—tends to replicate itself in those subject to it.
Liberalism created a society that masked real power within a formally equal competition for the maximum satisfaction of self-interest. This began at the top—with the wealthy structuring themselves as competing powers. But, because power is real and efficacious, this structure was reproduced, over time, down and through the social order.
This was not merely a structural transformation. It was a moral and spiritual transformation. The self-interest-based structures of liberalism produced vicious men, who then extended these structures, which then produced more effective mechanisms for the production of vicious men.[10] This was an accelerating process, and one that favored, Pius asserted, men who were further along in the destruction of their consciences.[11]
As society became increasingly morally bankrupt, the last remnants of the previous “society of solidarity” were colonized—including, finally, the state itself.
This is a very important point. What Pius was arguing (as we’ll see in a moment) was that as the ethos of liberalism was internalized it necessarily destroyed the conditions of possibility for liberalism itself, because the actors within the liberal regime no longer cared about preserving the structures of liberalism. Rather, all structures, including the state, became just another realm of competition for power, where the victors would use that power for their self-interest.
The great liberal thinker Ludwig von Mises once wrote: “Liberalism is not a policy in the interest of any particular group, but a policy in the interest of all mankind.”[12] Fair enough. But the problem should be immediately obvious. In whose particular interest is it to maintain the interests of all mankind? Is Mises not suggesting, then, that liberalism must ultimately rest on non-liberal suppositions, or, at the very least, that those who control the state must not themselves be actors within the liberal order but stand somehow outside that order, in service to some truth greater than that order? There was a contradiction within liberalism, since it relied upon a state that was not self-interested, that cared about the common good and so still bore the mark of solidarity, of pre-liberal Christianity.[13] This was the last great power of solidarity that was conquered, according to Pius, by the liberal ethos of competitive gain.
Pius writes, and forgive the long quotation:
[The] concentration of power and might, the characteristic mark, as it were, of contemporary economic life, is the fruit that the unlimited freedom of struggle among competitors has of its own nature produced, and which lets only the strongest survive; and this is often the same as saying, those who fight the most violently, those who give least heed to their conscience. This accumulation of might and of power generates in turn three kinds of conflict. First, there is the struggle for economic supremacy itself; then there is the bitter fight to gain supremacy over the State in order to use in economic struggles its resources and authority; finally there is conflict between States themselves, not only because countries employ their power and shape their policies to promote every economic advantage of their citizens, but also because they seek to decide political controversies that arise among nations through the use of their economic supremacy and strength. The ultimate consequences of the individualist spirit in economic life [are that] free competition has destroyed itself; economic dictatorship has supplanted the free market; unbridled ambition for power has likewise succeeded greed for gain[.][14]
When the drive for amassing wealth and power penetrated the state, it became cynical; it became unprincipled, a dictatorship. This is what Pius saw happening in the 1920s and 1930s. Power-hungry and unscrupulous men had risen to the top and had converted the structures of power to their ends.[15] This, Pius argued, was just liberalism destroying itself according to its own principle of the primacy of self-interested competition.
These dynamics were playing out among the poor as well, though in a different way. As the traditional structures of solidarity were eliminated, people were thrust into a world of competition within which they could not win. As the powerful became increasingly self-interested, the workers appropriately stopped viewing them as authorities who cared for their well-being and started viewing them as their oppressors, as their masters. They had to submit to these masters because of the consequences of not doing so, but this submission was not obedience. It was, rather, self-interested. The self-interest of the masters was replicated in the self-interest of the workers. The people became increasingly envious and resentful as, ironically, they became more like the people who were abusing them. In such mutual greed, Pius says, we see the origins of class conflict.[16] This was a downward spiral.[17] As Pius describes the situation:
Thus it came to pass that many, much more than ever before, were solely concerned with increasing their wealth by any means whatsoever, and that in seeking their own selfish interests before everything else, they had no conscience about committing even the gravest of crimes against others. Those first entering upon this broad way that leads to destruction easily found numerous imitators of their iniquity by the example of their manifest success, by their insolent display of wealth, by their ridiculing the conscience of others, ... or lastly by crushing more conscientious competitors. With the rulers of economic life abandoning the right road, it was easy for the rank and file of workers everywhere to rush headlong also into the same chasm.[18]
The destruction of solidarity led to the unhappiness of the people. Hierarchies of subsidiarity, structures of solidarity, develop out of a people oriented to truth and so to real happiness—because these are the form the fulfillment of that objective takes, even as they are the means of achieving it. A happy family, for example, both produces happy people and is the form of life that happy people build. This holds true for all social structures of solidarity. Happy people build de-centralized and pluralistic societies of ascending authority because such societies are what make people happy. The destruction of these structures, then, and the replacement of them by hegemonic structures of self-interest was both caused by and led to social unhappiness.[19] People were increasingly lonely and afraid. They were anxious and restless. They were frustrated and increasingly angry, even if they didn’t understand why. As Pius remarked, “that blessed tranquility which is the effect of an orderly existence and in which the essence of peace is to be found no longer exists, and, in its place, the restless spirit of revolt reigns.”[20]
Here, then, we have all the pieces for a socialist reaction to liberalism. As Pius explains:
If we would explain the blind acceptance of Communism by so many thousands ... we must remember that the way had been already prepared for it by the religious and moral destitution in which wage-earners had been left by liberal economics.... It can surprise no one that the Communistic fallacy should be spreading in a world already to a large extent de-Christianized.[21]
Historically, socialism is a reaction to capitalism—one that does not question liberalism’s fundamental premises nor the historical consequences of their application. Socialism begins with the affirmation of class conflict. It does not suggest that class conflict is wrong, but rather that it must be waged as ruthlessly as possible. It affirms the bitterness and envy of the workers against the wealthy, [22] even as it suggests that the wealthy must, in their natures, oppress the workers; both classes were merely pursuing their self-interest, which, for the socialist, as for the liberal, is the universal law of history. Socialism does not question liberalism’s implicit philosophical materialism or moral relativism, but makes them explicit. It does not question liberalism’s practical atheism, but makes it explicit. It does not lament liberalism’s destruction of the family, morality, the church, or traditional ways of life, but rather seeks to complete the destruction. It does not challenge liberalism’s obsession with equality, but shifts the obsession from formal equality to material equality. It does not question liberalism’s drive for the accumulation of wealth, but rather doubles down and argues that socialism will out-produce capitalism, that socialism will eliminate scarcity.[23] It does not seek to stop liberalism’s concentration of property into fewer and fewer hands, but wants to complete it. It does not even question the form of industrial production, but rather—as Lenin himself explained[24]—it seeks to turn all of society into one giant factory. It does not question that the state is a mere instrument of the powerful’s oppression of the weak (the reality that Pius recognized as the consequence of liberalism); it merely asserts that this is always the case and commits itself to gaining control of the state precisely so the state can be used to oppress the oppressors, so it can be turned against the enemies of socialism.[25] Socialism, like liberalism, denies the inevitability and goodness of social authority.[26] Finally, socialism seeks to address the spiritual malaise of liberalism not by returning man to the only true path to happiness, the path of Christ, but rather, as Pius explains, by providing “a false messianic idea ... a pseudo-ideal of justice, of equality and fraternity in labor ..., a deceptive mysticism, which communicates a zealous and contagious enthusiasm to the multitudes entrapped by delusive promises.”[27]
Socialism challenges none of the vices engendered by liberal society. It provides an avenue for righteous indignation and revolutionary action that does not demand moral reform or even a paradigm shift in thought. Socialism is liberalism’s self-hatred. It is the miser’s hatred of himself that grows steadily even as he falls deeper into his vice. Thus, while entertaining no sympathy for liberal individualism, Pius can state definitively: “no one can be at the same time a good Catholic and a true socialist.”[28]
The point, though, is this: socialism is a historical opposition to liberalism that emerges only from within the logic of liberalism and only within social spaces that have already been reduced from structures of solidarity to structures of self-interest. (This is why in liberal societies “socialist” agitation is almost exclusively limited to the most liberal demographic, the upper middle class). Another way of saying this is that socialism is the constant companion to liberalism. When the liberal ordering of society occupies only a small amount of the social space, when most of society is still structured through powers of solidarity, socialism is small and relatively unimportant. As liberalism colonizes more of the social space, reducing areas of solidarity to areas of exploitation, the appeal and significance of socialism grows.
It is only when the structures of solidarity are all but eliminated that the struggle between capitalism and socialism, between individualism and collectivism, can be mistaken for the totality of social possibilities.
As liberalism succeeds in reducing more of the social space to zones of competition—and so as the appeal of socialism grows—, at the same rate, according to Pius’s logic, liberalism itself becomes increasingly corrupt and power structures within it become increasingly cynical (because only lingering solidarity kept this corruption at bay). The same holds true for the growing socialist opposition: as liberalism expands—and so as socialism expands with it—, socialism loses its radical idealism (which was rooted in a persistent orientation to solidarity) and becomes increasingly cynical.[29] Socialism is most ideologically pure when it is a tiny minority position with relatively little chance of success. As it gains ground, it becomes increasingly concerned with power—like everyone and everything else.
As liberalism advances, the elite class is more and more inclined to use the state to its advantage—which increasingly means using the state to fill in the social gaps left by the destruction of solidarity, in this way falsely “shoring up” society without having to disrupt the financial gains that that destruction had wrought. Welfare systems replace extended families: things like that. At this same rate, socialism gains in appeal, and so the powerful are inclined to use socialist rhetoric or policies to their own advantage—Bank of America funds Antifa, for example. At the same time, as socialism becomes more popular, it becomes more integrated into the regime and so itself becomes a vehicle of self-interest—the leaders of BLM are millionaires, for example. The point of all this is that capitalism and socialism are engaged in a sort of dance that converges on what Pius XI called “economic dictatorship.”[30]
This is the reason that ideological socialism has gained power only in non-liberal societies (most obviously, Russia and China). If it is not to be diluted, such pure doctrine must be imported from without. Bound as it is to liberalism, however, even such socialism cannot leave liberalism completely behind. In order to implement socialism, the party must attempt to duplicate the social results of liberalism at a hyper-pace. Hence, the solidarity-destroying collectivizations and purges and “cultural revolutions.”[31] But this, of course, leads to self-interest and fear, which robs socialism of its idealistic fire. The centralization of the means of production becomes, then, in the end, the control of the means of production for self-interest: what John Paul II called “state capitalism.”[32]
The point, though, is that capitalism and socialism are bound up together in a common trajectory, which is the centralization of political and economic power for private gain. The resultant “system,” such as it is, Pius XI calls (from the direction of liberalism) economic dictatorship, and John Paul II calls (from the direction of socialism) state capitalism, but they are substantially the same.
In such a system, economic and political power collapse into each other; the masses are reduced to self-interested workers and consumers; and all of it is spiced up with fanatical, collectivist-style rhetoric that isn’t really aimed at overthrowing the system at all, rhetoric which in the end always seems to buttress the power of the most powerful. This is the system in China. This is more-or-less the system in Russia. This is the system that I think is being built here.
Such a situation is dangerous and unstable. Atomized and discontented populations might be ideal for maximizing economic and political power, but the power will be built on unstable foundations. Such populations are unhappy and vulnerable, verging on desperate, and this makes them dangerous: makes them open to sudden and unpredictable shifts into totalitarian fanaticism of either right-wing or left-wing varieties.[33] Pius warned Europe in 1931 of the consequences of exactly this state of affairs, writing: “unless utmost efforts are made without delay to put [reforms] into effect, let no one persuade himself that public order, peace, and the tranquility of human society can be effectively defended against agitators of revolution.”[34] The rest of the century, of course, proved the pope right.
Pius XI’s analysis of the 1920s and 1930s is clearly applicable to our own situation. It would be hard for anyone to deny that structures of solidarity have been rapidly dismantled over the decades since World War II. It is clearly true that as this happened, the market has greatly expanded, colonizing the vacated space. At the same time, the state has greatly expanded, facilitating the growth of the market while seeking to minimize the social fallout of the destruction of solidarity. At the same time, leftist rhetoric has gained traction. At the same time, business interests and political interests have grown together to the point where I don’t think they can be meaningfully separated any more. At the same time, we have experienced massive moral corruption both among our elites and among the masses. At the same time, our political discourse has become increasingly externally fanatical, even as its deeper substance has been increasingly reduced to squabbles over power. At the same time, people have become increasingly unhappy: every year we have more drug abuse, more alcohol abuse, more suicide, more people on anti-depressant medications, more and more people self-identifying as lonely—and it is obvious that we have more and more anger. All of this fits into the pattern identified by Pius XI.
This, then, is why we have more interest in socialism.
So, now for the second half of our question—what should we do about it? Pius is very clear. The problems we face are caused by our abandonment of Christianity and thus of social justice and social charity.[35] The only solution is the restoration of society’s orientation toward the true and the good and society’s grateful reception of the grace of God. In other words: conversion. As Pius wrote: “if human society is to be healed, only a return to Christian life and institutions will heal it.”[36]
A place to begin is perhaps recognizing that what are often presented as economic problems are, in fact, moral ones. We have to reassert the superiority of the moral law over all other so-called laws.[37] As Pius asserted:
If we faithfully observe [the moral law], then it will follow that the particular purposes, both individual and social, that are sought in the economic field will fall in their proper place in the universal order of purposes, and We, in ascending through them, as it were by steps, shall attain the final end of all things, that is God, to Himself and to us the supreme and inexhaustible Good.[38]
Both our political left and our right miss this. Pius writes:
Just as the unity of human society cannot be founded on an opposition of classes, so also the right ordering of economic life cannot be left to a free competition of forces. For from this source, as from a poisoned spring, have originated and spread all the errors of individualist economic teaching. Destroying through forgetfulness or ignorance the social and moral character of economic life, it held that economic life must be considered and treated as altogether free from and independent of public authority, because in the market, i.e., in the free struggle of competitors, it would have a principle of self-direction which governs it much more perfectly than would the intervention of any created intellect.[39]
Pius is not here calling for leftist-style state intervention. The directing principle he is calling for is not that of a command economy. Rather, he writes:
Loftier and nobler principles—social justice and social charity—must, therefore, be sought whereby this dictatorship may be governed firmly and fully. Hence, the institutions themselves of peoples and, particularly those of all social life, ought to be penetrated with this justice, and it is most necessary that it be truly effective, that is, establish a juridical and social order which will, as it were, give form and shape to all economic life. Social charity, moreover, ought to be as the soul of this order, an order which public authority ought to be ever ready effectively to protect and defend.[40]
He is, of course, talking first about morals, about justice, about personal virtue and action, and secondarily about the social structure that flows from them.[41]
To conclude, then:
Liberalism, Pius asserts, was founded upon the denial of authority and the unleashing of self-interest. This led, in history, to increasing corruption as the remnants of Christian civilization were eliminated. From our distance, we can see that these remnants included such things as disinterested and limited government, tolerance for differences, a sense of duty, the work ethic, family values, the value of friendship, notions of fair dealing, notions of service to the community as a whole—all things that American conservatives tend to champion, and that underwrote an economy with its foundations in small businesses and a politics still focused on local problems. It was precisely the overthrow of such pre-liberal or at least non-liberal values and social structures that cleared the way for the rise of both liberalism and socialism.
What American conservatives so often identify as “capitalism,” what they place in contrast to “crony capitalism” or “woke capitalism” or “progressivism” or whatever other label attempts to capture the late-liberal situation of a society not-quite-capitalist, not-quite-socialist, is so often this half-way point in liberal development, a fleeting moment when self-interest toward the top was combined with solidarity toward the bottom, when the profit-motive in business was combined with family values at home and patriotism in politics, and when, therefore, maximal productivity found an uneasy coexistence with happiness. This could not last. Self-interest is imperialistic. The desire for power is the desire to centralize power, and power is real. Power replicates itself in those subject to it: only, among the weak it manifests as envy and bitterness. Envy breeds the desire for vengeance. And so, politics becomes the horrifying display of vitriol that we see today.
Christianity cannot be contained in a “private” realm. The failure of the American conservative imagination is, generally, the failure to see the dynamic nature of history: the error is to suppose that society can be held in stasis, that we can somehow “capture” the 1950s. But this is just wrong. Human society is moving, either up or down, and any given moment is a moment of interior contradiction. The notion that we could unleash the raw power of self-interest in the economic realm while protecting solidarity in the private realm was foolhardy from the beginning.
Christian civilization itself is characterized by contradiction. But unlike in the modern ideologies, this contradiction is not obscured or denied or masked behind formal fictions. Rather, the contradiction is present in the very self-conception of Christian order: in Christianity, sin is present always within sin’s undoing. Self-interest is always there, but it is always the weaker, the one being driven out as solidarity advances; simple love of self is always being converted to the love of neighbor as one’s self in and through the love of God. Christianity isn’t a stasis, but the movement of redemption, the movement from law to its fulfillment in charity through grace. The recognition of persistent injustice is an aspect of the justice Christ brings. Justice comprehends injustice (while the inverse is not the case). This means that Christianity contains within itself its own negation because Christianity is the undoing of that negation through fulfillment over time. Christianity isn’t just an end, happiness; it is also a means, the process of becoming happy, of negating sin—and so Christianity essentially involves management, economy, politics. Christianity is an operation, a continuous reform. Liberalism rejected this conception of human life. It thought it could contain sin and use it to fuel a static power machine. It thought it could eliminate politics, eliminate the reality of the temporal struggle between good and evil, by giving each its domain. This was a Faustian folly. As Pius wrote:
There would be today neither Socialism nor Communism if the rulers of the nations had not scorned the teachings and maternal warnings of the Church. On the bases of liberalism and laicism they wished to build other social edifices which, powerful and imposing as they seemed at first, all too soon revealed the weakness of their foundations, and today are crumbing one after another before our eyes, as everything must crumble that is not grounded on the one cornerstone which is Jesus Christ.[42]
The principles of political liberalism themselves—let’s list them as: equality before the law, respect for private property, universal negative rights, tolerance—were, it turns out, dependent on the survival of a substrate of pre-liberal social order. When liberalism destroyed this substrate, it destroyed the possibility for itself. Hence, in the 1930s, Europe’s decline into totalitarianism. What we need to see in our own time is resisting the rise of socialism, trying to return to this substrate of proper social order and proper values, must not be an attempted return to liberalism, or—if I dare to speak an especially charged word—to capitalism. It must, rather, be a return to Christianity, to structures of solidarity, to de-centralized politics and distributed property, to subsidiarity. As Pius wrote:
No genuine cure can be furnished for this lamentable ruin of souls, which, so long as it continues, will frustrate all efforts to regenerate society, unless men return openly and sincerely to the teaching of the Gospel.... [T]he sordid love of wealth, which is the shame and great sin of our age, will be opposed in actual fact by the gentle yet effective law of Christian moderation which commands man to seek first the Kingdom of God and His justice, with the assurance that, by virtue of God’s kindness and unfailing promise, temporal goods also, insofar as he has need of them, shall be given him besides.[43]
Or in another place, he writes: “We have shown that the means of saving the world of today from the lamentable ruin into which a moral liberalism has plunged us, are neither the class-struggle nor terror, nor yet autocratic abuse of State power, but rather the infusion of social justice and the sentiment of Christian love into the social-economic order.”[44]
Such a conversion of society would entail the structural re-ordering of society through powers of solidarity. Society would take on a new shape—one that will at the same time be an immediately recognizable shape, because it is the shape of those little, persisting social orders in which, even in our sad times, we still find happiness under just authority. As Pius wrote: “And so, then only will true cooperation be possible for a single common good when the constituent parts of society deeply feel themselves members of one great family and children of the same Heavenly Father; nay, that they are one body in Christ.”[45] Submission to the Kingship of Christ, then, under which all human authority is arranged, is the only means to the equality and freedom to which both liberalism and socialism aspire. Pius writes:
Only in this kingdom of Christ can we find that true human equality by which all men are ennobled and made great by the selfsame nobility and greatness, for each is ennobled by the precious blood of Christ. As for those who are in authority, they are, according to the example of our Lord Jesus Christ, but ministers of the good, servants of the servants of God, particularly of the sick and of those in need.[46]
This, I think, is a central lesson we can learn from Pius XI.
This essay is adapted from a talk given on November 15, 2021 at Franciscan University of Steubenville in response to the question: “Why is there an increased interest in socialism and what should we do about it?”
Quadragesimo Anno 110.
Quadragesimo Anno 122.
As the father of Catholic social teaching, Pope Leo XIII, explained: “Assuredly, the Church wisely inculcates the apostolic precept on the mass of men: ‘There is no power but from God; and those that are, are ordained of God. Therefore he that resisteth the power resisteth the ordinance of God. And they that resist purchase to themselves damnation.’ And again she admonishes those ‘subject by necessity’ to be so ‘not only for wrath but also for conscience’s sake,’ and to render ‘to all men their dues; tribute to whom tribute is due, custom to whom custom, fear to whom fear, honor to whom honor.’ For, He who created and governs all things has, in His wise providence, appointed that the things which are lowest should attain their ends by those which are intermediate, and these again by the highest. Thus, as even in the kingdom of heaven He hath willed that the choirs of angels be distinct and some subject to others, and also in the Church has instituted various orders and a diversity of offices, so that not all are apostles or doctors or pastors, so also has He appointed that there should be various orders in civil society, differing in dignity, rights, and power, whereby the State, like the Church, should be one body, consisting of many members, some nobler than others, but all necessary to each other and solicitous for the common good” (Quod Apostolici Muneris 6).
STh. I, q. 94, a. 4. 6
“For there was a social order once which, although indeed not perfect or in all respects ideal, nevertheless, met in a certain measure the requirements of right reason, considering the conditions and needs of the time. If that order has long since perished, that surely did not happen because the order could not have accommodated itself to changed conditions and needs by development and by a certain expansion, but rather because men, hardened by too much love of self, refused to open the order to the increasing masses as they should have done, or because, deceived by allurements of a false freedom and other errors, they became impatient of every authority and sought to reject every form of control” (Quadragesimo Anno 97).
F. A. Hayek, Road to Serfdom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 18.
Quadragesimo Anno 78.
As Leo XIII succinctly stated: “man has never yet been able to arrive at a state of obeying no one” (Diuturnum 4).
As Pius described the situation: “the inordinate desire for pleasure ... sows the fatal seeds of division not only among families but likewise among states; the inordinate desire for possessions ... inevitably turns into class warfare and into social egotism; the inordinate desire to rule or to domineer over others ... soon becomes mere party or factional rivalries, manifesting itself in constant displays of conflicting ambitions and ending in open rebellion” (Ubi Arcano Dei 24).
“[From original sin] arises that unquenchable thirst for riches and temporal goods, which has at all times impelled men to break God’s laws and trample upon the rights of their neighbors, but which, on account of the present system of economic life, is laying far more numerous snares for human frailty. Since the instability of economic life, and especially of its structure, exacts of those engaged in it most intense and unceasing effort, some have become so hardened to the stings of conscience as to hold that they are allowed, in any manner whatsoever, to increase their profits and use means, fair or foul, to protect their hard-won wealth against sudden changes of fortune.... Lastly, We must not omit to mention those crafty men who, wholly unconcerned about any honest usefulness of their work, do not scruple to stimulate the baser human desires and, when they are aroused, use them for their own profit” (Quadragesimo Anno 132).
Ludwig von Mises, Liberalism (New York: The Foundation for Economic Education, 1996) 12.
Pius XI saw this contradiction clearly when he wrote: “But free competition, while justified and certainly useful provided it is kept within certain limits, clearly cannot direct economic life—a truth which the outcome of the application in practice of the tenets of this evil individualistic spirit has more than sufficiently demonstrated” (Quadragesimo Anno 88).
Quadragesimo Anno 107–109.
“[T]o these evils we must add the contests between political parties, many of which struggles do not originate in a real difference of opinion concerning the public good or in a laudable and disinterested search for what would best promote the common welfare, but in the desire for power and for the protection of some private interest which inevitably result in injury to the citizens as a whole” (Pius XI, Ubi Arcano Dei 12).
Ubi Arcano Dei 12.
“On the contrary, there has been born a spirit of violence and of hatred which, because it has been indulged in for so long, has become almost second nature in many men” (Ubi Arcano Dei 20); “the inordinate desire for pleasure ... sows the fatal seeds of division not only among families but likewise among states; the inordinate desire for possessions ... inevitably turns into class warfare and into social egotism; the inordinate desire to rule or to domineer over others ... soon becomes mere party or factional rivalries, manifesting itself in constant displays of conflicting ambitions and ending in open rebellion....” (Ubi Arcano Dei 24).
Quadragesimo Anno 134.
As Pius explains the consequences of rejecting the rule of Christ: “the seeds of discord sown far and wide; those bitter enmities and rivalries between nations, which still hinder so much the cause of peace; that insatiable greed which is so often hidden under a pretense of public spirit and patriotism, and gives rise to so many private quarrels; a blind and immoderate selfishness, making men seek nothing but their own comfort and advantage, and measure everything by these; no peace in the home, because men have forgotten or neglect their duty; the unity and stability of the family undermined; society, in a word, shaken to its foundations and on the way to ruin” (Quas Primas 24).
Ubi Arcano Dei 15.
Divini Redemptoris 16.
Quadragesimo Anno 137.
“For, according to Christian teaching, man, endowed with a social nature, is placed on this earth so that by leading a life in society and under an authority ordained of God he may fully cultivate and develop all his faculties unto the praise and glory of his Creator; and that by faithfully fulfilling the duties of his craft or other calling he may obtain for himself temporal and at the same time eternal happiness. Socialism, on the other hand, wholly ignoring and indifferent to this sublime end of both man and society, affirms that human association has been instituted for the sake of material advantage alone” (Quadragesimo Anno 118).
V. I. Lenin, The State and Revolution (New York: Penguin Books, 1992), 91.
“Society, therefore, as Socialism conceives it, can on the one hand neither exist nor be thought of without an obviously excessive use of force; on the other hand it fosters a liberty no less false, since there is no place in it for true social authority, which rests not on temporal and material advantages but descends from God alone, the Creator and last end of all things” (Quadragesimo Anno 119).
Divini Redemptoris 10-12.
Divini Redemptoris 8.
Quadragesimo Anno 120.
Divini Redemptoris 15.
Quadragesimo Anno 88, 105, 109-110.
On this point, see Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1966), chapter 10.
Centesimus Annus 35.
As Hannah Arendt explained: “Totalitarian movements are mass organizations of atomized, isolated individuals.” The sort of loyalty demanded by the movement “can be expected only
from the completely isolated human being who, without any other social ties to family, friends, comrades, or even mere acquaintances, derives his sense of having a place in the world only from his belonging to a movement, his membership in the party” (The Origins of Totalitarianism, 323–24).
Quadragesimo Anno 62.
These are his terms: see Quadragesimo Anno, especially 88 and 126. 36
Quadragesimo Anno 128–129.
“There remains to Us, after again calling to judgment the economic system now in force and its most bitter accuser, Socialism, and passing explicit and just sentence upon them, to search out more thoroughly the root of these many evils and to point out that the first and most necessary remedy is a reform of morals” (Quadragesimo Anno 98).
Quadragesimo Anno 43. On how the modern conception and practice of “economics” came into being precisely by leaving morality to one side, Pius writes: “Strict and watchful moral restraint enforced vigorously by governmental authority could have banished these enormous evils and even forestalled them; this restraint, however, has too often been sadly lacking. For since the seeds of a new form of economy were bursting forth just when the principles of rationalism had been implanted and rooted in many minds, there quickly developed a body of economic teaching far removed from the true moral law, and, as a result, completely free rein was given to human passions” (Quadragesimo Anno 133).
Quadragesimo Anno 88.
Quadragesimo Anno 88. As my friend Reuben Slife has remarked, it is “obvious that the much-lauded Centesimus Annus 42 on whether capitalism is good or bad should be read in light of these passages of Quadragesimo Anno. Both St. John Paul the Great and Pius XI are talking about ‘a system in which freedom in the economic sector is ... circumscribed within a strong juridical framework which places it at the service of human freedom in its totality, and which sees it as a particular aspect of that freedom, the core of which is ethical and religious.’ ” [41]
“What we have taught about the reconstruction and perfection of social order can surely in no wise be brought to realization without reform of morality, the very record of history clearly shows” (Quadragesimo Anno 97).
Divini Redemptoris 38.
Quadragesimo Anno 136.
Divini Redemptoris 32; “Every true and lasting reform has ultimately sprung from the sanctity of men who were driven by the love of God and men” (Mit brennendner Sorge 20)—and this, as we have seen, will have structural implications.
Quadragesimo Anno 137.
Ubi Arcano Dei 58.