Catholic Theories of Property III: Belloc and Conclusion

April 27, 2010

Within the few decades following the publication of Rerum Novarum, the dominance of capitalism and the threat of militant socialism remain, but the alternatives become somewhat clearer.  By the time Hilaire Belloc is writing The Servile State in 1913, and certainly by his Essay on the Restoration of Property in 1936, it has become clear that socialism does not mean, as Leo perhaps still imagined, the abolition of property ownership, but rather, the concentration of property ownership in the hands of the state.  Belloc is thus able to recognize socialism not as the opposite of capitalism, but simply as an essentially pragmatic development of the same impulse, underlying industrial capitalism, of centralizing control of the means of production.  Hence, in contrast to Leo, Belloc believes the situation calls a defense, not of private ownership in the abstract against common ownership, but of well-distributed private ownership against concentrated ownership--it is empty, in his mind, to defend the right of private property if only a small sliver of the population are to enjoy that right.  It is worth noting also that, perhaps due to his English setting, he does not want to explicitly situate himself in the Catholic tradition, though we can surmise that it lies in the background of his thought.

Like both Aquinas and Leo, Belloc’s endorsement of private property combines aspects of an appeal to nature and to practical considerations, but the form of his argument has more in common with Aquinas than Leo: private property does not derive directly from nature, but the structure of nature is such that private property proves most beneficial to man.  The content of Belloc’s argument, however, has more in common with Leo, focusing more on the good of the individual possessor, rather than the benefits accruing to society as a whole, and bears the stamp of modernity in its consideration of “freedom” as a preeminent value.  Assuming, with Leo, the priority of the family as the basic economic unit, he focuses and provides a clear basis for Leo’s concern that each family be able to provide for itself.  “It is obvious that whoever controls the means of production controls the supply of wealth.  If, therefore, the means for the production of that wealth which a family needs are in the control of others than the family, the family will be dependent upon those others; it will not be economically free.”  He of course acknowledges that such pure freedom and independence is neither possible nor desirable, since man is a social animal, but he nevertheless thinks it importance that the family retain as much freedom as possible.  

But why?  Why is economic freedom important?  Because, it is needed to properly realize social and individual needs residing in man’s nature.  First, the social needs: “In its absence general culture ultimately fails and so certainly does citizenship.  The cells of the body politic are atrophied and the mass of men have not even, at last, an opinion of their own, but are moulded by the few who retain ownership of land and endowments and reserves.  So essential is property to full life.”  Second, the individual needs: 

"Now, there is discoverable in man, Freewill.  His actions are of moral value to him if they are undertaken upon his own initiative; not if they are undertaken upon compulsion.  Therefore the use of choice is necessary to human dignity....Next, economic freedom is a good because man’s actions are multiple, both his desires and his creative faculties; but it is only in the possession of economic freedom that this multiplicity can be effective."

This appeal has the basic structure of Aquinas’s justification of private property, resting not, as it were, on the esse of mankind, but on the bene esse of man’s life in the world.  It has not, then, as for Leo, the character of an a priori appeal to the nature of things, but a deductive application of the natural law to the current state of mankind.  

But the differences from Aquinas far eclipse the similarities.  The principle of common use, for Aquinas the foundation of all discussion of property, and for Leo still present as a restraint on private property, seems to have vanished entirely.  Belloc has lost faith in Thomas’s crucial distinction between administration and use--whereas Aquinas could be read as saying that some individuals or groups could justly administer the world’s goods for the benefit of all, Belloc argues forcefully that each family must have not just the use of that portion of the world’s goods that they need, but the power of administration to produce all that they need.  The basic problem then is not that industrial capitalism had failed to genuinely use private possessions for common use, though Belloc certainly thought it had; rather, for Belloc, common use is not enough, because man must have the power not merely to live, but to administer his life according to his own desires and with regard to his own interests.  This becomes clear in a crucial passage from The Servile State: “What distinguishes private property is not that the possessor thereof is less than the state, or is only a part of the state...but rather that the owner may exercise his control over it to his own advantage, and not as a trustee for society, nor in the hierarchy of political institutions.” Thus far has the fundamental value of capitalism triumphed over Belloc’s mind--that everyone ought to be able to use his own goods for his own advantage, not for others.  

Aquinas’s hierarchy of values has been inverted--potestas dispensandi, has, as it were, taken priority over usum--for Belloc, the fruits of the world do not exist primarily to enable man to provide for his material needs, but to enable him to realize his human dignity by giving him the power of disposing of them as he sees fit.  Of course, this may well provide a useful augmentation of the Thomist justification for private property: by highlighting its value not merely for society as a whole but also for developing the full moral character and dignity of the proprietor (which thus further benefits society), Belloc’s argument suggests that Aquinas should have attended not merely to the importance of the existence of private property, but also of its wide distribution.  However, Belloc shifts the emphasis so far that the value of freedom is at risk of trumping those of justice and charity, leaving distributism, unlike Thomism, able to say very little when it comes to questions of just use of property.

In conclusion, then, we have seen that both Leo and Belloc, responding to the threats of socialism and (particularly for Belloc) capitalism, alter the tenor of Catholic thinking on property by shifting the emphasis from the priority of common use to the priority of private proprietorship.  Leo does this by making private property a principle of the natural law, and thus justified a priori, rather than by virtue of its benefit to the rest of society, while Belloc does it by rooting the good of private property in its contribution to individual self-realization through freedom.  In both cases, the result is a gravely weakened and theologically impoverished account of the social function of property, and the obligations of justice that govern its use.  While Aquinas, though taking note of Aristotle, sought to subordinate him to the Christian moral tradition, Leo and Belloc both end up marginalizing any theological and Christian account of property in favor of values and premises drawn from philosophies outside the Christian tradition.  

Finally, these changes seem, in the end, basically unnecessary.  Could not Leo have adequately addressed the threat of socialism by reiterating the ways in which neither society as a whole nor the individual worker is well-served by destroying the right of private property?  Could not Belloc have augmented, without disregarding, Thomas’s statement of the social good of property by drawing attention to the benefits accruing to society when it is characterized by free proprietors rather than wage laborers?  In light of these considerations, an essentially Thomist stance regarding the ethics of property appears to remain the best alternative for a society attempting to cope with the fallout of industrial capitalism while avoiding the threats of socialism.  

Catholic Theories of Property II: Rerum Novarum

Six hundred years later, the growth of capitalism has called forth a militant socialism in reaction.  Its call for the abolition of all private property by the state incites Leo XIII to respond with the encyclical Rerum Novarum, inaugurating the tradition of Catholic Social Teaching.  At the center of this document is a full-blown attack on socialism, based on a sturdy defense of the right of private property, a right that Leo feels the need to affirm more strongly than Aquinas did.  While seeking (and no doubt perceiving himself) to be in line with Thomist teaching, Leo comes close to simply rooting the right of property in nature, in a way that Thomas never does.  He does this by importing a Lockean metaphysical account of property, suggesting that a right to private property simply arises out of one’s labor upon that property.  It is worth attending carefully to how he constructs his justification and how it differs from Aquinas’s.

According to Matthew Habiger, Leo’s case for private property is based on four main arguments.  First, “property is man’s wages in another form,” an argument that Leo develops in paragraph 5 of the encyclical, saying, “It is surely undeniable that, when a man engages in remunerative labor, the impelling reason and motive of his work is to obtain property, and thereafter to hold it as his very own.”  The worker ought to be free to dispose of his wages as he sees fit, and this means he should be free to buy property as he desires.  This argument seems to be a bit of a petitio principii, since, if private property is illegitimate, the mere fact that a worker wants to use his wages to acquire it can scarcely make it legitimate; Leo’s main point in this argument seems to be to convince the socialists that, on a pragmatic level, their proposals to help workers will actually make life worse for workers.  It is worth remembering this appeal to the importance of the worker’s freedom, because it will resurface in Belloc in a much stronger form.

In paragraph 6, Leo moves on to what he sees as the crux of the issue: “What is of far greater moment, however, is the fact that the remedy they propose is manifestly against justice. For, every man has by nature the right to possess property as his own.”  His second and third arguments are elaborations of this appeal to nature.  Habiger summarizes the second, “Of all animals, only man can plan for future needs.  He therefore has a right to permanent possession” (developed in RN 6-7), and the third, “Man’s cultivation of nature entitles him to possess that which he cultivates” (developed in RN 9-10).  I will return to these in a moment, as they deserve to be considered in careful detail. 

Leo considers these arguments of justice to be conclusive, saying (perhaps a bit pompously) “So strong and convincing are these arguments that it seems amazing that some should now be setting up anew certain obsolete opinions in opposition to what is here laid down” (10).  Nevertheless, he adds one more pragmatic argument, which Habiger summarizes, “Man, as a father, must provide for those he has begotten.  Property enables him to do so with security” (developed in RN 12-13).  This argument does not seem to hold much water on its own, since the socialists might well reply that under their system, each family would be provided for with much more security and reliability than private property would allow, and each father could rest assured that his offspring were taken care of.  Although Leo seems to state very strongly that each father has the obligation to himself provide, out of his own resources, for the needs of his family (“It is a most sacred law of nature that a father should provide food and all necessaries for those whom he has begotten” [13]), it is unclear why this must necessarily be the case.  The main burden of Leo’s defense of private property, then, falls on his second and third arguments, from nature and justice. 

The first of these is recognizably Thomistic, though it has changed significantly from its original use.  Leo appeals to the rational nature of man, unique among animals in his ability to plan for the future, and to administer this world’s goods, by his reason and will, for his present and future needs.  “And on this very account--that man alone among the animal creation is endowed with reason--it must be within his right to possess things not merely for temporary and momentary use, as other living things do, but to have and to hold them in stable and permanent possession” (6).  Jose María Díez-Alegría points out that, in arguing from man’s reason to his right of possession, Leo seems here to be following Aquinas’s argument from articulus 1: “Whether it is lawful for man to possess external things.”  However, whereas for Aquinas this argument established the right of mankind in general to possess external things (prior to consideration of the issue of private property), for Leo, this shows that “every man has by nature the right to possess property as his own” (6, emphasis mine).  This marks a “seriously erroneous interpretation” of Aquinas’s argument, and loses much of the logical coherence of the original. 

The next argument has nothing in common with Aquinas, as it seeks to justify private property on metaphysical, rather than social, grounds, following closely in the footsteps of Locke.  Indeed, the echoes of Locke are hardly subtle: 

Now, when man thus turns the activity of his mind and the strength of his body toward procuring the fruits of nature, by such act he makes his own that portion of nature's field which he cultivates - that portion on which he leaves, as it were, the impress of his personality; and it cannot but be just that he should possess that portion as his very own, and have a right to hold it without any one being justified in violating that right. (9)

One wonders whether this argument actually proves rather more than Leo would wish to, for by saying that ownership of a thing arises directly and automatically from the application of one’s labor to it (“As effects follow their cause, so is it just and right that the results of labor should belong to those who have bestowed their labor” [10]), he would seem to undermine the whole capitalist arrangement, in which the laborer is always bestowing his labor on things that remain the property of the capital owner.  He does not seem aware, however, of the tensions that arise from his application of a metaphysically-determined property right to a system governed by socially-determined property rights.  Distributism, indeed, might fit more comfortably with Leo’s arguments than the capitalist arrangement he basically accepts.

Although Leo appeals to the Thomistic distinction between common use and private ownership, quoting Thomas directly in paragraph 22 regarding the duty that every man has to use his possessions for the common good of all, he significantly alters the relationship between the two.  We can see this clearly in paragraph 8: 

The fact that God has given the earth for the use and enjoyment of the whole human race can in no way be a bar to the owning of private property. For God has granted the earth to mankind in general, not in the sense that all without distinction can deal with it as they like, but rather that no part of it was assigned to any one in particular, and that the limits of private possession have been left to be fixed by man's own industry, and by the laws of individual races.  

This seems intended as something of a restatement of Aquinas’s argument in a. 2 ad 1, regarding the senses in which the natural law does and does not prescribe common ownership, but, as already discussed above, it basically removes the caesura that Aquinas has carefully placed between the natural law and the institution of private property.  

Aquinas resolutely affirms (whatever his remaining ambiguities) that the right of private property does not arise directly from nature, but is the product of a natural state of common ownership that has been subsequently modifed by social arrangements resulting from prudent deliberation, and can be justified only on the basis of its social value.  Leo, on the contrary, has made himself quite clear in stating that the right of private property is given directly by nature, and holds irrespective of its social value (though Leo does seek to  bolster his case with arguments from social value).  Habiger affirms that this is Leo’s intent, and demonstrates moreover that it was the intent of the two main drafters of the document: “It is clear from the final redaction of Rerum Novarum, approved by Pope Leo XIII, and from the thought of the two theologians who composed the earlier drafts of the document, that the right (or principle) of private property is established by a direct appeal to the natural law....The foundation of the right is located ultimately in the natural law.”  Habiger indeed tries repeatedly to show, contra Leo’s critics, that this is no departure from Thomas’s teaching, but is simply a different emphasis.  He reads Aquinas as rooting private property in the natural law: “Already we see that St. Thomas would hold that private property is an enhancement of the natural law principle of common property, made necessary by man’s Fall, and is a permanent, although derived secondary principle in man’s post-lapsarian condition.” 

Even if Habiger’s reading of Thomas is correct, however, and Aquinas does make private property a “derived principle,” the derivation is quite different from Leo’s, since Aquinas derives it from man’s obligations to other men, to effectively facilitate the common use of property, while Leo roots it in man himself, and his relationship to the world.  Common use is thus severely marginalized in Leo’s account, and there is no hint of Aquinas’s suggestion that private property ceases to be justified if it ceases to serve common use. 

Catholic Theories of Property I: Aquinas

Still traveling, so I haven't had the opportunity to write up anything new, but I thought that, since I've been saying for so long in comments, "Oh, I discuss this at more length in the papers I'm writing" I should post those papers, now that they're done.  I must confess that they don't include much of what I claimed they would, because there's this abominable 5,000-word limit at University of Edinburgh that O'Donovan thinks is complete rubbish.  But, all that can be saved for another day.  So, first, the paper on Catholic Theories of Property--this post will include the introduction and section on Aquinas.

For western Christians living after Fukuyama’s fabled “end of history”--the demise of communism and triumph of capitalism--it is easy to feel as if the problem of private property is not a problem at all.  All sides of the political spectrum, whatever their differences, would agree that private property is good and necessary, and that, on the whole, we have succeeded in assuring adequate access to it in our societies (though conservatives would gripe that it is not sufficiently free from government predation, and liberals would implore us to make it more a reality for the lower strata of society).  But in Christian history, it started as quite a serious problem, with many Church Fathers denying the legitimacy of private property altogether.  In the Middle Ages, theologians developed a more nuanced view, influentially crystallized by Thomas Aquinas, who affirmed the good of private property, but made it subordinate to the right of common use.  

The gradual growth of capitalism over the ensuing centuries, favoring increasingly unrestricted private property rights, finally incited a radical reaction back towards the abolition of private property, in the form of socialism and communism, in the 19th-century.  Within the Catholic tradition, this evoked fresh reflection on the question of private property, and a particular urgency to unequivocally justify it against these new threats, as we see in Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical, Rerum Novarum.  Leo, however, achieved this unequivocal justification at the cost of theological coherence and of loyalty to the tradition, particularly on the priority of common use and the relationship of private property to the natural law.  In the early 20th-century, an intriguing new current of Catholic social thought emerged in the form of Distributism, propounded by the English writers G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc.  They radicalized Rerum Novarum’s somewhat superficial critique of capitalism and socialism and articulated more clearly the importance of private property, but in the process lost sight of theological criteria and the principle of common use altogether.

In this essay, I propose to compare these two modern forms of Catholic reflection on property rights to Thomas Aquinas’s account of private property in the Summa Theologiae.  I will argue that, although Distributism in particular highlights some key issues that are insufficiently present in Aquinas, both Leo and Belloc’s arguments manifest troubling capitulations to modern, non-theological paradigms, undermining their ability to critically engage the dangers of modern economic rationality.  Moreover, I will suggest that their departures from the Thomist tradition are ultimately unnecessary to meet the threats they perceive, as this tradition possesses adequate resources for a response to the social problems of both capitalism and socialism.  Although a full account of property ethics would involve a number of other issues, in this brief essay, I will limit myself to the questions “Is private property legitimate and desirable?  If so, on what basis and for what ends?”

To understand Aquinas’s answer, we should first understand the two traditions to which he seeks to do justice.  The early Church Fathers are full of statements which seem deeply hostile to the institution of private property, and, although we may make allowances for rhetorical exaggeration, there is little doubt that the Patristic era essentially viewed private property as, at best, a deeply ambiguous imposition upon the natural state of common ownership (a teaching derived from the ancient Stoics).  Aristotle, on the other hand, had offered a much stronger endorsement of private property, and by the thirteenth-century, his thought was gaining a great deal of authority in Western Christendom.  Aquinas thus faced the dilemma of reconciling, on the one hand, a long Christian teaching on the unnaturalness of private possession, and, on the other hand, an Aristotelian insistence on its naturalness, together with the testimony of practical experience that showed the prudence of such an institution.

His solution was to affirm, with the Christian tradition, that the natural law prescribed common ownership, while arguing that it did not thereby proscribe private ownership.  Private ownership, then, although not natural, was not thereby unnatural; rather, it was a legitimate and (perhaps) necessary development and augmentation of the natural law.  He arrives at this solution by means of a number of subtle distinctions, which I will seek to carefully spell out.

First, in article 1 of the question on property, Aquinas establishes that it is lawful “for man [speaking of mankind in general] to possess external things” (art.).  Although only God can have dominion over the world and its fruits in terms of their nature, yet he has given to mankind the right to exercise dominion over them “with regard to the use of them” (resp.).  This natural right exists in virtue of man’s reason, the divine image in him, by which “he is able to make use of external things to his own advantage” (resp.).

This, however, is an entirely distinct question from “Whether it is lawful for anyone to possess something as his own,” (art. 2) that is, the question of private property.  Here, he invokes a further distinction to resolve the problem--between “use” and “the power to procure and dispose” (potestas procurandi et dispensandi), which we could call “administration” for short.  The use of external things is given to all men in common, and yet, in order that the goal of common use may be best achieved, it is generally more effective that individuals be given the right, or perhaps better, the responsibility, to administer a certain portion of the world’s goods for their own use and that of others.  Aquinas gives three reasons for this: 1) the tendency towards laziness and abdication when working on something commonly possessed, 2) the confusion that results from the attempt at common administration, and 3) the quarrels that result when each tries to claim his just share of the common property.  In view of these practical concerns, he argues that “it is necessary to human life” to allow a private right of disposition, while keeping the use of external things common, “that is, in such a way that he [the owner] is ready to share them with others in the event of need” (resp.).  

In this account, since the common use of the earth’s goods is according to natural law, common use has priority over private disposition, and the latter exists to serve the former.  For this reason, private property cannot be justified in itself, but only insofar as it serves as a means to facilitate common use.  According to John Finnis, the justications for particular property rights are based on “general justice”--the advantages they will bring to the whole community.  Private property is “derivatory and secondary” right, with “the obligation to realize the primary purpose of property, namely, use,” (96) according to Parel, who even says, “if there is conflict between use and ownership, there was no doubt in Aquinas’ mind which should prevail.”

But how exactly does this “derivatory” right of private possession relate to the common possession given in natural law?  Aquinas carefully states that common possession is natural not in the sense that the natural law 

dictates that all things should be possessed in common and that nothing should be possessed as one’s own, but because the division of possessions is not according to natural right, but, rather, according to human agreement, which belongs to positive right, as stated above.  Hence the ownership of possessions is not contrary to natural right; rather, it is an addition to natural right derived by human reason (a. 2 ad 1).

It is possible to read this in at least two crucially differing senses.  On the one hand, one can read “the division of possessions” as meaning “any division of possessions, as opposed to the initial common ownership.”  On this reading, Aquinas is saying that the fact of private property does not arise from nature, but from contingent, pragmatic arrangements that human societies may make, which are nevertheless, insofar as they serve common use, legitimate augmentations of natural right.  Parel, taking this reading, goes so far as to say that property right “is to be sought rather in historical conditions which vary from time and place and culture....But this is something for the times, for the cultures, and the good legislators to determine.”  If we take this reading, then private property rights are derived from the natural law only in the same sense that, say, legal penalties for adultery are; they can be prescribed based on rational application of the natural law to particular circumstances, but they are not part of it.  In other words, private property is permitted (and in practice, generally very desirable), but not mandated.

On the other hand, one can read “the division of possessions” as meaning “any particular schema for dividing up possessions at a particular time and place,” such that it is only such particular arrangements that are not “according to natural right, but, rather, according to human agreement.”  Presumably, then, on this interpretation, the general fact of divided possessions is not merely a matter of human agreement, but is, in some sense, according to natural right.  On this reading (taken by Leo in Rerum Novarum, as we shall see shortly), private property is still not a primary postulate of the natural law (it is clear that, for Aquinas, it is not), but is still, as it were, part of the natural law as a “derived principle.”  An example of such a derived principle might be “Whosoever sheds man’s blood, by man his blood shall be shed.”  For Aquinas, such a principle, although not straightforwardly given in the natural law, can be deduced from it as a necessary consequence, not a historically contingent application, and this is how Leo and his followers want to read Aquinas on property.  In other words, private property is mandated by the natural law.  

It is not easy to adjudicate between these two interpretations.  The former, while it seems to square with Aquinas’ emphasis on the priority of common ownership (which is reduced to little more than a cipher in the latter reading), runs into the problem that Aquinas speaks of division into private property as “necessary to human life,” not, as Parel does, as “something for the times, for the cultures, and the good legislators to determine.”  The latter, while it does justice to the idea of private property as a necessary augmentation of the natural law, makes Aquinas’s statement in ad 1 terribly banal--did Aquinas really mean to state the obvious fact that “natural right does not itself determine the specific property arrangements for any given time and place”?  The ambiguity here, it should be pointed out, is not unique to this issue, but resides in the ambiguous role that the ius gentium (in which private property seems clearly to belong for Aquinas) plays in Aquinas’s thought, as a sort of middle axiom linking natural law and positive law.  In any case, we can probably safely say that Parel’s interpretation is rather too weak, and Leo’s certainly too strong.  

Moreover, we can say this much with certainty about Aquinas’s view of the right of private possession, distinguishing it in crucial ways from some later theories: unlike the general right of man’s possession of the earth, the right of private possession does not derive from anything inherent in the nature of the world, or man’s relationship with it, but from the requirements of the common good arising from man’s relationship with other men.  As John Finnis puts it, 

The moral or juridical relationships to such an entity that we call property rights are relationships to other people.  They are matters of interpersonal justice.  Arguments for founding property rights on alleged ‘metaphysical’ relationships between persons and the things with which they have ‘mixed their labour’, or to which craftsmen have ‘extended their personality’, are foreign to Aquinas.

Taxation and Theft Supplement: More about the OT Economic Laws

Since daring to post that taxation and theft essay on Facebook, I’ve been snowed under responding to comments and objections there, so instead of posting a bit on Just War theory, as I was hoping to, I will just offer instead one of the more substantive clarifications I posted in the taxation and theft discussion:

One thing worth dealing with properly here and now is the issue of the OT laws. For the sake of conciseness, I offered in my initial post a rather brief appeal to the matter of the OT laws, a matter which I’ve been studying for a long time (largely in order to get a handle on these very issues). Two main lines of objection have been raised. The first is that the Old Testament laws never authorize a centralized government authority to tax money from one group of people, pool it, and then hand it out to another group of people. I substantially agree with this objection (though I shall offer something of an exception in a moment). My point was not to say that the OT laws authorized this. 

Indeed, I made a point of saying this: “Of course, we cannot make simple one-to-one applications from the OT laws to welfare laws today; far from it.” Many pertinent facts are quite different--for one, we're now living in the New Covenant! My appeal to the Old Testament laws is to establish a more basic point--that it can be just for law to “require that resources be taken from those who have surplus to help supply the needs of those who, for whatever reason, do not have enough,” as I put it in the initial post. They generally do not accomplish this goal by taxation (again, with it seems to me, one exception), but indeed, it seems they are more radical, more “intrusive” upon property owners than mere taxation. Let me spell out the most relevant laws to make sure this is clear. Dt. 15:1-18 requires that in the Sabbath year, debts be released. This means that if I’ve loaned you money, money that is “rightfully” mine, that you ought to pay back, I am required by law to let you keep it after a certain amount of time (worse, the law goes on to say that I’d better not hesitate to lend to you on that account!). This is, it seems to my mind, at least as intrusive as taxation. In the Jubilee year, all property was to be returned to the original owner (Lev. 25:8-22); this is to prevent any Israelites from becoming permanently landless and thus chronically impoverished. Now, this is not a straightforward rich/poor redistribution; in fact, it is something rather more radical. It’s a mechanism for preventing, as much as possible, such a distinction from arising, in any long-term form. No matter how bad things got for someone, he could always be assured that he’d be alright, because he could get his property back, and his debts cancelled, at the expense of those who had amassed a lot of property and wealth. Such legally-mandated equitable (not egalitarian) distribution seems to be a much more radical imposition than mere taxation. Now we move on to the more directly relevant laws: we have laws like the gleaning laws (Lev. 19:9-10; Dt. 24:19-22) and the requirement that all the produce of the land in Sabbath year be shared (Lev. 25:1-7). In other words, a portion of what you produced, on your property, was, by legal mandate, to be free for the taking of anyone who required it (though they, in their turn, weren’t to abuse this right--Dt. 23:24-25). Not a terribly huge portion, because, on account of the debt release and Jubilee laws, poverty should not have been a terribly big problem. Now, these laws are still different in form from redistributive taxation--which would be leaving the corners of the field for the local magistrate to come reap (or handing over a share of your reapings), and for him to then distribute to the local needy--but they are essentially the same in effect, and in the underlying principles. Indeed, one could say that the OT law is in some ways more instrusive than taxation, because although a lot of us resent paying taxes, I think we would resent it rather more if the law gave the poor to come into our field, or our store, or our office, and take enough for their sustenance that day. That said, I prefer the minimum of gov’t involvement that the gleaning approach offers. 

Finally, we have one law, the triennial tithe, that seems like straightforwardly redistributive taxation (this is the one exception I mentioned). Deuteronomy 14:28-29: “At the end of every three years you shall bring out all the tithe of your produce in the same year and lay it up within your towns. And the Levite, because he has no portion or inheritance with you, and the sojourner, the fatherless, and the widow, who are within your towns, shall come and eat and be filled.” Again, it is a very modest tax by our standards, because, on account of the laws to prevent poverty in the first place, it didn’t need to be very large. But it was a tax all the same. 

Now, all this with regard to the first objection. The second objection claims that, while all these laws are in the Torah, they are not really laws...not in the sense we are discussing, anyway, because no one would’ve enforced them. They are, we are supposed to believe, more like “Thou shalt not covet,” moral principles that God lays down. Now, so far as I have been able to determine--at least, so far as it has ever been explained to me--this interpretation relies on a single, simple criterion for determining this sweeping and remarkable judgment: it never says how they might have been enforced, ergo, they obviously weren’t to be enforced--that means you couldn’t make someone give land back at the Jubilee, or stop someone from trying to wring debt payments out of someone after the Sabbath year, or stop someone from charging their brother interest, etc. Now, to be frank, this sort of hermeneutic seems an awful lot like those people who insist that, in order to take the Bible seriously, they have to read every prophecy “literally,” so that they insist, for instance, that clearly Isaiah’s prophecies against Babylon haven’t been fulfilled, because the moon hasn’t yet turned to blood; obviously, Babylon is going to be rebuilt, and then destroyed once again, complete with celestial fireworks, in fulfillment of the prophecy. Now, when someone gets a hermeneutical principle that enshrined in their head, to the exclusion of all other considerations, it’s hard to argue. But let me make a stab at it in this case.

First of all, that objection seems to display an ignorance of how legal science works. I am not a law expert, and I hope someone who is can help clear this up for us, but my understanding is that even modern law codes, which are extremely systematic, thorough, and all-pervading, do not prescribe precisely what the punishments are to be for every offense, particularly for civil, rather than criminal prosecutions (and almost all OT prosecutions were of the former kind). That’s why you sometimes get these judges handing down these absurd rulings, like the old lady who gets $5 million for burning herself on a McDonald’s coffee--the law leaves the determination of the penalty up to the court. Now, how much more should this be the case for a law code in the ancient world, when law codes were never as systematic, precise, and all-pervading! Particularly when, as was especially the case in ancient Israel, the structures for enforcing justice were highly localized and decentralized. The Torah was to be for the whole nation, but there wasn’t a Supreme Court responsible for enforcing it; rather, the Torah states what should and shouldn’t be done, and, though in quite a number of cases it spells out precisely what ought to be done to those who violate its commands, in other cases, it leaves this underdetermined, or entirely undetermined, since no doubt in many cases, the local court would want to be able to exercise its discretion in resolving the problem as seemed to suit the particular circumstances. 

As it is, it seems clear, from the form in which the Torah law-codes have come to us, that they were never intended to be exhaustive, but rather, a large number of representative examples of what was and wasn’t to be done in various situations, and what sorts of punishments were to be imposed on offenders. It never presents itself as trying to give all of the relevant facts. 

Now, I know the die-hards aren’t buying it yet. So I will attempt to show a) that many laws that it would seem would have been enforced do not have an enforcement mentioned; and that b) some laws that don’t have an enforcement mention were, indisputably, enforced. 

So then, let’s look at the first set of laws in Ex. 21-23. We begin with a long series of laws in what’s called the casuistic form, which is basically, “If anyone does this, this shall happen to him.” This form generally tells us the penalty as part of telling us the law. Not always, though. For example, 21:2: “When you buy a Hebrew slave, he shall serve six years, and in the seventh he shall go out free, for nothing.” Ok, but what if I don’t want to let him? What if I refuse to let him go free? It doesn’t say. Does that mean there could have been no enforcement? What about the law in the same form, near the end of this section, “If you lend money to any of my people with you who is poor, you shall not be like a moneylender to him, and you shall not exact interest from him?” Is this drastic imposition upon the “free market” to be enforced? The laws then turn to the apodeictic form--”You shall, you shall not”--this form often does not include any word as to enforcement. “You shall not revile God, nor curse a ruler of your people” (22:28); “You shall not spread a false report, or bear false witness in a lawsuit” (23:1-2); “You shall not oppress a sojourner” (23:9)--none of these would have been enforced? 

How ‘bout Leviticus? Right after the gleaning laws, which we are told would not have been enforced, because no enforcement is mentioned, we have “You shall not steal; you shall not deal falsely; you shall not lie to one another....You shall not oppress your neighbor or rob him....You shall do no injustice in court....You shall not go around as a slanderer among your people.” (Lev. 19:11-16) None of these would’ve been enforced? What about Dt. 19:14: “You shall not move your neighbor’s landmark, which the men of old have set, in the inheritance that you will hold in the land that the Lord your God is giving you to possess”? I could go on, but I’ll stop.

What about b)? Do we have proof that laws for which no enforcement was mentioned were in fact enforced. Sure we do. We know that by the time of Christ, laws regarding the Sabbath day were being quite rigorously enforced, for instance, even though the Torah, so far as I know, never says what you’re supposed to do with someone if they do not keep the Sabbath holy. Ah, but these were Pharisees. Ok, what about Nehemiah? I quote from Nehemiah chapter 5 (thanks to my Dad, who suggested peeking around in Nehemiah for some guidance): 

“Now there arose a great outcry of the people and of their wives against their Jewish brothers. For there were those who said, "With our sons and our daughters, we are many. So let us get grain, that we may eat and keep alive." There were also those who said, "We are mortgaging our fields, our vineyards, and our houses to get grain because of the famine." And there were those who said, "We have borrowed money for the king’s tax on our fields and our vineyards. Now our flesh is as the flesh of our brothers, our children are as their children. Yet we are forcing our sons and our daughters to be slaves, and some of our daughters have already been enslaved, but it is not in our power to help it, for other men have our fields and our vineyards."  I was very angry when I heard their outcry and these words. I took counsel with myself, and I brought charges against the nobles and the officials. I said to them, "You are exacting interest, each from his brother." And I held a great assembly against them and said to them, "We, as far as we are able, have bought back our Jewish brothers who have been sold to the nations, but you even sell your brothers that they may be sold to us!" They were silent and could not find a word to say. So I said, "The thing that you are doing is not good. Ought you not to walk in the fear of our God to prevent the taunts of the nations our enemies? Moreover, I and my brothers and my servants are lending them money and grain. Let us abandon this exacting of interest. Return to them this very day their fields, their vineyards, their olive orchards, and their houses, and the percentage of money, grain, wine, and oil that you have been exacting from them." Then they said, "We will restore these and require nothing from them. We will do as you say." And I called the priests and made them swear to do as they had promised. I also shook out the fold of my garment and said, "So may God shake out every man from his house and from his labor who does not keep this promise. So may he be shaken out and emptied."

Here we have a clear account of Nehemiah bringing charges against wealthy men for violations of the usury laws and, it appears, debt-slavery laws, even though, in the Torah, we have no mention of anyone enforcing these. 

All of this does not prove that the gleaning laws or the triennial tithe, for instance, would have also been enforceable in court, but it means that there is no prima facie reason to suppose that they weren’t, and, once we look at the context and the larger goals of the law, it seems to me fairly convincing that they were. 

However, I wonder if the whole question about whether the gleaning law would've been "enforced," for instance, is not a bit beside the point.  The key question, as I have tried to insist, is whether "theft" is strictly speaking, the proper accusation, and if so, why.  That all seems to depend on the question: "who has a right to the property?" Now, suppose that I have been entrusted with a number of gifts, that I am supposed to hand out to my siblings.  I keep them for myself instead.  So my siblings go into my room and take them.  Now, this was perhaps a breach of some kind of charity or etiquette, but was it “stealing”?  It doesn’t seem like it.  What if my parents ordered me to hand over the gifts to them, and then distributed them to my siblings?  Would that be stealing?  Or, to try an analogy more alien to our experience--suppose my father goes away, and leaves me with orders to care for my younger brother, who is sick and unable to earn his keep, and therefore will depend on my income for sustenance.  If I refuse to give him any money for food, is it “stealing” for him to take some from me?  Is it stealing if he appeals to a friend who has been appointed mediator between us, who then requires me to supply him what he needs?  Both the brother or the mediator could do all kinds of things wrong in the way they take the money, but I don’t know if they would be “stealing” by taking it.  All this then comes back to a question, raised in a discussion on here last fall, as to whether the requirements to share these resources with those in need of them are duties of charity or duties of justice.  I’m contending, as seems to me clear from the OT and from historic Christian teaching, that they are duties of justice.  Which means that, if the law is requiring me to fulfill these duties via taxation, it might be doing a lot of things wrong, but it’s not “stealing.”  So the OT laws, in this discussion, serve to show that I really do legally owe it to my poor brother to make sufficient provision for his needs, and thus these are duties of justice, however they may have been enforced in the OT.  Of course, a tension for me is that I have unanswered questions about the nature of the distinction between charity and justice.  So any contributions on that front would be most welcome.

Disenchantment with Distributism

My appreciation for distributism was considerably lessened last week when I delved deeper into Belloc as part of writing up my paper on Catholic theories of property.  I had noted before, of course, that Belloc rooted distributism not in Biblical principles (like an appeal to Old Testament law) but in the rather modern value of "freedom," which troubled me a bit.  But, on closer consideration, this seems considerably more problematic, and risks turning the whole Thomistic tradition on its head in favor of capitalist values like the freedom to pursue individual self-interest.  At the risk of being accused of laziness, I will paste here the entire relevant section of my paper:

Within the few decades following the publication of Rerum Novarum, the dominance of capitalism and the threat of militant socialism remain, but the alternatives become somewhat clearer.  By the time Hilaire Belloc is writing The Servile State in 1912, and certainly by his Essay on the Restoration of Property in 1936, it has become clear that socialism does not mean, as Leo perhaps still imagined, the abolition of property ownership, but rather, the concentration of property ownership in the hands of the state.  Belloc is thus able to recognize socialism not as the opposite of capitalism, but simply as a development of the same impulse, underlying industrial capitalism, of centralizing control of the means of production.  This shifts the nature of the discussion fairly radically.  As Belloc sees it, the threat to private property is more practical than theoretical; capitalism has first seen fit to increase production by concentrating ownership of capital in the hands of a few, thus undermining the institution of private property; socialism has then concluded that if property is to be concentrated in the hands of a few, it were better that it be administered for the good of all, rather than for the good of the possessors alone, and that requires state ownership.  Hence, in contrast to Leo, Belloc believes the situation calls a defense, not of private ownership in the abstract against common ownership, but of well-distributed private ownership against concentrated ownership--it is empty, in his mind, to defend the right of private property if only a small sliver of the population are to enjoy that right.  It is worth noting also that, perhaps due to his English setting, he does not want to explicitly situate himself in the Catholic tradition, though we can surmise that it lies in the background of his thought.

Like both Aquinas and Leo, Belloc’s endorsement of private property combines aspects of an appeal to nature and to practical considerations, but the form of his argument has more in common with Aquinas than Leo: private property does not derive directly from nature, but the structure of nature is such that it proves most beneficial to man.  The content of Belloc’s argument, however, has more in common with Leo, focusing more on the good of the individual possessor, rather than the benefits accruing to society as a whole, and bears the stamp of modernity in its consideration of “freedom” as a preeminent value.  Assuming, with Leo, the priority of the family as the basic economic unit, he focuses and provides a clear basis for Leo’s concern that each family be able to provide for itself.  “It is obvious that whoever controls the means of production controls the supply of wealth.  If, therefore, the means for the production of that wealth which a family needs are in the control of others than the family, the family will be dependent upon those others; it will not be economically free.” (14)  He of course acknowledges that such pure freedom and independence is neither possible nor desirable, since man is a social animal (14-15), but he nevertheless thinks it importance that the family retain as much freedom as possible.  

But why?  Why is economic freedom important?  Because, it is needed to properly realize social and individual needs residing in man’s nature.  First, the social needs: “It has been found in practice, and the truth is witnessed to by the instincts in all of us, that such widely distributed property is necessary to the normal satisfaction of human nature.  In its absence general culture ultimately fails and so certainly does citizenship.  The cells of the body politic are atrophied and the mass of men have not even, at last, an opinion of their own, but are moulded by the few who retain ownership of land and endowments and reserves.  So essential is property to full life.” (17-18)  Second, the individual needs: “Now, there is discoverable in man, Freewill.  His actions are of moral value to him if they are undertaken upon his own initiative; not if they are undertaken upon compulsion.  Therefore the use of choice is necessary to human dignity....Next, economic freedom is a good because man’s actions are multiple, both his desires and his creative faculties; but it is only in the possession of economic freedom that this multiplicity can be effective.” (21-22)  This appeal has the basic structure of Aquinas’s justification of private property, resting not, as it were, on the esse of mankind, but on the bene esse of man’s life in the world.  It has not, then, as for Leo, the character of an a priori appeal to the nature of things, but a deductive application of the natural law to the current state of mankind.  

But the differences from Aquinas far eclipse the similarities.  The principle of common use, for Aquinas the foundation of all discussion of property, and for Leo still present as a restraint on private property, seems to have vanished entirely.  Belloc has lost faith in Thomas’s crucial distinction between administration and use--whereas Aquinas believed that some individuals or groups could justly administer the world’s goods for the benefit of all, Belloc believes that each family must have not just the use of that portion of the world’s goods that they need, but the power of administration to produce all that they need.  The basic problem then is not that industrial capitalism had failed to genuinely use private possessions for common use, though Belloc certainly thought it had; if so, Leo’s solution of a capitalism governed by charity and concern for the common good would have sufficed, or even socialism.  Indeed, Belloc does not doubt that socialism could succeed in providing for everyone’s material needs, but it must do so at the expense of freedom.  Rather, the basic problem for Belloc is that common use is not enough, because man must have the power not merely to live, but to administer his life according to his own desires and with regard to his own interests.  This becomes clear in a crucial passage from The Servile State: “What distinguishes private property is not that the possessor thereof is less than the state, or is only a part of the state...but rather that the owner may exercise his control over it to his own advantage, and not as a trustee for society, nor in the hierarchy of political institutions.” (48-9) Thus far has the fundamental value of capitalism triumphed over Belloc’s mind--that everyone ought to be able to use his own goods for his own advantage, not for others.  

Aquinas’s hierarchy of values has been inverted--potestas dispensandi, has, as it were, taken priority over usum--for Belloc, the fruits of the world do not exist primarily to enable man to provide for his material needs, but to enable him to realize his human dignity by giving him the power of disposing of them as he sees fit.  Of course, this may well provide a useful augmentation of the Thomist justification for private property: by highlighting its value not merely for society as a whole but also for developing the full moral character and dignity of the proprietor (which thus further benefits society), Belloc’s argument suggests that Aquinas should have attended not merely to the importance of the existence of private property, but also of its wide distribution.  However, Belloc shifts the emphasis so far that the value of freedom is at risk of trumping those of justice and charity, leaving distributism, unlike Thomism, able to say very little when it comes to questions of just use of property.