For all her undoubted wisdom, even the rich tradition of Catholic Social Teaching (CST) is not safe from the snares of logical fallacies. While the faithful owe fidelity to the teachings of the Catholic Church on matters of faith and morals, the commentaries of popes and ecclesial officials on matters of society, economy, and politics can be met with careful discernment and conscientious disagreement. One of the grounds for respectful disagreement with the reflections of a papal encyclical or the recommendations of a Vatican document is often a lack of prudence in judging the practical application of Catholic principles to concrete realities. A common culprit behind such misjudgments is the spillover fallacy, which is perhaps more influential in discussions of Catholic social thought than sometimes recognized.

We must make the building of a free society once more an intellectual adventure, a deed of courage. —F.A. Hayek

Seventeen seventy-six was an auspicious year. The Bolshoi Opera began in 1776. Also in 1776, the Duchess of Kingston was found guilty of bigamy. For conspiracy theorists, 1776 was a very important year: The Illuminati was founded. For scholars, the first chapter of Phi Beta Kappa was formed at the College of William & Mary.

The year 1776 proved to be a mixed blessing for economists, however: On the dark side, Rhode Island established wage and price controls. On the bright side, a book was published entitled: An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.

“Compassionate conservatism” is not a phrase you hear often these days, but at its height it represented a new brand of Republican governance. Compassionate conservatism originated with a coherent understanding of the cause and impact of civil society’s reversal across the 20th century, the result of an increasingly mechanistic approach to solving social problems. Previously, America had been celebrated by Alexis de Tocqueville and others as a bastion of voluntary association, relying for social cohesion and problem-solving on the marketplace, but first and foremost on family, church, civic groups, charities, and mutual aid societies. In Liberty Lost: The Rise and Demise of Voluntary Association in America Since Its Founding, Robert E. Wright lays out the almost comical number of clubs and organizations that Americans started for the purpose of solving problems, debating ideas, and entertaining themselves. These served to create strong social bonds and networks, regardless of the particular goals of this or that organization. However, the rise of progressivism at the turn of the 20th century created an elite class of expert planners whose regulatory schemes, administrative agencies, and massive reorganizing of social, cultural, and economic life crowded out these organic social institutions. 

Modern economics tends to understand itself as a discipline that has left behind the theological presuppositions of its own emergence. It operates in the vocabulary of models, incentives, and equilibria; its authority rests on abstraction and formalization, not revelation. And yet, as this ambitious and erudite volume demonstrates, a significant portion of what now appears as self-evidently “economic” thinking in fact rests upon a much older moral-theological tradition. A History of Christian Political Economy: From the Patristics to the Present by Jordan J. Ballor and Erik W. Matson invites a reconsideration of the standard narrative—not as the emancipation of economic reason from religion but as a transformation internal to it.

Dante had his Beatrice and Mark Twain had his Joan of Arc. Granted, they are not quite the same sort of muse, one devoted to peace and the other a famous warrior, but they may play similar roles for our great poets of comedy. Dante’s readers, perhaps not a little under the spell of Beatrice themselves, eventually called that comedy (the story has a happy end) divine; whereas Twain’s comedy is decidedly all-too-human. The difficulty is rather elsewhere: Everyone who’s heard of Dante has heard of Beatrice, but almost no one who reads Twain has read his Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (1896, his last novel), despite his repeated statements that it was his best book, the one he most loved, and other words to that effect aimed to persuade posterity, since his contemporaries did not admire or much read the novel either.

St. Francis of Assisi died 800 years ago, in his mid-40s, on the third of October 1226. He is remembered the world over as the gentle patron saint of the poor, peace, nature in general, and animals in particular. He is remembered especially by the religious orders that bear his name and by his Church, which celebrates his feast day on October 4. He is remembered well, but often poorly. G.K. Chesterton, in his concise and illuminating biography St. Francis of Assisi, wrote that “St. Francis anticipated all that is most liberal and sympathetic in the modern mood,” and yet when modern readers study his life, they find aspects of the saint “quite remote and repulsive.”

From 1966 to 1967, tens of thousands of people in the Indian state of Bihar died from drought-induced starvation. This was orders of magnitude less than the estimated two million policy-induced famine deaths suffered decades earlier by its neighboring state of Bengal (modern-day West Bengal and Bangladesh). Yet the suffering in Bihar garnered arguably more attention than the Bengal famine of 1943 due to the work of photojournalists like Thomas Hoepker, who was awarded third place in the World Press Photo Contest for his evocative images of the famine. His unnerving photos of emaciated bodies, originally published for Stern magazine, haunted the imaginations of many Westerners. Then, just a year later, that discomfort turned into alarm when Paul Ehrlich published his bestselling book The Population Bomb, where he characterized his 1960s visit to Delhi in this way:

Wilfred M. McClay is the Victor Davis Hanson Chair in Classical History and Western Civilization at Hillsdale College, where he is also professor of history. Among his books are the award-winning Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story, The Student’s Guide to U.S. History, and Religion Returns to the Public Square: Faith and Policy in America. Prof. McClay has been the recipient of fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Academy of Education, and was a 2022 recipient of the Bradley Prize. He received his B.A. from St. John’s College in Annapolis, and his Ph.D. in history from Johns Hopkins University.

One of the most consequential conversations in American revolutionary history occurred in a Philadelphia bookstore, a meeting place for colonial leaders unhappy with the English Crown. In March 1775, Benjamin Rush, a young physician, walked into the shop. He was introduced to a down-on-his luck British ex-patriot hired by the shop’s owner, Robert Aitken, as an editor for his new Pennsylvania Magazine.

Rush had been working on a document arguing the case for American independence. But he wasn’t sure he should publish it because Philadelphia was the place of his livelihood, and the city was divided over the question of independence. “I shuddered at the prospect of the consequence of it not being well received,” he wrote later.

Impressed by this British national, Rush suggested he should take up the task instead. The man agreed. His name was Thomas Paine.