Catholicism, the Common Good, and the State
The common good has become a sort of spell or incantation that seems to justify any course of action. We must resist the temptation to use the term as an excuse for advocating the power of the state to impose solutions through its compulsory taxing and regulating powers. We must cultivate an acute consciousness of the perils and temptations that can lure us to allow the soft despotism of state power as the key to impose desired outcomes.
Charity, William-Adolphe Bouguereau, oil on canvas, 1859. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
Among some Catholic commentators the idea that political authority exists for the common good is understood as giving to the state quasi-plenary authority over the whole of the social order under its jurisdiction.[1] The pursuit of the common good is seen as demanding very specific political answers pointing toward an expanded role of the state in civil society. It is as if Catholics may not legitimately advocate alternative solutions if those solutions are not centered on a whole host of policies mostly associated with the left. Religious progressives, including Catholics, have created electoral organizations around a version of the common good that demands an interventionist government. Examples include Vote Common Good and the Nuns on the Bus tour.[2] These types of organizations present the common good as the outcome of a choice between an activist state and selfishness.[3] This approach represents a misapprehension of this important concept within the Catholic tradition.
This misconception of the common good is not limited to those aligned with the political left. The integration of political and religious authority is the aim of integralism, which harkens back to a premodern integration of church and state. In this view, political authority has a duty to promote true religion as a necessary element of the common good, and in the process of integrating these two authorities, the state becomes more central and more powerful as the instrument of the common good.[4] Integralism appears to be a reaction to the perceived failure of the liberal experiment; it proposes the end of the economy as a separate and autonomous field and the integration of all social reality within the affairs and institutions of the church-state fusion. Integralists see the creation of a secular sphere as contrary to the truth about man in his integrality; the separation of powers is a negative development, not an achievement. They reject the position of critics such as Reformed philosopher Lambert Zuidervaart, who in his book, Religion, Truth, and Social Transformation, sees this separation as a benign development that helps limit corruption and permits the unfolding and flourishing of aspects of social life according to their proper internal logic.[5]
The Second Vatican Council’s Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, Gaudium et spes, defines the common good as “the sum of those conditions of social life which allow social groups and their individual members relatively thorough and ready access to their own fulfillment” (no. 26). This definition implies the creation of a space that facilitates the pursuit of fulfillment. The idea of access to fulfillment bespeaks a pursuit and a harnessing of various elements dispersed throughout the whole of society, as fulfillment is not a product or commodity but an eschatological aspiration that only begins to take shape here and now as the foreshadowing of a new earth.[6] Access to the conditions necessary for fulfillment does not necessarily mean the direct provision of all goods and services deemed necessary for a given purpose. It might simply mean assisting in the creation of an environment that facilitates human agency.
“What gives a greater sense of the moral life in a journey of encounter with the poor is the process of creating, not the act of distributing. This is so because the act of creating involves the poor more meaningfully.”
This language is consistent with the idea of integral human fulfillment found in the Catholic tradition of natural law. Because integral fulfillment as a general goal is only partially gained by the realization of any particular human good, it follows that any means to advance fulfillment is only a partial component in the overall fulfillment of human beings. Integral human fulfillment is always a task, an open-ended pursuit, and no specific choice or set of choices brings it about fully.[7] We can also define the common good as the sum of conditions that provide access to basic goods. Basic human goods are any and all of the things we can choose for their own sake as intrinsic aspects of our wellbeing.[8] As there is a plurality of goods and these goods are actualized differently, it is reasonable to expect that different communities will exist within the social order.
Human goods take full shape according to how they are addressed, advanced, and lived out within different communities. The common good is thus a complex system of interconnected elements forming a network. Insistence on the intervention of the state, which is but one community, tends to reduce our focus to the transactional element used for meeting biological needs. This biologism distracts our attention from the fact that the process that has as its outcome meeting human needs—a process that involves human agency—is as important as the outcome itself. When these processes reflect the full scope of dignity, people flourish in the task of meeting their needs. When these processes treat people as mere recipients, people languish despite the provision of goods and services.[9]
There is a tendency among some Catholic activists and thinkers to see the common good in a way that assumes we can jump from principles to goals to outcomes. What seems important is the outcome of a process and not the process itself. The idea of human goods, however, brings our attention back to the human person as he actualizes these goods through acts of choice. We plant a seed, and it eventually gives us a plant that blooms. The process of flourishing gives attention to the space in between. Virtues, after all, are habits of living, not mere net results. What gives a greater sense of the moral life in a journey of encounter with the poor is the process of creating, not the act of distributing.[10] This is so because the act of creating involves the poor more meaningfully.
Other Church documents, including Mater et magistra (1961), Pacem in terris (1963) and Dignitatis humanae (1965), repeat that the common good refers to the total conditions of social life that facilitate the pursuit of fulfillment both as individuals and as communities.[11] It follows that in a social order composed of various communities or organs with their own ethos and ends, no individual community can bring about the accomplishment of the general aspiration of fulfillment. It also follows that there must be a unique, essential nature to each organ that must not be set aside or ignored. The ordinary functioning of a society takes for granted that each community contributes something special and that if that particular community falters, the common good falters. It can be added that the definition does not deny the possibility that, if a community fails in its responsibilities, another community may come to its aid. It follows that these interventions are to be seen as extraordinary or subsidiary. There is dysfunction when in the ordinary course of social life extraordinary interventions become normalized or when the members of a community are seen as directly tied to other organs in the pursuit of aspects of fulfillment that are supposed to be accomplished within a given community.
In effect, in Pacem in terris, Pope John XXIII describes a well-ordered society as one informed by the moral law and the balancing of the goods of truth, love, justice in freedom (no. 37). As the state acts primarily based on compulsion, its interventions ought to be limited and its power checked. Political authority, it follows, is necessary in a well-ordered society and fulfills its duties toward the common good only when it is limited and subsidiary. It is not to be conceived as “a force lacking all control.”[12] Its power and its law must be in accord with right reason and a moral order whose source is God. Its power ought first to reside in persuasion, not in force. The modern state, however, relies primarily on power and force. If the state pursues the common good primarily with coercion, it fails; and this reveals a key truth: the state cannot be relied on as the primary means for advancing the common good. Pacem in terris puts it this way:
Wherefore, a civil authority which uses as its only or its chief means either threats and fear of punishment or promises of rewards cannot effectively move men to promote the common good. Even if it did so move them, this would be altogether opposed to their dignity as men, endowed with reason and free will. (no. 48)
The common good has become a sort of spell or incantation that seems to justify any course of action. We must resist the temptation to use the term as an excuse for advocating the power of the state to impose solutions through its compulsory taxing and regulating powers. We must cultivate an acute consciousness of the perils and temptations that can lure us to allow the soft despotism of state power as the key to impose desired outcomes. The whole of Catholic social thought, putting aside the various prudential specific paths proposed by various thinkers, cannot be reduced to desired outcomes, even in the meeting of basic needs. The act of creating as the primary way of building character is not to be placed on hold until every hole of basic needs is plugged. Preferring the political route over the organic process found in the action of individuals and the interactions of familial and intermediary communities may bring about the collapse of social order into the affairs and institutions of the state. It is a false dichotomy to propose as alternatives statist intervention for the common good and market competition based on the profit motive, as if there are no other modes in civil society. This proposal smacks of propaganda against the necessary uncertainties and risks that accompany the action of free individuals in exchange.
In effect, the free market has greatly contributed to the common good and to the limitation of state power by providing space for human freedom—a necessary ingredient for a well-ordered society, as we saw in Pacem in terris. As scholar Samuel Gregg tells us, the market is a healthy community not merely on the grounds of its efficiency but because it takes seriously the idea of individual freedom and responsibility in the economic sphere.[13] It is a canvas on which the human person actualizes his potentialities and grows in virtue. When Catholics ignore this process, they can end up becoming mere delivery workers. The market also has a moderating quality, as those who strive to trade seek compromise and connect peacefully with a variety of others (p. 101).[14]
At the same time, there is a world of familial and intermediary communities that constitute the heart of civil society and reject the false dichotomy between homo politicus and homo economicus. Thus, there is no cause for an alternative “third” way by which we attempt to moralize the free market through such artifacts as what some call “common-good capitalism.”[15] The hyphenation of a system often implies confounding right order. In the process we damage delicate elements of the orders being merged, harming both. It is as if we confuse the grinder with the meat. A good grinder will mill the added meat, producing good sausage. If you add rotten meat to it, do not expect the smell to be appetizing. Misidentifying the source of the problem might move you to take a hammer and strike at the grinder, thinking that if you adjust it a little the outcome will change. The conflation of causes will shift your attention to the grinder, when you should be looking elsewhere: to the meat.
Similarly, if the cultural landscape is not virtuous, do not imagine that the market will fix that problem. Leave it with its unique features as an effective economic system and infuse your culture with the values of the Gospel. Do not attempt to Christianize the system by misplacing your attention. If I want to find the transcendent, I should not get upset at the strictly ordinary. Common-good capitalism (or common-good constitutionalism) confuses the categories.[16] The market economy is a context for free exchange between individuals. Our abuse of freedom and the opportunities that our creative powers provide in that context is a problem in us, not in the idea of free exchange per se.
As the philosopher Michael Novak said, the historical achievements of capitalism have never been fully recognized by theologians and the churches. The amazing success of capitalism has benefited the poor more than all the efforts of others over millennia. Capitalism created unparalleled systematic and continuous production and facilitated the improvement of human life as never before. For the most part, theologians have faulted it for revealing the content of human hearts, displaying the vices already there.[17] The system was blamed and continues to be blamed by its religious beneficiaries (pp. 17–18). Its pluralism deviates from the unitary visions of both traditional societies and socialist orders. It allows the expression of human imperfection; thus, it is castigated as amoral. There is anomie and alienation; vice and evil coexist with virtue. The great error of this negative analysis is the failure to understand freedom. What critics see as alienating and disturbing is “the necessary other side of any genuine experience of freedom,” (p. 52) without which virtue cannot obtain. Catholics do not serve well the faith and an authentic respect for the dignity of human being—made in the image and likeness of God, with the moral capacity for self-realization—by undertaking campaigns to “Christianize” capitalism or create economic alternatives by adding “common good” to the title. Christians have shaped and should continue to shape the ethos of our society, but they should not seek to command it (pp. 68–69). As Novak puts it,
For great dangers to the human spirit lurk in the subordination of the political system and the economic system to a single moral-cultural vision. Daily life is (as Christians believe) a contest with the world, the flesh, and the devil. An attempt to impose the Kingdom of God upon this contest is dangerous not only to human liberty but to Christianity itself (and to any other religion similarly tempted). (p. 68)
This implies a hierarchy within a network of communities that stand alongside each other. There is horizontal equality in the need for all communities to make their unique contributions, and there is a vertical relationship in the necessary priority of the activity of communities that rely on familial and friendship bonds instead of legal and power commands. For example, if children are better served by being born and raised in families, there is a closer relationship between children and their direct caretakers. Children are members of a given community first, but as that community is a part of a network, they are related also to other communities. We can think here of extended family networks, neighborhoods, cities, local societies that aid families, churches, and many others. What seems to create the hierarchy is proximity to the life of members. It follows that the closer a community is to the individual members of another community, the more important its role is within an order or hierarchy.
You might notice that we are discussing the social order at two levels: that of individuals and that of communities. There is a mutual relationship within each level and between each level. At the individual level we speak of commutative relations regulating people’s obligations to each other. But there is a level that involves not only individuals but also sets or orders, groupings of individual members of systems with a social purpose. This is because individuals are persons, interdependent beings who belong to various communities at once.[18] Persons retain an individuality that cannot be subsumed within the group and, at the same time, they are not islands unto themselves who avoid ad extra relations with other individual islands. The principle of subsidiarity evolved out of a need to make these relationships clear. As popularized [TH1] by Pope Pius XI in his encyclical Quadragesimo anno, subsidiarity opposed the collectivism of socialism and also responded to nineteenth-century economic and political liberalism, which seemed to reduce the composition of society to the individual and the state.[19]
The aspiration of fulfillment is an ideal that cannot be fully realized here and now but can guide our actions both as individuals and as communities of persons. There is no scheme or architectonic arrangement to bring about integral fulfillment, because its open-ended nature is informed by various alternatives in the pursuit of what is good and because of the complex nature of human volition. The fact that each organ offers only a partial aspect of the conditions for fulfillment implies the necessity of a sphere of autonomy for each organ—an autonomy that, in turn, implies some measure of sovereignty over certain aspects of fulfillment. For each organ to function, there must be a barrier against intrusion. While the autonomy of each organ is limited, as it contributes only one aspect of a greater whole, the power of other organs to intervene must also be seen as limited to maintain coherence in the overall arrangement.
As the total conditions of social life entail the work of all the basic communities of society and no individual activity or set of actions (whether by individuals or communities) can bring about fulfillment, the common good is a task of every individual member of the community and every organ within the body politic. The state, as an organ within society, must be understood as operating alongside other communities. There is nothing in the definition of the common good that grants superintendency to the state. We might understand the role of the state as one of coordination. This coordination task flows from a difference between the state and other organs. The state is different from other organs only in terms of its intended target. The target of the state is the entire social arrangement under its jurisdiction, and, in that sense, it is different from other communities such as the family, the marketplace, or the religious community. Although the former communities are limited in their scope, they share with the state the same general goal of pursuing the ideal of the integral human fulfillment of its members. The idea of “total conditions of social life,” it follows, can be explored both comprehensively and narrowly. All communities within the body politic together provide the conditions of social life, and each independent community offers its set of social conditions. As this is the case, coordination appears to be the necessary task of the state.
Moreover, as human action is first and foremost individual action, integral human fulfillment begins with the individual person, and the individual person’s task of autonomous choosing cannot be transferred to or subsumed within the collective activity of individual communities—even less by the comprehensive activity of society as a whole.[20] The individual person is unrepeatable and irreducible.[21] Such comprehensive activity can be matched with the state’s sphere of activity, as its target is the entirety of the social order under its jurisdiction. It seems to follow that the individual person cannot escape the burden of responsibility, nor can he be denied the necessary sphere of autonomy, which is often encapsulated in the language of rights. In that regard, Pope Francis in Laudato si’ writes, “Underlying the principle of the common good is respect for the human person as such, endowed with basic and inalienable rights ordered to his or her integral development.”[22]
Each individual has the duty to pursue his integral fulfillment within the communities he belongs to and as he interacts with others. Each community is to provide the necessary conditions to assist individuals in this important pursuit. Every community must be at the service of the common good by providing conditions within its sphere of life that assist people in pursuing their fulfillment. The political community derives its legitimacy from its service to the common good. The Catechism of the Catholic Church is explicit on the question of legitimacy:
Authority is exercised legitimately only when it seeks the common good of the group concerned and if it employs morally licit means to attain it. If rulers were to enact unjust laws or take measures contrary to the moral order, such arrangements would not be binding in conscience. In such a case, “authority breaks down completely and results in shameful abuse.”[23]
Regarding the state as the primary or even exclusive community in charge of promoting the common good is a grave misinterpretation. This is often expressed in the language of nationalism or Christianity[TH2] . We are told that a compassionate society that promotes the common good is one where the state takes a leading role as an icon or token of recognition of the nation as a whole and where citizens accept the confiscation of their property, leaving decisions on how to allocate these resources in the hands of political actors and bureaucrats. Other basic communities take a backseat or become surrogates of state decision-making.
Against erroneous views of the common good stands the vision of ordered liberty, a better framework for building a thriving society. In a regime of ordered liberty, there is an integrated social pattern of spheres in relation to each other. These spheres of life complement but never subsume each other. Ordered liberty recognizes the delicate relations that maintain balance and is alert to the ever-present danger of conflating spheres. Individual freedom is respected as much as virtue is promoted, and the two are seen as inseparable. In this arrangement, the fact of choice is always be tied to the content of choice, but the content of choice is promoted rather than imposed. Autonomy is valued because it directs us toward the good of self-mastery. As Alexis de Tocqueville put it, “It cannot be repeated too often: Nothing is more fertile than the art of being free, but nothing is harder than freedom’s apprenticeship.”[24] The hard part is directing human action toward the good; the good must be understood to be discernible but also to be freely appropriated.
To accomplish the balance, we need institutions and customs that promote integral liberty,[25] the heart of ordered liberty. This type of liberty goes beyond the question of “positive” or “negative” liberties and into the anthropological question of what it means to be a human person. Integral liberty directs free choice toward self-mastery; it directs the subjective dimension of our lives toward the objective goods to be pursued. Integral liberty is always a pursuit. The civitas or political community in a society of ordered and integral liberty circles the pedagogical wagons around the concept of virtue. The virtues of religion and education are essential in such pursuit. The law, seen as a primary pedagogue, is crucial in this endeavor, as the law can protect integral freedom by the way it sanctions and promotes virtue. It can, in subsidiary fashion, teach us about what choices can, when freely taken, promote our good, and what choices are unworthy of human beings. The law restrains the obstinate and encourages the good citizen.[26]
Ordered liberty is oriented toward integral human fulfillment, that is, toward the pursuit of self-mastery. Such liberty must always be associated with a commitment to the limitations of the various organs of society, as each organ, possessing its proper functions, must also possess its own sphere of action and unique contribution toward the good. This implies that various communities exist by right and we cannot conceive the good society amid the blurring of distinctions offered in either socialist or integralist proposals. Both gravitate toward a certain conception of the state or a sort of centralized sphere that can easily end up collapsing everything within its gravitational pull. With Lord Acton, we must reject such a vision: “The state is competent to assign duties and draw the line between good and evil only in its immediate sphere. Beyond the limits of things necessary for its well-being, it can only give indirect help to fight the battle of life by promoting the influences which prevail against temptation—religion, education.”[27] That is, the state is limited to promoting the common good within its proper sphere of action, even if its jurisdiction is the entire social order. In sum, government must be concerned with making its citizens virtuous, and that is precisely why it must be limited and only act prudentially and in a subsidiary fashion—because autonomy is a virtue.
Within ordered liberty, the market is also a limited but important sphere.[28] As economist William Röpke puts it, the market, like the state or the church, “neither exhausts nor determines society as a whole. The market is only one section of society.”[29] But a section it is. The market is the heart of the secular.[30] We shall not ask the market to lead where it is incapable of doing so, but we must also avoid the temptation of “Christianizing” it by altering its necessary configurations that are informed by economic laws, as if there is a distinctly Christian way of examining economic exchange per se.[31] Instead, economic principles are independent of any given theology. Individuals need the sphere of free economic exchange to actualize their creative potential. They must also be aware of the implications and ramifications of their economic activity considering their understanding of the good of the human person. By supporting a robust economic system where the rules of economic exchange are respected (thereby both taming the power of the state and containing our temptation to theologize economic science), we allow the economic system to function qua economic system and, in that narrow fashion, contribute to the common good. We can call this view economic personalism.[32]
A depersonalized understanding of the common good brings with it many dangers. Wilhelm Röpke examined one: chronic enmassment (pp. 52–56). The state of being part of the mass is inevitable, as we do often find ourselves as members of a crowd, but our sense of moral responsibility can be affected by acute enmassment as we become more susceptible to manipulation or excitement. It is when we conceive the social group within the constraints of chronic depersonalized collectivism that we might confuse these manipulations with the common good. The intellectual depersonalization that accompanies the chronic mass state causes us to become “shallow, uniform, derivative, herdlike and tritely mediocre” (pp. 56–57). Our social life suffers as we lose sight of the deepest sense of the common good and attend to the destruction of the social order. Röpke adds, “By this we mean the disintegration of the social structure, generating a profound upheaval in the outward conditions of each individual’s life, thought, and work” (p. 55).
This is an outcome to be avoided, obviously. One way to guard against it is to resist the misidentification of the common good as the prerogative of government action.
Endnotes:
[1] Second Vatican Council, Pastoral Constitution on the Modern World Gaudium et spes (December 7, 1965), no. 74; see, for example, Alexia Kelly, “A Catholic Call to the Common Good,” America: The Jesuit Review, October 15, 2007.
[2] See the website for Vote Common Good. Nuns on the Bus is a campaign sponsored by NETWORK, a progressive Catholic organization that sees the Church’s teaching on the common good as necessitating an activist government. From the premise that the government “plays an important role in our lives,” such activists conclude that advocacy for the full scope of interventionist policies in progressive politics is necessary. See NETWORK’s Catholic Social Justice Reflection Guide, p. 12.
[3] Vote Common Good, for example, states that promoting the common good “means that good-hearted Christians, Jews, Muslims, and people of all traditions cannot simply vote for what is best for themselves as individuals or even what is best for their religion, party, race, or nation alone, but must be concerned for the common good. Or to put it differently, selfish people of every religion and tradition vote for self-interest or partisan interest alone, but good people of every religion vote for the common good.” See “What & Why.”
[4] See Steven P. Millies, “What is Catholic Integralism,” U.S. Catholic, October 14, 2019. Prominent contemporary integralists include Patrick J. Deneen, Gladden Pappin, and Edmund Waldstein.
[5] See Edmund Waldstein, “Integralist Manifesto,” First Things, October 2017.
[6] Gaudium et Spes, no. 39: “We do not know the time for the consummation of the earth and of humanity, nor do we know how all things will be transformed. As deformed by sin, the shape of this world will pass away; but we are taught that God is preparing a new dwelling place and a new earth where justice will abide, and whose blessedness will answer and surpass all the longings for peace which spring up in the human heart. Then, with death overcome, the sons of God will be raised up in Christ, and what was sown in weakness and corruption will be invested with incorruptibility. Enduring with charity and its fruits, all that creation which God made on man’s account will be unchained from the bondage of vanity.”
[7] See Robert P. George, In Defense of Natural Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 5.
[8] See John Finnis et al., Nuclear Deterrence, Morality, and Realism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 317–18.
[9] For a good examination of the importance of human agency over mere provision of goods, see David. T. Beito, From Mutual Aid to the Welfare State: Fraternal Societies and Social Services, 1890–1967 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999); and Charles Murray, Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950–1980 (New York: Basic Books, 1994).
[10] For a thoughtful examination of distributism and the common good, see Alex Salter, The Political Economy of Distributism: Property, Liberty, and the Common Good (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2023).
[11] See Joseph Capizzi, “The Common Good and Religious Liberty,” First Freedom Blog, US Conference of Catholic Bishops.
[12] Pope John XXIII, Enc. on Establishing Universal Peace in Truth Pacem in terris (April 11, 1963), no. 47.
[13] Samuel Gregg, On Ordered Liberty: A Treatise on the Free Society (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2003), 98.
[14] Gregg cites Tocqueville in this regard: “Trade is the natural enemy of all violent passions. Trade loves moderation, delights in compromise, and is most careful to avoid anger.”
[15] See Salter, Political Economy of Distributism, 2.
[16] Adrian Vermeule, “Beyond Originalism,” The Atlantic, March 31, 2020.
[17] For a list of the many wrongs capitalism has been blamed for, see Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982), chap. 1.
[18] See Pope Pius XI, Quadragessimo Anno, 78.
[19] For discussions of subsidiarity, see Marvin Krier Mich, Catholic Social Teaching and Movements (CT: Bayard, 2000), 81–84; Joseph Burke, “Distributive Justice and Subsidiarity: The Firm and the State in the Social Order in Journal of Markets & Morality 13, no. 2 (Fall 2010): 297–317; Anthony Santelli Jr. et al., The Free Person and the Free Economy: A Personalist View of Market Economics (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2002), 75–76; Robert A. Sirico, “Restoring Charity: Ethical Principles for a New Welfare Policy,” in Transforming Welfare: The Revival of American Charity, ed. Jeffrey J. Sikkenga (Grand Rapids, MI: Acton Institute, 1997).
[20] In the prologue to the second part of his Summa Theologiae, St. Thomas tells us that a human being is the kind of being who is “the principle of his actions, as having free-will and control of his actions.” Summa Theologiae I-II, prologue; for Christian personalists, the human person is the ontological and epistemological starting point of reflection about human dignity. See Santelli Jr. et al., Free Person and Free Economy, 7–9.
[21] Stefan Swiezawski, introduction to Karol Wojtyla, Person and Community: Selected Essays, trans. Teresa Sandok (New York: Peter Lang, 1993), xiii; see Aquinas’s discussion on irreducibility in the relationship of the human soul and the body in Summa Theologiae I, q. 75.
[22] Pope Francis, Enc. on Care for Our Common Home Laudato si’, (May 24, 2015), no. 157.
[23] Catechism of the Catholic Church (1997), no. 1903.
[24] Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. I.P. Mayer, trans. G. Lawrence (New York: Perennial Classics, 2000), 40.
[25] Gregg, On Ordered Liberty, 9, 44.
[26] St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 98, a. 6.
[27] John Dalbert-Acton, “The History of Freedom in Antiquity,” in Selected Writings of Lord Acton, vol. 1, Essays in the History of Liberty, ed. J. R. Fears (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1986), 7.
[28] On the importance of the market see Novak, Spirit of Democratic Capitalism, chap. 5.
[29] Wilhelm Röpke, A Humane Economy: The Social Framework of the Free Market (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2014 [1960]), 92.
[30] Michael Novak: “The secular marks off what properly belongs to this world as opposed to the kingdom of God, the Church, and the larger external world, within which time and space and human history are enveloped.” See Michael Novak, “The Troublesome Term ‘Secular,’ ” Crisis (May 2007).
[31] Novak, Spirit of Democratic Capitalism, 67–70.
[32] See Santelli Jr. et. al., Free Person and Free Economy, chap. 1.
