The Soul of Liberty

The Soul of Liberty is a book of the Acton Institute, where Flavio Felice, lecturer at the Pontificia Universita Lateranense in Rome, interviewed Robert Sirico, a co-founder of the Acton Institute.

Author Daniel Hinšt, Vice President of the Centre for Public Policy and Economic Analysis (CEA), provides an overview of key messages from The Soul of Liberty.

Foreword

Despite the remnants of socialist mentality in Eastern Europe and progressive secularism in Western Europe, it is important to remind open-minded people about the Christian roots of the original classical liberalism or conservative liberalism, which could be considered conservativism, especially in the Anglo-Saxon political culture.

Accordingly, this synergy between classical liberalism and conservativism is especially present nowadays since radical woke ideologies influence Western educational systems, and even businesses with risky concepts such as ESG.

Furthermore, despite predominant perceptions about historically different approaches of Catholic and Protestant traditions toward free market capitalism and entrepreneurship, the Acton Institute testifies about the synergy within Western Christianity. Also, Acton Institute explains that the roots of liberty go back to times before the Enlightenment.

Key messages from the book

Note: All bullets represent paraphrased sentences from the book, with the relevant pages. Subtitles are of the author.

The difference between authority and power

• The seeming contradiction between religion and liberty can be resolved by meditating about authority as an internal restraint with which we acquiesce and power as an external restraint with which we are coerced (3).
• Power displaces internal consent, while authority legitimizes it. Even in the freest societies, social authority is essential (4).

Freedom goes with responsibility and truth

• Freedom includes responsibility for doing what is good and right and embracing the truth (4).
• By embracing responsibility, we choose to limit freedom, while false liberty, resisting all restraint, is a source of misery. Liberty must be ordered to the truth (5).
• Totalitarian systems impose falsehood; they are despotic when they impose truth through the apparatus of compulsion that disregards the conscience (6).
• Freedom means that doing right includes the opportunity of doing what is wrong, without harm to others. Therefore, freedom includes a moral, and not always legal, obligation that our conscience embraces the truth (6).

Permit freedom of choice

• Not every economic act that is freely chosen is moral, even if it is not considered a legal crime. Although such a choice could be morally inconsistent, we should not make it illegal. Instead, we must permit freedom of choice, while working on a cultural and spiritual level to inspire people and reorder their conscience (6).

Individual responsibility instead of State domination

• Transition toward freedom will be marked by taking greater responsibility for the lives of individuals and becoming more attached to families and worship communities, while the State must back away from dominating the economy and culture, by restricting its role to law enforcement and justice (7).
• A sense of direction in a society is based on moral formation, internal spiritual discipline, a right intellectual understanding, and self-governance (7).
• Jesus’ death on the cross was chosen freely by Him so we must be willing to give freely for others. Humans were offered redemption, through our submission to Him (8).

God-given freedom of will

• The sequence of free choices forms our character and destiny. We are given the same freedom to commit sins and choose penance. The State or religious thinkers should not override that freedom of will that God did not take away (8).
• The need for transcendence is implanted by God who became Man to die for sins and made salvation possible (9).

Judeo-Christian tradition of liberty

• The concept of liberty emerged in the Jewish and Christian traditions, with a strong emphasis on the human person and its inherent dignity, moral legitimacy, and integrity of private property. We can see liberty in the Holy Scripture; in the Garden of Eden, and in commandments dealing with what is mine and thine, the sanctity of marriage, and the importance of truth. In Christianity, the individual’s dignity precedes the State (9).
• The individual is more important, with rights that should not be violated, even by parents. Christendom led to an economic order with individual rights to create, own, contract, and prosper. But such rights were tied with social and moral obligations (10).

Separation of Church and State before revolutionary ideologies

• The Church and State have distinct and separate functions, based on our Lord’s comments on what belongs to Ceasar and God, John Calvin’s divided sovereignty, Saint Augustine, Vatican II’s Declaration on Religious Liberty, etc. (11).
• The religious assumptions behind the French and Bolshevik revolutions and National Socialism, political events deadly for freedom, were secularist, atheist, and pagan (11).
• Ancient Israel had non-state courts, handed down by prophets. The people of Israel demanded a king, and the prophet Samuel reminded them that the king taxes (11).
• The theme of leaving captivity and finding a promised land of freedom and prosperity is a metaphor for all people who struggle for freedom from bondage (11).

Christian liberation from arbitrary power

• The Left wants to establish a secularized kingdom of God on Earth, based on Christianized versions of environmentalism and socialism. Attempts to use the State to impose one’s view of virtue distorts the Gospel message, which is primarily spiritual. The Christian message seeks liberation from arbitrary power and personal holiness in the context of economic, political, and cultural freedom (13).
• Luther and Calvin were firm in their view about different institutions of Church and State, while the Orthodox tradition has developed links to the nation-state (15).

The heritage of entrepreneurship – Catholic thought, more Protestant in practice

• The Protestant tradition has practical men as ministers who understood the world of businesses and law. At least before the twentieth century, the Protestant tradition embraced the idea of the enterprising commonwealth. Without reading the sermons, one cannot understand the American founding (15).
• Thomas Aquinas was the first to explore the principles of market economics, and without the market, buying and selling, barbarism and starvation would be the normal state (16).
• The limitations of the social State, taxes, the need for private property, private initiative and stable currency, entrepreneurial vocation, free trade, and the right of association belong to the Catholic tradition of thought, not always carried out in practice; and it is the Protestant practice, not always carried out in theory (16).

Christian roots behind the Enlightenment’s liberal ideas

• The French Revolution, initially sparked by a bourgeois protest against oppressive government and taxes, became wildly destructive for freedom and property and culminated in despotism (16).
• Liberte and fraternite come from Christianity, not from Robespierre. The Enlightenment can be seen as analogous to a son who inherits wealth from his father and uses it to promote socialist theory. In the same sense, the emphasis on liberty, reason, human rights, cultural advancement, and learning would not exist without Christianity. When we think of the Enlightenment today, mainly the secular strain is remembered (17).
• Cardinal Newman and Lord Actonwereamong the liberal Catholics (not the modernists) of the nineteenth century, who found some good in the Enlightenment and attempted to purge it from skepticism and anti-clericalism. Newman and Lord Acton were aware of the Christian roots of liberal thought (18).

On socialism and capitalism

• The problem of socialism is anthropological: it denies freedom and personal initiative and rejects the inherent dignity of the human person (21).
• The idea of subsidiarity means that higher orders intervene only when the lower ones fail (21).
• There are two forms of capitalism: one rooted in Christian ethics, and one allowing consumerism. Instead of capitalism, one can prefer the names business economy and free economy. Materialism is an error in any system, and it can manifest in socialism too. Such a spiritual problem cannot be addressed through political change but through religious conversion (22).
• People who we call “poor” today have more material wealth than the wealthy people in Scripture, who were often politically connected. When the Scripture warns the wealthy, it is a critique of the materialist state of mind, not the intention to single out a certain income group. We make a mistake if we think that the rest of us are exempt from temptation. We are all wealthy by any historical standard (23).
• Hayek’s late work deals with questions that have absorbed Christian thinkers for centuries (24).
• The world of commerce and the market are the expression of human evaluation, solidarity, and community; of people bringing their abilities and talents to the service of others through exchange. This distinguishes the Austrians from the economistic approach of the neoclassical school which assumes that a man is an economic being. Christian leaders have feared that people should not be the pawns of blind economic forces; this fear is never more fulfilled than in Communism where economic forces rule (24).

Religious liberty without imposing the truth

• We must continue to fight for religious liberty (26).
• We cannot impose the truth but have the freedom to propose it (27).
• The modern State wants to displace the Church and become an object of worship. Secularism does not want competition, so prayer is suppressed in public schools (27).
• Enlightenment is a period that provided a greater understanding of liberty but left a secularistic mark on the world. The work of Lord Acton demonstrates the Christian origins of liberty (27).
• Outside Christendom, there was only the rule of mob conquest and arbitrary dictate. The History of Christianity is about development and progress, regressions and setbacks. Lord Acton saw a need for moral accountability of the Church for every unjust act of coercion to clear its conscience; Acton was writing before Communism and Nazism (28).
• The secular mind is so critical of the past problems of the Church even when faced with Communism (29).
• People naturally seek self-transcendence (29).

Ignorance of many intellectuals

• Few intellectuals know about religion other than that it led to witch burning and the Crusades. In the academy, there is an ignorance of the prime force of history since it represents a rebellion from morality (29). Modern intellectuals shield themselves from learning from religious historians and theologians. We need to understand the theological origins of economic science. We face a situation different from that in the Middle Ages, where the university was of place of interdisciplinary exchange and where theology was the intellectual umbrella for every other science. Since this is no longer true, all checks of intellectual folly have been removed (30). At the same time, we can see pseudo-religion in the back door of radical environmentalism and witchcraft on campus (31).
• A handful of cults believed that there was no need for law; they quickly died out (31). Today people are encouraged to eliminate the objective standard by identifying their behavior with morality. As a result, there is no privately enforced morality, so the State fills the vacuum with political edicts. Therefore, the absence of multiple private authorities encourages a single authority of the State (31).

Socialist ideology dispenses human rights

• Socialist ideology encourages men to imagine themselves as social planners and dictators, refashioning human nature according to their dreams, and the central plan of the few with the power to make dreams reality. It dispenses human rights and dignity (32).
• Socialism treats the material world as the only reality, and everything outside it as a myth. The other form regards the material as evil and encourages aestheticism for the sake of the environment and poverty. In such materialism and anti-materialism, we lose the Christian understanding described in Augustine’s City of God. Instead of seeing the human person as God’s creation, we are told to despise the world and worship alternatives (32).

Complementary relationship between science and religion

• Students should learn from faculty who do not have artificial walls between religion and economics, for example. According to the old Scholastic model, all truth is interrelated to the one Truth. When Scholastics were doing scientific work on astronomy, for example, they were discovering more about God, about the natural law of God as its author. A person doing good work in social, economic, and political theory is discovering new aspects of the way the world, created by God, works (33). By adding the ethical dimension, we generate theoretical research. Too often, social scientists are isolated from religious and ethical thought. A higher reconciliation can be achieved by bringing the sides together through free intellectual inquiry (34).

Capitalism needs morality

• Wall Street is rarely in the mood to hear the fact that there are moral obligations (34).
• We need to properly frame our criticism, not to target a free economic system but the values of those who would squander freedom. The capitalist ethic needs to be tempered by morality and tradition (36). The economic truth is not the whole truth. Markets do not contain a moral logic, which must be provided by reason and faith. Holy Scripture warns that wealth is not a means of salvation. However, by looking at wealth as a means, we can increase human betterment and knowledge through investment, charity, and philanthropy. It depends on what we do with wealth (37).

Parents against the government censorship

• The Internet does not change the nature of choices. Therefore, liberty must subsist within a moral framework (38).
• Instead of those who believe that they can restrict the content by government censorship, parents are in a better position to define limits (38).

Radical ideologies go against our nature and produce conflicts

• Radical individualism and collectivism are contrary to our nature. Also, there are foundations seeking to create eco-spirituality and eco-theology, in which spirituality and life are not focused on the human person but on other things, while supposing a conflict between man and nature. Some radicals believe that the environment would be better off if people were extinct (39). Left-environmentalism appears to be a pagan idea (40).
• Marx’s idea is a society of conflict between capitalists and workers. Since the idea is no longer viable, the Marxist model has been changed to assume a conflict between nature and man, or feminists assume a conflict between men and women. This is a complete repudiation of the Jewish-Christian worldview (40).

Humans have dominion and there is a natural interdependence

• In the Bible, humans have dominion over nature to exercise stewardship and ownership over nature. Augustine rejected the idea that animals and plants have rights equal to those of people and ridiculed the idea that killing an animal is murder (40).
• Instead, there is a natural interdependence between workers and entrepreneurs, women and men, nature and men. A clean environment is our interest, through creativity and intelligence. Environmentalism as a political movement restricts the ability of man to control, own, and clean the environment (41).

The Parable of the Talents as the biblical basis of capitalism

• Trade is the foundation of cultural contacts (44).
• People do not give up their ideas when going into business, they live them out and the entrepreneurial vocation liberates society from poverty, with responsibilities to keep contracts, pay workers, and not profit from immoral investments (46).
• There are economic and practical implications of the Parable of the Talents, from the twenty-fifth chapter of the Gospel of Matthew. In the parable, each servant is given some talents. The servants are praised by the master if they have doubled their value through investment. Here we have a description of the wealth generation in entrepreneurship (47).
• Paying interest is endorsed and its rate tends to equal the return on capital (48).
• Other parables, on laborers in the vineyard, from the seventeenth chapter of Matthew, offer lessons against envy and underscore the right of employers regarding their property and unequal distribution (48).
• Owner responsibility and private property make people more accountable for their jobs (48).

Competition in education and the primary responsibility of parents

• The goal of education reform should be to introduce competition that would improve quality. Vouchers can help, despite the dangers of government control over private schools (48). Tax relief would open private alternatives. Parents must bear primary responsibility for education and public education is organized against this. Also, teachers’ unions are hostile to parental involvement and their motivation is the pay scale in education (49).
• Communication with God is before any other concern (53).