“In this regard our contemporary age has developed the hope of creating a perfect world that, thanks to scientific knowledge and to scientifically based politics, seemed to be achievable. Thus Biblical hope in the Kingdom of God has been displaced by hope in the kingdom of man, the hope of a better world which would be the real “Kingdom of God”… (as fans of “liberation theology” would have us believe perhaps? CK)…It has also become clear that this hope is opposed to freedom, since human affairs depend in each generation on the free decisions of those concerned. If this freedom were to be taken away, as a result of certain conditions or structures, then ultimately this world would not be good, since a world without freedom can by no means be a good world. Hence, while we must always be committed to the improvement of the world, tomorrow’s better world cannot be the proper and sufficient content of our hope. And in this regard the question always arises: when is the world “better”? What makes it good? By what standard are we to judge its goodness?”

… stay tuned!

“The liberal secular state lives on premises that it is not able to guarantee by itself.”

and discussed by a cross section of academe (including a personal favorite Charles Taylor) here:

http://www.resetdoc.org/EN/Liberal-dilemma.php

As for Leo XIII’s internalized Lockeanism in his formulation of private property rights, I agree with Ernest Fortin’s assessment (it seems apparent that the younger Liberatore more than Taparelli was the real innovator here, but I’m not sure of that). I think it’s understandable that such a concession to the natural rights tradition would be made in a context of aggressive Marxian-statist attacks on private property, but “sacred” or not, property rights remain subordinate to the common good, strongly so, in the Leonine social tradition from Pius XI through John Paul II. We will know more about how strongly so with the imminent release of Pope Benedict XVI’s “Caritas in Veritate,” his major economic encyclical. The influence of Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde on Benedict is being discussed as suggestive of a radicalization of official teaching. See here, http://chiesa.espresso.repubblica.it/articolo/1338746?eng=y ,
for an article discussing Böckenförde’s influence, including a re-post of a recent explosive article by the German jurist arguing for a radical reconstruction of economic foundations.

best,Lew

In fact, whenever you hear a member of Congress mention any of these words, you are advised to secure your wallet and adopt the bearing of the Allen Brothers because the future of your liberty, freedom and personal way of life are about to be abridged for a greater good that is neither great nor good.

Imagine that, a state of “freedom” and “liberty” might imply certain restraints and obligations upon the bearer and “responsibility” and abnegation might not be pejorative? what will they think of next?

The Rattlesnake was a contender for national symbol over what Franklin referred to as “that carrion eating Bald Eagle” It was felt to be a good symbol because it was :
1. Native and unique to the Americas
2. Retiring unless provoked, whereupon it warned before striking.
3. Deadly when provoked

It would appear the Carrionophagia won out.

Belloc is correct economically because free market economics depend on the “vast number of firms” hypothesis, which states that all production for any given commodity takes place within such a vast number of firms that no firm, or no likely combination of firms, has any pricing power; they are all price takers rather than price makers. But the precondition for this hypothesis is the widespread distribution of productive property. Thus distributism, or something very like it, stands beneath all free market theories. And in wage negotiations, only a person who has other alternatives to the job–that is, his own property, can actually negotiate. You can’t NO-gotiate if you can’t say “no.”

I find the similarities between the arguments made here, from the perspective of Christian duty and those shared with the Buddhist philosophy, to be extremely compelling.

Regardless of labels, the history of persistent ideas has proven deliberate and deductive reasoning ultimately leads to similar conclusions abstracted from personality or geography. Only through continued dedication and diligence can one experience true freedom.

What an intriguing contradiction.

Do you mean to say that Rerum is traditional because Aquinas also defended PP? For me MacIntyre has made it impossible to agree that because words or concepts are in common that a shared world of discourse exists. I think your next sentences on the prudential basis of PP in Aquinas demonstrate the point: Rerum does not exercise prudential judgment but appeals to the notion of inviolable and sacred natural rights with respect to property.

That is not a shared discourse, and the implications for equity are simply enormous.

As a means of limiting the power of the Federal government only.

The discussion of private property is traditional, or at least is Thomistic, since Thomas makes a vigorous defense of PP. However, that defense is on pragmatic grounds rather than principled ones. Things just work better when everyone has their own little bit of property to look after. For Thomas, the natural law was common property, with private property a human addition and pragmatic addition to bring forth the common values of property.

John Paul II would “correct” Leo by making the misuse of property a question of law as well as a violation of charity. This is a critical shift.

It is rumored that there will be a new social encyclical this month. It will be interesting to see what Pope Benedict does on this issue. He has been good friends with the neoconservative George Wiegel, but had nice things to say about the Frankfurt School in Spe Salvi.

I’m wondering what your response would be to Ernest Fortin on Rerum novarum? In your post you state that the intellectual grounding for Rerum avoided the “anti-human extremes of liberalism and socialism,” but Fortin, in that masterful Theological Studies article from 1992, claimed that the intellectual grounding and assumptions of Rerum attempted to synthesize the antithetical traditions of liberalism and Catholicism–antithetical because one was teleological and the other not.

For Fortin, modern talk of private property is a decisive break from the tradition, and the encyclical’s use of this language and its assumptions renders somewhat difficult its stated aim, and what I believe is your approval, to defend property without unhinging it from the common good. For the tradition, property is prudential. A very good idea, it ought to be favored whenever possible (read “usually”) but it is not a natural right. But the encyclical uses borrowed language of “inviolable” and “sacred.”

The Jesuits to whom you refer (Taparelli and Liberatore) are identified by Fortin as using Lockean rather than Thomistic assumptions, and with those assumptions comes this difficulty (I’m paraphrasing what I remember from Fortin): while Leo didn’t intend to declare private property holy, he all but did. What he meant to do and how he did it were at odds.

The reason this is so interesting, given your post, is you claim Locke seduced the faith in the sentence preceding your positive claims regarding Rerum. But if Fortin is correct, Locke seduced Rerum as well.

Further, claims Fortin, as Leo shifted the language of private goods and the common good from the tradition of justice to the language of charity, he rendered the principle empty of legal use and leaves it to the discretion of individuals. But isn’t that precisely the issue at hand, a new kind of autarchy as individuals give or use their goods?

Would appreciate knowing your thoughts on this.

That said, you — quite excusably — misinterpret the scope of my argument in equating the theory of property I outline with stoicism; so excusable is it, that I wondered aloud this week whether a reader of my essays could make a connection between the emphasis on private ownership and self-subsistence and the arguments for continual and communal interdependence elsewhere. Given the awful practice of many conservatives today of celebrating a radically free market dissolvant of families even as they proclaim in a “separate sphere” their love for and defense of “family values,” it was unfortunate that I should appear to reproduce this “dual consciousness” by seeming to praise autarchy in one place and continual dependence on another elsewhere.

I left myself open to charges of “stoicism” or the a kind of unworldly republicanism of Jefferson, having offered only one clue to the Thomist foundation beneath my series of claims. I said that true property and true ownership led to the common good. Since I did not explain what that meant, one might have thought I was preaching some sort of “invisible hand” doctrine that insists private greed will make for public virtue. To the contrary, I am merely following Aquinas. Says St. Thomas, all things are initially common property; they may be made contingently private in human society; it is good that property be made private, because a sense of private ownership, of have a fixed stake on a fixed share of property gives one a more profound sense of responsibility for good stewardship. Aquinas, in the Summa, seems almost to rush past the details of private property itself, so anxious is he to remind us of its common origin and to insist on the expressly public nature of private ownership. I’m rather embarrassed not to have made this more explicit, but perhaps may beg the further excuse that Mark Shiffman had adequately explored these questions in his first FPR post on the meaning of property. I’ll work out something more formal for the near future to redeem whatever remains to be redeemed.

Along with Patrick, I found your etymology fascinating but unexpected. I have written on Burke and Acton’s respective use and confusion of freedom and liberty, wherein Freedom is “negative,” the absence of restraint, whereas “liberty” describes the free action of one raised up through a system of obligations to act noblely. Since I was increasingly unconvinced of my own argument on one aspect of this point (Burke’s distinction of liberty and freedom is at best uncertain), I’ll revisit the question with your illuminating essay and Patrick’s objections in mind.

Human freedom is paradoxical in that man (unlike God) can choose to be unfree, can choose to be a slave. True, our God can take “the form of a slave,” but only by emptying himself of divinity. Our freedom can negate itself, to become its own opposite, which it does when we choose vice over virtue. Thus Michael Novak can assert that in the “freedom” of democratic capitalism, “Every vice must be allowed to flourish.” For Novak, and many other moderns, the vicious is at the heart of freedom, in a kind of free competition with virtue.

Vice limits freedom, is the negation of freedom. Hence, freedom is paradoxical in that in order for their to be freedom, it must be limited to the good. Contra Novak, a market in which vice flourishes cannot be a free market; a society in which vice flourishes will become a society of slaves. They may have freely chosen their slavery, but they will be slaves nonetheless.

This basic concept is also seen in the development of the Greek idea of freedom – that its opposite is the condition of slavery, which is not only or merely the condition of being a slave, but most profoundly the condition of being subject to forces over which you have no control. Even a “free” man can be a slave, if that person is not able to govern the appetites. Thus, for Aristotle, a citizen is a person capable of “ruling and being ruled in turn.” The condition of the “eleutheroi” is not simply that of an absence of external restraint, but the capacity to enforce restraint upon oneself, through self-control and law.

While you valorize the concept of “freedom” deriving from the Germanic etymology that emphasizes an interpersonal dimension, it’s noteworthy that this backdrop lacks a political dimension. Perhaps for this reason the word “freedom” has – in my view – become more corrupt with individualistic overtones in our current age, mainly because for moderns, the interpersonal (familial, friendship) is simply private, and thus tends to escape considerations of commonweal. While I would agree that the word “liberty” has also been corrupted – and does tend to have the connotation of “negative” liberty for many, as you suggest – its political dimension has, in my view, prevented it from thorough corruption.

Still, most important finally is not necessarily or finally the etymology, but the extent to which we have a correct understanding of the concept of freedom/liberty that accords with a proper understanding of human anthropology. Until that is corrected, words will continue to lose their meaning.