by Andrew Kuiper

Any genealogy of modernity that fails to explain the development and dominance of political economy risks irrelevance. Economics is one of the master-discourses of our age and evaluating how and why it emerged has always been a site of bitter contestation. The framing of the narrative already includes certain models of human nature, interaction, and flourishing. If one is committed to a philosophical anthropology that casts man as homo economicus, then the ability to barter, truck, and trade is a natural and sociable instinct. The emergence of modern market economy is simply the gradual removal of artificial obstacles to honest exchange and the replacement of inefficient institutions with more practicable ones. If, on the other hand, you view modern capitalism as a more contingent arrangement that was not  simply the inevitable unfolding of rational actors, you must have a more specifically historical account. Important examples of this latter stance are Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation and Ellen Meiksins Wood’s The Origin of Capitalism which both take the implementation of enclosure laws in early modern England as ground-zero for capitalism. Things become even more complicated when historians, economic and otherwise, attempt to sift the role religious thought and practice plays in these narratives. Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and R. H. Tawney’s Religion and the Rise of Capitalism continue to draw both praise and criticism as an indispensable attempt to solve this question of whether there are religious sources for political economy. Going all the way back to Marx, even though he thought the dynamism of capital dissolves traditional religious practice, his critique of political economy involved the suspicion that it was a kind of faux theology and economists faux theologians:

Economists have a singular method of procedure. There are only two kinds of institutions for them, artificial and natural. The institutions of feudalism are artificial institutions, those of the bourgeoisie are natural institutions. In this, they resemble the theologians, who likewise establish two kinds of religion. Every religion which is not theirs is an invention of men, while their own is an emanation from God.^[1]

Dan Edelstein gives an account which is subtly different from all of these previous approaches. He argues that the emergence of market economy is dependent on a discourse which should be precisely and properly recognized as theology. As always, Edelstein restricts his scope to what is directly relevant to the story of early modern natural rights. However, he indicates that fuller and more wide-ranging accounts of the role Jansenist theology played in economic history are contained in the following forthcoming books: David Grewal’s The Invention of the Economy and Jacob Soll’s Free Market: The History of a Dream. Though Edelstein does not mention them, the contemporary theologians David Bentley Hart and John Milbank have performed a similar diagnostic on modern capitalism by relating it to late medieval and early modern forms of natural and social theology. Eugene McCarraher, though technically not a theologian, has developed the most sustained account of capitalism as an aberrant and particularly virulent form of theology with its own surrogate divinity in his The Enchantments of Mammon (Harvard University Press, 2019) and other writings. All this to say that even if Edelstein is not directly engaging these other more theology-centric genealogies and critiques, he is contributing to a historical question that demands a contemporary, and in part theological, answer.

What specifically does Edelstein find significant in early modern Jansenism for his narrative? He begins by noting how Blaise Pascal’s contemporaries, Jean Domat (1625-1696) and Pierre Nicole (1625-1695), almost immediately reversed the former’s epistemically pessimistic positions concerning of natural law. Pascal’s position on the natural law is so severe as to be almost indistinguishable from Montaigne (though of course their religious instincts could not be more different). Edelstein notes that the illegibility of the natural law was of such significance for Pascal that he rather egregiously rewrote passages from Romans 2. “Pascal had rewritten these same biblical verses in a way that restricted the knowledge of the divine law to the chosen people alone: ‘[Jesus Christ] had to produce a great people, elect, holy, and chosen […] give laws to this people, engrave these laws on their hearts; offer himself to God for them and sacrifice himself for them.’”^[2] (For more on Jansenism at TRF, see here and here.)

Even though Jean Domat had a close friendship with Pascal, having turned to Jansenism under his influence, the legal philosophy contained in his masterwork Les loix civiles dans leur ordre naturel took a very different tack. Immensely popular, this work was translated into English, and Thomas Jefferson even recommended it to students.^[3] Hewing closely to the traditional understanding of Pauline arguments for natural law, Domat rehearsed the familiar neo-Stoic and neo-Thomist positions, joining with Pufendorf in rejecting epistemic skepticism (whether the skepticism was motivated by a genuine agnosticism or was a gesture of pious humility was immaterial). However, as Edelstein remarks, “[i]f Domat had simply brought Jansenism back in line with traditional Christian views of natural law, his contributions would not be particularly noteworthy” (121). It is rather in Domat’s theology of society and the laws governing its formation that we can discern new paradigms emerging.

Like Pufendorf and many others, Domat sees sociability as a natural human tendency. Mutual love between the sexes leads to the formation of marriage and other primary societies which in turn give rise to cascading networks of political associations. What distinguishes him here from most of his contemporaries is that the emergence of formal government from primary societies is conceived as entirely evolutionary and organic. That is, there is no need for a moment of contract or formal consent. Unlike Pufendorf or Suarez, Domat sees no need for a covenant or consent of the governed to ground political authority and, in a kind of absolutist naturalism, sees all authority as coming directly from God.

But in what way does political authority come immediately from God for Domat? The answer lies in his deployment of society as an ordre naturel which he understands in a very similar way to Malebranche’s simultaneously occasionalist and providentialist account of social interactions. God providentially implants tendencies of need, sentiment, and reason. This kind of social naturalism rejects the idea of the state as a work of art and instead ends up placing divine authority in non-intentional actions. This legal and social theory already has economic ramifications as it stands, but Domat’s Jansenism contributed something in particular that gave extra force to his account. It is in attempting to thread the needle of a natural sociable instinct which tends toward the good and the theological realities of the Fall and Original Sin that economy and theology are finally wedded. Edelstein explains:

Since the Fall, humans are no longer driven by mutual love alone but by self-love, amour-propre. This sinful selfishness is the source of all evil: “Whatever we see in Society that is contrary to Order, is a natural consequence of the Disobedience of Man to the first Law, which commands him to love God.” As God is omnipotent, however, he must have willed the existence of evil; and since God is also benevolent, he could only have done so in order to “draw Good out of it, and a much greater Good than a pure State of Good Things would have been, without any mixture of Evil.” One greater good that derived from human self-love was increased economic productivity: the Fall “hath also augmented the necessity of Labour and of Commerce, and at the same time the necessity of Engagements, and of Ties.” All of this activity was beneficial to society, and ultimately forced selfish individuals to act virtuously: to obtain what it desires, self-love “complies with all Duties, and even counterfeits all Virtues.”

This unhappy union was partially prefigured by other Jansenist reflections on self-love and society. Even Pascal praised the indirect gifts of sinful self-love: “We have founded upon and drawn from concupiscence admirable laws of administration, morality, and justice.” Even more direct and horrifying was Pierre Nicole’s assertion in his essay “On Greatness”: “There is nothing that one gets more out of than human cupidity.” Edelstein argues that Domat’s model goes beyond even these conclusions about the usefulness of self-interest because they remain at the level of indirect goods (as Mandeville would later argue concerning private vices as public virtues). Pascal and Pierre Nicole never maintained the full-throated position that “the entire system of human passions, society, and even government followed the natural order willed by God and defined by natural law” (123), as Domat did. Laissez-faire economic paradigms flow logically from this political anthropology and its underpinnings of social naturalism. Human interaction is a self-organizing system which works toward the profit and advancement of society as a whole without direction. In fact, to meddle with natural interactions is to stay the invisible hand of God providentially working through our cupidity.

The through-line from Jansenist legal philosophy and political theology is easy to trace to economics proper. Pierre le Pesant de Boisguilberg, famous for being one of the first to explicitly argue that we must simply let nature act in order to increase the wealth of the nation, studied under the Jansenists at Port-Royal. Economists outside of France would later honor him as an exemplar: “In this way, Boisguilbert served as a bridge between the Jansenist school of Domat and Nicole, and the more celebrated eighteenth-century liberal economists, from Vincent de Gournay and the Physiocrats to Adam Smith” (124). We could also add that in his Thoughts and Details on Scarcity Edmund Burke seems to have inherited this nightmarish theology of political economy when he says we must strive “manfully to resist the very first idea, speculative or practical, that it is within the competence of Government, taken as Government, or even of the rich, as rich, to supply to the poor, those necessaries which it has pleased the Divine Providence for a while to withhold from them. We, the people, ought to be made sensible, that it is not in breaking the laws of commerce, which are the laws of nature, and consequently the laws of God, that we are to place our hope of softening the Divine displeasure to remove any calamity under which we suffer, or which hangs over us.”

Dan Edelstein has done us a great favor in helping to identify early modern economics as a form of political theology. It remains to us to determine whether or not it is a genuinely Christian political theology. And if not, much work remains for us to develop a theological and prophetic account of society, economics, and politics. Our current academic mood is still predominantly one in which skepticism concerning grand narratives, so-called metanarratives, is considered an exemplary virtue of scholarly responsibility. Dissatisfaction with previous grand narratives of history (whether Christian, Hegelian, liberal-progressive, Whig, Marxist, etc.) should not leave us with a tepid post-structuralist and/or conservative contentment. In fact, the methods of research which assume the contingent meaninglessness of history as an arena of non-development is itself a grand unifying narrative which brooks no rivals. Rather, with the contemporary philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, we must recognize that “[t]he wretchedness of the conventional forms of grand narrative by no means lies in the fact that they were too great, but that they were not great enough. The meaning of ‘great’, of course, remains arguable. For us, ‘great enough’ means ‘closer to the pole of excess’. ‘[A]nd what would thinking be if it did not constantly confront chaos?'”^[4]

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^[1] Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, London 1966

^[2] Pensées, ed. and trans. Roger Ariew (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2004), para.504, p.160 as cited in On the Spirit of Rights, Dan Edelstein (University of Chicago Press, 2019) fn.29, p.274

^[3] See David J. Bederman, The Classical Foundations of the American Constitution: Prevailing Wisdom (Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 11

^[4] Sloterdijk, In the World Interior of Capital, p.5