Somewhat to our surprise, our posting Monday of this week on Professor Michael Sandel's course on justice at Harvard ("Justice, Justice, Thou Shalt Pursue") got more hits in a shorter period of time than any previous posting, with the sole exception of the posting the day of Mr. Obama's inauguration — which was also on justice, or (more accurately) the omission of justice from the public arena, especially economics and politics.
This may be telling us something. As we noted in the letter to the Wall Street Journal and as Dr. Norman Kurland, president of CESJ, has been saying for years, there is a great hunger for justice in the world — and that means for a sound understanding of the natural moral law. This is a hunger that is not being met either by State imposition of desired results, or private sector efforts to maintain an unsustainable status quo.
Now, bear with us for a moment. Last week we received a solicitation from the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty signed by Rick Santorum, who served as U.S. Senator from Pennsylvania from 1995 to 2007. Although Senator Santorum assisted CESJ in presenting the "Iraq Oil Proposal" to the Department of Defense, we had to tell him that CESJ does not as a rule make grants or give contributions to other groups or individuals.
We were, however, able to give Mr. Santorum something that might prove more valuable in the long run: a (very brief) updating on CESJ's efforts to foster a revival of the natural moral law in academia and politics, and a recommendation that he reestablish contact with Dr. Norman Kurland, president of CESJ, whom the Senator met with briefly a few years back.
Naturally, we weren't going to waste a great letter like that on one person, so we copied a number of people, including Dr. Max Weismann, president of the Center for the Study of the Great Ideas in Chicago. Even though Dr. Weismann has more pressing irons in the fire that demand his attention, he sent us two articles by Dr. Mortimer J. Adler on justice and the natural law. Dr. Adler, of course, was not only America's premier Aristotelian philosopher of the 20th century and the co-founder with Robert Maynard Hutchins of the Great Books of the Western World program at the University of Chicago, he was also co-founder with Dr. Weismann of the Center for the Study of the Great Ideas, and co-author with Louis O. Kelso of the mis-titled yet profound The Capitalist Manifesto (1958), and the equally mis-titled yet revolutionary short monograph, The New Capitalists (1961).
Why do we call The New Capitalists "revolutionary" when we characterize The Capitalist Manifesto as "merely" profound? Because The New Capitalists calls into question the most fundamental assumption of modern economics, an assumption that keeps the great mass of people tied to the wage system and utterly dependent on the wealthy elite or the State through the monopoly on money creation and access to existing accumulations of savings. Kelso and Adler make this clear in the subtitle of The New Capitalists: "A Proposal to Free Economic Growth from the Slavery of Savings."
Both of Kelso and Adler's books are, as we might expect, solidly grounded in natural law theory. This raises the question as to what, exactly, is this thing we call the "natural law"? After that lengthy buildup, we expect an answer that lives up to its billing. That is what Dr. Weismann provided us with in the two articles he sent us earlier today, and which we will summarize in the next posting in this series.
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