Combining Louis Kelso’s innovation in economics and finance, and with Mortimer Adler the clearly defined principles of economic justice, along with Pius XI’s revolution in social philosophy lays the groundwork for economic personalism. In this way, economic institutions — including the policies and laws governing those institutions — can be structured in a way the respects the dignity of every person. The result is a Just Third Way that transcends the flaws inherent in collectivism that manifests as socialism, and individualism that finds expression in capitalism.
Orestes A. Brownson
Like any theory, however, economic personalism requires clear guidelines to apply principles in a practical way to achieve a more just and humane future for all. Sound theory is essential, but to be effective it must be put into practice without violating its own principles. The end does not justify the means.
With respect to the demands of economic and social justice, the primary task is to integrate the exercise of each person’s inalienable natural rights (especially life, liberty, and private property) into the institutional structure of the common good. This must be done to optimize the exercise of individual rights to the advantage of the whole of society, or at the very least do no harm.
As originally conceived, this was the idea of the system implemented by the U.S. Constitution. It was the reason the American political system has been commended by almost every pope since Pius IX. Orestes Augustus Brownson (1803-1876) put it well in the Introduction to The American Republic (1866),
The United States, or the American Republic, has a mission, and is chosen of God for the realization of a great idea. . . . its mission is not so much the realization of liberty as the realization of the true idea of the State, which secures at once the authority of the public and the freedom of the individual — the sovereignty of the people without social despotism, and individual freedom without anarchy. (Orestes A. Brownson, The American Republic: Its Constitution, Tendencies and Destiny. Wilmington, Delaware: ISI Books, 2003, 3.)
Sometimes, however, the institutional structure within which individuals exercise their rights becomes distorted or flawed. Usually this involves the law, but it also includes custom, tradition, and any other social structure that guides individual behavior within groups, and of smaller groups within larger groups.
Albert Venn Dicey
When the institutional environment becomes flawed, everyone in that society has the personal responsibility to organize with others to effect changes in the surrounding institutions. As the goal of the act of social justice, this ensures that every person has equal access to the common good, including the means to secure one’s own dignity, empowerment, and development.
As was seen in the Papal States under Pius IX, this presents a problem if people are not well-grounded in the principles of personalism, or if they are not prepared to apply those principles in a practical way. Constitutional scholar Albert Venn Dicey (1835-1922), for example, noted that no law is likely to have the desired effect unless people are prepared to accept the law and obey it in the manner intended. Nor can the State force compliance. It must come from people themselves. (See Albert Venn Dicey, Lectures on the Relation Between Law and Public Opinion in England During the Nineteenth Century. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction Books, 1981.)
Fr. William J. Ferree
People must therefore come together in social charity (Caritas in Veritate, § 78.), loving their institutions as they love themselves and their neighbors. As Father William Ferree explained, instead of destroying them, we must understand our institutions and identify their flaws (often artificial barriers to equal opportunity and access to the means to participate fully) in order to determine what corrections we need to make in those systems and institutions. By organizing with others to correct the system, our institutions can then once again be in material conformity with the natural law and the principles of personalism.
Only in the spirit of social charity and its process of understanding our institutions and their social purposes can people organize effectively. They can then carry out acts of social justice with the directed intent of bringing about the necessary changes in the institutional environment.
The State’s role, then, is not to try and coerce desired results or command them by fiat. Rather, the State should assist organized groups to make the required and appropriate changes in their institutions and laws and enforce them when necessary.
Moving from the personalist theory of social restructuring in general, we are now prepared to look at the personalist application of social restructuring of the economic order in particular. That is, we must reconcile the common good at the level of the economy with the economic good of each person, and we must do so without harming or unnecessarily limiting either.
In personalism we must always keep in mind that the purpose of society is to assist individuals in becoming virtuous. The first guideline to keep in mind, therefore, is that the State is made for man, not man for the State. The State, frankly, is only a social tool presumably designed by and created to assist people, not the other way around.
Second, we must also keep in mind that no coerced act is truly virtuous. A State that mandates how people are required to live is fundamentally different from one in which people are free to act as they see fit within established parameters. A personalist social order is one that respects freedom of choice as far as possible, without violating the lives and rights of others.
Third, a personalist society requires that all persons have power. A person is that which has rights, and it is generally only by the exercise of rights that persons become virtuous. Persons that do not have the power to exercise rights are inhibited from becoming virtuous, as they become the objects or tools of others.
Fourth and finally, persons without power must have the means of obtaining power, and those with power must have the means of securing it. We can therefore gauge whether a society is just and truly personalist not merely by observing whether everyone has the equal opportunity and means to gain power, but also how power is obtained and maintained.
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