It would be impossible in this brief Foreword to attempt even

a general sketch of Pesch’s system of economic thought. The text of

Ethics serves such a purpose, if only in a general way, and Mulcahy’s
book provides a useful and concise summary of Pesch’s thought based
upon his chief works – no small task given the literally thousands of
pages of both original work and commentary that Pesch produced
during his lifetime. Nor would it be feasible to attempt a refutation
of all the criticisms that have been leveled at Pesch, recently or other-
wise. But a quick glance at the root of those criticisms affords us an
opportunity to understand both what motivates his critics and what is
of essential value – and current relevance – in his work.
That the chief criticism of Pesch came, and still comes, from
the most rabid partisans of lassiez faire economics demonstrates that
the objections to his position are not Catholic objections but rather
liberal objections. Despite the fact that many of Pesch’s critics style
themselves “conservatives” – some of whom even style themselves
Catholics and who imagine their “conservatism” to be Catholic as
well – and claim to have only the good of society in mind when
attacking Pesch’s position, economic freedom and the creation of
Ethics and thE national Economy
16
material and monetary wealth for them come unreservedly ahead of
all other concerns in the socio-political and economic arenas. Chief
among these critics was Ludwig von Mises (1881–1973), champion
of the Austrian school of economics. In his 1922 work Socialism,
he included a superficial analysis of Pesch’s thought in the section
entitled “Pseudo-Socialist Systems.” He writes:
Solidarism proposes to leave the private ownership in the
means of production. But it places above the owner an authority
– indifferent whether Law and its creator, the State, or con-
science and its counselor, the Church – which is to see that the
owner uses his property correctly. The authority shall prevent
the individual from exploiting “unrestrainedly” his position
in the economic process.... Thus State or Church, law or con-
science, becomes the decisive factor in society. Property...ceases
to be the basic and ultimate element in the social order. ...own-
ership is abolished, since the owner, in administering his prop-
erty, must follow principles other than those imposed on him by
his property interests. ...Solidarism...does not regard [norms
aiming only at free ownership] as alone sufficient.... [It] wants
to put other norms above them. These other norms thus become
society’s fundamental law. No longer private property but legal
and moral prescription of a special kind, are society’s funda-
mental law. Solidarism replaces ownership by a “Higher Law;”
in other words, it abolishes it (Socialism, II, III, 16, 1, §5).
As a statement of the fundamental opposition between Liber-
alism and Catholic Social Doctrine, von Mises’ comments are hardly
surprising. That they contain and imply fundamental errors about
the nature of property ownership and the role of law and morality in
the social order is part and parcel of their roots in classical liberalism.
What is scandalous is the blatantly obvious way in which von Mises
implicitly demands the freedom of property from the rights of God
Who himself constitutes the “Higher Law” in which all moral and
legal prescriptions have their validity. That Law can be imagined to
abolish ownership only if ownership is understood to mean an unre-
stricted right not only to possess but also to do anything and every-
thing that is economically possible with privately owned property.
Even more disturbing – and more illustrative – is the way
in which modern, Catholic, so-called “scholars” not only take von
Mises as their starting point in understanding the role of morality
in economic life (or rather in rejecting its role), but also subject the
authoritative Teaching of the Church to his judgment and that of his
forEword
17
liberal colleagues and ideological heirs. For them the doctrines of the
Austrian school become the “higher law” which, over and above the
Catholic Faith, determines what shall and what shall not be accepted
as economic truth. One “scholar” has recently gone so far as to speak
of “an agonizing crisis of conscience” caused by the inconvenient
clash of the teaching of the Church on socio-economic questions with
“what Austrian economists know to be true.” While another, speak-
ing of the Church’s teaching in such documents as Rerum Novarum
and Quadragesimo Anno, has railed against the “indefensible extension
of the prerogatives of the Church’s legitimate teaching office into
areas in which it possesses no inherent competence[!]”
The corrective to these gross misunderstandings is a thor-
ough reading of the following work, and an exposure to the whole
tradition of real scholarship that lies behind it, and which constitutes
the integral Social Doctrine of the Catholic Church. At the heart
of that Doctrine, insofar as it applies to economic questions, is the
understanding that economic science is subordinate to moral science,
a position maintained by classical philosophy no less than medieval
Scholasticism. No true Catholic can maintain that “economics is
a value-free science;” nor can he imagine it merely to be “a study
that...demonstrates to man, given his ends, how they can or cannot be
achieved.” To do so denies the essentially moral nature of all of man’s
social as well as private activity; it flies in the face of all sound Catholic
reasoning on the question; and it leads to the whole host of errors into
which almost all branches of modern economic science have fallen.