Joost Hengstmengel
Journal of Economics, Theology and Religion, vol. 4 (2024): 112-116
Publication history
First view: 12 December 2024
Published: 18 December 2024
Economists like to think of their discipline as a secular enterprise. On closer observation, however, contemporary economics has theological foundations—as argued by Macalester College Professor of Political Science David Blaney, in his latest book. To students of the field called “economics and theology,” or “economic theology” (Schwarzkopf 2020), this sounds like a familiar claim. The assertion that economic science has clandestine theological underpinnings is an old one. It at least goes back to the American economist Thorstein Veblen, who published his main works in the first quarter of the 20th century. As he reasoned in a series of three journal articles (Veblen 1898; 1899a; 1899b), the difference between the evolutionary type of economics that he defended and (pre)classical economics was a difference of “spiritual attitude” towards the facts they studied. According to Veblen, the French Physiocrats and Adam Smith and his followers had started from a metaphysical “preconception of normality.” Their theories rested on a belief in a providential, teleological order of nature through which the Creator sought to serve human welfare. Throughout the 20th century, a Gideon’s Gang of scholars in the footsteps of intellectual historian Jacob Viner (1892–1970) has further exposed these theological preconceptions underlying the earliest schools of economics.
Generally speaking, the theological content of (early-)modern economics, whether it was hidden or not, has been studied from three angles. Some historians, following Viner (1972) himself, have focused on the doctrine of divine providence. Political economy and economics well into the 19th century can be shown to have relied on a firm belief in divine government and supervision—not in the form of miraculous interventions but, faithful to Enlightenment thinking, immanent in the order of nature and society. Think of Smith’s “invisible hand” idea. Others, like Paul Oslington (e.g., 2018), have studied the theories of early economic thinkers from the perspective of natural theology, the type of theology that seeks to argue for the existence and attributes of God using reason and observation independent of divine revelation. While economic writings in the 18th and 19th centuries were not usually intended as contributions to this field (the Scottish minister and political economist Thomas Chalmers came closest), they could be read as such, and did often contain natural-theological argumentation. A final group has highlighted the role of theodicy, in early economic discourse, the attempt to reconcile the existence of evil and suffering with the idea of a benevolent and omnipotent God. If these kinds of theodicies were not already an explicit part of economic theories, as was the case of the first edition of Thomas Malthus’ Essay from 1798, it was de facto what quite a number of early writers on economics offered by explaining away the negative effects of self-interest and competition. John Milbank (1990) may have been the first to portray the science of political economy as such.
Historically, the ideas of divine providence, natural theology, and theodicy were of course intertwined—and have also been studied as such (e.g., Waterman 1991). Blaney, too, recognizes all three perspectives as the background against which the science of political economy both emerged and evolved since the Enlightenment. As he sees it, the idea of providence was usually worked into an explicit natural theology, which in turn often included a theodicy. The main lens of his book, however, is that of theodicy, which he defines as the attempt “to justify an all-knowing and all-powerful god in spite of the evils present in the world” (1). Or, using the characterization of philosopher Ernst Cassirer, as the question “how to reconcile a vision of creation as simple and harmonious with the disorderly facts of human experience” (25).
Another feature of his book that makes it a welcome addition to the history of economics and theology field is the timespan under study. Blaney’s account covers economic thought from Bernard Mandeville, David Hume, Adam Smith, and Thomas Malthus in the long 18th century, to William Stanley Jevons, Alfred Marshall, and John Bates Clark during the transition from 19th to 20th century, and ends with contemporary neoclassical economics. The latter is reminiscent of Robert Nelson’s work, especially his 2001 book in which he sought to offer a “theological exegesis of the contents of modern economic thought,” from Paul Samuelson to the Chicago economists and beyond. But whereas Nelson (according to Blaney) mainly described 20th-century economics as religion or theology by analogy, Blaney seeks to expose its real and persistent theological structure. It is persistence in the sense that economics not only emerged against the backdrop of a religious climate of thought but also retained a theology. This claim is what distinguishes his book from, for example, Benjamin Friedman’s Religion and the Rise of Capitalism from 2021, which downplays the survival of theological ideas. According to Blaney, economists continue to operate “within a theological symbolic order” with has theodicy as a “constitutive element” (1; cf. 4). Economics is not, and never was, a secular enterprise.
A final novelty of Political Economy as Theodicy is its International Relations (IR) vantage point. The author explicitly—but not exclusively—addresses an IR audience and emphatically reads the source material from Mandeville to Clark and beyond as an IR scholar (“Preface”). Contributing to Routledge’s RIPE Series in Global Political Economy, his focus is therefore on international political economy (IPE). The book catchily opens with the “patron saint” of IR, who is said to have once asked his MA students at an exam to discuss whether IR is a theodicy. From the perspective of the realist school of this academic discipline (with its stress on the necessity of conflict and war to a stable global political order), it can indeed be seen as such. Blaney, however, wants to broaden his look beyond security issues by turning to IPE. Studying IPE and its history through theological glasses sheds new light, he believes, on this subdiscipline and on IR as a whole. Rather than being an essentially secularized pursuit, IR has an “irreducibly theological character” (4). In order to recognize this truth, moreover, one must pay attention to the role played by theodicies.
Besides the introduction, which links IR and economics to secularity and theodicy, Blaney’s book consists of 9 chapters. Chapter 1, which might be the most demanding to the average IR reader, prepares the background for the later chapters and basically does two things. First, it defends the idea that the science of political economy as it emerged in the 18th century has a “theological structure,” or as he expressed it elsewhere, operated within a “theological symbolic order.” Second, it identifies G. W. Leibniz’s (1646–1716) theodicy as the model deployed by early-modern political economists and modern economists to account for the evils in economic life. Since Blaney’s account of the theological structure of Enlightenment thought comes in the form of a discussion of the works of Karl Löwith, Giorgo Agamben, Hans Blumenberg and Michael Gillespie, it is not so easy to grasp the essential elements of this order that is central to the book. Is it the belief in a benign order of nature, trust in an immanent divine providence, and faith in progress? More problematic, perhaps, is the fact that the author equates the theodicy project with Leibniz’s Augustinian attempt. What makes him so confident that the theodicy (political) economists resorted to is the Leibnizian one and not the Irenaean or Origenian? Malthus’s theodicy, for example, bears more resemblance to Irenaeus (130–202) than to Leibniz.
Chapters 2-4 and 5-7 respectively deal with classical political economy and economics, and neoclassical economics in the making, and focus on the individual (political) economists mentioned above. An interlude that discusses Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer as trailblazers of evolutionary thinking in economics splits this historical core in two. I will make no attempt here to review the individual chapters, as the interpretation of these individual economic thinkers at this level of detail deserves the assessment of specialists. The main thrust of these accounts, however, which I find convincing, is their theodicical way of thinking, on the one hand, and the partial nature of their more or less explicit theodicies, on the other. As to the latter, Blaney stresses throughout the “cracks” or “gaps” in the socioeconomic order that the individual thinkers defended with their theologically laden theories. They each came with their own versions of what Smith termed the “invisible hand,” explaining that—thank goodness—apparent evils such as self-interest, competition, and the like contribute to the common good, both nationally and internationally. This is of course what theodicies are supposed to do. But at the same time, these vindications of the (God-given) market order are incomplete. Such “social ills” as inequality, poverty, social dislocation, slavery, and racism persist or appear. Instead of becoming resigned to the order of nature and society, the (political) economists in question generally regarded these as gaps to be closed, and cracks to be covered—which explains their paradoxical appeals to the “visible hand” of government and social reform as some sort of buttress of the edifice they defend.
In chapter 8, the author extends his line of argument to contemporary neoclassical economics. Things are getting complicated now, as Blaney observes a “Manichean moment” (158) in the discipline’s history. While 20th-century economists built on the work of Jevons, Marshall, and Clark, they are said to have taken a different theological path in which the need for an explicit theodicy is evaded. They did so by starting to construct static mathematical models with simplifying assumptions that ruled out any moral loss or injustice to individuals or society at large. In the event that these model builders stumbled upon social ills, they held the interfering state responsible for it: the evil is thus not in the market modelled but in the disruption of its beneficent laws. This, Blaney argues, is the contemporary economic Manichean universe—referring to the 3rd-century prophet Mani, who offered a dualistic solution to the problem of evil by positing the coexistence of Light and Darkness as two opposing principles. However attractive the theological metaphor of Manicheanism may be, Blaney sows doubts here regarding his own main thesis that a theodicical mindset underlies political economy and economics from Mandeville, Hume, and Smith up to the present. Apparently, the only theology left in modern economics is a Manichean denial of any darkness in the natural course of economic life. Is that not rather meagre evidence to refute the alleged secularity of the field?
With books like this, it is easy to criticize the choice of the dramatis personae. Blaney stays ahead of this potential criticism by recognizing that the story is selective in terms of the writers discussed—to wit (neo)classical, European/American, and Protestant Christian (8). The realization that ‘there is more out there’ is all the more evidence to him that economics is not a neutral science. The 9th and final chapter, entitled “Beyond Theodicy?,” accordingly “provincializes” (8) economics by sketching how some alternative cosmological visions respond to human suffering. These traditions, including Gustavo Gutiérrez’s liberation theology, that stress community, reciprocity, and economic limits form a counter narrative to the invisible-hand way of thinking central to the other chapters. It is not so clear why precisely the author turns to Karl Polanyi, Gustavo Gutiérrez, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and Tyson Yunkaporta, who—except for Polanyi—will be unknown to most economically-minded readers. After all, there is over a hundred years of heterodox economics thinking available that was equally critical of the “Liberal Creed” (Polanyi, quoted at 177). From this tradition (actually a motley collection of alternatives to the classical and neoclassical school), a similar point could be made.
Overall, Political Economy as Theodicy is a thought-provoking book. Rejecting the popular conception that the history of political economy and economics is one of increasing secularization, it argues for the survival of a theological core. It is to be feared, however, that this well-documented bookwill not convince its secular readers. In particular, Blaney seems to underestimate the deathblow inflicted by Darwin and others to the Enlightenment project of natural theology and theodicy. The fact that natural-theological language remains, and modern economics theories can be read as theodicies does not imply that they are “theological” or have a real “theological structure.” Unfortunately, the chapter on more recent economics that should make this case is underdeveloped and relies too much on secondary literature. It is to be hoped, therefore, that the author will fulfill his promise from the introduction to do further research on 20th- and 21st-century economics.
References
Milbank, John. 1990. “Political Economy as Theodicy and Agonistics.” In Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason. Oxford: Blackwell.
Nelson, Robert H. 2001. Economics as Religion: From Samuelson to Chicago and Beyond. University Park: Pennsylvania State University.
Oslington, Paul. 2018. Political Economy as Natural Theology: Smith, Malthus and Their Followers. London: Routledge.
Schwarzkopf, Stefan, ed. 2020. The Routledge Handbook of Economic Theology. London: Routledge.
Veblen, Thorstein. 1898. “Why Is Economics Not an Evolutionary Science?” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 12, no. 4: 373–97.
Veblen, Thorstein. 1899a. “The Preconceptions of Economic Science.” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 13, no. 3: 121–50.
Veblen, Thorstein. 1899b. “The Preconceptions of Economic Science.” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 13, no. 4: 396–426.
Viner, Jacob. 1972. The Role of Providence in the Social Order. An Essay in Intellectual History. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society.
Waterman, A.M.C. 1991. Revolution, Economics & Religion. Christian Political Economy 1798-1833. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
