Roman Church - Pioneer of Liberty and Free Markets

 

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During the course of my research concerning the conditions of freedom, I keep reverting to the question why liberty emerged uniquely in Europe. I have recently chanced upon two fascinating accounts that go a long way towards explaining the special European path.

One account is contained in Jack Goody's path-breaking The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe, and the other is Harold Berman's equally seminal Law and Revolution.

Both deal with "papal revolutions" that have changed the course of history. Both provide evidence that the Roman Church acted as the perhaps most decisive pioneer of liberty and capitalism, by effecting the breakthrough of individualism in Europe and introducing the foundational institutions of a market-based society.

Around 300 A.D. European patterns of marriage and kinship were turned on their head. What had previously been the norm - marriage to close kin - became the new taboo. The same applied to adoption, the obligation of a man to marry his brother's widow and a number of other central practices. With these changes Christian Europe broke radically from its own past and established practices which diverged markedly from those of the Middle East, North Africa and Asia. In this highly original and far-reaching work Jack Goody argues that from the fourth century there developed in the northern Mediterranean a distinctive but not undifferentiated kinship system, whose growth can be attributed to the role of the Church in acquiring property formerly held by domestic groups. He suggests that the early Church, faced with the need to provide for people who had left their kin to devote themselves to the life of the Church, regulated the rules of marriage so that wealth could be channelled away from the family and into the Church. Thus the Church became an 'interitor', acquiring vast tracts of property through the alienation of familial rights. At the same time, the structure of domestic life was changed dramatically, the Church placing more emphasis on individual wishes, on conjugality, and on spiritual rather than natural kinship.

(Source: book description at Amazon, Germany)

On page 7 of his Reviving the Invisible Hand, Deepak Lal concludes:

Most Eurasian civilizations ... had similar family values, for agrarian civilizations required stable settled families to operate their settled agriculture. To maintain this stability all these cultures sought to limit the common human but ephemeral passion of love as the basis of marriage. Their values were communalist. It was the first papal revolution of Gregory the Great in the sixth century which changed these hitherto communalist values to the individualist ones which have come to characterize and distinguish the West from the Rest. This papal revolution, by promoting love as the basis of marriage and advocating the independence of the young, led to the rise of individualism in the West.

The first papal revolution made the Church rich and powerful to such an extent that it dared to challenge the secular powers-that-be in a second papal revolution instigated in 1075 by Pope Gregory VII, when he proclaimed: "Let the terrestrial kingdom serve - or be the slave of -the celestial," which inaugurated the church-state.

Deepak Lal summarises on page 6 of his Reviving the Invisible Hand:

Berman has shown how the whole Western legal tradition derives from the development of both canon and secular law during the eleventh to thirteenth centuries under the aegis of the Roman church. For the rise of the market economy the most important was the development of the "law of the merchant" - the lex mercatoria. "The church state set an example for the city-state, and church law set an example for city law and for commercial law."

Comments

[Ed Stevens]

Georg:

As a practicing Catholic christian AND as a card-carrying small-government capitalist, I especially appreciate your points regarding the influence of the Church on matters usually (and often incorrectly) viewed as narrowly secular.

My only complaint about your post is that now the stack of books next to my chair will grow by two or three, since the titles you cite are, at least to me, irresistible. One day, I fear, said stack will likely topple over and crush me since it is growing much faster than I can read - though my time available for reading has recently been enlarged. I fell and broke a hip a couple of weeks ago, and though I am doing really well, I do seem now to spend more time in one spot, so to speak. Maybe I can get a little bit caught up!

Thanks for your continued thoughtful and timely posts. Many of we "inter-nuts" just spend our time cursing the darkness, where you seem mostly to search for light. Kudos.

[Georg Thomas]

What a horrible message: a broken hip, not exactly a trifling matter. Get well soon, Ed. Or rather: get well properly, and if it takes time, so be it. Just get well. My slipped disc has taken two years to heal.

I retain from my Catholic upbringing a strong sense of respect and gratitude toward the Catholic personalities and institutions that have been formative to me.

Recently, I was writing a part of the book I am working on that deals with anti-commercial traditions in the West. It was inevitable to take a look at anti-commercial Christian positions, too, and there are lots of them throughout history. But I am eager to see the full picture, and though anti-commercial views may be preponderant, to this day, I always knew, however, a little too vaguely unfortunately, that Christianity has made very important contributions to the development of freedom and free markets. It is impossible for me to catch up with all the literature supporting this view in the little time I have; the happier I was to chance on these two sources that provide significant evidence for the indispensable role of Christendom in the rise of freedom in the West.

The pragmatic ambitions of the Roman church first for survival, then for growth and finally for power, it seems indubitable to me, have contributed most vitally to the competitive environment for societal forces that were to give the West its edge eventually over monolithic societies (India, China, notably) where the state had everything under control, being able to stifle fruitful social experiments, like the church-state.

I am far from taking an uncritical view of the Roman church, but I am also sick and tired of the crude anti-ecclesiastic stock views that are so hip today, probably even more in Europe than America.

I am glad and thankful (to my parents and educators) to have been brought up a Catholic, and I am curious to find out why I feel this allegiance.