Leo XIII’s Rerum NovarumLeo XIII’s Rerum Novarum
AS WE NOTED AT THE OUTSET, DESPITE THE IMPORTANCE OF social justice, precise statements about its nature are hard to find. The index of the famous post–Vatican II encyclopedia Sacramentum Mundi lists only one reference, a single paragraph alluding to the concept, but no specific entry.1 Rodger Charles, S.J., in The Christian Social Conscience does not even mention the term, but relies on the classical distinctions among commutative, distributive, and legal justice.2 The discussion in Johannes Messner’s magisterial thousand-page text, Social Ethics (1949), is disappointingly brief; he treats the concept on only one page.3
Aside from Nell-Breuning’s commentary (mentioned earlier, but treated more thoroughly in the next chapter), the best treatments I have discovered agree that the term “social justice” came into contemporary usage with an unusual lack of clarity. Two of these treatments offer a brief history of the term and, in the main, complement one another. One of these speaks of the term with considerable disparagement (Ernest Fortin), while the other (by Jean-Yves Calvez and Jacques Perrin) puts the term in the best light it can muster—but still lacking a clear definition.
The third treatment, by William Ferree, Marianist Father at the University of Dayton, offers a highly stimulating interpretation, quite novel and sadly neglected.4 Indeed, from him I have learned my basic insight, namely, that social justice is in fact a virtue of individual persons. More recently, Patrick Burke has published a detailed study reinforcing this view.5
Fortin dryly spells out the confusion surrounding the term “social justice” in this brief description of the way most people speak of social justice—what might be called the “vulgar” view of social justice:
As nearly as I can make out, social justice, in contradistinction to either legal or distributive justice, does not refer to any special disposition of the soul and hence cannot properly be regarded as a virtue. Its subject is not the individual human being but a mysterious “X” named society, which is said to be unintentionally responsible for the condition of its members and in particular for the lot of the poor among them.6
This concept makes sense, Fortin continues, “only within the context of the new political theories of the seventeenth century.” These theories shifted attention away from virtue and moral character—where nearly all philosophies had directed attention until then—to newly imagined social structures that would guarantee the security and freedom of atomistic individuals. “As such, it is of a piece with the modern rights theory,” writes Fortin. “On the one side, it departed from traditional theories of virtue. On the other, it used the language of modern natural rights theory, but then stepped quite outside it, in order ‘to equalize social conditions.’” But equalizing conditions, of necessity, dramatically diminishes personal responsibility, virtue, merit, and character.
Like Calvez and Perrin, Fortin notes that the first author to use the term “social justice” was the Italian Jesuit Luigi Taparelli d’Azeglio, in his Theoretical Essay on Natural Right from an Historical Standpoint (1840–43). Fortin adds that the influence of this Catholic scholar on Leo XIII can be clearly traced. Taparelli attempted to import the Enlightenment term “natural rights” into Catholic social thought by linking it to a new concept, social justice.
However, according to Fortin, what really laid the groundwork for this new concept of social justice was Rousseau’s view that society corrupts the pure individual. Rousseau (1712–78) reformulated virtually all human problems in terms of the distinction between nature and history, as opposed to the classical distinction between body and soul. Fortin summarizes the consequences:
If society and its accidental structures are the primary cause of the corruption of human beings and the evils attendant upon it, they must be changed. Social reform takes precedence over personal reform; it constitutes the first and perhaps the only moral imperative.
No doubt Fortin is correct about the woolly sloganeering to which social justice has been prey. Even the Communists found “social justice” useful for their propaganda, and socialists and social democrats still use it unabashedly as the generic name for their own program. Since Leo XIII wrote expressly against socialism and the growing state, as well as against the destructive force of “equalizing conditions,” the left has wandered very far from his express intentions.
To rescue the term from ideological misuse is no easy task. The first step is to disentangle the term’s complicated history.
In his careful study, Burke details how Taparelli, as a nineteenth-century “conservative” opponent of classical liberalism and supporter of the old feudal powers, including the Church, viewed social justice in terms of constitutional order and as having nothing to do with economics (on which he also wrote without ever mentioning social justice). Burke also notes the contemporaneous significance of Antonio Rosmini, who, in contrast to Taparelli’s conservativism, developed in The Constitution under Social Justice7 and other writings a Catholic “liberal” understanding of social justice that hinged on the constitutional organization of political life, with principal concern for property rights and, in turn, the condemnation of redistributive economic policies and practices.8
Decades later, in drafting the encyclical Rerum Novarum, Pope Leo XIII and Matteo Liberatore, S.J., both students of Taparelli, were faithful to Taparelli’s concept of social justice, particularly in their development of the doctrine of inequality. But forty years after Rerum Novarum, Pope Pius XI’s Quadragesimo Anno, drafted in large part by Oswald Nell-Breuning, who was a student of Liberatore, set aside Taparelli’s views on social justice and inequality, and promoted social justice as economic doctrine. Nell-Breuning’s line-by-line commentary, The Reorganization of Social Economy, treats social justice as both a virtue and a regulative principle. Later usage picks up on the social regulative principle, and ignores the virtue.
In the subsequent debate, where mention is made of “social justice,” no single generally accepted definition has emerged. Messner, in his work mentioned above, explains with considerable mixing of terms that “‘social justice’ refers especially to the economic and social welfare of ‘society,’ in the sense of the economically cooperating community of the state.”9 Cardinal Höffner, in Christian Social Teaching, adopts the position that social justice is the late-medieval “legal justice” which is related to the later German “general justice.” He suggests calling it “common-good justice, a virtue that is exercised only by the state, territorial authorities, professional classes and the Church.”10 Calvez and Perrin, who narrow down the term a bit more than Charles, Messner, and Höffner, conclude that “social justice is general justice applied to the economic as distinct from the political society.”11
A wonderful chapter in a dissertation produced at Boston College by Normand Joseph Paulhus analyzes the theological school that explored the terrain on which the developing concept of social justice would be built. This group in southern Germany, called the Fribourg Union, spurred the widespread discussion of key background issues in the period before Rerum Novarum. Paulhus draws our attention to at least three of them.12
At the beginning of the 1800s, the word “political” dominated discourse, while the word “social” appeared with comparatively less frequency. The slow turning from monarchical to republican forms of government (“democratic” forms in today’s usage) brought more attention to concrete differentials among the demos, the people. Thinkers began to differentiate farmers from city folk: craftsmen, tradesmen, manufacturing workers, and so on. Marx and others supplied political analysis with new theories of class and class warfare. Attention elsewhere shifted to the many “factions” among democratic peoples. The success of the young United States in lifting so many of its in-streaming poor from poverty to property ownership and steady upward mobility created for Europe das Sozialproblem: why was Europe not lifting up its own les misérables? In some discussions, the word “social” began displacing the term “politics,” and was made to seem analytically prior to “political.”
Meanwhile, the analysis of the word “social” was also beginning to undergo a sea change of a different sort. For centuries after Aristotle, man was said to be a “political animal,” and the main method for analyzing polities was to study their laws and their rational principles—the well-formed habits, perspectives, and rules that bound peoples as one. But after Machiavelli (1469–1527), the main method of analysis began to shift away from laws and principles of reason to the will of individuals, a voluntarist energy, and an awareness of the nonrational forces at play in social life: self-preservation, the hunger for power, pride, greed, self-interest, and self-exultation. The “real world” of naked will versus “dreams of reason.”
As the word “social” came into common use, that use increasingly came to be steered down three different tracks. Down one track, “social” became pitted against “individual.” Down another track, “social” (as in civil society and in various traditional and newly arising free associations) was more and more pitted against “state.” As Paul Adams pointed out in his introduction to this volume, excessive attention to the individual on the one side, and to the state on the other, crushed out the space in between them both, the space of civil society and its freely forming associative life.
Down a third track, “social” came to be divided by its basic inspirations: reasoned and law-abiding social energies versus social energies moved primarily (it was said) by passion, will, and self-interest. It was “rationalists” versus “voluntarists,” Aristotelian-Thomists versus Machiavelli and Hobbes.
It was into this complex vortex of contrary meanings and energies that the term “social” came to be paired with “justice.” No wonder “social justice” became hard to define.
Let us, then, take another cut at the history of social justice. During the nineteenth century, among those driven to use the term “social,” one side favored the tradition of “legal justice” laid out first by Aristotle, and developed more fully by Aquinas. This side gathered wind in its sails from the Thomistic revival (or “scholastic revival”) that gained strength from about the 1830s until its powerful blessing and impulsion by Leo XIII in Aeterni Patris (1879).
As a rival to it, the other side used “social justice” to call for more political activism—activism demanding state coercion, usually to enforce new patterns of redistribution of income via taxation.
Pius XI in Quadragesimo Anno and theologians such as Nell-Breuning seemingly combined both factions. On the one hand, they promoted the rebirth of the Thomistic tradition, with its praise for thick associational living (as in the guilds and city-states), reason, law, and the virtues guided by practical wisdom. On the other hand, they also felt it necessary to call upon the will of the state to enforce certain social outcomes, such as wealth redistribution and state protections of the vulnerable and needy.
It is not clear that any one thinker in those days foresaw the danger of a growing state Leviathan, using humanitarian motives to justify massive new state powers, even the totalitarian state claiming to speak for “the people.” No one, that is, except Alexis de Tocqueville, who foresaw (and dreaded) the soft despotism which lies always ready to rise up under the cover of false sentimental motives. Few directly will the dictatorial state. But many cherish the sweet comforting desires that feed its rise—and which it falsely promises to satisfy. Presciently, Tocqueville wrote:
I think, then, that the species of oppression by which democratic nations are menaced is unlike anything that ever before existed in the world; our contemporaries will find no prototype of it in their memories. I seek in vain for an expression that will accurately convey the whole of the idea I have formed of it; the old words despotism and tyranny are inappropriate: the thing itself is new, and since I cannot name, I must attempt to define it. . . .
Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances: what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?
Thus it every day renders the exercise of the free agency of man less useful and less frequent; it circumscribes the will within a narrower range and gradually robs a man of all the uses of himself. The principle of equality has prepared men for these things; it has predisposed men to endure them and often to look on them as benefits.
After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.13
From “common good” uncritically employed to the false justification of a soft despotism is not so long a step. Similarly for the move from “social justice” to state coercion.
As we have already noted above, the context in which Leo XIII encountered the term “social justice” sprang from one of the most enormous social transformations in human history: the end of the agrarian age that had begun before the time of Christ, and its fairly abrupt entry into an era of invention, investment, factories, manufacturing, urban growth, and city services. No longer did families have an inherited roof over their heads and daily food from their own land. They were uprooted, and now dependent on city dwelling, the availability of jobs, and their own initiative. Traditional social networks were cut to shreds. Associations of a lifetime were torn asunder.
Moreover, two radically opposed social ideals were propagandized during the nineteenth century: on the one hand, the socialism of Marx and those of similar mind and, on the other hand, the apparently radical individualism of Bentham and Mill. (Actually, English life was not nearly as individualistic as the latter two’s abstractions suggested. Among Europeans, the English showed the most striking mutual respect, politeness, and consideration for others, as seen in polite queuing up at bus stops and ticket windows. Theirs was the most genial orderliness.) On the whole, the Continent leaned toward the statist emphasis and away from the model of civil society and respect for the individual. Pope Leo XIII in Rerum Novarum made it his aim to trace a new pathway, closer to the English model of civil society, and veering away from the socialist model.
John Stuart Mill was a great champion of the liberal order (meaning individual liberty and relatively free markets, of the sort that encourage invention). But taking a cue from his wife, he also leaned toward the sort of democratic socialism that he thought would own the future. Mill was a classical liberal in his well-worked-out principles, but in his sympathies he was a social-democratic liberal.
Pope Leo understood that new times demanded a new response. The old social order was fading fast, a new one was swiftly arising—which shape it would take was not yet clear. Since the family, he noted, has always been the most central and intimate institution for handing down the faith, new fractures and stresses in the family demanded that the Church enter into the battle for the shape of the future. The English line of argument would not convince the French or Germans, nor the reverse.
Leo XIII saw that new institutions and new virtues among individuals would be required for new times. He feared the socialist state (for thirteen specific reasons he carefully spelled out). He feared the futile and false idea of equality. And he also feared the ideal of radical individualism, which would eventually, he predicted, drive the undefended individual into the eager arms of the state.
The Rise of a New Moral Imperative
The best way to grasp both the complexity and concreteness of Leo XIII’s thought is to meditate slowly and first-hand on some of his key texts, especially those that spell out long in advance the ill effects that socialism would wreak on the human race. For instance, Leo’s long list of reasons for opposing real existing socialism proved remarkably more accurate in their pessimism than were the rosy hopes of many intellectuals of his time and later.14
Most vividly and at great length Leo XIII diagnosed the evils of socialism. But then he also diagnosed the fatal flaws in the idea of “equality of conditions” that underlies socialism. We must take these up in turn. But it is first necessary to put ourselves into the dilemma of the nineteenth century.
Until that time, it was taken as normal that the vast majority of the world was very poor. “The poor ye shall always have with you.” That brute fact generated no urgency that said that poverty must be overcome. Resignation and acceptance were taken to be the moral imperative. But then, rather abruptly, came the beginning of a new age; new wealth was being created, inventions and discoveries led to a rapid increase in manufacturing and the spread of (at first) small factories, the growth of urban areas, and a decline in the primacy of agriculture.
The agrarian age which had ruled for more than two millennia slowly yielded to a new age, based on invention (the pin machine observed by Adam Smith, for example), enterprise, industry, new sources of power (such as the steam engine) and transportation (the railroads), and a massive exodus from the land to swelling towns and burgeoning cities. Families were uprooting themselves; more and more men no longer worked on the fields adjacent to their homes and alongside their families, but in factories that separated them from their families for long hours at a time, at first as long as ten to twelve hours per day, six days a week. Since for centuries the family had been the nursery of the faith, Leo XIII saw that the future of the Church was also at stake, as well as the condition of the working man, and millions of at least partially abandoned women and children.
But Leo also saw, as no pope before him could, that new wealth was being created not on farms, but more and more in industry. Railroads were being built, night lamps lit city streets, new inventions kept arriving yearly. For the first time, poverty in Europe came now to be experienced as a disgrace. Marx had described it as a disgrace, precisely because it stood out in contrast to the unprecedented wealth created by capitalism, but he had overlooked the widespread movement out of poverty in America. Worse still, he had failed to grasp the genius by which new wealth is created from the bottom-up. The same must be said of Leo XIII, too. For the United States presented to the world not only a new model of a republican polity (it was not like the French Republic or the Republic of Venice). It also presented a new model of the dynamic economy. It displayed unparalleled upward mobility. Few in Europe grasped America’s inspirations, methods, and practices.
But Leo did grasp, more generally, the moral obligation of providing material and external help for the poor:
We have insisted, it is true, that since the end of society is to make men better, the chief good that society can possess is virtue. Nevertheless, it is the business of a well-constituted body politic to see to the provision of those material and external helps “the use of which is necessary to virtuous action.”15
So Leo saw that poverty is no longer inevitable for the human race. It is socially, morally wrong. It must be alleviated. But through socialism?
Thirteen Reasons Why Socialism Is Evil and Will Fail
With no hesitation, Leo dismissed the promises of socialism as futile—doomed to embarrassing failure—and evil. He recognized plenty of inequities and wrongs in the economic world of 1891:
To remedy these wrongs the socialists, working on the poor man’s envy of the rich, are striving to do away with private property, and contend that individual possessions should become the common property of all, to be administered by the State or by municipal bodies. They hold that by thus transferring property from private individuals to the community, the present mischievous state of things will be set to rights, inasmuch as each citizen will then get his fair share of whatever there is to enjoy. But their contentions are so clearly powerless to end the controversy that were they carried into effect the working man himself would be among the first to suffer. They are, moreover, emphatically unjust, for they would rob the lawful possessor, distort the functions of the State, and create utter confusion in the community.16
Leo later returned to dwell on the evils socialism would bring in its train. His reflections were all the more remarkable, since at the time neither the Soviet Union nor any other example of modern socialism actually existed. Leo was arguing from principles about human nature that are repeatedly verified in human experience. Thus, based solely on principle and its historical verification, he confidently predicted that socialism would be proven not only unjust, but more than that, too:
It is only too evident what an upset and disturbance there would be in all classes, and to how intolerable and hateful a slavery citizens would be subjected. The door would be thrown open to envy, to mutual invective, and to discord; the sources of wealth themselves would run dry, for no one would have any interest in exerting his talents or his industry; and that ideal equality about which they entertain pleasant dreams would be in reality the levelling down of all to a like condition of misery and degradation. Hence, it is clear that the main tenet of socialism, community of goods, must be utterly rejected, since it only injures those whom it would seem meant to benefit, is directly contrary to the natural rights of mankind, and would introduce confusion and disorder into the commonweal. The first and most fundamental principle, therefore, if one would undertake to alleviate the condition of the masses, must be the inviolability of private property. This being established, we proceed to show where the remedy sought for must be found.17
In these two paragraphs, Leo listed six reasons why socialism is evil and doomed to failure. Let us number them plainly here. The first six problems with socialism are:
1. It works upon the poor man’s envy of the rich.
2. It strives to do away with private property.
3. It contends that all property should become the property of the state.
4. It robs the lawful possessor of what is his natural right.
5. It expands without clear limits the functions of the state.
6. It causes confusion in the community.
But Leo does not stop here. He keeps stomping away:
7. The socialist project strikes at the interests of the wage-earner by depriving him of liberty to dispose of his own wages.
8. Still worse, socialism destroys the poor man’s hope of bettering his condition in life:
Socialists, therefore, by endeavoring to transfer the possessions of individuals to the community at large, strike at the interests of every wage-earner, since they would deprive him of the liberty of disposing of his wages, and thereby of all hope and possibility of increasing his resources and of bettering his condition in life.18
9. Socialism places man on the level of the other animals, by denying him basic human rights and his use of his freedom to reason, choose, and act for himself, his family, and others:
What is of far greater moment, however, is the fact that the remedy [socialists] propose is manifestly against justice. For, every man has by nature the right to possess property as his own. This is one of the chief points of distinction between man and the animal creation, for the brute has no power of self direction, but is governed by two main instincts, which keep his powers on the alert, impel him to develop them in a fitting manner, and stimulate and determine him to action without any power of choice. . . . It is the mind, or reason, which is the predominant element in us who are human creatures; it is this which renders a human being human, and distinguishes him essentially from the brute. And on this very account—that man alone among the animal creation is endowed with reason—it must be within his right to possess things not merely for temporary and momentary use, as other living things do, but to have and to hold them in stable and permanent possession; he must have not only things that perish in the use, but those also which, though they have been reduced into use, continue for further use in after time.19
10. By placing the state first, socialism undermines the natural order of things, in which man precedes the state:
Man, fathoming by his faculty of reason matters without number, linking the future with the present, and being master of his own acts, guides his ways under the eternal law and the power of God, whose providence governs all things. Wherefore, it is in his power to exercise his choice not only as to matters that regard his present welfare, but also about those which he deems may be for his advantage in time yet to come. Hence, man not only should possess the fruits of the earth, but also the very soil, inasmuch as from the produce of the earth he has to lay by provision for the future. Man’s needs do not die out, but forever recur; although satisfied today, they demand fresh supplies for tomorrow. Nature accordingly must have given to man a source that is stable and remaining always with him, from which he might look to draw continual supplies. And this stable condition of things he finds solely in the earth and its fruits. There is no need to bring in the State. Man precedes the State, and possesses, prior to the formation of any State, the right of providing for the substance of his body.20
11. Socialism commits injustice by ordering that one man’s labor be enjoyed by another, without the laborer’s consent:
Is it just that the fruit of a man’s own sweat and labor should be possessed and enjoyed by any one else? As effects follow their cause, so is it just and right that the results of labor should belong to those who have bestowed their labor.21
12. The socialist state intrudes into family life and the household and thereby destroys the home:
The contention, then, that the civil government should at its option intrude into and exercise intimate control over the family and the household is a great and pernicious error. . . . Paternal authority can be neither abolished nor absorbed by the State; for it has the same source as human life itself. “The child belongs to the father,” and is, as it were, the continuation of the father’s personality; and speaking strictly, the child takes its place in civil society, not of its own right, but in its quality as member of the family in which it is born. And for the very reason that “the child belongs to the father” it is, as St. Thomas Aquinas says, “before it attains the use of free will, under the power and the charge of its parents.” The socialists, therefore, in setting aside the parent and setting up a State supervision, act against natural justice, and destroy the structure of the home.22
13. Finally, socialism propagandizes falsely and denies the necessary lot of humanity. Socialism necessarily advances by deluding. The truth is not in it:
To suffer and to endure, therefore, is the lot of humanity; let them strive as they may, no strength and no artifice will ever succeed in banishing from human life the ills and troubles which beset it. If any there are who pretend differently—who hold out to a hard-pressed people the boon of freedom from pain and trouble, an undisturbed repose, and constant enjoyment—they delude the people and impose upon them, and their lying promises will one day bring forth only evils worse than the present. Nothing is more useful than to look upon the world as it really is, and at the same time to seek elsewhere, as We have said, for the solace to its troubles.23
In summary, socialism is not a livable system for humans, for it incites envy, the most evil of social passions.
I thought of this passage in 1991, when I arrived in what my ticket called Leningrad. When we landed, however, the name of that famous city had reverted to presocialist Saint Petersburg, the jewel of pre-Soviet Russia. The flags snapping in the wind were the blue, white, and red bars of the old Russia; gone were the hammer and sickle. That night, a Russian philosopher, flush with pride at how he and an entire crowd of his fellow citizens had faced down the Soviet tanks commanded to crush them, rejoiced now in his nation’s new liberty. Now he was a freedom fighter, too. He pounded me on the chest. “Next time you want to start an experiment like socialism, try it on animals first. Humans it hurts too much.” (I enjoyed the irony of him blaming me.) A little later, after a vodka or two, he again announced: “If you socialized the Sahara, within two years people would be standing in line for sand.”
The Root of Evil in Socialism Is Forced Equality
Leo was not at all shy about calling a spade a spade. After noting how socialism would incite envy, encourage invective, and disturb creative order, Leo’s next words were so strong one suspects him to be carried away like a preacher with hyperbole and brimstone. But what he predicted actually happened. Witness the deliberate starvation of millions of Ukrainians in the 1930s because they refused to give up their family lands.
Most of all it is essential, where the passion of greed is so strong, to keep the populace within the line of duty; for, if all may justly strive to better their condition, neither justice nor the common good allows any individual to seize upon that which belongs to another, or, under the futile and shallow pretext of equality, to lay violent hands on other people’s possessions.24
Moreover, Leo’s unflinching eyes saw that a certain inequality is inherent in individual talent and behavior. And such inequality is a great advantage for human societies:
It must be first of all recognized that the condition of things inherent in human affairs must be borne with, for it is impossible to reduce civil society to one dead level. Socialists may in that intent do their utmost, but all striving against nature is in vain. There naturally exist among mankind manifold differences of the most important kind; people differ in capacity, skill, health, strength; and unequal fortune is a necessary result of unequal condition. Such inequality is far from being disadvantageous either to individuals or to the community. Social and public life can only be maintained by means of various kinds of capacity for business and the playing of many parts; and each man, as a rule, chooses the part which suits his own peculiar domestic condition.25
Where then does this destructive dream of equality come from? That self-destructive metaphysics is built on conflict and enmity. Leo wrote:
The great mistake . . . is to take up the notion that class is naturally hostile to class, and that the wealthy and the working men are intended by nature to live in mutual conflict. So irrational and so false is this view that the direct contrary is the truth. Just as the symmetry of the human frame is the result of the suitable arrangement of the different parts of the body, so in a State is it ordained by nature that these two classes should dwell in harmony and agreement, so as to maintain the balance of the body politic. Each needs the other: capital cannot do without labor, nor labor without capital. Mutual agreement results in the beauty of good order, while perpetual conflict necessarily produces confusion and savage barbarity.26
And for still another reason, God made human life an occasion for individual virtue and merit, as many parables of Jesus highlight:
As for riches and the other things which men call good and desirable, whether we have them in abundance, or are lacking in them—so far as eternal happiness is concerned—it makes no difference; the only important thing is to use them aright. Jesus Christ, when He redeemed us with plentiful redemption, took not away the pains and sorrows which in such large proportion are woven together in the web of our mortal life. He transformed them into motives of virtue and occasions of merit; and no man can hope for eternal reward unless he follow in the blood-stained footprints of his Saviour.27
Still again, all must contribute to the common good. Each individual must do so according to his own talents and capacities, but not all in the same way. Social space in which individual commitments can be freely made is, therefore, necessary:
But although all citizens, without exception, can and ought to contribute to that common good in which individuals share so advantageously to themselves, yet it should not be supposed that all can contribute in the like way and to the same extent. No matter what changes may occur in forms of government, there will ever be differences and inequalities of condition in the State. Society cannot exist or be conceived of without them.28
In other words, Leo predicted that great inequalities would persist under communism. And so they did.29 Leo XIII’s main task, however, was not to condemn socialism, but to specify the remedy for it. He saw in the material progress of the nineteenth century, including the steam engine, locomotives, gas lights, and (on the horizon) electricity, that poverty is not the necessary condition of the human race. More and more people could be freed from the shackles of poverty. “The poor ye shall always have with you” is no fateful imperative. If wealth could be created to raise the lot of many humans (of all nations) out of poverty, then poverty is not a necessary condition but a wrong. And what is the creative remedy? Not socialism.
If Not Socialism, What?
Leo XIII recommended that free and self-determining persons turn to their own distinctive strengths: social initiatives and the arts of association. They themselves should conceive of and build free labor unions and many other organizations seeking to better the life of all. And their aim should be to better life not only materially, but also in the pursuit of truth, beauty, and the interior love of God and love of neighbor. All humans need to learn to cooperate with one another for the good of all. They need to learn to focus not only on themselves.
To get to this point, Leo said quite forcefully that the “liberal” (that is, capitalist) nations would have to undertake serious reforms. He was not ready to condemn liberalism, but he was not ready to give it a clean bill of health, either. He held that both utilitarianism and Anglo-American individualism had too narrow a view of the importance of community. He feared that liberalism left the lonely individual too much at the tender mercies of the omnivorous state. Here I think Leo XIII shares a vision not unlike Tocqueville’s in Democracy in America. Tocqueville noted new forms of community taking shape in America, which people on the Continent did not perceive. In America, Tocqueville noted how local associations were everywhere having beneficent effects. He praised the American emphasis on building small communities: villages, then towns, then counties, then states, and only in the end a united community of one nation. Further, Americans showed much more reverence for religion than Europeans, at least religions of the biblical type (Jewish and Christian) which highly valued both the person and the community.
Furthermore, as Pius XI later noted in Quadragesimo Anno, Leo XIII’s distance from communism and capitalism was not symmetrical: He severely criticized capitalism and insisted on its revision, whereas he rejected socialism root and branch.30
Although Leo did not expressly linger on it here, the practices of the new habits he called for constituted in themselves a new school of virtue, suitable to free and democratic times, in which lay persons and their associations would have ever larger concerns for one another, and active and cooperative roles in changing the world. Rerum Novarum was preceded by the vision of Novus Ordo Seclorum: “of new things” and “the new order of the ages.” Each of these visions had something to teach the other.